- Well, welcome again to the Community Lecture Series.
Tonight's speaker is Dr. Neil Prendergast,
and his topic is a timely one:
The Roots of the Real Christmas Tree.
And Neil's in my history department.
He's an assistant professor there.
He's been with us since 2010.
Is that right, Neil?
He has a PhD from the University of Arizona.
He has a master's degree in history
from Miami University in Miami, Ohio.
He's working currently on a book project
which has something to do with this topic:
American Holidays, American Nature.
And he's currently in progress
working on that book manuscript.
Neil is a recipient of our Excellence in Teaching Award
at the university.
He is also the co-coordinator
of the Environmental Studies minor,
and he teaches courses in U.S. history since 1877,
U.S. environmental history,
United States environmental politics since 1900,
and food and the environment, among others.
So there's a common theme that you can see there
to his interests.
Neil is on the History Committee
of the Wisconsin State Historic Preservation Review Board.
He's very active in that regard.
And he's also a member of some professional organizations,
including the American Historical Association,
the American Society for Environmental History,
the Network in Canadian History and Environment,
and the American Studies Association.
A little tidbit about Neil.
When he moved here, he moved from Arizona, as I said,
and he immediately got an interest in birding,
because when he was first here
he saw both a turkey and a red-tailed hawk
on the same limb of a tree.
And we said welcome to Wisconsin.
Either it's a dumb turkey or a dumb hawk, one or the other.
So I want to welcome Neil Prendergast,
The Roots of the Real Christmas Tree.
Neil.
(audience applauds)
- Thanks so much for being here.
I want to thank Chris Cirmo for the introduction
and the College of Letters and Science
for hosting this event.
And I'd also like to thank the Portage County Public Library
for doing its part in hosting the event as well.
My talk tonight is called
The Roots of the Real Christmas Tree,
and it really comes from my interest
in the role of nature in modern American life.
As an environmental historian,
that's my particular field of study,
I'm interested in all of the ways in which nature
has mattered to Americans in the past.
And I think the ones that motivate my interest the most
are the ones that are close to home.
Some people are interested in distant landscapes,
but the materiality of our every day world
is really fascinating to me.
And so I took up an interest in
the place of nature and holidays.
And who can avoid, if they're interested in that,
the Christmas tree?
And, of course, one of the big ways
of looking at the Christmas tree is through authenticity.
So I'm going to talk a little bit today
about how we've come to think about the Christmas tree
as either real or perhaps fake,
what the historical roots of that
particular way of thinking are.
So, thank you for coming out tonight.
I also wanted to point out before I get too much into things
that I've provided a handout.
And you guys might see this on the chairs.
Maybe you don't have one, but the person next to you should.
There are several of them out there.
These are simply the quotes that I'll be drawing from
throughout the lecture.
I have some of them excerpted on the PowerPoint,
but sometimes I feel it's nice to have
the real deal in your own hands right there in front of you.
So that's there for you to look at.
So the roots of the real Christmas tree,
I think it's really impossible to
start talking about the real Christmas tree
without first beginning with what could be regarded as
the elephant in the room: A Charlie Brown Christmas.
And I'm imagining, I'm hoping actually,
that all of you have seen this many, many times,
have come to love it,
and view this in a good light. (laughs)
Is that the case?
Are you guys all viewers of this?
You've seen it? Wonderful, okay.
So you might recall this scene.
I think this is really the most important one for me.
This is when Charlie Brown is trying to sell the idea
of this spindly little three-limbed evergreen
to Linus.
And Linus, you might recall, is a little suspect.
They've been charged, actually,
with getting a fancy Christmas tree,
and Charlie Brown has the independence of
making a decision on his own because, well,
Lucy's not around (laughs).
And Lucy is the one who wanted
the purple, shiny, aluminum tree.
And as you guys probably all recall,
Charlie Brown does in fact select the spindly version.
He views it as more authentic,
and it's sort of a symbol of the need to get away from
commercialism at Christmastime.
And I would argue that this piece of media here
is probably the most influential
in how Americans think about Christmas trees even today.
There's nothing else, I think, that's been viewed as much
that has attempted to cast some meaning
on what the Christmas tree is.
And the meaning here is authenticity.
This is the real thing. It's anti-commercial.
My curiosity is how did we get there?
And I think it's probably common sense to say,
well, you're gonna have a real version if
you've got a plastic one, too.
Certainly that comparison means that we're going to create
different meanings for the both of them.
But I think that, actually, the concern about authenticity
and the way we produce Christmas trees in this country
actually have far deeper roots than Christmas 1965
when A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired.
So what I want to do today, actually,
is address this question that we face every single season
in a historical way.
And you guys, I'm certain, have probably already seen
news stories like this one already
where the media is doing some sort of lifestyle piece
where they say, well, let's give the viewers something about
Christmas trees this year.
Maybe we'll do some sort of pass
at an environmental analysis of which one is better.
It's a very common news story.
I'm sure that you've seen something like this before.
Looking at this now, I'm a little jealous
that it was 79 degrees in Houston
(audience laughs) when I took this screenshot.
But I think we're not doing so bad, either, this year.
So this is a story that kind of bugs me, actually,
because we do it every single year,
and I don't think we ever really get a good answer as to
which one is better for the environment.
And some people will argue passionately
on one side for the plastic tree,
and some people will argue passionately
on the side of the real tree.
I'm not really interested in trying to convince
anybody in this room of which one
is the better environmental choice.
What I'm interested in doing is having us see why
that's a choice at all.
And so that's, to me, the most interesting thing
about Christmas trees.
Why do we have the choice that we have?
So tonight I want to begin with some Christmas tree history.
So we're gonna go way back to the 1800s.
You guys, after all, gave the microphone to an historian,
so we're going to the 1800s.
We have to really begin in the 1820s, 1830s.
And that's when Christmas really becomes
the domestic holiday
that we can recognize today in the United States.
Previous to the early 19th century,
the people who lived in what would become the United States
did not commonly celebrate Christmas very much.
In New England, for example, the Puritans did not think
it was a worthwhile holiday to pursue.
In fact, they were very much against it.
They weren't a fan of really too many holidays, in fact.
And so there wasn't really a common practice of Christmas.
And when Americans did celebrate Christmas,
it was usually actually newer immigrants from Europe
who celebrated it in a way that the Puritans
didn't quite like,
which was to get really, really drunk,
break into each other's homes,
sing, dance, and do all sorts of not very Puritan things.
(audience laughs)
So the Puritans didn't really like it.
Well, this continues into the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s.
And there's a rising middle class in those years.
And they're kind of like the Puritans.
They don't like the misrule of the way that
newer immigrants are celebrating Christmas.
They don't like the drunkenness,
but they kind of want to celebrate Christmas.
And so they come up with a different version of a holiday.
And their version of a holiday is to make it
a domestic holiday that's really focused on children.
And for that, they used the Christmas tree.
And so the Christmas tree becomes a significant part
of the American version of Christmas
as Americans decide to make the holiday about kids
and about being at home during the holiday.
Here you can see the children
sort of very excited about the gifts
that are underneath the Christmas tree.
And, in fact, this would have been a typical
sort of Christmas tree for much of the 19th century.
It's a tabletop Christmas tree,
and it's one that might have been
the top part of a tree cut off
or just a very immature tree.
But, still, not too many Americans,
even in the mid-19th century, really celebrated Christmas.
It was not at anywhere near the scale
that we would experience it today.
By the time we get to the late 19th century, though,
things sort of change.
A lot of Americans start to celebrate Christmas,
and they're doing it in the domestic way that we know how.
And this creates a deep concern
for America's conservationists.
They think that cutting down trees,
even if it's just the top, is a bad idea.
This photograph is from the 1890s.
And you can see in the photograph,
to the bottom left-hand corner
are the Christmas trees starting to be piled up.
The men are trying to haul away the Christmas trees.
It's still somewhat a localized industry,
actually, in the 1890s.
You can see the sort of equipment they have.
This is not an industrialized
harvesting of trees by any means quite yet.
Still, this is going on in most New England states,
most middle Atlantic states, and most Midwestern states.
And people are starting to be a little bit concerned
about the impact this was having on America's forests.
And the 1890s was a time when conservation
was very important to Americans.
This is when the conversation about
the Forest Service begins.
And, ultimately, the Forest Service gets created
in the first decade of the 20th century.
This is also the origins of Arbor Day.
You guys probably are familiar with Arbor Day,
planting a tree on Arbor Day.
And, in fact, it's J. Sterling Morton
who was the founder of Arbor Day
who described this sort of scene as a wanton waste.
And that's the first quote on the handout.
So, if you turn to your handout,
this is what he has to say.
"The absurdity
"of celebrating the birth of the Savior of the world
"by wanton waste and extravagance
"which jeopardizes the welfare
"of millions of human beings yet unborn..."
He thought there would be a timber problem in the future.
"Is obvious to every thinking man."
So there was this backlash against Christmas trees.
And this is not at all
where the conversation is today in the 21st century.
So the 1890s and the early 1900s
was a very different conversation about Christmas trees.
Now, some people retorted,
well, the Christmas trees that are being cut down
were not going to be the large trees
that would supply the nation with future timber.
These were small trees
of species that really had very little timber value.
The Boston Herald, for example, said,
"Until 10 years ago, the balsam fir,"
which was the very most popular Christmas tree species
at the turn of the century,
"was considered the most worthless three that ever grew.
"Its wood was valueless for timber and made poor fuel.
"The fir was outside the pale of human utility."
So, there was two sides to the debate.
Some people, like Morton, were saying this was a waste,
and others were saying, no, we can afford it.
Who cares about balsam fir anyway (laughs)?
So this debate went on for quite some time,
and it really created some confusion
around the issue of Christmas trees
so that not very many Americans
actually had Christmas trees in their house.
Around 1900, there were about
four million Christmas trees harvested,
is the best estimate we have.
And the country's population in 1900 was about 75 million.
So not every household had one.
Not even, probably, really half the households had them.
Today, we're at a much higher percentage.
Now the solution for some people
was to create a judicious process.
And this is the words of Colman's Rural World,
which was a popular conservation
agricultural magazine of the turn of the century.
And what they wanted was the Forest Service
to create some sort of regulation.
The 1890s, the early 1900s, was the era of the Progressives,
commonly called the Progressive Era,
and this was the moment in American history
where it seemed like about just everybody
wanted to create a bunch of rules
for everybody else to live by.
We need processes and regulations.
That was sort of the mood of the day.
And so Colman's Rural World said,
"Only when Christmas trees are removed
"by a judicious process of selection
"would it be the fitting end of a useful life."
Again, this is a conversation that is not at all
like the one that we have today about real versus fake.
So, what to do?
Well, some people realized
that this was not just a conservation problem.
That this problem was also one about
community life in America.
Some people said, well, we're concerned
that we're cutting down all these trees.
We're maybe not so sure if it's a problem or not.
There seems to be some confusion on the issue.
But what we realize
is that we could help solve the problem
if not every single household,
or as many as currently did,
needed to have a Christmas tree.
And, in fact, that would not only
lessen the demand on these trees,
these poor balsam firs and other species,
but maybe we could come up with a solution
that would actually bring everybody together
at Christmastime.
Maybe we could have a public Christmas tree.
And if you guys, you know, have been outside today,
and I trust that you've been on this street today
and looked down Main Street,
you've seen that we have a public Christmas tree.
What I'm talking about right here
is the origin of the tree that you see outside, actually.
The intellectual origins, you could say.
The living community Christmas tree idea
was a way to create one Christmas tree
in every town to be planted, actually,
in the town square, perhaps outside a courthouse
or some other public meeting ground.
And the notion was that people could celebrate Christmas
in this public space.
They wouldn't need to celebrate Christmas
in their private homes in a domestic fashion.
Christmas could be a public holiday,
much like the Fourth of July
or other similar public holidays.
Progressives really liked this idea.
People like Jacob Riis, who you might recall
from a high school history class perhaps.
He was a famous progressive concerned about
community life in America.
He said this is exactly what our country needs.
What we need is a way to come together.
This was also the moment where
immigration to the United States was increasing rapidly.
And so some progressives wanted a way for
people to feel like they were all in it together,
as if there was a common American culture.
And they were trying to actually create that
through this idea of a living community Christmas tree.
So it was both a conservation idea
and an idea about community life.
Again, very different than how we consider
a Christmas tree today and the questions that we ask
about a Christmas tree today.
Now, part of the concern
was what happened to immigrants as they became American.
And some people thought one of the most--
One of the worst parts, actually, about coming to America
actually people thought there were bad parts to it,
(audience laughs)
was that individuals maybe would retain
a little bit of their family life.
Maybe they would come to the United States
with a sibling or a parent or a child,
and so they would retain some of the,
sort of the closest bonds they had with family members.
But what they would lose
was the village life that they had relied upon in Europe.
And so the Charity Organization Society,
which was a society in New York
that was sort of an umbrella organization
for other charities,
really thought through the loss that immigrants had.
That they weren't necessarily introduced
to a similar community when they came to the United States.
So, again, if you look at your handout,
this is the long one.
"The living community Christmas tree would transform
"what the Charity Organization Society called
"the debris of Europe's social tradition
"into a far richer and deeper kind
"of American community life."
It argued that "when the village community is transplanted
"man by man or family by family
"and tossed into the American city,
"there is more social tradition suddenly wasted
"than 100 years of orderly transformation could effect."
So, again, the concern here is about community life.
Here, this is an image from New York City
outside one of the typical missions
that dotted sort of Progressive Era cities.
These are people lining up for some food on Christmas day
outside a charity organization.
Now, this movement for a living community Christmas tree
really got underway first in New York City.
And so in Madison Square,
the first one was created in 1913.
And I just absolutely love this image
because it shows the construction of the tree.
So it shows that it's something in the making.
You can see the scaffolding there.
It's not a planted tree.
It was one that was cut and brought.
But nonetheless,
the proponents and the organizers of this tree
thought they were still doing something conservation minded
because if people decided to have their holiday
in Madison Square, they wouldn't need to purchase a cut tree
for their own private home.
So, again, there's two concerns paired together.
And they connected it,
the supporters, to the idea of democracy.
I don't think it's a big jump to talk about community life
and then to talk about democracy.
And so we can look at some of the ways in which
supporters made that connection.
Norman Radder, I have a quote from him.
He was a Progressive Era intellectual
who really thought a lot about media.
And what he had to offer was:
"To live democracy, every person in a neighborhood
"must learn about common problems,
"must discuss them with his neighbors,
"and must cooperate in solving them."
And he argued to do that,
people actually needed to be outside and see each other.
They couldn't all just be in their private homes.
I almost said on their smartphones (laughs).
(audience laughs) I didn't say that.
That wouldn't be historical.
I think I know how he would view those, though.
But we needed common places
to actually interact with one another.
And so he was in support.
He was one of the popularizes
of a living community Christmas tree.
In the 19-teens and the 1920s, this idea took off.
Some communities decided to have one that was planted.
Other communities tried that
and had a hard time getting the tree
actually transplanted in a healthy way.
There's a practical issue there, of course.
But nonetheless, they had a public tree,
a community tree, in the 19-teens and 1920s.
So it was a real movement, a successful movement.
Well, what's happened
to the living community Christmas tree,
and why don't we speak about Christmas trees
with the same sort of concern
that turn of century Americans had?
They were so concerned about community life.
They were so concerned about conservation.
And those really were on their lips
when they were talking about a Christmas tree.
Today we don't think about that.
We think about authenticity.
We think about which one is better for nature,
but we want to think that through from
ourselves as individuals, as consumers.
That's not how they frame the question over 100 years ago.
So, what's happened here?
Well, what's happened is that it was a great idea,
but people didn't really follow through with it
in the way that the initial organizers really desired.
And so I want to talk about some of the ways in which
the living community Christmas tree idea
was sort of steered away from even as it expanded.
The first thing, I think, to consider
is this idea of the corporate soul.
I borrowed this term from an historian
whose work I really admire, Roland Marchand.
He studied, actually, the public relations history
of American corporations.
And he's come up with this term the corporate soul.
And he's not arguing that corporations have a soul.
He argues that corporations
want you to think that they have a soul.
They don't. They're not people.
Well, you can sort of see this type of PR move,
where the corporation wants to convince
maybe residents in the towns that it operates within
or maybe its consumers
that it's actually a part of the community.
That it thinks and feels with the community.
When you look at some of the companies that tried to attach
their names to different community Christmas trees.
So we've got the Dayton Power & Light Company
of Ohio, Dayton, Ohio,
who recommended planting one because it was
the modern plan of conservation that, of course,
the Dayton Power & Light Company was so much behind.
They were simply trying to attach their own name
to something that they saw as being popular.
It's almost as if the Dayton Power & Light Company,
"liked" the Christmas tree on Facebook (laughs).
That's the sort of same sort of thing
that they were doing here.
The Bell Telephone Company.
A lot of these were utility companies, actually,
that would try to sponsor a community Christmas tree
because sometimes they could offer electricity
to light the trees, that kind of thing.
The Bell Telephone Company said,
"There have been few, if any, movements that had,
"as their objective, nothing more tangible
"than the development of community social feeling,
"the establishing of a social tradition,"
which sounds kind of odd
when it's the Bell Company telling you that
and not a city or a community telling you that.
This is one of my favorites.
This is the Christmas tree that was put atop
of McCormick Works in Chicago.
This was a similar move.
The advertising here of the company,
the goodwill the company was trying to generate
was toward its own employees.
Those of you who have taken my history classes
know that McCormick is, of course,
famous for being the company
that was at the center of the Haymarket affair,
which was a major labor uprising of the late 19th century.
In the early 20th century,
McCormick is trying all sorts of ways to make itself look,
well, like it has a corporate soul.
One of those ways is to have a Christmas tree.
I have a quote here from McCormick, actually, on the back.
Superintendent F.H. Harrison of McCormick Works
and his organization had their own Christmas tree.
This is on the back, actually, of this as a postcard.
"It was large enough to be visible to the employees..."
There's the crucial line.
"For a considerable distance and all directions
"as they came to and went from their work."
We're nice people. Trust us.
"It was lighted and decorated
" in attractive style and exemplified the..."
This is really my favorite part.
"The get-together spirit (chuckles)
"that is so characteristic of McCormick."
So, Christmas trees here are not neutral.
They're being deployed for reasons
that are particular to these corporations.
Another one of my favorite ones, actually,
is the Colorado Fuel and Iron Works.
The Colorado Fuel and Iron Works
is not a name that most people would know,
but you might know the name Rockefeller.
Rockefeller owned the Colorado Fuel and Iron Works.
It was part of his corporate empire.
And you might have heard of the Ludlow Massacre
in Ludlow, Colorado, in the early 20th century
when Rockefeller got the Colorado National Guard
to shoot and kill striking workers.
Well, by the time you get into the 1920s,
the Colorado Fuel and Iron Works
is advertising to its employees the Christmas festivities
that it's putting on for its workers.
So, what I'm pointing out here is that these corporations
are using the Christmas tree as a way to try to generate
some good feeling towards themselves.
And I'm not so certain that everybody bought it.
I think what it did is it watered down the idea
of a community Christmas tree.
It let people think, well,
this is really a product of a corporation.
This is a product of somebody else.
I'm not the one who's helping put it together.
I'm not engaging in the process of decorating it.
I'm not part of the creative work here.
This is just something that somebody says
they're doing for me.
And so it's a way to kind of push away, actually, I think,
what real community activity would look like.
And, finally, the one that everybody knows,
the Rockefeller one.
Rockefeller Plaza in New York City,
which began in the late 1930s.
The name Rockefeller running through a lot of this.
And this actually has an interesting history.
It was initially put up by workers
when they were constructing the plaza,
and then it was decided to make it sort of
a more of a centerpiece and to get a very large tree
beyond the scale of the one the workers had chosen.
Another thing that happened that really, I think,
made it difficult for the community Christmas tree
to really hold together Americans in a way that
it really would be the one tree
that they would celebrate Christmas at
and that they wouldn't want to go home
and just celebrate there privately
is ethnic tension in the early 20th century.
The quote I have here is from
a planning journal called American City.
If anybody is interested, actually, in urban history,
on the way cities are laid out,
to just thumb through old issues of American City
is really interesting.
This is where a lot of the ideas for the way that
turn of the century cities were laid were sort of discussed.
You could see a lot of the characteristics of a town
like Stevens Point, actually.
The American City was actually very positive,
and it was trying to say there's a big promise here.
So when it offered this,
that the ideal municipal tree should draw all classes,
all kinds of citizens, rich or poor, native or foreign born,
it was pointing towards an ideal
it hoped would be fulfilled by the Christmas tree.
It should symbolize to them
and awaken them to the spirit of brotherhood
while they voice together with the message of
peace and goodwill,
renewed loyalty to their common city, state, and country.
And you can see what American City is trying to do here
is trying to sort of divert attention away from
any kind of religious differences also.
Of course, Catholics and Protestants not always being
best of friends in the early 20th century.
But what happened was not what American City wanted.
More common were comments like this.
One Syracuse, New York, resident who really was kind of
a little bit upset at what she called the "comic crudity"
of "noisier, grosser" immigrants
who showed up at the community Christmas tree.
She had wanted a sort of a white,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant affair
and not an actual reflection of Syracuse, New York.
So people started to stay away
because they didn't really like to be with each other.
Another thing that happened,
we move into the mid-20th century,
is the suburban lifestyle.
People started moving to the suburbs,
as I'm certain you all are aware,
really in significant numbers following the Second World War.
I'm certain some people are familiar with
the history of Levittowns
and the other early suburban developments.
These early suburban developments
really did not put a large value on public space.
And they replaced things like Main Streets
and town squares with shopping malls.
This is an image, actually, from 1950
of Seattle's Northgate shopping mall,
which was one of the first enclosed shopping malls
in the United States.
And what it decided to do
was put a community Christmas tree up.
This is actually two different trees
somehow put together.
Some sort of arboreal Frankenstein.
(audience laughs)
You could see it from a long ways away.
It was a great idea.
It got Northgate shopping mall in the pages of Life magazine.
Was it public space? No, of course not.
Suburban living really did have a focus on private space.
And rather than try to make that argument myself,
I just want to turn to somebody who's a professional
in thinking about suburban history.
And so, Liz Cohen, who's a social historian
who a lot of historians admire,
really has kind of, I think, summed it up best.
So I think we can just trust Dr. Cohen here, who says,
"The privatization of public space
"in suburban shopping centers had ominous implications
"for the preservation of democratic freedom."
She's talking a lot about the limitations on free speech
that come when one tries to voice themselves
in private space compared to public space.
Shopping malls would qualify as private space.
So they're not real expressions of community.
They're really sort of carefully curated corporate spaces.
And, of course, suburban living
comes with those standalone homes, right?
And Americans in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s
who could afford one
and who didn't have a racial barrier to getting one
were very interested in filling up those standalone homes
with all of the things that
signaled their own personal progress
and what they regarded to be the progress of the country.
At Christmastime they were adamant about having
a Christmas tree in their own home,
as this suburban Washington, D.C., image shows.
And, of course, the presents that go underneath.
They're doing pretty well, I'd say.
So this is really what's going on.
And what we need to kind of keep in view, I would say,
is where that tree on the left came from.
That it came from a place on the right.
Well, maybe not exactly, but that type of place.
This is a Christmas tree farm.
And so what I've done so far is talk about
the ways in which Americans have purchased
Christmas trees or wanted to have a community one,
but I've now steered away for a little while
from how we've produced Christmas trees,
and how they've been grown and harvested.
That's actually an important part of the story
that I want to take quite a bit of time to discuss.
A Christmas tree for every home.
Christmas tree farms really ramp up
in the 1950s and the 1960s.
In many ways, they're products of initiatives
by the part of the US Department of Agriculture
trying to find ways of make rural Americans
or to allow rural Americans to make a living.
Lots of farmers were shifting from
sort of crops that weren't quite making it in their region,
trying to find something else to do.
The USDA said Christmas trees would be great.
Particularly they were telling this to farmers
in Michigan, North Carolina,
and some of the states that have really become
the major producers of Christmas trees.
Wisconsin would be among them.
And out of this effort emerged an organization
initially called the National Christmas Tree
Growers Association,
but then, quickly thereafter its founding in 1955,
shortened its name
to the National Christmas Tree Association.
They were thinking about
how I could fit their name on the slide.
(Neil and audience laugh)
And they're a traditional organization.
They aren't the bad guys or anything like that.
Just a typical agricultural organization
that seeks to serve the interests of its constituent farmers
in terms of pooling money for marketing programs,
lobbying for laws that are friendly to its endeavor,
and that kind of typical thing.
Well, they really did a great job, actually.
And, in the 1950s,
Christmas tree production gets to about 25 million,
and it's headed towards 30 million.
And it's really ramping up.
More and more farmers are getting into it.
In fact, a lot of the farmers argue that too many farmers
were getting into the tree farm business.
That was an issue for them.
They were also learning about pests for the first time,
how to apply herbicides for the first time,
that kind of thing.
And they were also,
just as they were becoming successful in the 1960s,
encountering the threat of the synthetic tree.
The reason being is that vinyl becomes
an affordable commodity in the mid-century,
and clever people figure out how to turn vinyl
into a Christmas tree.
And so the graph up here I have shows this competition
and how it really increases in the 1960s.
The total market share is the column on the left there.
And, in 1950, you can see synthetic trees
really are almost nil.
The darker line there is the grown trees.
I've called them grown trees, trying to get away from
the metaphors of real and fake for a moment.
But that dark green bar
decreases as you go to 1955 just a hair.
1960, wow, the farmers are paying attention.
And by 1965, they really are worried.
And so what to do?
Well, the thing to do is you market your tree.
You've got an organization that can do it, so you do it.
And here's what you come up with.
Well, you don't come up with that exactly, but you borrow from them.
I should say to be totally fair here,
Charlie Brown did a great thing
for the National Christmas Tree Association,
(audience laughs)
but not enough.
I would argue that he killed the aluminum tree,
but there should have been some dig in that cartoon
at the vinyl tree. (laughs)
So this is what
the National Christmas Tree Association does.
It markets the idea of the real tree.
This is a tag ironically printed on vinyl
(audience laughs)
that they wanted to put on Christmas trees
to remind them, remind consumers that what you're getting
is something real here.
In an age of plastic, that was a marketable idea.
Later, in the 1980s, they create this,
what they call the real tree campaign,
which included coloring books.
This is the cover of a coloring book: Real Trees 4 Kids.
My son, to this very day, did that (laughs).
I came home today, and he had that done.
A green Christmas tree.
It wasn't on a National Christmas Tree Association
coloring book, but it's close.
The other thing they did is they hired Willard Scott.
Willard Scott, the television personality
from the Today show, to say things on TV
like you don't eat a plastic turkey at Thanksgiving,
so you shouldn't have a plastic tree at Christmas.
It was this argument about authenticity
that he was really relying upon.
I want to be clear, though,
that real does not necessarily mean
automatically environmentally better.
After some analysis, it might be that a real Christmas tree
is environmentally better.
I'm not suggesting that that's impossible.
But it doesn't automatically mean that it's better
just because it's a grown tree.
And as a way to kind of point this out,
I want to look at the reaction
that the American Christmas Tree Association
had to Silent Spring.
I see some younger faces in the crowd,
people who need to take my environmental history classes.
(audience laughs)
Where you can learn about Silent Spring.
Silent Spring was a book published in the early 1960s
that really outlined the dangers of synthetic chemicals,
especially DDT.
It was a big hit. Very controversial.
Some people liked it.
Some people,
like Ed Udine from Pennsylvania State University,
who lended his work
to the American Christmas Tree Growers Journal,
did not like Silent Spring.
His reaction to it was, "In this book, Miss Carson..."
Rachel Carson was the author,
"makes an emotional and somewhat inaccurate outburst
"on the use of pesticides.
"She avidly accepted as facts,
" statements of questionable authorities,
"hearsay," and, God forbid, "housewives."
(audience laughs)
This was the sort of reaction
that the Christmas tree industry had
to any sort of criticism
that it was not an environmentally friendly industry.
It is true that they were spraying DDT.
They were also spraying other herbicides that we now know
have major environmental health consequences.
So just because it was real
does not necessarily automatically mean
that somehow it was better.
It might have just had different environmental issues.
Today, maybe there are tree growers,
and maybe there's a tree grower in the audience.
I don't know.
It's possible to be better,
but I'm not saying it automatically is.
And then, finally, the Christmas tree industry wises up,
and they realize, well, what we need to do
is actually embrace some green consumerism here,
and they, in North Carolina,
the state chapter of the national association
would put up these signs:
This is a Christmas tree farm: Feel free to breathe deeply.
Because, of course, trees produce oxygen, right?
And so they start making environmental claims
about the real tree.
And those environmental claims are still with us today.
This is from about 1980.
So it's still some time ago.
But as we get into the present, similar claims are being made.
Which leads us to this dilemma we have
every holiday season.
Real or fake, which one is better?
I hope I've confused the issue for you a little bit.
And I hope that you see that some of the reasons
we have this debate are because of this shift in mid-century
towards private consumption.
That without private consumption
we wouldn't be thinking at all about
which one we should purchase.
Maybe we would just be having more of a public one,
if we were to have one at all.
So, with that, I want to end
with this last slide.
That one of the earliest ideas with Christmas trees
was about democracy.
And so I just kind of want to end by challenging everybody
to think about how that's present in our lives
when we're buying things, if it is at all.
I think that's a really worthwhile thing
for us to think about any time of the year.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)