The Battle for Christmas Read online

  But that kind of ritual was becoming increasingly difficult to carry off. Lenox, Massachusetts, represented a vestigial pocket of rural paternalism—a self-conscious pocket, at that—and the Sedgwicks were both willing and able to play the role of gracious squires to their poor “pensioners.” In the urban areas of the nation, especially, such gestures were much more difficult to bring off. The urban poor were now living in separate neighborhoods, and (except for domestics and menials) they had little occasion for personal contact with the well-to-do. And when such contacts did take place, especially at Christmas, they were likely to take an awkward or even hostile form, mixed perhaps with a bit of mockery, and the whole exchange lubricated with alcohol.

  Still, the distinction between presents and charity was new, and it should not be surprising that it required a good deal of reinforcement. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the press, the economic elite, and even those who were most deeply concerned with helping the poor, all pressed the notion that organized charities provided the most appropriate means of assisting the poor.

  Horace Greeley, for example, reminded his New York Tribune readers in 1843 that “enough was expended on this festival uselessly … which would, if rightfully appropriated, have set in operation the means of ultimately banishing Pauperism and its attendant miseries from the land.”7 Rightfully appropriated was the operative phrase here: Money should be offered to the poor through organized charities rather than through what was now being universally attacked with a dismissive phrase: “indiscriminate giving.” Greeley was especially critical of what had become the dominant form of face-to-face charity—begging on the streets. One Tribune Christmas editorial opened with the blunt heading “DO NOT GIVE TO STREET BEGGARS,” and went on to dismiss that practice in no uncertain terms: “Whenever you see one of these City pests approaching, button up both pockets….”8 Another editorial (this one from a depression year) explained that “the evil of street-begging” would inevitably increase as a result of the hardness of the times. “Impostors will abound more than ever,” for example. But buttoning up one’s pockets was psychologically difficult: “he who rejects a petition for the needs of a night’s lodging or a meal may have his own warm rest disturbed by the reasonable apprehension that fearful exposure and distress have resulted from his prudence.”9

  On this occasion the Tribune handed out meal tickets instead of cash to beggars. But making contributions to organized charity offered a more effective solution. It would obviate the need for face-to-face encounters along with the danger of fraud, and it would be far more efficient. The Tribune pleaded with its readers to send their donations to one of the charity organizations, because “that way of helping the poor” might not be perfect, but “it is more effectual and humane than any other yet adopted.”10 Or, as the same paper put it in still another Christmas editorial: “Let us give not merely as cases of destitution may present themselves, but through the regularly organized channels for the dispensation of social charity wherewith our own and most other cities are blessed….”11

  If the middle-class press criticized “indiscriminate giving,” it also generally attacked another alternative to private charities: governmental support for the poor through programs of public assistance or public works. Many workingmen themselves called for just such programs, especially during years of severe depression—the kind of devastating depression that regularly shook the new capitalist economy. When the times were hard, many employers simply laid their workers off—and there was no unemployment insurance to see them through. In one depression year, 1854, a large group of unemployed New York workers held a meeting on Christmas Day, forming themselves as the “Mechanics’ and Working-men’s Aid Association.” The assembled workers passed a resolution that demanded that tenants “shall not be turned out of their homes by avaricious landlords” and called for what amounted to a rent strike by appointing a “vigilant committee” to oversee the response. The city had made a special $10,000 appropriation for the poor, and the workers demanded that some of those funds be given directly to the association itself. One speaker denounced the municipal soup kitchens as “haughty and contemptuous” (and added that they served watery soup). Another speaker called for public-works programs instead of soup kitchens. A third demanded that the city itself subsidize up to 50 percent of rent payments for the unemployed.12

  The newly established New York Times responded to the situation by acknowledging that “these were hard times” and expressing special sympathy for the fact that “men are poor this winter who were never poor before.” (This was as much as to say that such men were more worthy of sympathy than those who had always been poor.) In passing, the Times even proposed paternalist gestures on the part of those employers who could afford it: “retaining their workmen, though they are not profitable.” But the editorial reserved the bulk of its space to stress the superiority of giving through such established institutions as the churches and the newly formed Children’s Aid Society. This was presented in the name of simple efficiency. Money contributed to such organizations “will ‘find’ where the misery is.” Such institutions have well-established “channels” and employ “effectual and discriminating” techniques; they have at their disposal well-tooled “machinery” to make sure that each individual dollar “reaches tomorrow the very family that is famishing to-day for lack of it.” Implicitly, the paper argued that any contribution not mediated by those organizations was nothing but a form of indiscriminate giving. “If a man has money, and does not know how he can make the most of it, let him step into the offices of any of those excellent institutions, in whose hands, if you place a dollar, you do what, individually, you could not make five dollars do.”13

  A decade later, the same newspaper actually argued that this kind of charity was little more than a continuation of the long-standing tradition of Christmas generosity on the part of the British gentry and nobility. In the previous century, the argument went, “[n]o hungry faces were allowed to be seen around the barons hall, or the monk’s open doors, or the citizens gate.” That tradition was being maintained into the present with hardly a hitch: “Modern times have continued this pleasant custom of benefaction. Yesterday, we doubt not, the faces of thousands of the poor were made happy with the good fare provided by the generosity of the charitable…. The bounty of others … heaped the tables of the outcast with good things.” But in fact it was only to the work of charitable institutions that the paper was referring—to “the missions, the industrial schools, the lodging-houses for homeless boys and girls, [and] the almshouses and asylums and refuges.” And the editorial concluded by giving its readers the now-standard advice: Those good-hearted individuals “who fear to do as much injury as good by their indiscriminate charities, should seek out the great public almoners, our benevolent societies, who have reduced charity almost to a science, and probably seldom err on the side of too much generosity.”14

  As matters grew worse during the following decades, and workers responded by attempting to unionize, the press became even more insistent that private benevolence was far superior to either indiscriminate giving or public assistance. At Christmas in 1893 several local unions were out on strike. But the New York Times responded with a warning that it acknowledged might seem “strange” to its readers: “Strange as it may sound, there is danger of overdoing the charitable relief business, or at least of misdoing it, if it is not put under concentrated, intelligent, and judicious direction.”

  But there is need of great discretion in organizing and directing agencies for the relief of the poor in times like these. More than ever is it important that this work should be done intelligently and judiciously. Lavish and indiscriminate giving to applicants, however vouched for, will result in waste…. Worst of all, it will encourage and embolden beggary and attract worthless vagrants from all quarters.

  The editorial decried the use of public moneys to ease the situation, insisting that “organized arrangements for distributing this
superfluity among the needy through private benevolence are much better than efforts to use public authority and public funds for the relief of the poor or the unemployed.”15 What the editorial did not mention, though it would have been clear to any reader who also followed the labor columns of the same paper, was that not one of the established charitable organizations was willing to provide assistance to workers who were out on strike.16

  CHARLES LORING BRACE, NEWSBOYS, AND THE CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY

  As late as the early 1850s, the major charitable institutions in cities like New York were of two sorts: either municipal agencies (such as the almshouse and the workhouse for adults, and the city nursery for children) or arms of the city’s churches, which established “missions” to the urban poor (there were seventy-six of these missions operating in 1865). These institutions did not disappear, but during the 1850s they were supplemented by a new set of private philanthropic organizations dedicated exclusively to serving impoverished groups. At the same time, several church missions became quasi-autonomous operations. One of the first and most famous of these was the Five Points Mission, founded in 1852 by the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society, a Methodist group, and located in one of the city’s most blighted and dangerous areas (the Five Points was the site of a notorious gang war in 1857). Together with a similar agency, the Five Points House of Industry, founded in 1853, these missions offered charitable relief to neighborhood families and provided children with classes that taught them industrial or domestic skills.17

  Increasingly, these organizations came to focus their energies on a single group within the neighborhood they served: impoverished children. And very soon, organizations began to emerge that were devoted exclusively to children. The most effective (and aggressive) of these agencies—and probably, within a decade or two, the single largest and best-known charitable organization in the United States—was the Children’s Aid Society, established in 1853 under the guiding influence of the young reformer Charles Loring Brace.

  Brace came to the C.A.S. from the Five Points Mission, where he had worked in 1852, during the year that followed his visit to Germany. It was the end point of an eight-year period that Brace spent in seeking a clear vocation for himself. Born in 1826 in Litchfield, Connecticut, of old New England stock (his father later became principal of the Hartford Female Seminary, where Catharine and Harriet Beecher served as teachers), Brace graduated from Yale in 1846 and returned there a year later to study theology. Ambitious to make his way in a more cosmopolitan setting, he also studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. But he began to harbor sympathies for abolitionists and other reformers (including the European radicals who were leading the revolutionary movements of 1848). Late in 1849 Brace visited New York’s municipal facilities on Blackwells Island, where he preached to the poor in the almshouse and met with prisoners and ill prostitutes. It was like a conversion experience: “I never had my whole nature so stirred up within me,” he reported, “as at what met my eyes in those hospital wards.”18

  Early the next year Brace embarked on the European visit that brought him to Berlin in November, ostensibly to continue his theological studies. (It was in Berlin, a month after his arrival, that he witnessed the German Christmas celebration he would later write about.) But his sympathy for the oppressed was very much alive, and while touring Hungary in the spring of 1851 he was actually imprisoned for a month on charges of aiding the Hungarian nationalist revolutionaries led by Lajos Kossuth. Brace returned to New York after being released (through the efforts of the U.S. minister) and wrote a book about his experiences. But now he had finally determined what he wished to do with his life: He would dedicate himself to working for the poor. In that way he would be able to combine his religious commitment and training with his progressive secular politics. In 1852 Brace began working for the recently founded Five Points Mission but left the next year in order to establish the Children’s Aid Society, the institution with which he remained associated for the remaining thirty-three years of his life. As the executive secretary of the C.A.S., Brace was an early representative of an emerging social type in American history (and also a new group in the history of Christmas patronage)—the salaried managerial class.

  As a matter of pragmatic principle, the Children’s Aid Society devoted its work exclusively to young people. Brace had come to the firm conclusion that targeting adults was virtually useless—“like pouring water through a sieve,” as he once put it. All too often, adults wasted charitable relief on alcohol or worse. Moreover, whatever assistance they received (and on this point Brace’s ideas resemble that of many modern conservatives) only created a sense of dependency that further ensured their ongoing pauperization. Brace was persuaded that the only “hopeful field” was among “the young.” If one worked exclusively with children, he believed, “crime might possibly be checked in its very beginnings, and the seed of future good character and order and virtue be widely sown.”19

  Brace carried this principle very far. He decided not only that adults could not be part of the solution to the problem of poverty but also that they constituted the immediate source of the problem. It was, ironically, the family life of New York’s poor population that was destroying the character of its children. Brace had long been deeply aware, as Home-Life in Germany revealed, of the power of family life to mold the character of children, for better or for worse. (Indeed, he was so sensitive to the family’s influence that, as we have seen, he even felt that middle-class American families were failing to offer the genial, nurturing environment necessary to develop healthy adults.) But the families of the poor were worse than inadequate—they were, as Brace put it, actual “poison” for their own children.

  Brace argued that this was true of mothers as well as fathers. In making such an argument he was confronting the heart of the reigning domestic ideology—the belief that all mothers could be counted on, by their very natures, to nurture their children through thick and thin. Brace was prepared to attack this belief almost head-on. At Christmas, 1855, he published in several New York newspapers a plea for charity that consisted of several little “Scenes for Christmas.” One of these scenes pictured a proud and respectable young mother who had been reduced to poverty by a combination of hard times and her husband’s drinking. That was a familiar nineteenth-century scenario. But Brace went further. He argued that the young mother had lost her self-respect; she had even lost “the last thing a woman of her former [respectable] habits loses—the pride in neat appearance.” (And he added: “If she could but see it, it is just such dowdiness which sends the husband to the dram-shop instead of home.”) Brace concluded that it would be of little avail to offer assistance to this pathetic woman: “The husband will probably die a drunkard; [and] the young wife, who had left comfort and home for his poverty, will either kill herself or perish of a broken-heart.” But then there were the children: “There is the hope. Who will aid us in doing something for them?”

  Brace used such accounts to make a radical argument: It was not enough to help the children—they actually had to be separated, permanently so, from their parents. In another of his 1855 “Christmas Scenes” (this one titled “The Cold Home”), Brace contrasted a pair of “tidy, sweet children” with their chilly mother and her “cheerless” house. He had tried to persuade the mother to let the girls attend an industrial school (offering to provide them with clothing if they would do so), and he promised “that the boy should find a home if he would come to our office.” Brace was adamant: “[T] hough for her pure young children too much could hardly be done, in such a woman [herself] there is hardly any confidence to be put.” And he confidently generalized from this woman’s case: “In nine cases out of ten, it is probable, some cursed vice has thus reduced her, and that, if her children be not separated from her, she will drag them down, too.”20

  Charles Loring Brace. This woodcut was taken from a picture made late in Brace’s life. (Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library) />
  So Brace devised a new scheme. It involved persuading parents to send their children to the Children’s Aid Society (or persuading the children themselves to go there)—in order to ship them out of the city altogether, to new homes in the American West, in villages with stable families, ample opportunities for employment, and the kind of individualistic ethos that would offer the boys fertile soil to develop their competitive tendencies into socially productive channels. (“Manless land for landless men” was a slogan of the movement.) In its first four decades the “placing out” scheme—it would later be dubbed the “orphan train” program—managed to transport some 90,000 boys to new homes and lives in the West.21 And it helped bring international renown to Charles Loring Brace.

  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