The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  We found that for a whole week the coloured people in and around Tuskegee dropped work the day before Christmas, and that it was difficult to get any one to perform any service from the time they stopped work until after the New Year. Persons who at other times did not use strong drink thought it quite the proper thing to indulge in it freely during the Christmas week. There was a widespread hilarity, and a free use of guns, pistols, and gunpowder generally.

  Then there were the frolics, held every night of Christmas week in one of the cabins that once had served as slave quarters on the local plantation. Washington described the frolics as “a kind of rough dance, where there was likely to be a good deal of whiskey used, and where there might be some shooting or cutting with razors.” Perhaps redundantly, he added, “The sacredness of the season seemed to have been almost wholly lost sight of.”

  In one cabin I noticed that all that the five children had to remind them of the coming of Christ was a single bunch of firecrackers, which they had divided among them…. In still another family I found nothing but a new jug of whiskey, which the husband and wife were making free use of, notwithstanding the fact that the husband was one of the local ministers…. In other homes some member of the family had bought a new pistol. In the majority of cases there was nothing to be seen in the cabin to remind one of the coming of the Saviour, except that the people had ceased work in the fields and were lounging about their homes.

  The “lounging about” may have bothered Washington more than anything else. He even encountered an old local black preacher “who tried to convince me, from the experience Adam had in the Garden of Eden, that God had cursed all labor, and that, therefore, it was a sin for any man to work.” Washington recognized the irony of the situation: The old preacher was “supremely happy” during Christmas week, “because he was living, as he expressed it, through one week that was free from sin.”

  Familiar material. Nor was Booker T. Washington the first African-American to criticize it. In slavery days, many black people, from pious Baptists and Methodists to secular radicals like Frederick Douglass, had decried the carnival aspects of the slave Christmas, arguing that it demeaned those who engaged in it.

  Washington, too, understood that these practices were the lingering residue of slavery. But he managed to conclude the story he told on a happier note. In fact, Washington used his account of that first Christmas in Tuskegee to introduce a chapter devoted to the profound change he was able to produce in the character and habits of poor young black men who attended the famous college he established there. Washington went on to show the contrast between what he experienced in 1880 and the kind of Christmas celebration that he introduced to his students at Tuskegee. The transformation of Christmas was a paradigm of the larger changes he had set out to accomplish.

  In the school we made a special effort to teach our students the meaning of Christmas, and to give them lessons in its proper observance. In this we have been successful to a degree that makes me feel safe in saying that the season now has a new meaning, not only through all that immediate region, but, in a measure, wherever our graduates have gone.

  At the present time one of the most satisfactory features of the Christmas and Thanksgiving seasons at Tuskegee is the unselfish and beautiful way our graduates and students spend their time in ministering to the comfort and happiness of others, especially the unfortunate.

  Booker T. Washington may have been exaggerating a little, but his success as an educator and administrator leaves little room to doubt the fundamental reality of his claim. A Tuskegee education meant both a change of behavior and an interior change of spirit, a reformation that Washington hoped would allow his students to integrate into mainstream American society. As Washington understood when he wrote his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery, Christmas provided an apt and powerful symbol of that very reformation.

  And it provides us with an interesting reminder, a reminder that such a reform could and did originate within the African-American community itself. It is easy to think of the suppression of the carnival Christmas only as something that was imposed from outside. But this wasn’t the case. The suppression also came from within. Booker T. Washington’s students came to Tuskegee, in the depressing post-Reconstruction years that witnessed the emergence of Jim Crow, as members of a demeaned and betrayed group of Americans. They had little to risk, and a world to gain, by learning the skills and the values associated with respectable white society, including an appreciation of a “new meaning” for Christmas. In hindsight, there is something poignant about their efforts; we now know that even educated African-Americans were unable to achieve the respect and security that Booker T. Washington staked his career on providing, and to us what they lost in the process of reforming themselves may be more valuable than what they gained. But we should not doubt that for Washington and his students, learning a new meaning for Christmas seemed a form of empowerment. Suppression from outside was the most dramatic vehicle by which the old Christmas traditions came to an end. But it was not the only one.

  JOHN CANOE AND THE WREN BOYS

  John Canoe, too, eventually disappeared from the American mainland. It was still going strong in North Carolina as late as the 1880s, but by the turn of the twentieth century the old ritual had pretty much disappeared. Its ultimate suppression closely mirrors what we have just seen. According to interviews with elderly black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina, taken by a folklorist around 1940, the decline of the ritual was the result of new pressures both from whites and from within the black community.

  What seems to have played the decisive role in suppressing the John Canoe bands was the emergence of a new political culture among the white people of Wilmington, a reformist culture that was unwilling to tolerate public drunkenness and the rowdy behavior that accompanied it. One black resident later recalled: “‘De policemen usta run the kooners because dey would get drunk and kick up a lot of fuss.’” Another’s analysis was more elaborate:

  Kooner was ragin’ here ’bout 1882 but hit done died out ’bout 1900. De reason hit died out was dat different city mayors came in to hold office and dey stopped all dat. Each Christmas hit got less and less and finally the city officers stopped dem from marching down de main street.

  A key event may have been a serious riot that occurred during the 1898 John Canoe parade. In any event, one woman reported simply that “‘de whites finally run all de kooners away.’”

  But the folklorist who conducted these interviews also reported that John Canoe began to be opposed by black ministers who felt that the custom “tended to degrade the Negroes in the eyes of the white people of the community,” together with members of the emergent black middle class, who “began to look upon the exhibition as one that lowered their status in the eyes of the whites. They disliked to see ‘their folks making a fool of themselves.’” And apparently some of the John Canoers themselves began to feel the same way. One old unreconstructed Wilmington black man reported that the “kooner folk got dicty [i.e., snobbish, high-class]. Then dey gave up ruffian’s ways. Dey got educated.” Booker T. Washington might have phrased it differently, but he would have been delighted with the result.2

  All in all, then, the John Canoe ceremony fell victim to a combination of external suppression and internal reform. In its essentials, that was just what became of similar forms of Christmas revelry within white communities throughout Western culture. And it provides a model for exploring the transformation of Christmas in the white working-class culture of the nineteenth century as well.

  Consider the Irish. In the 1840s Ireland constituted the major source of immigration to America, and that land was the major source of new membership in the American industrial working class. In those very years, as it happens, there was a major battle within the Irish community over the use of alcohol—even when it was used as part of the Christmas festivities.

  Irish Christmas rituals in the early nineteenth century will be familiar to readers of this b
ook, as they are reminiscent of both the English practices described in Chapter 1 and the slave practices described in Chapter 7. Even when the Irish rituals were religious, they retained the rowdy old carnival note—alcohol, sex, and aggressive begging. Take the midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, for example. This event (it was held outdoors, illuminated by great bonfires) was usually preceded and followed by what a nineteenth-century Irish writer termed “jovial orgies,” perambulating groups who engaged in heavy drinking that often led to illicit sexual couplings.3 By the 1830s, the church itself had largely abolished the midnight Mass.

  Other Irish Christmas rituals lacked even the veneer of religion. In one urban version of the English wassail, during the weeks before Christmas, several hours before daybreak each night, a group of serenaders would stop at the houses of all the prosperous residents, calling out the hour of the morning and declaring the state of the weather (this ritual was known as “Calling the Waits”). The serenaders waited until Christmas Day to go around to every door, collecting “the expected remuneration.” In one instance, in Kilkenny, the lead performer was accompanied each year by a dozen youths in blackface (a “retinue of young negroes,” as they were termed in the original account), who stopped at the house of “every respectable family in the city;” there they would drink a holiday toast and be given a half crown in return. (According to this account, the members of the group often became so drunk that they had to be carried back to their own houses.)4

  The best-known wassail ritual in rural Ireland involved groups of youths known as the Wren Boys. Dressed up in rags, ribbons and bits of colored paper (reminiscent of the John Canoers), the Wren Boys would march noisily through their village—stopping, of course, to sing in front of rich people’s houses. (One of their songs is virtually identical to the “Gloustershire Wassail,” quoted in Chapter 1. After asking for beer, this group of Wren Boys proceeded to pronounce the familiar mix of promise and threat: “And if you dhraw it ov the best, /I hope in heaven yer sowl will rest; / But if you dhraw it ov the small, / It won’t agree wid’de wran boys at all.”)5

  But here, too, there was a change, a change initiated and spread from within. Beginning in the late 1830s, Ireland was swept by its own indigenous temperance movement, led by a Roman Catholic priest who was locally born and bred, Father Theobald Mathew (1790–1856). Father Mathew demanded total abstinence (or teetotalism), and he called on people to sign a written pledge that they would give up all forms of alcohol, in any amount. His movement swept through the Irish countryside like the religious revival it actually was, resonating deeply in both rural and urban areas. By 1842 an astonishing five million people had signed the temperance pledge.6

  Much like Booker T. Washington’s more systematic program of personal reform at Tuskegee, the Irish temperance movement took hold because it held out the promise of restoring dignity and self-respect to a conquered and oppressed people. In fact, Father Mathew’s movement was deeply intertwined with the political movement for Irish independence from England. And Father Mathew himself promised his potential followers that sobriety would be a means of achieving social advancement for themselves and their children.7

  Needless to say, Father Mathew’s temperance crusade had an effect on the old Christmas rituals. For this there exists a wonderful account, in the form of a diary kept by a wealthy English gentlewoman, Elizabeth Smith, who, together with her husband, managed a large estate in the Irish countryside in the years around 1840. The husband seems to have played the part of country squire to his dependents (she called them his “pensioners”), offering them gifts and forgiving their debts at Christmastime.8 Elizabeth Smith did not object to the begging, and her diary shows that she was quite happy to play her own part in the ritual. What troubled her was that many of these dependents had chosen to give up drinking! On Christmas morning, 1840, she made a mistake that haunted her throughout the day: “I forgot teetotalism when I mixed the puddings,” she wrote, “and not one of the outside men would taste them.” Mrs. Smith expressed grudging (and condescending) pleasure with the reformation—that “these unruly people have such self-command where they think it a sin to yield to temptation.” But she was also disappointed that the old ways were changing. “What a pity,” she mused, referring to her oversight—or was it to her tenants’ new-found sobriety?

  In any case, early the following morning the Smiths were awakened by a group of Wren Boys shouting “a regular reveilee—the Wren—under our windows.” The Wren boys, too, were keeping sober, and once again Mrs. Smith took note of the dampening effects: “This morning there were no young women of the party as there used to be. Maybe they don’t find it merry enough now that whiskey a’n’t in fashion.”9

  It’s a fascinating reversal. Here in rural Ireland, we can witness a mid-nineteenth-century instance of exactly what both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington claimed was true of the American South—a representative of the ruling classes who wished to see the Christmas drinking continue, and her dependents, who decided to stop it themselves.

  From the mid-1840s on, just after Father Mathew’s movement reached its peak, Irish people began to emigrate in massive numbers to the United States. Many of these immigrants had been affected by the movement, and others joined it after they arrived in America. Father Mathew himself spent two and a half years (from 1849 to 1851) touring the United States, spreading the total-abstinence pledge chiefly among his newly arrived countrymen. (This was the very time the American temperance movement was hitting a crest of its own, one that would inspire a wave of prohibitionist legislation in several American states. All six New England states, for example, passed temperance laws between 1851 and 1855). Eventually, Irish-American newspapers that supported the cause of independence from England also began to print Clement Clarke Moore’s “Visit from St. Nicholas” on Christmas Day.10

  A LEGAL HOLIDAY

  This puts in place the final large element in the process by which a carnival Christmas was replaced by a domestic one. Victory in the battle for Christmas in America resulted from a convergence of interests that melded a variety of groups and classes. In the first place, as we have seen, the domestic reform of Christmas was an enterprise of patricians, fearful for their authority. (In New York, the reform was part of a larger project that was a response to the democratization and commercialization of the city—a strategic shift from the use of politics to that of culture as a way of retaining control of urban life.) That domestic reform, examined in Chapters 2 and 3, led to (and was part of) the development of a commercial Christmas trade (examined in Chapter 4). As such a trade developed, merchants needed the streets to be free of drunks and rowdies in order to secure them for Christmas shoppers. And shoppers themselves needed to feel secure in the streets.

  But finally, especially in the 1840s and afterward, the development that I have just traced occurred—a reform from within the working classes themselves. With at least some working-class support for a domestic Christmas added to the existing (and growing) enthusiasm of the middle classes and the remnants of the old elite, something new began to happen. Christmas Day became officially recognized as a legal holiday in the United States. It was the individual states, one by one, that passed the necessary legislation. The movement swept the nation during the two decades that began in the mid-1840S. By 1865, twenty-seven out of thirty-six states (along with four territories) had set December 25 apart as a day when certain kinds of ordinary business could not legally be transacted.

  There was an intriguing pattern to this legalization process, a pattern that can be detected by focusing on those states that were relatively late in granting legal recognition to Christmas Day. Of the twenty-four states that joined the United States no later than 1820 (the “first generation” of states, as we might think of them), by 1865 all but five had made December 25 a legal holiday. What is striking about the list is that four of the five states that had not done so were slave states—the two Carolinas, Mississippi, and Missouri. (Two other slave stat
es, Texas and Florida—both admitted to the Union in 1845—waited until 1879 and 1881, respectively, to legalize Christmas.) The slave South seems to have been the laggard in this matter. Not New England, surely—all six states in that supposedly Puritan region of the country had recognized Christmas between 1845 and 1861 (Connecticut being the first to do so, and New Hampshire the last).11

  To be sure, the pattern was not universal. The first three states to legalize Christmas all permitted slavery, while the final member of the “first generation” to do so—Indiana, in 1875—was a free state. And the Civil War itself may have had something to do with the South’s relative recalcitrance (though the war did not stop Northern states from proceeding on this score). In any case, the meaning of the pattern is not fully evident, but there is one possible explanation. It has to do with how much pressure there was in any given state for a formal, legislatively mandated release from work at Christmas. Such pressure was strongest in New England, the most heavily industrialized part of the United States, but less so in the slave South, an agricultural region that was still governed (as we have seen) by a seasonal rhythm that may have made it unnecessary to dictate a holiday by force of law.

  This hypothesis is partly borne out by looking at the Christmas legislation in a single, highly industrialized state—Massachusetts.12 Christmas achieved legal recognition in Massachusetts in a pair of laws, passed in 1855 and 1856, respectively, during two turbulent sessions of a reform-minded legislature that was under the majority control of an insurgent “third party,” the American Party—better known as the “Know-Nothings.” The Know-Nothings are best remembered today for a single plank in their platform, a nativist hostility to the immigrants who were flocking to New England. But just as important, the Know-Nothings were a party that represented native-born urban workers (who actually held almost 25 percent of the total seats in 1855). The legislation passed by the Massachusetts Know-Nothing legislatures included measures to suppress gambling, prostitution, and—especially—the use of alcohol (the penalty for selling a single glass of liquor was six months’ imprisonment). It also included a set of antislavery laws, as well as laws related to industrial welfare and safety in the workplace. The Know-Nothings almost succeeded in passing a bill that would have ensured factory workers a maximum ten-hour day. A recent study of the Massachusetts Know-Nothing legislature concludes that most of its legislation “specifically addressed the needs of an industrial society.”13