Charity as Spectator Sport (Liberals of the 1890s)

Dissent / The Battle For Christmas by Stephen Nisssembaum ^ | December 11, 2014 | David Huyssen

[SamAdams76]

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, well-to-do New Yorkers had begun to arrange new and larger kinds of Christmas visitations to the poor and these gala events reeked - strongly - of exploitation. During the 1890s some New Yorkers began to treat charity, almost literally, as a kind of spectator sport, performed on a large scale in arenalike spaces before a paying audience. On Christmas Day, 1890, a midday dinner was served to 1,800 poor boys (many of them newsboys) at Lyric Hall, a theatre at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. A newspaper account made clear what was taking place: "Every floor was crowded with lookers-on, principally members of the Children's Aid Society and other charitable people." This meal was followed, that same evening, by the traditional dinners held at every Newsboys' Lodging Houses in the city. It was as if the newsboys were being asked to put on performances at different holiday venues - ass if there were something erotically charged about watching hungry children eat.

The above is an excerpt from Stephen Nissenbaum's excellent book "The Battle For Christmas" which describes how Christmas in America evolved from a holiday of decadence and misrule (it was actually banned at one time in Colonial America) to the family-centric holiday centered around children and commerce that it is today.

Hard as it is to imagine today, during the 1890s, up to 20,000 well-heeled spectators would crowd into Madison Square Garden in their finest furs and jewels to watch the poor herded out onto the floor, under bright electric lights, to feast at hastily assembled trestle tables on turkey, bread, potatoes and mince pies - all served on an industrial scale. As each course was brought out to the huddled masses, the rich would politely clap from the grandstands.

"THE RICH SAW THEM FEAST" screamed a headline from the New York Times after one of these occasions.

For those in the audience, it was entertainment on a grand scale. Like watching animals in a zoo.

As one can imagine, the "poor" people on the arena floor started to realize that they were being made a spectacle of. Their one decent meal of the year was being ruined by being under a spotlight and being patronizingly gazed upon by the upper classes.

Misrule began to become the norm at these occasions. Food fights would break out with many of the boy hurling bread and potatoes as well as silverware at their servers, who just couldn't move fast enough. The smarter among them would roll the meat and mince pie into their shirts and get the hell out of there.

In future years, policemen were assigned to maintain order but to little avail. The rich in the audience expected the poor to "perform" for them, by eating their Christmas meal with "manifest gusto and gratitude" but the poor people on the floor resented the loss of their dignity by being forced to make their own hunger a matter of public display and entertainment for their "betters" sitting in the audience.

By the early 1900s, these public charity dinners became a thing of the past.

However, a remnant of those days still remain. All those bell-ringers from the Salvation Army that you see at department stores and street corners originated from those public dinners - as that was how they raised much of the money to conduct them.

[SamAdams76]

[goodnesswins]

Interesting...