Thomas Nast: How the Americans Invented Santa

Article by Charlie Thompson. Edited by Hannah Lyons. Additional Research by Liz Goodwin.

Most people know that Christmas is an American cultural icon. However, this goes beyond the Coca-Cola adverts that appear on our TV screens earlier and earlier every year. In fact, it goes back to the self-confidence and confusion that the nouveau riche and the buoyant middle class enjoyed at the end of the American Civil War. 

Somebody always profits from war, and the American Civil War was no exception. Treasury Secretaries Salmon P. Chase and William Fessenden flooded the North with war bonds and other financial instruments – including America’s first national paper currency – in order to finance it. This cemented Philadelphia and particularly Wall Street as the nexus of a more modern finance industry. Railroads and meatpackers boomed transporting soldiers and food from the farm to the front line. Manufacturers churned out ordnance for the war effort.

While much of this was unsustainable, it helped transform American society. The businessmen who could harness this growth became fantastically rich. But perhaps more importantly, these new industries spawned armies of clerks, bureaucrats and accountants in order to manage industries that physically grew from a small workshop or railroad to a large factory or sprawling network. These upwardly mobile and prosperous white-collar workers formed the bedrock of a new middle class in America, and the cartoonist Thomas Nast was in many ways their voice; he articulated their ideas on politics and society in graphical form.

The post-Civil War boom left the North with the factories and industrial capacity to produce goods for a new consumer economy. The armful of toys that Santa carries in his most famous depiction of Christmas shows the existence of the disposal income with which middle-class American could consume the goods that these massive factories were producing. To historians trying to understand the transformation of America from an agrarian republic to the world’s premier capitalist nation this will be interesting in and of itself. However, the image of Christmas as a time for material pleasure highlights how Americans gave a new importance to disposable income.

It may sound trite to suggest a smiling Santa shows how people like consuming goods, but in America this was more complicated. The American Revolution left a vocabulary that warned against bathing in luxury as being effeminate, weak and susceptible to the evil forces of corruption that looked for an opening to suppress public liberty. However, this picture shows a new idea about Christmas: that it was a time for consumption regardless of political or religious sensibilities. Consumerism grew to be important enough for the new middle class to relegate other ideas to the fringes of their mentality.

The way that Americans navigated the changes and the prosperity of the post-war era, then, directly influences and reinforced the way in which our society sees Christmas.

Nast also invented or popularised many of the simple idioms of Christmas, the most important of which is the smiling, portly and bearded gentlemen who appears on our Christmas cards today – with one exception: his black-and-white drawings did not allow him to be coloured red. His drawing Santa Claus and His Works expanded on traditional conceptions of morality to depict graphically the record of good and naughty children, the workshop where he makes children’s toys and the idea of holiday season to have a week off.

This is an extraordinarily confused image. On one hand, the idea of having a week off work signifies the availability of a level of disposable income that the vast majority of the population could never afford, something that the growing prosperity of the middle class allowed for. On the other hand, the idea of a workshop, where Santa personally oversees the production of toys, represented nostalgia that everybody, including Nast, recognised was a bygone age. The new middle class who bought into this image of Christmas – and bought the magazine that printed these images – worked as clerks, paymasters and managers in the new factories so hated by the skilled workshop artisans who had been replaced.

When Nast created a new image of Christmas, he did so with the nostalgia and confusion of nineteenth-century America in mind. Despite the middle-class confidence the ability and popularity of consumption represents, this was a time of great upheaval. Civil War was the Ghost of Christmas Past. Raging class-conflict, poverty and corruption was the Ghost of Christmas Present. Depression was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Americans knew the irony of the juxtaposition of Santa’s romantic workshop with the giving of mass-produced toys produced by cheap immigrant labour. They created Christmas in spite of it.

In the post-Civil War era it was Nast who took the traditional image of St. Nicholas and turned it into a symbol of the changes that the Civil War and industrialisation had wrought. His most famous image of Santa, which depicted a rosy-cheeked old man with an armful of toys and a U.S. belt, embodied the way that the new middle class saw their own position in the new America as well as a growing association of America with middle-class prosperity and consumption.

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“He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot / and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot / his eyes, how they twinkled! His dimples, how merry! / his cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry ... He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf!”

Extract from A Visit From St Nicholas, by Clement C Moore in 1822.

St Nicholas’ Day is 6th December. He’s the patron saint of children, in particular.

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