The Battle for Christmas (45 page)

The several thousand wealthy observers entered first, so that they could look on as the “hungry multitude” was admitted. “In the boxes and gallery of the great building,” the story ran, “sat many thousands of well-fed and prosperous people, among them many women who had come in carriages and were gorgeously gowned and wore many diamonds, who looked on in happy sympathy …, who had come to see the spectacle of thousands being made happy.” There were four large sections of tables on the arena floor, and it was there that the poor, sitting in the upper gallery till their turn was called, were fed 2,200 at a time. This was a charity event on an industrial scale, a kind of Gilded Age version of Bracebridge Hall in which the entertainment itself was produced on an assembly line. Even so, the food ran out before everyone could be served.

Before the meal, both rich and poor joined together in singing the hymn “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” The hymn was sung in unison, “position and fortune forgotten for one brief moment.” It was a moving occasion, the
Times
reporter wrote: “The pathos of it all was in the expression contained in the smiles of thanks.” And the reporter concluded hopefully, suggesting that the very scale of the event foretold an imminent solution to the vexing problems of capitalism: “Neither any Continental city nor even London ever had to do anything approaching this in magnitude. It means the dawning of a new era, the bridging of the gulf between the rich and poor.”
⁵⁷

Only a single report, in the
New York World
, suggested that what had happened was more a matter of voyeurism than of class reconciliation:

There was still another strange twist. The Salvation Army hit upon a novel fashion for raising funds to pay for these events: They hired unemployed men to play the part of street-corner Santa Claus, soliciting passersby for contributions as they did their Christmas shopping. (This technique is still employed by the Salvation Army.) Given the long history of the transformation of Christmas in the nineteenth century, there was irony as well as ingenuity in this tactic, for what it did was to re-create the structure, though not the substance, of a much older ritual in which the poor were informally sanctioned to approach the rich during the Christmas season and beg for gifts. Even the fact that the needy men who acted as street-corner Santas were begging
in disguise
was deeply rooted in the mumming tradition. (After all, Belsnickles had done much the same thing in Pennsylvania towns at least as late as the 1870s.) But of course what the Salvation Army Santas were doing was profoundly different from older forms of Christmas wassailing and mumming: Their public begging was sanctioned only because they were not soliciting for themselves. They did not get to keep the money but had to turn it over to the organization for which they worked. They were in fact the paid employees of a charitable organization. (It is not clear whether they were paid a flat rate or a percentage of what they raised.) Perhaps these Santas were also permitted to attend the Madison Square Garden dinners they themselves had helped to make possible. But even if they were, it would only be because they had been given a ticket of admission by their employers. In that sense, the entire Santa Claus ritual was nothing less than a microcosm of the workings of nineteenth-century capitalism itself.

There is a final twist to this story, a twist that reveals still another microcosm. In 1902 the Salvation Army’s charity dinner was moved from Madison Square Garden to another arena, the Grand Central Palace. Once again, 20,000 people were fed. But this time the event failed to go exactly
as planned. The problem resulted from the fact that approximately 1,000 of the banqueters were young people, most of them newsboys, and they were seated separately in sections of their own at the two ends of the hall. These arrangements proved to be a mistake. (Charles Loring Brace would have known better, but he had been dead for a dozen years.) The youths took advantage of the opportunity to engage in activities other than eating:

The story in the
Tribune
reported what happened in deadpan language and considerable detail:

Finally, order disintegrated completely:

The organizers learned their lesson. The next year a somewhat smaller group of young people were invited (again, most of them newsboys), and this time the organizers had taken a precaution: The boys “were arranged in a corner of the hall all by themselves, where they could give vent to their boyish caprices without disturbing the more sedate.” The tactic seems to have worked. The youths “occasionally let out a deafening war whoop just to break the monotony and let other folk know they were there”—but apparently that was all.
⁶⁰
Two years later, in 1905, 600 newsboys attended, and as many as 10 policemen were assigned to control them. Even so, a substantial number were ejected from the hall during the course of the meal.
⁶¹

W
ITH SUCH TRADITIONS
of misrule emerging in the very midst of this kind of “spectatorial” event, an event devised by (and in large measure
for)
the well-to-do who came to observe the fruits of their charity, we have come full circle. Newsboys, as we know, had long been prone to such behavior at Christmas. As poor and youthful males, they came from the single sociodemographic group that had been most closely associated with Christmas misrule from at least as early as the sixteenth century.

A newspaper report of one of the Christmas dinners, held in 1895 at a Newsboys’ Lodging House, made it clear that the newsboys’ rowdy behavior was not mere random chaos but the expression of an elaborate and venerable ritual. The reporter explained it in this way: “There are many queer and quaint customs among the newsboys which are strictly kept on Christmas, and which lend originality to their doings at their dinners.” For one thing, they would never deign to dress up on such occasions: “All the newsboys come in their everyday clothes. Any one who would have ventured to present himself in his best suit would have been regarded by the [other] lads as aspiring ‘ter shine in de upper crust.’” And they insisted on eating their Christmas dinners in a particular sequence, beginning with dessert:

The newsboys had a reason, then, to disrupt the 1902 Salvation Army dinner: The food was not being served in the proper sequence, and
there were not enough pies. As the report of that chaotic event pointed out, “They began hurling bread and potatoes at those who waited on them, and said that they did not want turkey, but wanted more pie.” (The newsboys’ reversal of the standard dinner sequence was itself a kind of misrule—inverting the normal order of things. The pie-throwing itself was probably part of the ritual.)
⁶³

But there was probably a more important reason as well for the newsboys’ behavior. For if Christmas charity had become a spectator sport for the well-to-do, that meant it had become a form of what E. P. Thompson, referring to eighteenth-century England, has termed political “theater.” (In this case, it was theater in the most literal sense, complete with an arena equipped with a stage floor and galleries, as well as a separate entrance for the paying audience.) The well-to-do New York spectators expected the poor to “perform” for them, as it were, by eating their Christmas meal with manifest gusto and gratitude.

But from this perspective it is also fair to say that the spectators were putting on a performance of their own, by dressing up in their “gorgeous gowns” and flashiest jewelry. There was an earlier precedent for that, too. E. P. Thompson has also proposed that eighteenth-century gentry “theater” provoked a kind of responsive “counter-theater” on the part of the plebeians themselves, a dramatic assertion of their own identity, thrown mockingly back in the face of the gentry. And so with the newsboys in latter-day New York. The taunts and the pie-throwing, like the refusal to dress up, are understandable enough. These boys
were
hungry, after all, and the banquet they were being given was almost certainly the best food they would get all year. Yet it was surely demeaning to the newsboys that their own pleasure was also a spectacle to be observed by the rich. As early as 1876, a story about the annual dinner implicitly conveyed this point, even though the reporter ascribes the boys’ reaction to being watched to mere self-consciousness: “To appreciate the enjoyment of these boys properly one will have to see them when they sit down to hide away the ribs of beef,” the story began, only to continue with the acknowledgment that, unfortunately, “it will not do to be seen when seeing; for your newsboy, brave and sometimes impertinent as he sometimes is upon the street, is as sensitive, when he has his knees under the table as if he had been brought up in a hot-house, and was the most sensitive plant that grows.”
⁶⁴

Ostensibly, then, the newsboys’ display of misrule was a matter of mere juvenile high jinks. But surely it was also a form of counter-theater, aimed at those who were observing them. (As the 1903
New York Times
reporter
put it, they “let out a deafening war whoop just … to let other folk know they were there.”) This counter-theater served as a gesture that was meant to restore some of the dignity the newsboys had lost by being forced to make their own hunger a matter of public display. Among other things, it announced that they weren’t so thoroughly dependent on their mince pies, or their patrons, that they couldn’t afford to engage in a dramatic gesture of wasting the former by throwing them at the latter. In the process, the newsboys managed to make the most important point of all. They might be known as “Pinkie,” or “Pickle Nose,” or “No-Nothing Mike”—but whatever they were called, it would not be
Tiny Tim
.

C
HRISTMAS
1867 arrived in the midst of a depression. But that year the
New York Times
interrupted its standard admonition about remembering the plight of the city’s poor in order to offer a plea on behalf of a still worthier object of seasonal charity. There was already enough “ostentatious benevolence” directed at the urban poor in New York and other Northern cities, the paper admonished—“cities which, despite depression, are yet wealthy and happy.” So the arrival of Christmas might better serve to remind Americans of a forgotten portion of American society that was destitute indeed. It was the South—the defeated South. In that benighted region “a merry Christmas will not be known anywhere.” The newspaper painted a sorry scene: “Despair, or something like it, reigns in the mansions, and destitution is supreme in the hovels. Grim poverty makes its presence felt everywhere. Those who were once rich find themselves menaced by want, and those who, though always poor, were always provided for, now find themselves hungry and helpless.”

The Civil War had ended less than two years earlier, and a short-lived effort to force the “Radical Reconstruction” of the South was barely under way. But the
New York Times
seized this occasion to make a plea for sectional reconciliation between the vanquished South and the victorious
North. More precisely, the plea was for reconciliation between the respectable white populations of the two regions. When the
Times
spoke of the South’s “poor” who lived in “hovels,” it was referring to ex-slaves. That was why it made the point that in the past the poor had “always been provided for.” Slavery itself had ensured the physical well-being of those in bondage; the system had generated a “bond of sympathy” that “held these classes together.” But emancipation had severed that bond. The result was racial tension that could, if it were not defused, easily exceed in severity any class conflict that existed in the Northern states.