A Kinder, Gentler Holiday: Innovating Christmas in America

Thomas Nast's famous "Merry Old Santa
Claus" from the January 1, 1881 edition
of Harper's Weekly 

Reupping the story of John Pintard and his innovation of the Christmas season, a deleted chapter from the final draft of "Innovation on Tap." Pintard engaged in social engineering, a type of innovation that almost always fails, almost. . .

Between 1790 and 1840, the combined population of New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston grew from 94,000 to 626,000 residents.  An antiquated colonial watch system, overwhelmed by disorder and crime, gradually gave way in the 1830s to the first police forces, themselves overwhelmed by corruption and incompetence.  

Politics, religion, immigration, and race were all divisive issues.  A sudden financial panic could swell the numbers of unemployed.  Urban poverty and vagrancy grew.  The threat of violence hung in the air.  Mob activity was seen by many as a valid way to deliver justice when the law hesitated or failed. 

“A man ought to fear God, and mind his business,” congressman Reuben Davis wrote, summing up one version of the American credo.  “He should be respectful and courteous to all women; he should love his friends and hate his enemies.  He should eat when he was hungry, drink when he was thirsty, dance when he was merry, vote for the candidate he liked best, and knock down any man who questioned his right to these privileges.^[1]  Violence, Davis believed, was simply part of how an American protected his freedoms. 

Likewise, when Frenchman Michel Chevalier toured the country in 1839, he noted that citizens gathered in the morning to share the news of hangings and floggings—“and then go on to the price of cotton and coffee.”  There was little difference North or South, East or West.  “A riot which in France would put a stop to business,” he wrote, “prevents no one here from going to the Exchange, speculating, turning over a dollar and making money.”^[2]

For wealthy New Yorkers such as John Pintard (1759-1844) and his friends, escape from these terrifying moments of “mobocracy” meant heading north, away from the old, congested Dutch settlement at the southern tip of Manhattan to the pastoral areas of what is now the city’s grid of numbered streets.  Even this exodus proved inadequate in the face of ceaseless population growth.

In the years following the Revolution, a kinder, gentler city seemed out of reach.  

Charles Beard: Historian Entrepreneur

[Author’s note: This essay was intended for Innovation on Tap but was cut for length—and as part of a (losing) debate I had with several editors who did not see Charles Beard as an entrepreneur.  I took the position that if Lin-Manuel Miranda is an entrepreneur, attracting a new audience to Broadway by combining the Founding Fathers with rap, then Charles Beard was an entrepreneur by selling a boatload of books to Americans who never thought to measure the creation of the Constitution against economic interest and greed. I continue to believe that intellectual innovation is as important as social or technological innovation, but that belief didn’t do much to get Beard his own chapter in Innovation on Tap.]

In a nation whose sense of identity comes not from geography, ethnicity, or religion but from a set of ideals, history is a high-stakes proposition. 

Even today, America’s Founding Fathers sit in influential positions.  Twenty-first-century citizens wonder, for example, what Jefferson and Hamilton might think of our national debt, campaign finance laws, and healthcare reform.^[1]  Would Washington endorse military activity in the Middle East?  Would Madison allow handguns on the streets of Manhattan?  

Invoking the voices of 250 years ago is a business fraught with peril because challenging America’s Founders tend to challenge Americans’ sense of identity. 

That makes what Columbia University historian Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) brought to market in 1913 not just an important innovation, but perhaps the most influential history book ever written in America.^[2]

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale: Entrepreneur, Editress, and Edison

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1788-1879) circa
1831 (Richard's Free Library, Newport, NH)

Like contemporary Emma Willard, the story of Sarah Josepha Buell Hale fell victim to an editing purge in the weeks leading up to the birth of Innovation on Tap.  (An editor herself, perhaps Hale would have understood.)

Sarah Hale was a force to be reckoned with in life and remains an inspiration in death.  

Eleven years old when George Washington died, Hale lived to see the birth of Herbert Hoover and to hear Edison's first sound recording--for which she will forever be associated.  Read on. 

                             +++++++++++++++++

Sarah Hale lost her husband four days after the birth of their fifth child in 1822.  A widow at 34 with five young children, Sarah turned to her husband's Freemason lodge, which underwrote her first book of poetry in 1823. 

Encouraged by this success, Hale published her first novel, Northwood: Life North and South, Showing the True Character of Both, four years later.  In the Preface, she told readers that most of the book had been written holding a small child in one arm.

Emma Hart Willard: Innovating Girls' Education

Emma Willard School, circa 1940 (The Tichnor Brothers
Collection, Boston Public Library)

The story of entrepreneur Emma Willard (1787-1870) was deleted from Innovation on Tap in the final days of editing as we struggled to keep the book to a manageable length.  But Willard's story remains inspirational and, knowing that 130 million girls globally continue to be denied educational opportunities, highly relevant.

As I reviewed this post, I was struck again by how savvy Willard was in the way she positioned and advanced her signature educational innovation.  She told the Lords of Albany one thing--but clearly had another in mind.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

In a world where fathers determined the future of each family member, women in the early American republic had little opportunity to engage in entrepreneurial activities.  “God made woman to be a help for man,” the Reverend Horace Bushnell wrote, “not to be a wrestler with him.”^[1]