The Battle for Christmas Page 8
The numerical growth of the city’s population was accompanied by a change in its composition: an influx of immigrants, especially Irish Catholics, and the appearance of an impoverished underclass that was living for the first time in its own poor districts (generally divided up by ethnicity and race), along with a wealthy upper class that took up residence in its fashionable ones.7 In the second decade of the nineteenth century, New York underwent an explosion of poverty, vagrancy, and homelessness. That was followed in the third decade by serious outbreaks of public violence. In the eyes of New York’s “respectable” citizens, to quote a recent historian on the subject, “the entire city appeared to have succumbed to disorder…. [It] seemed to be coming apart completely.”8 Many well-to-do New Yorkers began to move out to new uptown estates, which they enclosed with fences or hedges. In turn, those fences were sometimes pulled down, and the hedges uprooted, by poor and homeless people who persisted in regarding the new estates as “common land” open to everyone. As a result, by the 1820s these estates were commonly being guarded by watchmen, drawn from the same underclass as the rioters themselves.
The city’s streets became the center of a different version of the same conflict. As Elizabeth Blackmar has written, the city’s poorest residents—“peddlers, ragpickers, prostitutes, scavengers, beggars, and … criminals”—depended for subsistence on the freedom of the streets, and the unregulated opportunity to accost strangers at will, whether for legal or illegal purposes. But by the 1820s, the propertied classes had begun to make systematic efforts to protect themselves from such “unwanted intrusions from the streets.”9
John Pintard was one such propertied man. He was deeply troubled by the increasing visibility of poor people and by the danger their aggressive behavior posed to respectable New Yorkers.10 Pintard was the moving force behind the establishment, in 1817, of the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, an organization designed to put both a cap on the skyrocketing costs of poor relief and a stop to the public begging and drinking of the poor in order to make the city streets a safe place for people like himself.11 Needless to say, all these efforts failed. By 1828 Pintard was acknowledging that the problems of poverty, drinking, and street crime had, “I confess, baffled all our skill…. The evil is obvious, acknowledged by all, but a sovereign remedy appears to be impossible.”12
It should come as no surprise that all of these developments were reflected in the transformation of the Christmas season. As early as 1772, a New York newspaper complained that the absence of “decency, temperance, and sobriety” at Christmas was so serious a matter that it belonged in the courts. The problem was caused by “[t]he assembling of Negroes, servants, boys and other disorderly persons, in noisy companies in the streets, where they spend the time in gaming, drunkenness, quarreling, swearing, etc., to the great disturbance of the neighborhood.” The behavior of these rowdies was “so highly scandalous both to religion and civil government, that it is hoped the Magistrates will interpose to suppress the enormity.”13
By 1820 Christmas misrule had become such an acute social threat that respectable New Yorkers could no longer ignore it or take it lightly. What Susan G. Davis has demonstrated in her study of Philadelphia in this period holds equally true of New York. By the 1820s bands of roaming young street toughs, members of the emerging urban proletariat, were no longer restricting their seasonal reveling to their own neighborhoods; they had begun to travel freely, and menacingly, wherever they pleased. Often carousing in disguise (a holdover from the old tradition of mumming), these street gangs marauded through the city’s wealthy neighborhoods, especially on New Year’s Eve, in the form of callithumpian bands, which resembled (and may have overlapped with) the street gangs that were now vying for control of the city’s poorer neighborhoods. Throughout the night these bands made as much noise as they could, sometimes stopping deliberately at the houses of the rich and powerful.14 In 1826, for example, such a gang stopped in front of the Broadway house of the city’s mayor; there they “enacted” what a local newspaper termed “a scene of disgraceful rage.”15 The next year another newspaper sarcastically described these same gangs as “a number of ill-bred boys, chimney sweeps, and other illustrious and aspiring persons” whose sole purpose was “to perambulate the streets all night, disturbing the slumbers of the weary … by thumping upon tin kettles, sounding penny[whistles] and other martial trumpets.”16 John Pintard would have understood.
In 1828 there occurred an extensive and especially violent callithumpian parade, complete with the standard array of “drums, tin kettles, rattles, horns, whistles, and a variety of other instruments.” This parade began along the working-class Bowery, where the band pelted a tavern with lime; then it marched to Broadway, where a fancy upper-class ball was being held at the City Hotel; then to a black neighborhood, stopping at a church where the callithumpians “demolished all the windows, broke the doors [and] seats,” and beat with sticks and ropes the African-American congregants who were holding a “watch” service; next, the band headed to the city’s main commercial district, where they smashed crates and barrels and looted at least one shop; still unsatisfied, they headed to the Battery (at the southern tip of the city), where they broke the windows of several of the city’s wealthiest residences and tried to remove the iron fence that surrounded Battery Park; finally they headed back to Broadway for a second visit. This time a group of hired watchmen were waiting for the callithumpians; but the band stood down the watch force, and, in the words of a local newspaper, “the multitude passed noisily and triumphantly up Broadway.”17
What are we to make of scenes like these? Once again, E. P. Thompson makes a convincing case that it would be misleading to interpret them either as wholly conscious political protest or as mere revelry that got out of hand, a kind of nineteenth-century frat party. Historians of American cities have agreed with that assessment. One of them puts it like this: “Riotous disorder, racial violence, and jolly foolery for neighbors and audiences existed side by side … for decades…. Customary Christmas license combined with seasonal unemployment made the winter holiday a noisy, drunken, threatening period in the eyes of the respectable.” And another historian suggests that New York’s callithumpians can be considered “a bridge between the traditional youth group misrule of the English village … and a more direct challenge to authority.”18
KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY
Let us return for a few minutes to our friend John Pintard, if only because at one point, in December 1823, Pintard offered his own interpretation of the situation—and it is both interesting in itself and germane to the question of Christmas. Pintard mused that it might be the culture of Protestantism itself that was to blame for New York’s problems. Protestants, he argued, unlike Catholics and even pagans, had systematically suppressed the kind of “religious festivals” at which “mechanics and laborers” could find officially sanctioned and organized “processions” that would allow them to release their “pent-up” energies in satisfying but orderly ways.19 (Pintard might almost seem to be referring to Puritans in particular rather than to Protestants in general.)
In fact, John Pintard himself was drawn almost compulsively to ceremonies, rituals, and traditional practices—for himself and his family, for New York City, and even for the United States as a nation. And when he could not find such things, he devised them. (One of the nation’s first antiquarians, Pintard was the founder of the New-York Historical Society in 1804; and he played a role in the establishment of Washingtons Birthday, the Fourth of July, and even Columbus Day as national holidays.20) In fact, it was John Pintard who brought St. Nicholas to America, in an effort to make that figure both the icon of the New-York Historical Society and the patron saint of New York City. In 1810 Pintard paid for the publication of a broadside, sponsored by the Historical Society, that featured a picture of St. Nicholas bringing gifts to children during the Christmas season (actually, on St. Nicholas’ Day, December 6). The picture was accompanied by a short poem that began,
“Sánete Claus goed heylig man.”21
In his letters Pintard regularly expressed nostalgia for what he called the “old customs” and “ancient usages” of New York, and particularly for the forgotten spirit of the old Christmas season, when rich folk and poor, old and young, would mingle together in genial harmony in the streets of the city.22 But Pintard never managed to discover or devise any way of observing the Christmas holidays that actually involved working-class people. All of his own carefully planned seasonal rituals were restricted to the members of his own social class (for example, the formalized New Year’s Day described at the beginning of this chapter). The reason for this narrowing down was clear: It had simply become impossible for New York’s respectable citizens to continue participating in the rowdy old cross-class celebrations that Pintard recalled fondly from his own youth, when he and a family servant traveled together around New York in “boisterous” fashion, drinking a “dram” at every stop and “coming home loaded with sixpences.” As Pintard put it in 1827, “since staggering through the streets on New Years day is out of fashion [now], it is impossible to drink drams at every house as of old.” And while Pintard sorely regretted the disappearance of the goodwill that had characterized such occasions of public drinking in the olden days—he referred to this as “the joyous older fashion”—he also understood that the social price to be paid for that goodwill had become impossibly high. He noted that “intemperance, among the higher classes of our city, is no longer the order of the day. Among the hospitable circles …, a man would be marked who should retire intoxicated; indeed, convivial parties are all decent and sober.”23
Sobriety had become a necessity. “It is well,” Pintard acknowledged with a kind of sigh—“It is well, for formerly New Years was a riotous day.” And he quickly added, as if suddenly recalling that the real problem was a present-day one, that “the beastly vice of drunkenness among the lower laboring classes is growing to a frightful excess…. Thefts, incendiaries, and murders—which prevail—all arise from this source.”24 After all, that was why he had founded the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism.
Since there existed no Christmas rituals that were socially acceptable to the upper class, Pintard took on the responsibility of inventing them—characteristically enough, in the name of restoring something that had been forgotten. For more than twenty years—roughly between 1810 and 1830—he tried almost every year to come up with the perfect holiday. (Before the late 1820s these holidays did not involve Christmas Day itself; until 1827 Pintard always observed December 25 in simple fashion, as a time of prayer and private religious devotion.)
In the 1810S, Pintard organized and led elaborate St. Nicholas’ Day banquets for his fellow members of the New-York Historical Society, held at the society’s office in City Hall. But in 1820 his celebration of St. Nicholas’ Day was interrupted: “At six [p.m.] I attended [a meeting of] the Pauperism Society, for even festivity must not interfere with works of benevolence.” That, as it happens, is the last mention of St. Nicholas’ Day in Pintard’s published correspondence. By this time, and with an increasing intensity of commitment throughout most of the 1820s, he had turned to New Year’s Day—holding lavish dinners for his extended family, and making formal visits to old friends and relatives around the city. On January 1, 1821, Pintard engaged, apparently for the first time, in what he called “the good old custom of mutual visitings and cordial greetings.” For the rest of the decade he devoted each year to efforts to establish New Year’s as a day of mutual visitation in New York, describing it (as he did in 1822) as “the custom of the simple Dutch settlers.” Pintard sometimes referred to this custom with the phrase “open house,” but his use of the phrase is clear: Houses were “open” only to old friends and kin—to members of his own class. And in 1828 he ruefully admitted that the phenomenon was fading away in New York: “[T]he joyous older fashion [of visitation] has declined gradually.” Two years later he explained why: The practice was becoming “irksome” because “our city grows so extensive, and friends so scattered.”25 But by then, as we shall see, Pintard had discovered Christmas.
IN FACT, Pintard was not the only New Yorker who expressed an interest in restoring the old customs of the Christmas season. In 1819 and 1820 there appeared a book written by a fellow member of the New-York Historical Society—Washington Irving. Irving had actually written parts of The Sketch Book, as he titled his new publication, at one of the tables in the Historical Society. The book was a smashing success, one that propelled Irving into sudden transatlantic celebrity. The Sketch Book contained two stories that were destined to become classics: “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” But it also included five stories about Christmas. Unlike “Rip Van Winkle,” those Christmas tales were not about the Dutch heritage of New York but were set on a gracious estate in the modern British countryside, Bracebridge Hall. In these stories Irving used Christmas as the setting for a culture in which all the classes joined together in paternalist harmony.
Irvings narrator is hosted at Christmas by old Squire Bracebridge, an antiquarian-minded gentleman who is obsessed with the past, and who wields so much social authority that he is able to recruit the neighboring peasantry to join him in a reenactment, under his direction, of “the holyday customs and rural games of former times.” Irving’s narrator waxes eloquent as he contemplates “the quaint humours, the burlesque pageants, the complete abandonment to mirth and good fellowship with which this [Christmas] festival was celebrated.” The occasion “seemed to throw open every door, and unlock every heart. It brought the peasant and the peer together, and blended all ranks in one warm generous flow of joy and kindness.”
At the climax of the “Bracebridge Hall” stories the squire presents a Christmas banquet at which are displayed, along with “brawn and beef, and stout home brewed,” all the archaic customs of the season, including a wassail bowl, a Lord of Misrule, and a group of peasants—the old squire’s trusty dependents—who perform an old dance and then mingle gratefully with the squire’s household:
There is something genuine and affectionate in the gayety of the lower orders, when it is excited by the bounty and familiarity of those above them; the warm glow of gratitude enters into their mirth, and a kind word, and a small pleasantry frankly uttered by a patron, gladdens the heart of the dependent more than oil and wine.
It is, of course, an invention—“the invention of tradition,” as the historian Eric Hobsbawm has dubbed this kind of self-conscious re-creation of ostensibly old-time customs26—and Irving knows that. In fact, he not only knows it, he even takes pains to let us in on the secret. The narrator’s description of the squire’s Christmas celebration is larded with such terms as “odd and obsolete,” “quaint,” “ancient,” even “eccentric,” and in a later edition of The Sketch Book Irving admitted that at the time he wrote the “Bracebridge Hall” stories he had never actually seen the kind of Christmas he described in it. Even the Lord of Misrule is fictive: The role is taken by a real gentleman.
Nor is this all. As Squire Bracebridge drives home from church just before his great dinner party, he engages in a bit of nostalgic commentary.
He begins by lamenting
the deplorable decay of the games and amusements which were once prevalent at this season among the lower orders, and countenanced by the higher. When the old halls of castles and manor houses were thrown open at daylight;… and when rich and poor were alike welcome to enter and make merry.
As the squire continues, his nostalgia spills over into a confession of his inability to re-create the genuine rituals of Christmases past. And at precisely this moment, he moves from antiquarianism into political theory—Tory political theory:
“The nation,” continued he, “is altered; we have almost lost our simple true-hearted peasantry. They have broken asunder from the higher classes, and seem to think their interests are separate. They have become too knowing, and begin to read newspapers, listen to ale house politicians, and talk
of reform. I think one mode to keep them in good humor in these hard times, would be for the nobility and gentry to pass more time on their estates, mingle more among the country people, and set the merry old English games going again.”
At this point Irving’s own narrative voice takes over from Squire Bracebridge’s. “Such,” Irving continues, “was the good Squire’s project for mitigating public discontent; and, indeed, he had once attempted to put his doctrine in[to] practice, and a few years before had kept open house during the holidays in the old style” [emphasis added]. But the open-house experiment failed:
The country people … did not understand how to play their parts in the scene of hospitality: many uncouth circumstances occurred [these Irving does not choose to describe]; the manor was overrun by all the vagrants of the country, and more beggars [were] drawn into the neighborhood in one week than the parish officers could get rid of in a year.
So the squire was forced to back off his original project. Nowadays, Irving tells us, he “contented himself with inviting the decent part of the neighboring peasantry to call at the hall on Christmas day” [emphasis added]. It is that select group, rather than the entire neighborhood, that cornes to Bracebridge Hall (at the stipulated time) to entertain and mingle with the squire’s real guests.