The Battle for Christmas Read online

  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

  BUT 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.

  SO 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:

  [C]are is taken to have every
seat at every table accessible [to adults], so that in case any newsboy becomes intoxicated by the lavish display of viands, and forgets how he should behave while at a banquet, he may be reached before he has filled the eyes of more than two of his neighbors with pie. The wisdom of this provision has been shown time and time again.34

  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 PATIENT POOR

  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.)

  But in the course of the novel, without any training or support, this boy turns out to be a saintly child. He refuses to try alcohol or tobacco (“‘It’s agin my nater,’” he explains); he disdains to complain about his condition; and he befriends and supports—emotionally as well as financially—a variety of other outcasts, even becoming a surrogate parent to an adult woman. At one point the author is actually able to refer to her childish hero as “a miracle of goodness,” an instinctively perfect little boy.39 And at the end of the book he proves his worth by voluntarily sacrificing any prospect of marrying the wealthy girl he loves. If this newsboy begins the novel as a male version of Stowe’s Topsy, he ends it as a male version of another young character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin—little Eva. Such a child hardly resembled the kind of real-life newsboy that Charles Loring Brace had to deal with.

  It was with sentimental fantasies such as that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith that charitable agencies had to contend, but also to exploit, during the second half of the nineteenth century. And on no occasion did those fantasies become more pervasive than at Christmas. The original model for such fantasies was another fictional character, Dickens’s Tiny Tim. This boy is a cripple, but spiritually he is a perfect model of humanity, a paragon of patient, cheerful selflessness. (He is even more forbearing than his father in the face of adversity, and with the added vulnerability of his lameness.) In fact, characters like Tiny Tim resemble nothing so much as the selfless German children we encountered in Chapter 5, the children idealized by Coleridge and Pestalozzi.

  Two Images of Newsboys. The street urchin on the right appeared in the 1872 edition of Elizabath Oakes Smith’s novel The Newsboy. The appealing little boy on the left was the subject of an 1857 picture by the New York painter James Henry Cafferty, titled “Newsboy Selling New York Herald.” For all the contrast between them, the two pictures are essentially mirror images of each other. (Both illustrations: Courtesy, Harvard College Library)

  It was fictional children like Tiny Tim—needy children who were forbearing and grateful, and sometimes disabled as well—who would become the ordinary objects of charity in scores of stories and sketches written in the middle of the nineteenth century. A Christmas Carol was only the first of a host of stories published over the next several decades (and beyond) that evoked the gap between rich and poor, and used young children to imagine ways of bridging this gap through acts of direct personal generosity at Christmas. One such sketch, a nonfiction account published in 1844 (the year after A Christmas Carol appeared), sets the scene. Traveling on the ferry between New York and Brooklyn, the writer has encountered a small girl, palpably impoverished, and is struck by something unusual in the girl’s demeanor, something that set her apart from “the whining, obtrusive beggars of this large city.” Sitting quietly amid the other, more prosperous patrons of the ferry, this child signified “poverty that complains not.” Her face conveyed “utter hopelessness,” but also a striking “resignation.” The writer was drawn to that, and other passengers were, too: “Children crushed to the earth with poverty and crime are common in large cities: they are painfully numerous. But it is seldom that such quiet, uncomplaining little sufferers are met there.”40

  Here was the basis of the familiar, almost stereotypical genre in which poor children stand huddled in the cold outside the home of a rich family, gazing patiently through the window at the latter’s Christmas luxuries. As might be expected, these stories invariably deal with a Christmas encounter between someone rich and someone poor, an encounter in which the former is touched by both the plight and the patience of the latter (generally a child). The encounter is marked by a special Christmas gift that leaves both the giver and the recipient deeply touched. It is the old exchange of gifts for goodwill.

  Again and again, it was the passivity, the uncomplaining resignation, of such fictional children in the face of pervasive, ambient opulence that rendered them fit objects of direct charity. It was because they asked for nothing that they proved themselves worthy of receiving something. In one such story a little girl clothed in a dress that is faded but “clean” is looking into the window of a toy shop on Christmas Eve. But when a prosperous woman standing next to her wonders out loud whether the girl “‘wanted something she couldn’t get,’” the girl responds in “an unexpectant manner,” saying only that the toys were “‘good to look at.’”The prosperous woman thereupon offers the poor little girl a gift of $5, and the girl proceeds to give the money to her mother. After the
prosperous lady learns about the girl’s selfless gesture, her own daughter, too, decides to pass along some of her surplus Christmas presents. At the end, the reader is assured that the poor little girl will “never forget” these gifts in times of future hardship.41

  There is a deeper pattern to some of these stories, and it is a revealing one. It has to do with resolving the vexatious public issues of class division—issues that were essentially unresolvable within any version of the prevailing ideological language—by transforming them, under cover of fiction, into issues that are resolvable: private issues of family, morality, and forgiveness. I have not found a single nineteenth-century Christmas story that deals forthrightly with the dynamics of American class relations.

  In the commonest version of this pattern, the poor children turn out, at the end, to be related to their benefactors by blood itself. Take, for example, a story published in Godeys Lady’s Book in 1858, with the title “Christmas for Rich and Poor.” This story was accompanied by a two-page illustration showing precisely the now-familiar stereotypical scene: the rich family inside on the left side, the poor children outside on the right. Any reader of this story would have been led to assume that the story dealt with class divisions. And indeed, as it happens, the two children are poor, and their mother is ill as well. They had been out earlier that evening (the story is set on Christmas Eve), attempting to buy a small present for their mother in a local shop, and there they had been approached by a wealthy older man who overheard their plight (and witnessed their selfless demeanor) and immediately invited them to visit his house later in the evening so that he could provide them with food to take to their sick mother. That they do (once inside the house they observe toys “scattered in careless profusion”). But as they stand conversing with the rich man’s daughter, waiting for their promised basket of food, it transpires that they are actually the children of the rich man’s other daughter, his favorite and most indulged daughter, a woman who had shamed the family fifteen years earlier by eloping (on Christmas Eve, at that) with a man whom her father had refused to let her marry. The wayward daughter’s husband had soon proved unable to support her decently, and after his death she and her two children had fallen into abject poverty. All this while her wealthy father had refused to have anything to do with her. But now, on this Christmas Eve, he is eager to relent. The story ends with a scene of forgiveness and reconciliation.42