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The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Leigh Eric Schmidt
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Extract

Irving Berlin's popular musical of 1948, Easter Parade, starring Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, opens with a wonderful shopping scene. It is the day before Easter, 1911. Astaire's character, Don Hewes, sings and dances his way along the streets of New York past a dry-goods store and through millinery, florist, and toy shops. “Me, oh, my,” he sings, “there's a lot to buy. There is shopping I must do. Happy Easter to you.” In the millinery store saleswomen model elaborate Easter bonnets and mellifluously offer their wares: “Here's a hat that you must take home. Happy Easter…. This was made for the hat parade on the well-known avenue. This one's nice and it's worth the price. Happy Easter to you.” Everywhere Hewes goes he buys things—a bonnet, a large pot of lilies, a toy bunny. By the time he leaves the florist, he has purchased so many gifts that he is followed by three attendants who help carry all the packages. Don Hewes is a consumer on a spree, and Easter is the occasion for it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 135 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1994

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References

Notes

1. These and subsequent quotations have been transcribed from the movie itself, which is widely available on video cassette. I have also consulted a copy of the screenplay at the Lilly Library, Indiana University.

2. Roth, Philip, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 157.Google Scholar

3. New York Herald, April 16, 1881, 5. Existing secondary literature focuses more on the holiday's folk beliefs and customs than on historical shifts or modern reconfigurations of the festival. See Caplow, Theodore and Williamson, Margaret Holmes, “Decoding Middletown's Easter Bunny: A Study in American Iconography,” Semiotica 32 (1980): 221-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gray, Nada, Holidays: Victorian Women Celebrate in Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 54–67 Google Scholar; Kieffer, Elizabeth Clarke, “Easter Customs of Lancaster County,” Papers of the Lancaster Historical Society 52 (1948): 49–68 Google Scholar; Newall, Venetia, An Egg at Easter: A Folklore Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Shoemaker, Alfred L., Eastertide in Pennsylvania: A Folk Cultural Study (Kutztown: Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 1960)Google Scholar. For a notable exception, see Barnett, James H., “The Easter Festival: A Study in Cultural Change,” American Sociological Review 14 (1949): 62–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. “Easter Flowers,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 27 (July 1863): 189- 94.

5. Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 183–215 Google Scholar; Geldart, Ernest, ed., The Art of Garnishing Churches at Christmas and Other Times: A Manual of Directions (London: Cox Sons, Buckley and Co., 1882), 12 Google Scholar. See also Barrett, William A., Flowers and Festivals: Or, Directions for the Floral Decoration of Churches (New York: Pott and Amery, 1868).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Cutts, Edward L., An Essay on the Christmas Decoration of Churches: With an Appendix on the Mode of Decorating Churches for Easter, the School Feast, Harvest Thanksgiving, Confirmation, a Marriage, and a Baptism, 3rd ed. (London: Horace Cox, 1868), 12 Google Scholar; Geldart, , ed., Art of Garnishing Churches, 11.Google Scholar

7. Suffling, Ernest R., Church Festival Decorations: Being Full Directions for Garnishing Churches for Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and Harvest, 2d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907), 74.Google Scholar

8. Henry Dana Ward, “Diary,” April 8, 1855; March 23, 1856; April 12, 1857, New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

9. On this invasion, see Leach, William R., “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925,” Journal of American History 71 (1984): 325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Unidentifted Author, “Diary, 1872-1873,” April 13, 1873, New-York Historical Society, Manuscripts.

11. Sarah Anne Todd, “Diary,” April 21, 1867, New-York Historical Society, Manuscripts; Elizabeth W. Merchant, “Diary,” March 25, 1883; April 25, 1886; April 10, 1887, New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts; Mrs. George Richards, “Diary,” April 1, 1888, New-York Historical Society, Manuscripts. For the initiative of women in church decoration, see, for example, “How Some Churches Looked Last Easter,” Ladies' Home Journal 21 (March 1904): 32-33.

12. Geldart, , ed., Art of Garnishing Churches, 12, 44Google Scholar; New York Sun, April 1, 1861, 2; Suffling, , Church Festival Decorations, 85–86.Google Scholar

13. “Easter Flowers,” 190; Suffling, Church Festival Decorations, 2. On this domestic and sentimental piety, see Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar; and McDannell, Colleen, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

14. “Easter Flowers,” 190. On Phelps's novel and “the new domestic heaven,” see Douglas, , Feminization of American Culture, 214-15, 223-26.Google Scholar

15. Geldart, Ernest, A Manual of Church Decoration and Symbolism Containing Directions and Advice to Those Who Desire Worthily to Deck the Church at the Various Seasons of the Year (Oxford: A. R. Mowbray and Co., 1899), 17–18 Google Scholar; New York Herald, April 16, 1881, 5; Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899; repr., New York: Random House, 1934), 119, 307-9.Google Scholar On the narrow limits of Veblen's model, see Lears, T. J. Jackson, “Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display ofGoods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Bronner, Simon J. (New York: Norton, 1989), 73–97.Google Scholar

16. New York Herald, April 21, 1867, 4; April 14, 1873, 4; Suffling, , Church Festival Decorations, 32–33 Google Scholar; New York Sun, April 22, 1878, 3. Here I am playing off Lears's argument in No Place of Grace about the antimodernism in Anglo-Catholic aesthetics. As Lears suggests, this antimodernist, medievalist stance often had modernist, therapeutic consequences. This was at no point clearer than in the Victorian elaboration of the art of church decoration.

17. Geldart, ed., Art of Garnishing Churches, 12, 19; William Leach, “Strategists of Display and the Production of Desire,” in Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions, 104. Leach's conclusions about this “display aesthetic” are offered in expanded and far more critical form in his Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

18. Dry Goods Chronicle, March 26, 1898, 19; John Wanamaker (Philadelphia), “Easter, 1893,” Dry Goods Scrapbook, Bella Landauer Collection, New-York Historical Society.

19. “News from the Cities,” American Advertiser 4 (April 1890): unpag. For other examples, see [Tracy, Charles A.], The Art of Decorating Show Windows and Interiors, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Merchants Record Co., 1906), 199–206, 314-15Google Scholar; Bauer, Alfred G., The Art of Window Dressing for Grocers (Chicago: Sprague, Warner & Company, [1902]), 30–32 Google Scholar; “Robinson Window,” Greeting Card 8 (March 1936): 28; “Lilies, a Cross, Lighted Candles,” Greeting Card 5 (March 1933): 5; and “The Cross Was Illuminated,” Greeting Card 5 (March 1933), 8.

20. Robert A. Childs, “The Thoughtful Thinker” on Window-Dressing and Advertising Together with Wholesome Advice for Those in Business and Those about to Start (Syracuse: United States Window Trimmers’ Bureau, [1896]), 21; Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 225.

21. Tracy, Art of Decorating Show Windows, 315. For Wanamaker's Easter displays, see box 11B, folders 10 and 23; box 12D, folder 2, Wanamaker Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. On the paintings of Michael de Munkacsy, see box 55, folder 14; box 63, folder 3, Wanamaker Collection. See also Leach, , Land of Desire, 213-14, 222-23.Google Scholar

22. Baum, L. Frank, The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors (Chicago: Tile Show Window Publishing Co., 1900)Google Scholar, unpag. intro., 181, 185. On Baum, see Leach, , Land of Desire, 55–61.Google Scholar

23. This is R. Laurence Moore's conclusion about the varied blendings of Protestant values with commercial amusements and popular literature in the first half of the nineteenth Century. See Moore, , “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly 41 (1989): 236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Herron, George D., The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1891), 29–31.Google Scholar The “one undivided Kingdom of God” is a phrase from Washington Gladden, Things New and Old in Discourses of Christian Truth and Life (Columbus, Ohio: A. H. Smythe, 1883), 260. On the “festive marketplace,” see the classic evocation in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968), 19, 92. For Wanamaker as the consummate sacralizer of prosperity, see “The Power of Consecrated Wealth: John Wanamaker— What the Rieh Can Do,” Christian Recorder, March 15, 1877, 4-5. On liberal Protestantism and the consumer ethos, see Curtis, Susan, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

25. For the Watts hymn within the context of a Victorian Easter service, see Bingham, Jennie M., Easter Voices (New York: Hunt and Eaton, 1891), 2.Google Scholar On the consumer culture as a dream world, see Williams, Rosalind H., Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar On the new therapeutic gospel, see especially Lears, T. J. Jackson, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T J. Jackson (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 3–38.Google Scholar On the wider absorption of religious Symbols into modern advertising, see Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 264-84.Google Scholar

27. For the Irish adage, see Weiser, Francis X., The Easter Book (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1954), 159-61.Google Scholar For Poor Robin's maxim, see Brand, John and Hazlitt, W. Carew, Popular Antiquities of Great Britain: Comprising Notices of the Moveable and Immoveable Feasts, Customs, Superstitions and Amusements Post and Present, 3 vols. (London: John Russell Smith, 1870), 1:93.Google Scholar On Easter dothes, see Wright, A. R., British Calendar Customs: England, 3 vols., ed. Lones, T. E. (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1936-1940), 1:101 Google Scholar; and Shoemaker, Eastertide in Pennsylvania, 24. For the Herald's version of the proverb, see New York Herold, April 8, 1855, 1.

28. New York Herald, April 14, 1873, 4; April 14, 1879, 8.

29. New York Herald, April 26, 1886, 8; New York Times, April 7, 1890, 2.

30. Hower, Ralph M., History of Macy's of New York, 1858-1919: Chapters in the Evolution of the Department Store (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), 170, 451n.37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; New York Sun, April 17, 1878, 4; April 16, 1878, 4. It is important to underline that my analysis of Easter's commercialization is confined to the United States. It is likely that merchants in Paris or London, where the growth of the consumer culture was somewhat ahead of the United States and where Easter traditions were far less encumbered by low-church Protestant sentiments, were significantly in advance of their American counterparts. For a hint of this, see McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 74.Google Scholar

31. Dry Goods Economist, March 24, 1894, 36, 37; Dry Goods Chronicle, March 26, 1898, 19; Dry Goods Economist, March 18, 1893, 55.

32. Elizabeth Schuneman Orr, “Diary,” April 9, 1871, New York Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts.

33. Merchant, “Diary,” April 16, 1881; April 21, 1867; Clara Burton Pardee, “Diary,” March 25, 1883, New-York Historical Society, Manuscripts; Marjorie R. Reynolds, “Diary,” April 7, 1912, New-York Historical Society, Manuscripts; “New York Millinery,” Millinery Trade Review 7 (April 1882): 56.

34. New York Herald, April 7, 1890, 3.

35. Anne O'Hare McCormick, quoted in “The Easter Parade,” Time, April 25, 1949, 19.

36. Rufus Jarman, “Manhattans Easter Madness,” Saturday Evening Post, April 9, 1955, 103.

37. Ibid. On Easter conviviality and costuming, see Shoemaker, Eastertide in Pennsylvania, 43-45; and Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 78-79, 146. For the woman's outlandish hat, see New York Times, April 6, 1953, 14.

38. Yûsuf, Anna Ben, The Art of Millinery (New York: Millinery Trade Publishing Co., 1909), 227.Google Scholar On the male domination of nineteenth-century parades and public ceremonies as well as the efforts of women to gain a foothold in these rituals, see Ryan, Mary P., Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 19–57 Google Scholar; and Davis, Susan G., Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 47, 149, 157, 190.Google Scholar

39. New York Herald, April 13, 1925, 3. For representative accounts of Easter parades in the resorts, see New York Times, April 16, 1906, 9; John Steevens, “The Charm of Eastertide at Atlantic City,” Harper's Weekly, April 18, 1908, 20-22; New York Times, April 20, 1908, 3; New York Herald, April 8, 1912, 4; and New York Times, April 22, 1935, 11. On Coney Island and Atlantic City, see, respectively, Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978)Google Scholar; and Funnell, Charles E., By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), esp. 46, 89.Google Scholar Barnett noted in 1949 of New York's Easter parade: “The pattern appears to be diffusing as an American practice.” See Barnett, “Easter Festival,” 69.

40. New York Times, April 23, 1946, 25; April 19, 1930, 9; April 2, 1956, 14; Kresensky, Raymond, “Easter Parade,” Christian Century, March 23, 1932, 384-85Google Scholar; Richardson, Dorothy Lee, “Easter Sunday, Fifth Avenue,” Christian Century, April 28, 1954, 511.Google Scholar

41. Markham, Edwin, “The Blight on the Easter Lilies,” Cosmopolitan 42 (April 1907): 667-68.Google Scholar Markham's essays on child labor were collected in Children in Bondage (New York: Hearst's International, 1914).

42. “Blight on the Easter Lilies,” 670-73.

43. Ibid., 669.

44. New York Times, March 28, 1932, 1; Jarman, “Manhattans Easter Madness,” 104.

45. New York Times, March 28, 1880, 2; “Proper Observance of Easter,” Concert Quarterly 1 (March 1883): 1; New York Times, March 18, 1894, 18; Markham, “Blight on the Easter Lilies,” 668; Filier, Louis, The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Significance (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1966), 140.Google Scholar

46. Martin, E. S., “New York's Easter Parade,” Harper's Weekly, April 22, 1905, 567 Google Scholar; Doane, William C., The Book of Easter (New York: Macmillan, 1910), vii.Google Scholar