The Railroads That Created Christmas

The creators of the modern American Christmas include such figures as Thomas Nast, whose Harper’s Weekly illustrations gave us our enduring image of Santa, and Clement Clarke Moore, the author of the poem “A Visit From St. Nick.” But just as important was Henry Bessemer, the Englishman who figured out how to make steel rapidly, cheaply, and abundantly. The production of this highly useful alloy requires the careful control of iron and carbon. Bessemer created a quick method to remove carbon from a crude form of iron so that a precise amount of carbon could then be added to the iron to make steel. In 1884, Science magazine declared that Henry Bessemer’s process was “an invention which has, in the short space of a quarter of a century, completely revolutionized some of the greatest of human industries.”

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Bessemer’s process made the rails possible, which helped diffuse products across the nation, moving us away from buying only those goods that were locally available. The rails grew at a precipitous rate in the United States. In 1840, before the Bessemer process, there were 3,326 miles of railroad tracks. Just 20 years later, there were 30,600 miles—a little more than the distance around the equator. By 1900, there were enough steel rails stretching across American territory to circle the world 10 times. This meant that almost every corner of the United States was connected; along with that access came the nation’s appetite for that region’s products.

As factories churned out products, textiles, goods, foods, and materials, the United States went from a state of scarcity and entered the world of excess, as the historian Penne Restad has noted. Companies needed a way to offload all those materials. But for citizens to buy them, they had to be encouraged, because scarcity was connected to morality. The Puritan mind-set of “a penny saved is a penny earned” had to be transformed into an equally pious notion of sharing. The Christmas holiday made the purchase of excess acceptable by combining capitalism with the charity of gift-giving. And with that, gifts evolved into a new language of connection, particularly as families spread across the country. The technology of steel rails was highly useful in transmitting those messages of love through the movement of packages.

Of course, the trains brought fear at first. Some passengers wondered if going 30 miles an hour would strip them of their souls. But the economic benefits of mobility proved too great for the public to resist. Steel also played a role in nurturing Americans’ desire to consume by enabling the evolution of department stores. Department stores, which were later made tall by steel girders, became what Restad has described as “cathedrals of desire.” Their number blossomed in the 1800s. Those who could not make it to stores could acquire items by ordering them through catalogs. With this new convenience, the post office became inundated with packages arriving by train. When Christmas approaches, the Times reported in 1890, the post office clerk “groans.”