[At the beginning of this month, I posted a tribute
to my late mother, who died in May 2015 at 92.
(See “Mom,” 1 November.) I wrote
about some of the things we did together for fun, from my childhood when we
still did things as a family to the more recent years when my mother and I were
alone to amuse ourselves. About a month
ago, an article in the New York Times reminded me of another connection to my mom—not
something we had done together, but something we talked about. The coincidence was a little too strong for
me to overlook, so I’ve written about the connection and the historical
background the Times article
revealed. You may find it interesting,
especially if you have a link to New York City through someone in your past.]
Years ago, my mother told me about something she remembered from her
childhood that she couldn’t explain. Mom was a native New Yorker but
moved to New Jersey with her family when she was very young—about 7, I think,
which would make it around 1930. But there was still a lot of family in New
York City—my grandfather, for instance, had three sisters who all had daughters
around my mother’s age with whom Mom was very close—so my grandparents and
their two daughters used to drive into the city often for visits, family
events, and holidays.
One of those holidays was Thanksgiving and my mother’s family drove in
via lower Manhattan, presumably through the Holland Tunnel (the Lincoln didn’t
open until Mom was 14). Mom said she remembered seeing kids downtown—in
the lower Village, it seemed—all dressed in costumes like Halloween, except on
Thanksgiving, but she couldn’t remember what it was for. I questioned her
to be sure she wasn’t confusing two memories (we were talking about what may
have been an 80-year-old memory from when she was very young). She
insisted she remembered just what she told me.
I had no idea what Mom could have been recalling. Obviously,
nothing like that has gone on since I’ve lived here. I also had no
idea how to look up something like that, but I wrote to the New York Times.
As some readers may know, the Sunday paper has a column called “F.Y.I.” (now
published occasionally in the “Metropolitan” section, but which previously
appeared weekly in that section’s predecessors) that fields questions from
readers about the New York metro area just like this one.
Unfortunately, the Times never ran the query and I never
followed up.
As it happens, when I was at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the
Village with my friend Diana early last month, we walked over to Hudson Street-8th
Avenue to catch a cab back up to my neighborhood where she left her car. The location prompted me to tell her Mom’s story—but even though Diana’s
a New Yorker, too, and older than I, she hadn’t ever heard of kids dressing up
in costumes at Thanksgiving.
Well, I was reading the Times on Saturday night, 22
October, including the parts of the Sunday edition that come with the Saturday
paper. Among those was the “Metropolitan” section, which that week
contained an “F.Y.I.” column, responding to the question:
Before Halloween
trick-or-treating caught on, wasn’t there a different holiday in New York in
which costumed children went around asking for treats?
Lo and behold! the answer was all about Ragamuffin Day. Observed on Thanksgiving Day, kids dressed as
thieves, beggars, bums, and hobos and went door to door asking, “Anything for
Thanksgiving?” Neighbors handed out pennies
and other swag. In some communities, there were even ragamuffin parades,
precursors of today’s Thanksgiving Day parades. Ragamuffin Day was
popular in New York City—a few other places also had it—from before the turn of
the 20th century until about 1941, when Congress formally established Thanksgiving
as the fourth Thursday in November and Halloween became a popular unofficial
celebration of ghosts and goblins when kids got dressed up.
That’s the exact time-frame Mom was talking about in her recollection!
It’s terrific that entirely by accident—though synchronicity and serendipity
played a part, I think—Mom’s vague memory that I could never confirm or even identify
has been documented. I did a quick search of the New York Times archive
and there are plenty of old articles referencing ragamuffins and Google Images
has photos from the 1900s through the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s of kids in
costume for Ragamuffin Day.
The story of Ragamuffin Day seems to be as follows (I’ve had to piece this
account together from numerous sources and there are some, mostly
inconsequential, discrepancies):
Thanksgiving had always been a traditional holiday, even during
colonial times. It’s basic purpose was
the same as today: celebrate the harvest, honor the first settlers who braved
harsh conditions and uncertainty, and make a gesture of gratitude and
friendship to the American natives the Europeans displaced. But it was observed on different days as
local traditions arose and with many different rituals and practices—often a
meal of some kind, but not always. Customs
ranged from elaborate feasts to displays of charity to religious observations
to parades and pageants to games and athletic competitions (a forerunner,
perhaps, of the football bowl games today’s celebrants like to watch).
In 1863, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared a
national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father” and set the
day of observance as the last Thursday of November. The proclamation, however, had the force of
an executive order and had to be reissued by each succeeding president—who
could, although any seldom did, change the particulars of the day or date of
the observance. Then in 1941, both
houses of Congress passed a resolution setting the date for the official
Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday in November (which occasionally has
five Thursdays) every year.
Though Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, was a Christian holiday since
the Middle Ages (it may have been a Christianized pagan celebration that
predates even that, but that origin’s disputed), it was not an important
holiday in America until the mid-19th century when large numbers of Irish, who
had been observing All Hallow’s Eve for
centuries, and Scottish immigrants arrived.
Other immigrant groups, such as Germans and later Africans, added their national
traditions as well, making Halloween in the United States a uniquely American
celebration. Observance was confined to
the immigrant community until the late 19th century, however, and wasn’t
assimilated into the mainstream society until the 20th century. By the first decade of the new century,
Halloween had become a popular celebration among all strata of U.S. society
across the whole country, irrespective of ethnicity or faith. Civic organizations and schools even got into
the act, transforming what had really been an ad hoc festival into an
unofficial but universally sanctioned holiday.
By the 1920s and ’30s, Halloween parties for adults as well as children
became fashionable and the religious, occult, and superstitious aspects of the
holiday fell away, making it about secular fun, community, and enjoyment. It was at this time, too, that the practice
of trick-or-treating was revived—possibly transferred from the waning
observance of Ragamuffin Day.
According to one report, the ragamuffin tradition stemmed from the late
18th century, “when grown homeless men, during the holidays, would dress in
women’s clothing and beg for food and money.” Some believe that its
origins are in the immigrant communities in the cities who brought their folk
traditions to America with them but no longer had a celebration onto which to
graft them. So they borrowed
Thanksgiving for their carnival masquerade.
The mummery became popular among the native-born who spread the practice
throughout New York City.
From about 1870, however, children in New York City and some other
cities and towns dressed up as “ragamuffins” (shabbily clothed, dirty children,
according to the American Heritage
Dictionary) in exaggerated rags and cast-offs too big for them
(often their parents’ old duds), generally wearing masks or face-paint
(charcoal or burnt cork was commonly used as “make-up”), and went from house to
house asking, “Anything for Thanksgiving?”
On Friday, 1 December 1899, the day after Thanksgiving was celebrated in
New York that year, a Times article
reported:
The chief feature
of the day was the street charivari, not only of the girls and boys, but of
young men and women. Thanksgiving
masquerading has never been more universal.
Fantastically garbed youngsters and their elders were on every corner of
the city. Not a few of the maskers and
mummers wore disguises that were recognized as typifying a well-known character
or myth. There were Fausts, Filipinos,
Mephistos, Boers, Uncle Sams, John Bulls, Harlequins, bandits, sailors,
soldiers in khaki suits, Deweys, and Columbines that well supported their
roles. The mummery, as a rule, was
limited to boys in women’s skirts or in masks.
In the poorer quarters a smear of burnt cork and a dab of vermillion
sufficed for babbling celebrants. Some
of the masqueraders were on bicycles. others on horseback, a few in
vehicles. All had a great time. The good-humored crowd abroad was generous
with pennies and nickels, and the candy stores did a land-office business.
(Note that November of 1899 was one, the last Thursday of which was the
fifth one. A charivari, or shivaree,
is a “loud, cacophonous noise or hubbub,” according to Wiktionary. The “vehicles”
some maskers rode were probably horse-drawn carriages or carts, but the
horseless carriage, though not yet common on the streets—and quite
expensive—was invented more than 20 yeas earlier. Columbine is a stock character in Renaissance
Italian commedia dell’Arte and the
English harlequinades or pantomimes, popular in the 19th and 20th centuries,
derived from them. She’s depicted as a
lovely young woman, dressed as a serving girl, to whom Harlequin is
romantically attracted. Dewey seems to
be the philosopher John Dewey, 1859-1952, though I don’t understand why New
York ragamuffins would want to dress like him; somehow I doubt it’s a reference
to Melvil Dewey, 1851-1931, the librarian who invented the Dewey Decimal System
of cataloguing books; New York State Governor Thomas E. Dewey, 1902-71, wasn’t
even born when the article above was written.
If anyone has a more likely idea, I’d love to hear it! I can’t begin to guess why children would
dress like Filipinos—except that the United States had annexed the archipelago
the year before as booty from the Spanish-American War and then the hard-fought
and bloody Philippine-American War, 1898-1902.
Why any of that history would inspire Ragamuffin Day costumes, I don’t see.)
One Virginia reporter in 1911 described the scene in the streets of New
York:
On that one day at
least the children literally take possession of the streets, ride all over the street
cars, even on the fenders; impersonate Uncle Sam, George Washington and other
characters that suit their fancy; dress in all sorts of costumes, that of the
ragamuffin having the preference; mask, black their faces, parade, blow horns,
ride sorry horses, prance astride of broomsticks and generally enjoy themselves
to the limit of their temporary liberty.
It wasn’t uncommon for boys to dress in travesties of their mothers’
attire, as noted by John J. O’Leary (b. 1932) in Playing It Well (Trafford Publishing, 2011): “[W]e would dress up
in . . . Mother’s old clothes, make up our faces with . . . Mother’s face
powder, lipstick and rouge to go from door to door in the neighborhood.” Even in her beloved 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
writes that her main character’s brother, Neely Nolan, dressed in
one of mama’s
discarded dresses hacked off ankle length in the front to enable him to walk. The uncut back made a dirty dragging train. He stuffed wadded newspapers in the front
to make an enormous bust. His broken-out
brass-tipped shoes stuck out in front of the dress. Lest he freeze, he wore a ragged sweater over
the ensemble. With this costume, he wore
the death mask and one of papa’s discarded derbies cocked on his head. Only it was too big and wouldn’t cock and
rested on his ears.
The treats that the ragamuffins (also known as Thanksgiving Maskers) collected
were generally pennies, fruit, and candy.
In a 1909 sermon, the Rev. James M. Farrar, a minister and the former
president of the General Synod of the Reformed Church in America, advised children
on the best way to amass the most swag:
On Thanksgiving
morning put on old, patched but warm shoes; old, ragged but warm clothes; paint
your face or put on masks and then go out into the crisp morning for an hour[’]s
fun. Collect all the pennies the people
will give; get dimes and dollars if you can.
Tell the people the money is for the poor. Then scamper home.
(Reverend Farrar then counseled his young parishioners to bring the
money to the church when they came for Thanksgiving services and put it in the
offering plate.)
Later, as the practice became more widespread and popular, the costumes
became more diverse, beginning to resemble those worn later in the 20th century
at Halloween, such as Indians, devils, Uncle Sams, harlequins, bandits, sailors,
and characters from cartoons and popular children’s fiction such as Huck Finn,
Tiger Lilly, and Long John Silver; eventually Disney characters and even
objects and figures like alarm clocks and Michelangelo joined the throng. During the Great Depression (approximately 1929-39),
as you might imagine, Ragamuffin Day was especially popular—and the phenomenon
drew to an end at about the same time that the economic crisis did. By then, Thanksgiving Day had become
formalized and circumspect and the ragamuffin parades had morphed into an
organized and regulated Thanksgiving Day parade (the one in New York City
sponsored by R. H. Macy & Co. began in 1924, the year the Herald Square
store opened) and dressing up for Halloween and going trick-or-treating became the
popular (and slightly anarchic) phenomenon we know today. (In New York there’s also famously a
less-regulated parade through Greenwich Village on Halloween night since 1974.)
It would have been during the Depression years, essentially between
about 1930 and and the end of the practice in the early 1940s, when my mother
and her family would have driven into Manhattan and up through the Village,
Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen (now known as Clinton) to the Upper West Side,
where Mom’s aunts and cousins all lived.
Given the popularity of Ragamuffin Day, it’s hardly surprising that an
eight-, nine-, or ten-year-old girl would have noticed the clutches of children
her own age costumed and engaging in what we now call “trick-or-treating”
around their neighborhoods. (Mom never
said that she and her sister, four years younger, or the cousins who were Mom’s
playmates had gone out on Thanksgiving dressed as ragamuffins. She may therefore also have been a little
envious.)
The practice was accepted by many, like Reverend Farrar (who actually
encouraged it) and others were simply resigned to its continuation; but a few
decades later, some New Yorkers began to call for ending the begging and
mocking the poor. In the words of A Tree Grows, “The street was jammed
with masked and costumed children making a deafening din with their penny tin
horns,” and storekeepers even sometimes locked their doors “to keep the noisy
panhandlers out.” The get-ups could be
truly frightening (think Lon Chaney, Sr., in some of his horror roles) and the
ragamuffins occasionally turned dangerous and even violent as rival gangs of
ragamuffins pulled weapons on each other.
Bonfires were a common accompaniment to the revelry, too, and, one
report noted, tragic results sometimes occurred when the billowing costume of a
child dancing around the flames could catch fire.
Eventually, newspapers, clergy, and city and school officials railed
against the footloose ragamuffins and the begging and police cracked down on
the rowdy maskers. The raucous revelry clashed with the more solemn
import that Thanksgiving had come to embody: the family gathering and
celebration of the harvest bounty. By about
1930, the New York Times reported,
“The ragamuffin is vanishing,” but “persists somewhat . . . tenaciously” in
“places where the subway lines end”—such as the south end of Hudson Street on
the Lower West Side, where my mother appeared to remembered seeing the “gamins
. . . in their mothers’ dresses and with their fathers’ suits hanging limply on
them.” The immense popularity of the
Macy’s parade, which became a national event with the 1947 movie Miracle on 34th Street, and the rise in
the observance of Halloween began to pare away at the practice of Ragamuffin
Day. The dampening effect of
Prohibition, 1920-33, may also have had some bearing. Alcohol consumption was an impetus to much of
the revelry among the adults. A cop, who
seemed to bemoan the passing of the tradition, remarked that groups of men
used to get all
dressed up and their girls did, too, and they’d have prizes for the best
costumes and they’d come uptown for the parade, with horns and bells. And they’d get free drinks in the saloons. But now—without any be[e]r or anything—
The policeman let his sentence trail off, as if lamenting the loss.
By 1940, the Madison Square Boys Club, which since the 1930s had
campaigned against Ragamuffin Day, held its own Thanksgiving parade with over
400 children marching and carrying a banner bearing the slogan “American boys
do not beg.” The last mention of a Thanksgiving Day ragamuffin parade in
the Times was in 1956. (That event was in the Bronx. The Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge still
holds a Ragamuffin Parade in late September or early October.)
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