The Battle for Christmas (44 page)

Such material suggests that some members of the American bourgeoisie were facing a real Christmas dilemma. Their own children had become jaded with presents. On the other hand, the actual poor—who were unlikely to be surfeited with gifts—were a sea of anonymous proletarian faces, and in any event they were as likely to respond to acts of token generosity with embarrassment or hostility as with the requisite display of hearty gratitude. Giving to the
children
of the needy would solve the dilemma neatly.

Typically, the children selected to participate in such events (as in the case of the Portland Children’s Christmas Club) came from a pool that had been carefully screened by charitable organizations. These needy children made ideal recipients of face-to-face charity. They could be counted on to be both well behaved and truly grateful. They would respond
neither with the jaded indifference of more privileged children nor with the guarded resentment their own parents might display. And they would
show
their gratitude, with touching smiles and exclamations. Face-to-face charity—the exchange of gifts for goodwill—could be made to work in mid-nineteenth-century America, after all. But the economic divide could be bridged only by going across generational lines. In shorthand language, class had to be mediated through age.

In any case, from mid-century on—and with what appears to have been increasing frequency into the 1890s—some well-to-do Americans devoted part of their Christmas days to visiting the children of the poor. These visits were ordinarily encouraged and arranged by the charitable agencies themselves. The first instance I have found of what would become the standard ritual took place in 1844, when Margaret Fuller chose to spend part of Christmas Day with the children in New York’s Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb—and to report on her visit in the
New York Tribune
(this episode is recounted in
Chapter 5
). After 1850, New York’s charitable agencies for children institutionalized this kind of event. They began to hold formal open houses that more prosperous residents of the city were invited to visit on Christmas Day, open houses that received lots of publicity (they also served as effective fund-raisers).

A favorite place to visit was the children’s nursery on Randalls Island, the municipal establishment in the East River (it also contained the city hospital, insane asylum, and almshouse). On Christmas Day, 1851, the
New York Tribune
reported that “quite a large party of ladies and gentlemen” attended “a capital entertainment” given to the children at the municipal nursery and hospital. The following year, too, the
Tribune
reported that the children on Randalls Island were visited by “several dignitaries, including several merchants of the City,” who brought “a supply of juvenile presents suitable to the season.” On this occasion the children “marched in procession to meet them at the dock.” And of course they “most gratefully accepted and heartily enjoyed” the dinner that followed.
⁴⁷

And so on in subsequent years (the Randalls Island open houses continued into the twentieth century). Of course, Randalls Island was physically cut off from the rest of the city. But charitable institutions located within the city, even in its less savory areas, also invited visitors on Christmas Day.
⁴⁸
The most heavily publicized of these was in the Mission House located in the Five Points section, the most notorious slum area in the city (in the entire nation, for that matter). But the terms in which the
Tribune
reported the first such occasion, in 1853, are revealing. The report, headed “
CHRISTMAS AT THE FIVE POINTS
,” indicated that the Mission
House (located on the site of a former brewery) was “open all day” and received many visitors. In fact,

This was an intriguing description. It assured its readers that the Five Points area was transformed on this occasion, its menace momentarily defused. The more unpleasant denizens of the neighborhood simply withdrew from sight when the respectable outsiders came to visit, and only the presence of children was felt.
⁵⁰

What impelled people to make such visits? Pangs of conscience certainly played a part, but there is surely more. (To ease one’s conscience, it would have been enough to have made a substantial contribution, and stayed at home.) The visitors—and, just as important, the many others who merely read about them in the newspapers—seem to have needed to experience, in person or by report, the “gratefully accepted and heartily enjoyed” gifts, the “happy faces and joyful voices.” Such a need may have addressed an unspoken fear that was shared by many Americans in just these decades—a fear that the urban social order was coming apart, that industrial capitalism was leading to social collapse. From that angle, visits to poor children offered a kind of symbolic reassurance that the social order still held together, after all. It was not only a merry Christmas that the happy faces demonstrated; it was the viability of industrial capitalism itself.

But I suspect that such a “political” motivation is not the whole answer. The grateful exclamations and smiles of the poor children may have fulfilled another need as well—a need to experience spontaneous affectionate gratitude
in itself;
to participate in social interactions that evoked a powerful emotional response that was difficult to achieve within middle-class family life. Charles Loring Brace had written about the absence of truly warm social relations among American families, the forced and “hollow” nature of domesticity. During the latter part of the century, other commentators made similar points. The very importance that domestic life had taken on in nineteenth-century American society had led
many people to harbor a set of powerful expectations that real families found it difficult to fulfill. The middle-class family was becoming a victim of its own Utopian fantasies.
⁵¹
Here, too, Christmas became a volatile flash point.

To glimpse something of what may have been at stake, let me cite a rare personal account of one of these Christmas visits. In 1875 the press reports about the annual Christmas pilgrimage to Randalls Island noted the presence among that year’s visitors of a celebrity, Louisa May Alcott. (Alcott was now living in New York, eight years after the publication of
Little Women
had propelled her into literary stardom.) Alcott and her party visited first the municipal orphanage, then the children’s hospital, and finally the home for retarded children. Alcott herself carried a large box of dolls and a bundle of candy. At every stop, one newspaper reported, “Miss Alcott… mingled with the little ones, giving to each a doll and some candy, accompanying each gift with some kind greeting.” Alcott was deeply moved by the experience, and she wrote a lengthy private letter to her family describing it. Her letter is filled with graphic descriptions of the children’s gratitude, intense and helpless—the sudden “cry of delight,” the outstretched “groping hands,” the sighs of “oh! oh!,” the “cheer of rapture,” the “silent bliss.” (One little girl was “so overcome” by the present Alcott gave her that “she had an epileptic fit on the spot.”) It was the first Christmas Alcott had spent “without [family] dinner or presents,” but she liked it “better than parties”: “I feel as if I’d had a splendid feast,” she concluded, “seeing the poor babies wallow in turkey soup, and that every gift I put into their hands had come back to me in the dumb delight of their un-childlike faces trying to smile.”
⁵²

It is easy to look back at this with distaste. From one angle, Alcott was exploiting the youthful recipients of her benevolence—using them as what I’m tempted to call “charity objects,” almost an economic equivalent to the sexual representation of women in pornography. Alcott appears to have deeply craved the overwhelming gratitude displayed by the objects of her charity. In contrast to the aggressive begging of wassailers in pre-nineteenth-century Christmas rituals, these Gilded Age dependents took the role of passive, responsive instruments on whose emotional vulnerability Alcott seems to have “played.”

But that isn’t entirely fair. People like Louisa May Alcott had good reason to feel stifled by the constraints of domesticity, even as they were unable to liberate themselves from its assumptions. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, women were bearing the brunt of the tension (and the labor) that the Christmas season ordinarily entailed in prosperous
households. The
Ladies’ Home Journal
actually published an article in 1897 that acknowledged this as a cultural problem. Men in “thousands of homes” across America would be “truly thankful when this Christmas business is over,” the article began (it was written by a man). Why so? “[B]y seeing their wives, mothers, sisters, or daughters reach Christmas day utterly tired out, [and] with the prospect of a siege of illness as soon as Christmas is over.”
⁵³

These were women on whom the emotional work of Christmas had devolved, along with the bulk of the shopping and the cooking—women who felt themselves chiefly responsible for making sure that their husbands and their children (or, as in Alcott’s case, their fathers) were satisfied with the holiday experience. The task was daunting, and even partial failure (or anxiety about the prospect of failure) meant that guilt would be added to fatigue. Little wonder that Christmas was so often followed by “a siege of illness” for middle-class women.

Such women wished for a little relaxation, surely. But they also welcomed any opportunity to see their efforts rewarded with the kind of intense response their own families were often unable to provide. They were seeking intense sensation along with social justice. Not long afterward, some of these women would manage to link those dual urges together by turning to such activities as social work (in places like Jane Addams’s Hull House) or the radical Christian Social Gospel movement, which openly addressed the issue of bringing a capitalist social order into conformity with the teachings of Jesus (Charles Loring Brace can be considered a forerunner of this movement). Or, farther afield, these same women might have joined such emerging enterprises as the Colonial Revival and other forms of what the historian Jackson Lears has termed “anti-modernism.”
⁵⁴

In any event, the problem was not of their making. These women (and some men, too) were doing the best they knew how. The problem was not with their needs but with the dynamics of the society in which they lived. The problem was with a constricting domestic ideology that caused many people of means to harbor unsatisfied expectations of achieving personal fulfillment through family life alone. And the problem was also with an inequitable economic system that caused many of the same people—those, indeed, with the strongest ethical sense—to experience profound guilt, a guilt that, for good reason, could not be easily assuaged.

By the final decade of the nineteenth century, well-to-do New Yorkers had begun to arrange new and larger kinds of Christmas visitations to the poor, and these gala events reeked—strongly—of exploitation. During the 1890s some New Yorkers began to treat charity, almost literally, as a kind of spectator sport, performed on a large scale in arenalike spaces before a paying audience. On Christmas Day, 1890, a midday dinner was served to 1,800 poor boys (many of them newsboys) at Lyric Hall, a theater at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street. A newspaper account made clear what was taking place: “Every floor was crowded with lookerson, principally members of the Children’s Aid Society and other charitable people.” This meal was followed, that same evening, by the traditional dinners held at every Newsboys’ Lodging House in the city. It was as if the newsboys were being asked to put on performances at different holiday venues—as if there were something erotically charged about watching hungry children eat.
⁵⁵

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: