The Battle for Christmas (13 page)

In short, the Knickerbockers felt that they belonged to a patrician class whose authority was under siege. From that angle, their invention of Santa Claus was part of what we can now see as a larger, ultimately quite serious cultural enterprise: forging a pseudo-Dutch identity for New York, a placid “folk” identity that could provide a cultural counterweight to the commercial bustle and democratic “misrule” of early-nineteenth-century New York. The best-known literary expression of this larger enterprise is Irving’s classic story “Rip Van Winkle” (published a full decade after
Knickerbockers History)
. But in the
History
, too, Irving pictured old New Amsterdam as a place of “filial piety” in which people thought and acted “with characteristic slowness and circumspection …; who adhere … to the customs … of their revered forefathers.” New Amsterdam was a serene place in which people (watched over by good St. Nicholas himself) “did not regulate their time by hours, but by [the smoking of] pipes.”
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Which finally brings me to Clement Clarke Moore, the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” If we have any image of the man at all, it is apt to be of a benevolent figure, a scholarly but genial professor of Hebrew who stepped, just this once, out of his ivory tower to write, for his own children, those magical verses about what happened on “the night before Christmas.” He is a man who would appear to be as distant from the wider currents of history and politics as the figure of Santa Claus himself.

Clement Clarke Moore
. This woodcut was made from one of the four portraits painted of Moore at different stages of his life. Good oil portraits were expensive, and only wealthy people could afford even one. This is from the last of Moore’s four portraits, done around 1850, almost thirty years after the writing of “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
(Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

The image is not particularly misleading, and it is not my intention to dispel it. Still, Moore did have a real existence. He was born in 1779 (during the American Revolution) and died eighty-four years later, in 1863 (during the Civil War). And he fits perfectly the Knickerbocker mold: High Church Episcopalian, politically conservative, and quintessentially upper-class. Moore’s father was for thirty-five years Episcopal bishop of the diocese of New York, and Moore himself, though a layman, was an active and influential figure in the Church. (In fact, Moore held his professorship in a seminary that he himself had helped to establish.)

Moore was also conservative. His parents and grandparents had been closet Tories during the American Revolution—and open Federalists afterward. Moore’s own brand of conservatism took the form of an agrarian paternalism not far removed from that of a wealthy Virginia planter of the same generation. As a young man, Clement Moore himself published a series of tracts attacking both Jeffersonian radicalism and
urban commerce, and to the end of his life he remained suspicious of democracy and other “reforms.” For example, in middle age he opposed the movement to abolish slavery. Indeed, at the time Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” in 1822, he himself owned five slaves.
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Moore’s ideology was well suited to his social position. He was an old-style country gentleman, a patrician man of leisure who inherited so much land (and the income it brought) that he never needed to take a job. Moore accepted his professorship when he was past 40, and for a token salary, in a seminary constructed on land he himself had donated for the purpose.
³⁷
He inherited his mother’s large Manhattan estate, originally located well to the north of New York City. The estate, which bore the name Chelsea, extended all the way from what is now Nineteenth Street to Twenty-fourth Street, and from Eighth to Tenth Avenue. (This estate has given its name to the present-day Chelsea district of the city, just north of Greenwich Village.)

But when Moore was a young man this area was isolated and pastoral.
³⁸
John Pintard, who knew Moore well, wrote in 1830 that his Chelsea estate alone was worth $500,000. He also acknowledged Moore as his social superior, writing that even though he and Moore “have been always on the most friendly terms,… I have resisted all hospitalities when sitting in [his] elegantly furnished drawing room, for
he
is
wealthy.”
³⁹

Still, Moore’s great wealth did not prove sufficient to insulate him from the pressures that transformed New York in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In 1811, as already noted, the New York City council approved a grid system of numbered streets and avenues that would crisscross the island above Fourteenth Street. By the time Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” New York was expanding north through Chelsea itself. In fact, late in 1818 something called “Ninth Avenue” was dug right through the middle of his estate (the land having been taken from him by eminent domain).
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The 1821 city directory lists Moore as residing, not at Chelsea, but near the corner of Ninth Avenue and Twenty-first Street.
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Eleven years later, in 1832, John Pintard visited Chelsea and mused about the changes that had overtaken the neighborhood, filled now (as Pintard put it) with “streets that have become regularly built up … where, but a few years ago, all was open country. It really surprised me to notice a dense population and contiguous buildings in what only 10 years since was merely a sparse city.”
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By the 1850s the entire hill on which Moore’s house stood had been leveled to make new land and bulkheads along the Hudson River waterfront, and Moore had built new homes for himself and his family.
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Moore was disturbed by the transformation of his city, and the cutting-up of his estate. In 1818, the very year that his property was bisected by Ninth Avenue (and just four years before he wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas”), Moore published a pamphlet that protested against the relentless development of New York. In it he expressed a fear that the city’s beauty and tranquillity would be lost forever, and that its future was already in what he termed “destructive and ruthless hands,” the hands of men who did not “respect the rights of property.” City politics and policy were controlled by men Moore described as “mechanics and persons whose influence is principally among those classes of the community to whom it is indifferent what the eventual result of their industry may be to society.” New York was being turned over to a conspiracy, and Moore named its members: “cartmen, carpenters, masons, pavers, and all their host of attendant laborers.” Moore doubted that the city could (as he put it) be “save[d] from ruin.” And he was pessimistic about the future of his class: “We know not the amount nor the extent of oppression which may yet be reserved for us.”
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Manhattan in 1778
. When this map was drawn, New York City occupied only the lower tip of Manhattan (the shaded area at the bottom). The rest of the island was rural. Halfway up the map, on the left, is an estate labeled “Clarke”—the property of Thomas Clarke, Moore’s maternal grandfather. He called it Chelsea, after a district in London.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

Manhattan in 1831
. Now Moore’s Chelsea estate has been divided up into gridded urban terrain. Moore’s property, located near the lower right-hand corner of the map, extended from Eighth Avenue to Tenth Avenue, between Eighteenth and Twenty-fourth streets. (Note that on this map the more usual north-south orientation has been reversed; the southern part of the island is at the top.)
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

1810 St. Nicholas
. The broadside that John Pintard commissioned at his own expense, executed by the noted illustrator Alexander Anderson. In the right-hand panel are two children: a pleased little girl who has received a present and a tearful little boy who has not (perhaps he has received a caning instead). John Pintard confirmed the reverential image in a short poem placed beneath the picture: a child’s poem that begins with the words “Saint Nicholas, good holy man” and concludes: “Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! / To serve you ever was my end. / If you will now, me, something give, / I’ll serve you ever while I live.”
(Courtesy, The New-York Historical Society)

It was at this difficult juncture, in 1822, that Clement Clarke Moore wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” As we already know, Moore did not invent “the night before Christmas” out of whole cloth. In the distant background was the old Dutch ritual, and John Pintard and Washington Irving offered more immediate models. In addition, three other poems, two from 1810 and the third from 1821, would provide more materials—for example, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer, and even the poetic meter that Moore would employ. Moore’s own contributions may have been small, but they were crucial to the creation of a myth that suited the needs of his own Knickerbocker set—and that finally proved malleable enough to transcend those needs and to be appropriated by other groups of Americans. It is time to examine more closely the sources Moore had at his disposal.

First: Washington Irving. Yes, there
were
twenty-five references to St. Nicholas in
Knickerbockers History
. But Irving represented St. Nicholas not as a figure who appeared during the Christmas season but rather in the way that John Pintard had originally introduced him to the New-York Historical Society—that is, as the mythic patron saint of New Amsterdam. Early in
Knickerbockers History
, Irving wrote that “the great and good St. Nicholas … took … New Amsterdam under his peculiar patronage, and has ever since been … the titular saint of this excellent city.” In this role St. Nicholas (he never actually appears, except once in a dream scene and, again, as the wooden figurehead on a ship) was essentially an amusing caricature of the old-time Dutch gentry who inhabited Irving’s imaginary New Amsterdam: a genial yet obviously patrician saint, dressed in a broad hat and invariably smoking a long pipe.
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(Moore would later pick that up, but with one difference.)