The next year a newly formed organization, the Christmas Society, held a massive gift distribution at the newly constructed Madison Square Garden, an event attended by some 10,000 needy children, many of whom were accompanied by their mothers. Gifts were attached to a series of ropes that, in turn, were attached by pulleys to the roof of the Garden. The organizers of this event planned to attract the children of wealthy families as spectators, but few attended (one headline read: “THOUSANDS OF LITTLE ONES MADE HAPPY IN MADISON SQUARE GARDEN—CHILDREN OF THE RICH STAY AWAY”).56
Wealthy children were apparently not interested in watching hordes of their less-fortunate peers, but the parents of those wealthy children soon proved susceptible to the lure. It was, of all things, the Salvation Army that provided them with the opportunity. Beginning in 1898, this organization’s army of Christian soldiers organized immense public dinners for impoverished New Yorkers, held at Madison Square Garden. These dinners were great public spectacles, expertly organized. As the hungry and homeless were fed at tables on the arena floor, under the glare of electric lights, more prosperous New Yorkers paid to be admitted to the Garden’s boxes and galleries, where they observed the gorging. The event was reported as a front-page story in the New York Times, with a headline that announced, in block capitals, “THE RICH SAW THEM FEAST.”
The press reported in detail how “nearly 20,000 men, women, and children gathered from the highways and byways of the city in one great surging throng,” waiting patiently to be admitted to enter the arena. The crowd was kept waiting until after the spectators had been admitted—through a separate entrance:
To the Madison Avenue entrance came the spectators of the extraordinary scene …, men in high hats, women in costly wraps … the great concourse of the prosperous and happy…. They were to furnish the lighter shade to the pleasure, with their air of contentment, and prosperity, and perchance sympathy….
At the other entrance to the Garden [on Fourth Avenue] gathered the pilgrims from the illimitable abodes of poverty and wretchedness.
The several thousand wealthy observers entered first, so that they could look on as the “hungry multitude” was admitted. “In the boxes and gallery of the great building,” the story ran, “sat many thousands of well-fed and prosperous people, among them many women who had come in carriages and were gorgeously gowned and wore many diamonds, who looked on in happy sympathy …, who had come to see the spectacle of thousands being made happy.” There were four large sections of tables on the arena floor, and it was there that the poor, sitting in the upper gallery till their turn was called, were fed 2,200 at a time. This was a charity event on an industrial scale, a kind of Gilded Age version of Bracebridge Hall in which the entertainment itself was produced on an assembly line. Even so, the food ran out before everyone could be served.
Before the meal, both rich and poor joined together in singing the hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” The hymn was sung in unison, “position and fortune forgotten for one brief moment.” It was a moving occasion, the Times reporter wrote: “The pathos of it all was in the expression contained in the smiles of thanks.” And the reporter concluded hopefully, suggesting that the very scale of the event foretold an imminent solution to the vexing problems of capitalism: “Neither any Continental city nor even London ever had to do anything approaching this in magnitude. It means the dawning of a new era, the bridging of the gulf between the rich and poor.”57
Only a single report, in the New York World, suggested that what had happened was more a matter of voyeurism than of class reconciliation:
Some seemed to look upon this feeding of the ravens as a spectacle, and whispered and pointed at poorly clad men and women who ate ravenously, or smiled when a piece of turkey was surreptitiously slipped into a capacious pocket.58
There was still another strange twist. The Salvation Army hit upon a novel fashion for raising funds to pay for these events: They hired unemployed men to play the part of street-corner Santa Claus, soliciting passersby for contributions as they did their Christmas shopping. (This technique is still employed by the Salvation Army.) Given the long history of the transformation of Christmas in the nineteenth century, there was irony as well as ingenuity in this tactic, for what it did was to re-create the structure, though not the substance, of a much older ritual in which the poor were informally sanctioned to approach the rich during the Christmas season and beg for gifts. Even the fact that the needy men who acted as street-corner Santas were begging in disguise was deeply rooted in the mumming tradition. (After all, Belsnickles had done much the same thing in Pennsylvania towns at least as late as the 1870s.) But of course what the Salvation Army Santas were doing was profoundly different from older forms of Christmas wassailing and mumming: Their public begging was sanctioned only because they were not soliciting for themselves. They did not get to keep the money but had to turn it over to the organization for which they worked. They were in fact the paid employees of a charitable organization. (It is not clear whether they were paid a flat rate or a percentage of what they raised.) Perhaps these Santas were also permitted to attend the Madison Square Garden dinners they themselves had helped to make possible. But even if they were, it would only be because they had been given a ticket of admission by their employers. In that sense, the entire Santa Claus ritual was nothing less than a microcosm of the workings of nineteenth-century capitalism itself.
REVENGE OF THE NEWSBOYS: THE RETURN OF YOUTH MISRULE
There is a final twist to this story, a twist that reveals still another microcosm. In 1902 the Salvation Army’s charity dinner was moved from Madison Square Garden to another arena, the Grand Central Palace. Once again, 20,000 people were fed. But this time the event failed to go exactly as planned. The problem resulted from the fact that approximately 1,000 of the banqueters were young people, most of them newsboys, and they were seated separately in sections of their own at the two ends of the hall. These arrangements proved to be a mistake. (Charles Loring Brace would have known better, but he had been dead for a dozen years.) The youths took advantage of the opportunity to engage in activities other than eating:
They made so much noise that for a time it was thought they would break up the religious meeting that followed. They hurled pies and every other thing they could lay their hands on at one another, and even at those who waited on them.
The story in the Tribune reported what happened in deadpan language and considerable detail:
General Daniel E. Sickles and his daughter, Miss Mary Sickles, who were among the invited guests, attracted considerable attention. They spent most of the time entertaining the boys. Miss Sickles carried a Blenheim spaniel [a fancy breed] in her arms. She called it Bulwer [a fancy name]. When the boys set their eyes on Bulwer they began hurling mince pie and turkey at him. Miss Sickles was taken by surprise, and let Bulwer slip from her arms to the floor. Bulwer ran over to where General Sickles was seated. The boys set up a great shout and hurled knives, forks and spoons at him. Then they began cheering and shouting to General Sickles to make a speech. He laughed and said he was not able to do so.
Finally, order disintegrated completely:
There was an apparent shortage of mince pie for a time, and the youngsters thought that they were being overlooked. They began hurling bread and potatoes at those who waited on them, and said that they did not want turkey, but wanted more pie. Miss Sickles went into the kitchen and came out a minute later with her arms laden with pieces of pie. “Three cheers for Mama!” shouted the urchins, and they made a rush to take the pie from her. Miss Sickles pleaded with them to keep quiet and be patient, but they would have none of her advice. One boy, whom another called “Pinkie,” upset one of the plates on which were piled a number of pieces of pie, and there was a wild scramble to see who could get the most. Miss Sickles put the other plate of pie on the table and fled in dismay.59
The organizers learned their lesson. The next year a somewhat smaller group of young people were invi
ted (again, most of them newsboys), and this time the organizers had taken a precaution: The boys “were arranged in a corner of the hall all by themselves, where they could give vent to their boyish caprices without disturbing the more sedate.” The tactic seems to have worked. The youths “occasionally let out a deafening war whoop just to break the monotony and let other folk know they were there”—but apparently that was all.60 Two years later, in 1905, 600 newsboys attended, and as many as 10 policemen were assigned to control them. Even so, a substantial number were ejected from the hall during the course of the meal.61
WITH SUCH TRADITIONS of misrule emerging in the very midst of this kind of “spectatorial” event, an event devised by (and in large measure for) the well-to-do who came to observe the fruits of their charity, we have come full circle. Newsboys, as we know, had long been prone to such behavior at Christmas. As poor and youthful males, they came from the single sociodemographic group that had been most closely associated with Christmas misrule from at least as early as the sixteenth century.
A newspaper report of one of the Christmas dinners, held in 1895 at a Newsboys’ Lodging House, made it clear that the newsboys’ rowdy behavior was not mere random chaos but the expression of an elaborate and venerable ritual. The reporter explained it in this way: “There are many queer and quaint customs among the newsboys which are strictly kept on Christmas, and which lend originality to their doings at their dinners.” For one thing, they would never deign to dress up on such occasions: “All the newsboys come in their everyday clothes. Any one who would have ventured to present himself in his best suit would have been regarded by the [other] lads as aspiring ‘ter shine in de upper crust.’” And they insisted on eating their Christmas dinners in a particular sequence, beginning with dessert:
They always begin to eat a dinner by disposing of the pies, the puddings and other dessert dishes first. Each lad gets away with several large-sized pies and seldom tastes of pudding if there are any pies in sight. Then comes the turkey and the cranberry sauce.62
The newsboys had a reason, then, to disrupt the 1902 Salvation Army dinner: The food was not being served in the proper sequence, and there were not enough pies. As the report of that chaotic event pointed out, “They began hurling bread and potatoes at those who waited on them, and said that they did not want turkey, but wanted more pie.” (The newsboys’ reversal of the standard dinner sequence was itself a kind of misrule—inverting the normal order of things. The pie-throwing itself was probably part of the ritual.)63
But there was probably a more important reason as well for the newsboys’ behavior. For if Christmas charity had become a spectator sport for the well-to-do, that meant it had become a form of what E. P. Thompson, referring to eighteenth-century England, has termed political “theater.” (In this case, it was theater in the most literal sense, complete with an arena equipped with a stage floor and galleries, as well as a separate entrance for the paying audience.) The well-to-do New York spectators expected the poor to “perform” for them, as it were, by eating their Christmas meal with manifest gusto and gratitude.
But from this perspective it is also fair to say that the spectators were putting on a performance of their own, by dressing up in their “gorgeous gowns” and flashiest jewelry. There was an earlier precedent for that, too. E. P. Thompson has also proposed that eighteenth-century gentry “theater” provoked a kind of responsive “counter-theater” on the part of the plebeians themselves, a dramatic assertion of their own identity, thrown mockingly back in the face of the gentry. And so with the newsboys in latter-day New York. The taunts and the pie-throwing, like the refusal to dress up, are understandable enough. These boys were hungry, after all, and the banquet they were being given was almost certainly the best food they would get all year. Yet it was surely demeaning to the newsboys that their own pleasure was also a spectacle to be observed by the rich. As early as 1876, a story about the annual dinner implicitly conveyed this point, even though the reporter ascribes the boys’ reaction to being watched to mere self-consciousness: “To appreciate the enjoyment of these boys properly one will have to see them when they sit down to hide away the ribs of beef,” the story began, only to continue with the acknowledgment that, unfortunately, “it will not do to be seen when seeing; for your newsboy, brave and sometimes impertinent as he sometimes is upon the street, is as sensitive, when he has his knees under the table as if he had been brought up in a hot-house, and was the most sensitive plant that grows.”64
Ostensibly, then, the newsboys’ display of misrule was a matter of mere juvenile high jinks. But surely it was also a form of counter-theater, aimed at those who were observing them. (As the 1903 New York Times reporter put it, they “let out a deafening war whoop just … to let other folk know they were there.”) This counter-theater served as a gesture that was meant to restore some of the dignity the newsboys had lost by being forced to make their own hunger a matter of public display. Among other things, it announced that they weren’t so thoroughly dependent on their mince pies, or their patrons, that they couldn’t afford to engage in a dramatic gesture of wasting the former by throwing them at the latter. In the process, the newsboys managed to make the most important point of all. They might be known as “Pinkie,” or “Pickle Nose,” or “No-Nothing Mike”—but whatever they were called, it would not be Tiny Tim.
CHAPTER 7
Wassailing Across the Color Line: Christmas in the Antebellum South
INTRODUCTION
CHRISTMAS 1867 arrived in the midst of a depression. But that year the New York Times interrupted its standard admonition about remembering the plight of the city’s poor in order to offer a plea on behalf of a still worthier object of seasonal charity. There was already enough “ostentatious benevolence” directed at the urban poor in New York and other Northern cities, the paper admonished—“cities which, despite depression, are yet wealthy and happy.” So the arrival of Christmas might better serve to remind Americans of a forgotten portion of American society that was destitute indeed. It was the South—the defeated South. In that benighted region “a merry Christmas will not be known anywhere.” The newspaper painted a sorry scene: “Despair, or something like it, reigns in the mansions, and destitution is supreme in the hovels. Grim poverty makes its presence felt everywhere. Those who were once rich find themselves menaced by want, and those who, though always poor, were always provided for, now find themselves hungry and helpless.”
The Civil War had ended less than two years earlier, and a short-lived effort to force the “Radical Reconstruction” of the South was barely under way. But the New York Times seized this occasion to make a plea for sectional reconciliation between the vanquished South and the victorious North. More precisely, the plea was for reconciliation between the respectable white populations of the two regions. When the Times spoke of the South’s “poor” who lived in “hovels,” it was referring to ex-slaves. That was why it made the point that in the past the poor had “always been provided for.” Slavery itself had ensured the physical well-being of those in bondage; the system had generated a “bond of sympathy” that “held these classes together.” But emancipation had severed that bond. The result was racial tension that could, if it were not defused, easily exceed in severity any class conflict that existed in the Northern states.
In other words, it was not the poverty of the South’s black population that chiefly unsettled the New York newspaper writer. What really bothered him was the potential consequences of that poverty—consequences that might even involve racial violence. Southern whites were filled with “vague apprehension” about what might happen; for their part, the region’s black population was making demands—“demands that yield not to reason.” Those unreasonable demands were for social and economic justice. And the effect was a dark uncertainty: “Neither side knows what is coming. The blacks will not accept freedom as a substitute for food, and the whites are fearful of the excesses to which famine-stricken ignorance not seldom yields.”<
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It was Christmas that underlined this grim situation. Not only had Christmas been a time of charity and generosity on the part of white people in the slave South, it had also been a season of special joy for the slaves themselves—a time when the “bond of sympathy” between the races was most evident. The picture of harmonious Christmases under slavery offered an instructive contrast to the present state of things:
Slavery then put on its holiday garb. There was feasting and merrymaking everywhere [in the slave community]…. The bondsmen for the time forgot their bondage, and for a week gave themselves up to the rollicking enjoyment in which Sambo distances all competitors.1
It may seem insensitive for a Northern newspaper to argue that former slaveholders in the South required more sympathy than did unemployed workers in the North. And even that insensitivity might seem to pale in the face of the paper’s cynical use of Christmas as a way of pointing out the social benefits of slavery to black people. Still, this Northern newspaper was not alone in noting that the Christmas season was a time of special resonance in the slave South. For decades, Southerners themselves had been doing the same thing, and they would continue to do so for several decades more. And what makes the point even more striking is that it was made by black as well as white Southerners.
Many African-Americans wrote about their experience of Christmas under slavery, and it is difficult to avoid sensing the importance they attached to this holiday in clarifying what they had to say about slavery itself. Three of the best-known individuals who had been raised as slaves chose to focus an entire chapter of their autobiographies on a discussion of Christmas. Writing from very different positions on the ideological spectrum, both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington described Christmas under slavery as an occasion on which slaveholders systematically degraded African-Americans by encouraging them to get drunk. And Harriet Jacobs, in her fictionalized autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, poignantly described a Christmas she spent as a fugitive hiding in the crawl space of a house in Edenton, North Carolina, trying to evade an owner who desired to make her his concubine.
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