The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  21. Boyer, Urban Masses, 98. For a history of the movement, see Holt, The Orphan Trains, passim.

  22. Boyer, Urban Masses, 99 (“excursion to Hoboken” quotation); Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York, 1872), 114.

  23. Boyer, Urban Masses, 100.

  24. Charles Loring Brace, Gesta Christi; or, A History of Humane Progress Under Christianity (New York, 1882), 95, 414.

  25. Bender, Towards an Urban Vision, 147–149.

  26. Brace, Sermons to Newsboys, 38. The most sympathetic and perceptive modern treatment of newsboy culture is David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 62–87 and 149–166. Nasaw’s study deals with the period 1900–20, when newsboy culture had changed (for example, most early-twentieth-century newsboys lived with their own families).

  27. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1867.

  28. Brace, Sermons to Newsboys, 108, 112, 117.

  29. Ibid., 26.

  30. Kevin Gilbert, “Friends or Dependents: Christmas Charity Dinners and Changing Images of the Poor in New York City, 1897–1915” (unpublished seminar paper, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1993). On the newsboys’ code of honor, see Brace, Dangerous Classes, 98–99.

  31. Boyer, Urban Masses, 98.

  32. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1871; Dec. 26, 1872; and Dec. 26, 1873. Roosevelt was present once again in 1884 (ibid., Dec. 26, 1884).

  33. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1890. “This compilation does not make any allowance for the turkey bones, but, on the other hand, the weight of the newsboys before beginning the repast is placed rather high.”

  34. Ibid.

  35. Boyer, Urban Masses, 98.

  36. Brace, Dangerous Classes, 395.

  37. Horatio Alger, Jr., Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (Boston, 1868). Most of the other books about newsboys were anonymously authored. These include John El-lard, The Newsboy (Philadelphia, 1860), a nonfiction account of the “Newsboys’ Aid Society,” founded in Philadelphia in 1858; Tom Brice, the News-boy (New York, 1862); Willie Wilson, the Newsboy (New York, 1865), a moralistic tale of a good boy; Luke Darrell, the Chicago Newsboy (Chicago, 1866); and [Thomas March Clark,] John Whopper the Newsboy (Boston, 1871), a fantasy adventure story of a newsboy’s trip to China.

  38. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The Newsboy (New York, 1854; reprinted 1870), 17–18. Robert says later, “‘I never had any father; I was sea-born.’” (156).

  39. Ibid., 17 (“agin my natur”), 374 (“miracle of goodness”).

  40. E.H.C., “The Sufferer,” Child’s Friend, Apr., 1844, 19–22.

  41. Louise Chandler Moulton, “Just a Little Bit of Christmas,” Youth’s Companion, Dec. 21, 1865, 200. For other examples of poor children who do not ask for anything, see “Nelly’s Christmas Gift,” ibid., Dec. 20, 1877, 434–435 (in this story the little heroine is black); and also the two stories to be discussed below.

  42. Annie Fraust, “Christmas for Rich and Poor,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 57 (Dec. 1858), 513–516. See also Frank Lee Benedict, “The Orphan’s New-Year’s Eve,” Peterson’s Magazine 31 (Jan. 1864), 27–34, in which an impoverished orphan turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of the rich heroine’s closest friend.

  43. This story is also about the conflict between older notions of family structure, which gave fathers veto power over their children’s marriage partners, and emerging notions which accorded children free choice. From still another angle, the daughter’s “elopement”—and her subsequent banishment from the family—can be read as a symbolic way of touching on the issue of premarital sex and illegitimacy. Ironically, from this angle such stories do deal with social class, after all—in the form of the risk of downward mobility posed by sexual misconduct. (For a discussion of this question in a male context, see the story of young Robert Hamlin in Eliza Leslie’s story “Snow-Balling,” discussed in Chapter 3.)

  44. Susan Warner, Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking (New York, 1854), 14, 22. This point follows out the implication of scenes about consumerism from The Wide, Wide World (discussed in Chapter 4).

  45. William Dean Howells, “Christmas Every Day,” in Christmas Every Day and Other Stories Told for Children (New York, 1893), 3–22.

  46. Edmund Alton, “The Children’s Christmas Club of Washington City,” St. Nicholas 15 (1887), 146–149.

  47. New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1851; ibid., Dec. 29, 1852. For 1853, see ibid., Dec. 27, 1853.

  48. The Tribune of Dec. 26, 1853, published an extensive list of the charitable agencies that had held open house the previous day—twenty in all.

  49. Ibid., Dec. 27, 1853. For a similar story about a Boston institution, see “Christmas Eve at the Orphan Asylum,” Child’s Friend (Jan., 1856), 77–79.

  50. There were three other reports of charity visitations in that same number of the Tribune. All three took place at institutions for children: Randalls Island, the New York Juvenile Asylum (the children there were served a dinner “which they enjoyed in a manner that would have made many a street vagrant envious”), and the Girls’ Industrial School.

  51. See Richard Sennett, Families Against the City: Middle-Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872–1890 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

  52. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1875; New York Tribune, Dec. 27, 1875; Louisa May Alcott to the Alcott family, Dec. 25, 1875, in Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, eds., The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 210–213. That same year Alcott published a novel in which several children experience a perfect, present-filled Christmas: “‘Now, I believe I’ve got every thing in the world that I want,’” one of them says. (Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill [Boston, 1875], 226–227.)

  53. Edward W. Bok, “Complicating Christmas,” Ladies’ Home Journal, Dec. 1897. For women’s work at Christmas, see Leslie Bella, The Christmas Imperative: Leisure, Family and Women’s Work (Halifax, N.S.: Fernwood Pub., 1992).

  54. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Knopf, 1965). For an example of the Social Gospel applied to Christmas, see George Hodges, “What the Christmas Spirit Saith unto the Churches,” New England Magazine, Dec. 1896, 469–476.

  55. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1890.

  56. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1891. The event was repeated only once, the following year. It is evident that this event was resented by the established charitable agencies, who saw it as drawing attention (and contributions) away from their own work. A representative of the Christmas Society told a reporter the following year, “The organized charities of the city say we have been the means of depriving them of subscriptions [i.e., contributions].” Rental of Madison Square Garden alone cost $800 (ibid., Dec. 27, 1892).

  57. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1899. See also the 1901 report: “From the boxes many prominent people looked down upon the 3,000 Christmas diners, the majority of whom remained until the end of the entertainment.” The article concluded with a list of prominent New Yorkers who “purchased boxes” for this event (New York Times, Dec. 26, 1901).

  58. New York World, Dec. 26, 1899; quoted in Gilbert, “Friends or Dependents,” 9.

  59. New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1902.

  60. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1903. New York’s mayor, Seth Low, was in attendance on this occasion.

  61. Ibid., Dec. 26, 1905.

  62. New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1895. The article continues: “After eating three plates of turkey and as many dishes of sauce the soup is called for, and when they have got outside of one or two bowls they stuff their pockets with candy, apples, nuts, bananas and other good things and hasten to the gymnasium, where they exercise vigorously for an hour…. All these customs were kept strictly at the dinner last night.” For other newsboys’ dinners given by Fliess, see ibid., Dec. 26, 1895
; New York Times, Dec. 26, 1899 (with descriptions of pie-throwing in previous years); New York Times, Dec. 26, 1901 (a dinner given by Frank Tilford, who was quoted as saying: “Who is there that could watch these little fellows enjoying themselves without feeling happy?” Nevertheless, “twelve policemen were present to maintain order.” New York Tribune, Dec. 26, 1908 (a history of the newsboys’ Christmas dinners).

  63. There may have been an additional reason for the newsboys’ preferences: They were rejecting the “bourgeois” practice of separating sweet dishes from the rest of the food as a distinct course termed “dessert.”

  64. New York Times, Dec. 25, 1876.

  Chapter 7

  1. “Christmas at the South,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 1867. Over subsequent decades, Southerners themselves evoked similar recollections of Christmas as part of the psychological arsenal they employed to plead with Northern whites for reconciliation along class and racial lines (which, they implicitly argued, ought to transcend the earlier opposition along regional lines). See, for example, three fictional works by Thomas Nelson Page: A Captured Santa Claus (New York; 1902; first published in 1891); “Polly: A Christmas Recollection,” in In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories (New York, 1887), 187–230; and “The Christmas Peace,” in Bred in the Bone (New York, 1904), 183–234. See also Joel Chandler Harris, “A Child of Christmas: A Christmas Tale of North and South,” in The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories (New York, 1902), 71–151.

  2. John Esten Cooke, “Christmas Time in Old Virginia,” Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 10 (1883), 443–459; the “Bracebridge Hall” passage is on p. 451. Another account, published in 1897 by Thomas Nelson Page, included, just as Irving had done, an extended description of the anticipation of the guests who were being driven in carriages to spend Christmas in their old family mansion. (The illustration for this section—it is captioned “At last the ‘big gate’ is reached”—was surely intended to evoke the highly popular illustration that Randolph Caledecott prepared for the 1875 edition of Bracebridge Hall.) It is no coincidence that Page, who helped invent the idea of the old Southern Christmas, was also largely responsible for inventing the myth of Old Dixie.

  3. “Abolition of Christmas,” Evangelical and Literary Magazine (Richmond) 6 (Dec. 1823), 636–639.

  4. Charles G. Parsons, An Inside View of Slavery: A Tour Among the Planters (Boston, 1855; reprinted, Savannah, 1974), 27 (delirium tremens); Nancy Chappelear Baird, ed., Journals of Amanda Virginia Edmonds, Lass of the Mosby Confederacy, 1859–1867 (Stephens City, Va., 1984), 9–10 (1857), 64 (1861); Mary A. Livermore, The Story of My Life (Hartford, 1897), 210 (drinking children). See also Baird, Edmonds, 243 (1866): “‘Christmas Gift’ is uttered by all tongues this morning, then nog, breakfast, and almost tight!”

  5. Norfolk Public Ledger, Dec. 26, 2876. Norfolk was a port town with a naval yard and many saloons; it experienced a race riot in 1866. See George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 31.

  6. Journals and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian 1772–1774 (Williamsburg, Va., 1945), 52. The Robert E. Lee letter is quoted by James M. MacPherson, New York Review of Books 42 (Dec. 21, 1995), 15. For evidence that Christmas misrule was common in parts of the South at least as early as the late seventeenth century, see Michel Sobel’s provocative book, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 37, 67, and 263n13.

  7. M. M. Folsom, “Christmas at Brockton Plantation,” Southern Bivuoac n.s. 1 (1886), 483–489; quoted passage is on p. 486.

  8. William Nevison Blow, manuscript Memoir, Archives of the College of William and Mary. This item was brought to my attention by Patrick Breen.

  9. Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (3rd ed., Baltimore, 1888), 160–161.

  10. Quoted in Abe C. Ravitz, “John Pierpont and the Slaves’ Christmas,” Phylon 21 (1960), 384–385; also quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 578. The one general exception to the pattern of free time involves house slaves, whose labor (unlike that of field hands) was needed at Christmas.

  11. See also the testimony of Henry Cheatam, who attributed the policy to a mean overseer: “[D]ere weren’t no celebratin’, ‘ceptin’ at hog killin’. Dat was de biggest dat of de year.” Quoted in Norman R. Yetman, ed., Life Under the “Peculiar Institution”: Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 56. A few planters—they seem to have clustered in the “new” States from Alabama to Texas—allowed no holiday at all. An ex-slave from Alabama remembered once having to build a lime kiln at Christmas (ibid., 147). An ex-slave from Oklahoma recalled that her owner “didn’t [even] tell us anything about Christmas …, and all we done was work” (ibid., 329). The same informant also argued: “The way he made the Negroes work so hard. Old Master must have been trying to get rich” (ibid., 326). A planter’s wife in Texas justified this policy by telling her slaves that “Niggers was made to work for white folks.” But the powerful hold of the holiday even within this family is demonstrated by the fact that on at least one occasion another white woman living in the household secretly baked two Christmas cakes for the slaves (ibid., 70).

  12. For example, Mingo White recalled: “On Christmas we didn’t have to do no work, no more’n feed the stock and do de li’l work round de house. When we got through with dat we had de rest of de day to run round wherever we wanted to go. ’Course, we had to get permission from de master” (ibid., 314). See also Tatler, “Management of Negroes,” in Southern Cultivator 8 (1850), 162–164: “Believing that the strolling about of negroes for a week at a time during what are called Christmas Holidays is productive of much evil, the writer has set his face against the custom. Christmas is observed as a Sacred Festival. On that day as good a dinner as the plantation will afford is served for the negroes, and they all sit down to a common table, but the next day go to work. From considerations both of morality and needful rest and recreation to the negro, I much prefer giving a week in July, when the crop is laid by, to giving three days at Christmas.” Quoted in James O. Breeden, ed., Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 258.

  13. Yetman, Selections, 281. There was at least one ritual, practiced in the “low country” of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, that allowed slaves to exert at least symbolic control over the length of the holidays: They were to last as long as the “Yule log” continued to burn in one piece. Slaves would choose the largest possible tree, chop it down a year in advance, soak it in water for the entire year, and light it early on Christmas Day in the hall of the Big House, where it would be the “back-log.” The holidays would be over when the Yule log finally burned into two pieces—a process that could take a full week. This ritual was recalled by Booker T. Washington in “Christmas Days in Old Virginia” (1907), in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker?. Washington Papers (14 vols., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972–89), 1, 394–397 (Yule log is on p. 397). See also John Williamson Palmer, “Old Maryland Homes and Ways,” Century 49 (1894), 260; and Rebecca Cameron, “Christmas on an Old Plantation,” in The Ladies’ Home Journal (Dec. 1891), 5–8. This ritual was apparently devised by literary-minded Anglophile planters; it derived from an English custom in which tenants and servants were permitted to eat at the patron’s table as long as the Yule log burned.

  14. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 574–575. I have not encountered a single case in which slaves were unambiguously deprived of their customary right to freedom from labor at Christmas. The two cases most nearly approaching this both seem to refer to the deprivation of other privileges. In 1854, James Henry Hammond denied slaves Christmas celebrations at his plantation, on account of a poor (wasted) harvest. He wrote in his record book on Dec. 25, 1854: “
No festivities, crops being lost—negroes not having done their duty.” (Norrece T. Jones, Jr., Born a Child of Freedom Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990], 199.) In 1858 or 1859, on Robert Allston’s South Carolina rice plantation, two slaves “were made to run the gauntlet for taking a hog out of the pen. The whole plantation being shared out of Xmas until they found out the crimnal [sic].” (J. H. Easterby, ed., The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F.W. Allston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 34.

  15. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston, 1845), 74–75. This is the first version of Douglass’s autobiography; his description of Christmas is different in subsequent versions.

  16. For example, one slave owner “followed the common practice of paying his slaves if they chose to work during the holidays when they would otherwise be free. [In 1853 he] paid several slaves fifty cents a day for splitting rails, hauling cotton and corn, and operating the plantation cotton gin.” Orville W. Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 207.

  17. Jones, Child of Freedom, 70–71.

  18. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn & Buffalo, 1854), 214; Irwin Russell, “Christmas-Night in the Quarters,” in Poems by Irwin Russell (New York, 1888), 1 (“high carnival”); the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, D.D., Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop; A Tale (New York, 1852), 103–104 (“Ah! white man”), 109–111 (“times of cramming”). See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 574. For one former slave’s recollections, see John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 652–653.