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1900: Turn of the Century
Just exactly when does one century turn into another? At what point does a new millennium begin? Does it begin with the turn of a year ending in “99” or “00”? To those of a mathematical or scientific mind, it is clear that the counting system begins with one. To most of us all those zeroes at the end of the new year are reason to celebrate.# And what does this have to do with Christmas, anyway?
The Gregorian calendar is based on when Christ was born, so without that first Christmas the world would be numbering its years in some other fashion, and this would not be an issue.
This question was not an issue to the editors of the Chicago Tribune, who reckoned that December 25, 1900 was the last Christmas of the nineteenth century. In many ways, that day was like any Christmas Day. In many ways it was also different.
Here is how the Tribune reported that day, complete with the multiple headlines that were the journalistic fashion back then:
Last Christmas In The Century
Chicago Will Celebrate the Day in Elaborate Manner Fitting the Occasion
Feast For Every Person
All Routine Business Throughout the City Suspended,
but Santa Claus Works Overtime
Gayety In Every House
County Institutions, Hospitals, Orphan Asylums, and Prisons All Will
Furnish Special Programs
Music In The Churches
Good Christmas weather will prevail on Tuesday (today).
There will be some sunshine and some cloudiness, with probably a
few snow flurries. It will continue cold, the temperature ranging
from 18 to 20 degrees above zero, with fresh westerly Winds.
(Henry J. Cox, Professor of Meteorology, United States Weather Bureau.)
Thousands of Chicagoans will hallow Christmas by brightening with charitable effort the lives of their less fortunate fellows. I suggest that they go personally and carry their gifts to the families and individuals with whose worthiness they are satisfied. The giving of food or money to beggars at the door is inadvisable in the vast majority of cases. On Christmas day so many public dinners are served by charitable institutions that no worthy person need go hungry. (Ernest P. Bicknell, General Superintendent Chicago Bureau of Charities.)
I hope all persons who ask for food on Christmas day will be sent to Tatternall’s, where the Salvation Army is prepared to feed, free of charge, 10,000 persons. No one will be turned away hungry. Only in case a person cannot reach any of the free dinners in the city would I advise the feeding of beggars at the door. (George French, Colonel of Salvation Army.)
Christmas—old-fashioned and up-to-date, lavish and modest will be celebrated in Chicago today for the last time in the nineteenth century. The good cheer will be abroad in the city, in every nook and cranny, from the cribs in the lake to the prairies of Cicero, in the mansions, the tenements, the prisons, the hospitals, and among the homeless of the streets. No worthy person will be forgotten in the feasting and dispensation of the gifts of the day.
Not enough snow has fallen to furnish the Christmas upon which the old settlers are fond of dwelling, and Chicagoans will have to content themselves with a happy mean of crisp breezes and plenty of skating. The temperature will give ample reason for gathering close about the hearth fires within doors.
Program for the Day
The day will be spent in the exchange of gifts and greetings of good will, in religious worship, in feasting, and in recreations of limitless variety. The Puritans and the Cavaliers will be in evidence just as surely as in the days of broad brimmed hats, plumes and slashed doublets. For the former there will be as many church services as can be crowded into the holiday, while the latter will find opportunity for more than the usual amount of levity. The average citizen will attend church in the morning, dine in family reunion in the early afternoon, and devote the remainder of the day to social visits, the theater, and other entertainment. Friendships will be renewed, and about the homecoming of other thousands of absent ones a special gayety will reign.
Routine Activity Suspended
All routine activity has been suspended and in the hush which will prevail this morning in the city preparations will be underway for the sacrifice of many hecatombs of turkeys and other various fowl. . . .” It is estimated that 350,000 turkeys will be consumed by the Americans.... South Water street looked like the track of a storm last night after the heads of families had made their inroads there and carried home the Christmas feast.
Christmas really began yesterday afternoon between 3 and 4 o’clock, when a great clatter of closing desk lids was heard through the city and the exodus from the big office buildings commenced. By 6 o’clock the workingmen were pouring into the streets and the holiday was fairly inaugurated. State street was a place of wild excitement.
Santa Claus Works Overtime
Santa Claus arrived in town shortly after supper and worked slavishly all night in the distribution of his freight. He was found early this morning, and though worn out, consented to be interviewed.
“I have visited over 500,000 families in Chicago,” said he, “and have a few visits to make yet today before I leave. I don’t know when I have been so overworked. The chimneys are extremely smoky and sooty here.” (Copyright Chicago Tribune. Used by permission.)
In other news at Christmastime 1900, John D. Rockefeller had just presented the University of Chicago with a gift of $1.5 million. The Chicago school system, on the other hand, was having financial difficulties. Teachers were not being paid on time because of a dispute between the city comptroller and Mayor Carter Harrison II. At the same time, a report to the British government by Britain’s vice-consul in Chicago concluded: “The system of education in the U.S., especially in the city of Chicago, can be stated to be the most practical in the world for fitting the youth of the country for the battle of life.”
The city council had just passed a bill banning prize fighting except in clubs that didn’t charge admission. Friends of saloon and bowling alley owner Frederick Jaeger were passing around a petition, hoping to convince Mayor Harrison to restore Jaeger’s liquor license. The mayor had just lifted it, following complaints from parishioners at the nearby Saint Vincent’s Church at Webster and Sheffield. It was the culmination of a dispute going back six years. Father F. J. Walsh of Saint Vincent’s voiced the parishioners’ complaint: “The place has a tendency to attract young men, who go to bowl there, and while there, learn to drink. It also attracts a class of idlers, and as the saloon is the greatest enemy of the Irish Americans, we are naturally opposed to it. The bowling, especially on summer nights, disturbs the neighborhood. The noise can be heard in the church when the services are held.”
Fourteen-year-old Wilfred Johnson of Evanston was arrested Christmas Eve for stealing a pocketbook and two bottles of perfume from William S. Lord’s department store. At the police station, the boy began crying and said he wanted to give his mother and sister Christmas presents because they had always been good to him. The boy’s father was out of work, and so he had no money. Evanston police sent the boy home after he promised to tell his father what had happened; Wilfred was afraid he’d get a whipping.
Just before Christmas there was an unusual sight on Michigan Avenue: Barney the elephant ambled down the avenue from Lincoln Park, and then up four flights of stairs at the Chicago Athletic Club to perform in the club’s circus. In 1900 telephones were all the rage in gift giving. There was the newspaper ad that read:
The New Year is ever the time for new and better resolves. Resolve to start the New Year right by installing a telephone in home or office. The cost is 16 cents per day and up. Ask about measured service. The Chicago Telephone Company.
Predictions For Christmas 2000
On Sunday, December 23rd, the Chicago Tribune carried an editorial which might possibly resonate with today’s readers. The editorial decried the cynicism surrounding Christmas. It pointed out that gift giving had become a matter of calculation and vulgar display. The happy occasion had left people with empty pocketbooks, blasted expectations, and the pains associated with over eating and indigestion.
In its feature section, the Tribune gazed into its crystal ball and decided that by the year 2000 very few people would be celebrating Christmas at all. The Tribune writer believed Santa Claus would be passe, his reindeer extinct, and Christmas trees environmentally unsound because of depletion of the northern forests.
The writer believed the tradition of gift giving would be frowned upon as vulgar, and that all church creeds would be “as dead as was Santa Claus,” replaced by the preaching of the fellowship of man. He foresaw Chicago as being a metropolis of four million people and a seaport to the world. He predicted that noiseless, dustless electric transit at eighty miles-an-hour would extend the city’s suburbs to a radius of fifty-five miles. He wrote of cars running on compressed air and rolling on quiet, rubber-rimmed wheels. Adequate light, power, and heat would be distributed to all homes from a centralized location. Social problems would have been solved, and money will have “ceased to be the end toward which all people moved, and with the opportunity gone for the hasty piling up of millions society was looking to economy.”
No doubt the writer would be horrified if he could see what society is like today, one hundred years in the future.
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2004 Cornerstone Press Chicago
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