The Battle for Christmas (42 page)

In opting for this strategy, Brace had come to embrace the qualities of competitiveness and self-reliance that he sensed in many of New York’s poor children, children who had been thrown on their own devices. He saw such behavior as a sign of potential ambition that, healthfully channeled, could transform bad habits into productive ones. Even in
Home-Life in Germany
, Brace had acknowledged that self-reliance was a virtue (in America “a boy is an independent, self-reliant man …, when he is [still] in leading-strings in Germany”). But in that book he had seen self-reliance only as a “compensation” (and a partial one, at that) for the absence of strong family ties between American children and their parents. Now, as secretary of the Children’s Aid Society, Brace paid more attention to encouraging self-reliance than to fostering family ties. Knowing that many of New York’s poor children could be enticed with relative ease to leave home, Brace put to practical use what he had previously lamented as the weakness of family ties among American youths. He reported in just those terms the mood among a group of boys leaving New York for the West in 1855: “All seemed as careless at leaving home forever, as if they
were on … [an] excursion to Hoboken.” Life in the labor-starved, Protestant-dominated West, he argued, would be likely to transform a “rough, thieving New York vagrant” into an “honest, hardworking Western pioneer.”
²²
According to the historian Paul Boyer, Brace did not systematically track the later careers of the orphan-train riders: He “showed little interest in determining whether the boys he sent West actually became settled members of their communities; it was enough that they were ‘being absorbed into that active, busy population.’”
²³

But it would be a mistake to think that this complex man had turned into a simple apologist for the spirit of free enterprise. Despite his enduring admiration for the independent human spirit, Charles Loring Brace never lost the deep distrust of nineteenth-century capitalism that informed
Home-Life in Germany
. At the very height of the Gilded Age, in 1882, he published a work of theology that attempted to trace the changing role of Christianity in human history. In that book,
Gesta Christi
, Brace noted tentatively that the New Testament itself was permeated by a “certain tone” that was, “if not of’communism/at least in favor of greater distribution of wealth than would suit modern ideas.” Jesus and the apostles “almost denounce the rich,” he wrote, and “their sympathies are strongly with the working classes; they urge continually the diffusion of property, in whatever way would benefit the world.” At another point in the same book Brace insisted that there was “in many of the aspirations and aims of communism, a certain marked sympathy or harmony with the ideals of Christianity.” But he was also quick to add that “[n]othing, however, in Christ’s teachings tends towards any forcible interfering with rights of property, or encourages dependence on others.” As that final clause suggests, Jesus might be a socialist, but Brace would not relinquish the idea that he was also a man of self-reliance! Here as clearly as anywhere in his writings may be found a clue to the coherent philosophy that Brace never quite managed to articulate.
²⁴

B
UT IT WAS
not philosophy that earned Brace the respect of the philanthropic community, in any case. It was his practical organizational skills which did that, and his ability to deal effectively with poor children themselves. Those interpersonal skills came increasingly to the fore over the years. From the beginning, the Children’s Aid Society did not restrict itself to sending children West, and by the 1860s it was becoming clear that the supply of street children in New York far exceeded the demand for their labor on the farm.
²⁵
So the C.A.S. came increasingly to focus its efforts
on the industrial schools and lodging houses it had established in the city. The first and most successful of these local establishments—the one that captured the attention of the public, and became Braces personal pride and joy—was a lodging house designated specifically for a single subset of poor children: the city’s newsboys.

We have encountered newsboys before, during the 1840s, shortly after they came into existence as a result of the development of an urban “penny press” (see
Chapter 3
). Often homeless, they eked out their subsistence by hawking afternoon newspapers and “extra” editions on the streets of the city. By the 1850s newsboys constituted a familiar and sometimes aggressive segment of the urban population, and they were notorious for their streetwise impertinence and for the racket they made at their beloved theater. Charles Loring Brace referred to them as “a fighting, gambling set.” Consisting largely of immigrant Irish Catholics, the newsboys seem to have spoken in an argot of their own, and they were usually known only by nicknames—“Pickle Nose,” “Fat Jack,” Mickety,” “Round Hearts,” “No-Nothing Mike,” “O’Neill the Great,” “Wandering Jew,” even (in one case) “Horace Greeley.”
²⁶

The Newsboys’ Lodging House that Brace set up in 1854 provided many of these boys with a stable household. By 1867 the Children’s Aid Society was operating five such lodging houses in poor districts of New York, one of which was located at the corner of West Twenty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, just at the edge of the former Chelsea estate owned by Clement Clarke Moore!
²⁷
The newsboys became a source of special pleasure for Charles Loring Brace. Working with them became for him a secular version of the ministry to which he had originally intended to devote himself. From time to time Brace even delivered brief sermons to his charges, nonsectarian sermons that avoided any effort to lure the always-suspicious “newsies” away from their Catholic heritage. (He delivered one of these sermons at Christmas, emphasizing Jesus’ humble birth and upbringing “among common laboring people” and the fact that his own chosen ministry was to “the great masses of mankind—the poor laboring people—just such as you are, boys.” And in another sermon Brace called Jesus “the working-man’s friend.”)
²⁸

Guided by what was probably a combination of private admiration and pragmatic tactics, Brace dealt with these newsboys without sentimentality, without pretending that they embodied purity or selflessness. He came to relish what he saw as the independence, competitiveness, and signs of
ambition
that characterized the culture of newsboys, even the aggressive edge they displayed, and he worked to encourage those attributes.
Whatever else they were, newsboys were by definition not beggars—they
worked
for their own support. The most successful among them earned as much as $3 a day and sometimes even more.
²⁹
(The aspiring young author Horatio Alger spent several months in residence at the original Newsboys’ Lodging House, and he based several of his novels on that experience.)

Brace retained, at the same time, his earlier sense that the newsboys needed to grow up in an environment that was genial and cheerful, and he tried with considerable success to make every Newsboys’ Lodging House into just such an environment. Brace was skillful in dealing with newsboys on their own terms, and he made sure he hired a flexible and well-trained staff. Indeed Brace, along with many others, admired the newsboys’ independent spirit, their solidarity, and their internal code of honor. As one scholar has put it, “Newsboys inhabited a twilight realm somewhere between desperate poverty and democratic manhood.”
³⁰
Brace knew better than to patronize the newsies, and he even took pleasure in watching them ridicule any visiting speakers who did. The lodging houses were characterized, as Paul Boyer has put it, by “the prevailing high spirits, the street slang, and the boisterous shouts of tough little gamins totally unin-timidated by the surroundings of a benevolent institution.”
³¹
Such geniality satisfied Brace’s own deep craving for the unforced social warmth he had first encountered in Germany at Christmastime.

S
O IT MAY
be no coincidence that the high point of the year at every Newsboys’ Lodging House was the annual Christmas dinner. Those dinners became a regular institution during the last four decades of the nineteenth century and were reported with relish in the press. (Between 1870 or so and the early 1900s, the annual dinners at the original Lodging House were regularly arranged and paid for by a wealthy New York businessman named William Fliess. Other prominent New Yorkers often agreed to host dinners at the other lodging houses. Theodore Roosevelt did so, for example, every year from 1870 to 1873, and on at least one of those occasions the future president presented a $25 cash prize to a newsboy who had submitted the best essay in a writing competition.)
³²

Year after year, New Yorkers read about the gusto and speed with which the newsboys consumed the food placed before them. As one report put it, “Dyspeptics who cannot enjoy the eating of a good Christmas dinner ought to make it a point to go to the Newsboys’ Lodging House … at 7 o’clock in the evening of Christmas Day and see the newsboys eat.” Such accounts sometimes recorded exactly how much the boys
consumed—in one year, when 450 boys were fed, it amounted to “670 pounds of turkey, 200 pounds of ham, 3 barrels of potatoes, 3 barrels of turnips, 200 loaves of bread, and 350 pies.” The reporter calculated this with mock precision as coming to “one-twenty-fifth of their own weight.”
³³
(Only once, in 1888, have I found an acknowledgment that something more serious may also have been at stake for the boys: Their “stomachs [were] small with chronic hunger.”) The Christmas dinners were often described in military terms, as in 1888, when the story was headed “
NEWSBOYS WILL BE FED
. They Battle with a Dinner and Win a Great Victory.” Or in 1890:
“THE NEWSBOYS’ ANNUAL TRIUMPH OVER TURKEY AND PIE.”

The press accounts took equal delight in reporting the newsboys’ raucous behavior on such occasions—their expertise in “cutting such capers … as only street arabs know.” But these high jinks seem never to have gotten out of hand, in part because of the skill with which the lodging-house staff arranged matters, including even the placement of the tables:

All in all, such scenes can be seen as the inventive fulfillment, in a very different set of circumstances, of the very Christmas fantasy that Charles Loring Brace had first described in
Home-Life in Germany
—a scene of genuine, spontaneous cheer in which people did not “seem to be enjoying themselves, because it is a ‘duty to be cheerful,’” but simply “because they cannot help it.”

The Children’s Aid Society was a great success by nineteenth-century standards. By the end of the century, sister organizations had been established in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.
³⁵
And other charitable institutions, too, began to direct much of their attention to the children of the poor.

Pleas for giving charity to poor children reached their height during
the Christmas season, and they seem to have made for an effective fund-raising technique.
³⁶
The effectiveness was no accident. Almost certainly it stemmed from a powerful convergence of older and newer holiday traditions: those older traditions in which Christmas was the major occasion in the year for offering gifts to the poor and those more recent traditions in which Christmas was the major occasion for giving gifts to children. Impoverished children embodied simultaneously the core of both rituals. Little wonder, then, that those children became the object of such attention in mid-nineteenth-century American cities.

What people may actually have expected of those children was problematic. Charles Loring Brace was among the few who seem to have been able to accept the rough-edged behavior of the “street arabs” with something that approached unadulterated admiration. Others persisted in trying to see them in a more romantic light.

As it happens, newsboys themselves were a source of fascination for middle-class Americans in the decades after 1850. There seemed to be something almost exotic about them. It was as if people were intrigued by their own uncertainty about whether newsboys were lost Victorian children waiting to be redeemed or just young hoodlums in the making. A fair number of books about newsboys appeared in the 1850s and 1860s. One of these,
Ragged Dick
(1867), was written by Horatio Alger, who based the novel on his own observations in the original Newsboys’ Lodging House.
³⁷
The title character of this book is spunky and ambitious, but he is also polite.

In none of these books, however, is the confusion as clear as it is in Elizabeth Oakes Smiths novel
The Newsboy
(1854). Published in the same year that Brace opened the first Newsboys’ Lodging House, this otherwise forgettable book offers an extraordinary example of authorial ambivalence. The hero of
The Newsboy
starts out as an uncouth homeless urchin who knows nothing about his parents. When he is asked who his mother is, he responds almost like little Topsy, the incorrigible slave girl in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, a book that had been published only two years earlier. The newsboy replies, “Got none.” (“Well, your Dad, then?” “Got none.” “Whew! Who owns you?” “Nobody.”)
³⁸
And the young newsboy uses rough language, too. On one occasion he responds to the solicitous question of a stranger by yelling, “‘What in h-1 is that to you?’” (This response is virtually identical to that which Charles Loring Brace had received from the English laborer he had similarly accosted on the street.)