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FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS EVERYTHING
Reviewed by Lawrence A. Hoffman It is hard to imagine a far-off time when department stores had no Santa, Easter was bereft of bunnies, Valentine was just another a martyred saint, and mothers (never mind fathers) had no days named after them But that's the way it once was. Old-time Puritans downplayed the traditional Catholic and Anglican calendar; and Enlightenment moralists thought time was money, and therefore too valuable to waste in profligate holiday revelry. How all that changed is the fascinating topic of Leigh Eric Schmidt's Consumer Rites, an apt title, pun and all, for a book that is consumed with consumerism and the formative role that business played in the cycle of America's sacred days. Several chapters have appeared elsewhere-- one of them in Cross Currents (Fall 1992). But here they are together, richly documented, smoothly narrated, and lavishly illustrated by a cultural historian who knows his stuff and tells it with panache. Consumer Rites is good history and good reading. There is some jargon here and there--Mother's Day attracting a "polycentric patronage" (286), Easter as a "polysemous" and "liminal" event (217)--but to an extraordinary degree, Consumer Rites is a terrific story terrifically told. Christmas shopping, for instance, is described as a "secular pilgrimage" (130); commodified religion becomes "Jello-thick with meaning" (308); crosses used as merchandising centerpieces for store-window Easter finery bespeak "a shift in crucicentric piety from self-denial to self-fulfillment" (210). The tantalizing trivia that support the larger thesis are themselves ample justification for this book. How many people know that Santa Claus was once a woman (1815), or "a little old Negro" (1827), or even a Jewish peddler (New York Evening Post, 1820)? that in 1939 Franklin Roosevelt tried to hype business early by moving Thanksgiving (and holiday shopping) up a week--leading wags to rename the holiday "Franksgiving"? or that jokes about giving Dad a bad tie for Father's Day go back to the 1920s? But Consumer Rites is not trivial. This is serious history, born of painstaking research into Victorian diaries, old news clippings, trade journals, and American literature from O'Henry's Gift of the Magi to Philip Roth's operation Shylock. Christmas carols (duly dated and contextualized) vie with Irving Berlin's White Christmas and even old greeting cards archived by Hallmark to weave the fascinating story of the commercialization of religious holidays, or the religionization of commercial success, depending on how you look at it. The details of the story fascinate. Valentine's Day came first, a mid-nineteenth-century sign of the middle-classing of America. Gift-giving, hitherto an upper-class predilection, was being modified for the masses. Rowdy lowerclass street festivity was being displaced by the polite display of virtuous happiness in newly conceived and orchestrated nuclear family units. All the signs of Victorian sentimentalism are already here: middle-class family-centeredness, romantic men wooing demure women, and women redefined as keepers of the hearth requiring cobbled-together consumer calendars to tell them what to buy for whom and when. Christmas became a virtuous shopping spree, Easter a parade of spring finery, and women themselves the idealized objects of the new national fete of Mother's Day. Date Valentine's Day from 1840 to 1860 and Christmas trees about the same time; Christmas cards began arriving in the 1870s, and Easter parades emerged by the 1880s. Mother's Day was born as the 1907 brainchild of Anna Jarvis, never a mother herself, but a devoted daughter who thought her holiday would enshrine forever the pristine Protestant piety that her Sunday-school-teaching mother had personified. Individuals make history here: Anna Jarvis herself, for instance, and Sonora Smart Dodd, who gave us Father's Day in 1910. Joyce Hall, an itinerant Nebraska salesman, captured America's consumerist passion with Hallmark Cards. John P. Wanamaker married his personal Presbyterian passion to public marketing brilliance, and turned his Philadelphia shopping mart into a virtual cathedral, proving religion makes good business and vice versa. For current images of Santa Claus, thank Thomas Nast, whose depictions of the old fellow from 1863 to 1866 in Harpers Weekly gave us the jolly cultural icon whom Coca Cola apotheosized in its 1920s images on Coke cartons. But as the Santa Claus instance suggests, individuals generally end up being coopted by business. Easter belonged to milliners; Father's Day to the New York men's wear cartel; Mother's Day to ladies' fashions; and Christmas to everyone: Macys, Bloomingdales, Wanamakers, and Toys R Us. What Schmidt never quite tells clearly enough is the underlying tale that he knows very well, but scatters about in his narrative, rather than summarizing it succinctly and analytically in a single summative chapter. It is sometimes hard to remember the complex social forces operating below the surface: a pattern of victorious Victorian domesticity generously underwritten by middle-class wealth and appetite, fueled by the postbellum business boom and its satellite industries like advertising and trade journals. At the root of the whole thing, and deserving more attention than it gets, is the phenomenon of nineteenth-century immigration, which provided the old country traditions (like German Christmas trees and Easter bunnies) that the Wanamakers, Halls, and Jarvises appropriated, homogenized, and Americanized--not to mention the population bulge and cheap labor that made both industrialization and consumerism possible in the first place. Schmidt is excellent in his detailed depiction of how these raw forces were domesticated into the America we falsely take for granted as going back forever. He does not sufficiently locate these developments in the larger picture of nineteenth-century ritualization that was sweeping Europe as well as America: the proliferation of men's lodges, for instance, most notably the Freemasons; or the romantic nationalism that was behind the invention of Bastille Day in France (1880) and oak Leaf ceremonies in Germany (about the same time). But Consumer Rites is a brilliant chronicle of the American tale where domesticated remnants of Protestant religion, not nationalist identity alone, drove developments, and where capitalist expansion was in the driver's seat. The book is lavishly illustrated in terms of a symbiosis between business and religion, a relationship that Schmidt wisely refuses to condemn, arguing instead that religion and the market place needed each other. So, from twenty years before the Civil War to the end of World War I, the period of time surveyed, the names remain the same-- Christmas, Easter, and saints days--but the old-time Christian calendar is subtly but utterly transformed from "church time" into "merchant time." Schmidt knows better than to paint this as a morality tale: good church guys against bad merchant capitalists. Actually, churches themselves pushed Christmas gift-giving as a religious alternative to the secular New Year when gifts used to be the norm, and department stores learned from churches--not the other way around--how to adorn their Easter windows. Anna Jarvis would have failed without the support of conservative Christian interests who hoped Mother's Day would revive prefeminist American womanhood--and if Jarvis eventually woke up to the extent to which business was taking over her secularized beatification of her mother, Sonora Dodd was positively passionate in the welcome she accorded business interests who jumped aboard her Father's Day campaign. Both capitalist and religious to its core, America has drawn equally on church and mart to define its calendar, and if there is manipulation here, it is not clear who is the user and who is being used. John Wanamaker was both pious and business-wise. Some people buy Christmas cards and really mean what they say--maybe even learn what to mean by reading what the saying-manufacturers tell them. Schmidt comes clean on this score in his Acknowledgements, which deserve careful reading. He avoids the facile critique of "elite aestheticists" (308), and cautions us to take the popular piety of church and market place with equal seriousness. Consumer Rites is a book for everyone: business and religious leaders, certainly, as well as students of American culture, and specialists in women's studies, all of whom have a stake in Schmidt's detailed account. But this is a book for nonspecialists too. Give it as a gift next Christmas, Mother's Day or Father's Day! It's the American thing to do. By LAWRENCE A. HOFFMAN Cross Currents,
Vol. 46, No. 2, Summer 1996 |