EVERYONE FROM THE ASTORS to the gutter sweepers called it the Marble Palace, though that wasn’t its name. A. T. Stewart & Co. graced the east side of Broadway, the unfashionable side, the side where the merciless afternoon sun turned the sidewalks to griddles and sent New Yorkers scurrying to the shaded shops on the better side. Despite the store’s déclassé location, when the Marble Palace opened its doors in 1846, The New York Herald gushed at its elegance: “The walls and ceiling are painted in fresco, and the tinting and design are exquisitely chaste, classic, and tasteful—There is one large chandelier in the main hall, that is not surpassed in beauty by anything we have ever seen.” The ceiling was supported by fluted columns of glistening Italian marble, topped with ornate capitals carved into an intricate design of a cornucopia and a caduceus of Mercury, the god of commerce. This was no garish display of mercantile ostentation. “Its decorations, in general and in detail, are of the most chaste and classic description. There is no gaudy gilding or tinsel show to disgust refined taste, but everything is ornate and elegant.”
The focal point of the new emporium—one soon to be copied by stores in Boston, San Francisco, and London—was an elegant central dome soaring ninety feet above a circular sales floor. When Stewart built a new store a few blocks away, near Astor Place, his signature dome was replaced by an even larger atrium, with five mezzanine levels enclosed by massive iron balustrades. “Leaning over one of these balustrades, and looking up or down, the sight is brilliant and attractive,” wrote one critic. “Thousands of persons are scattered about the floors making purchases. Hundreds of clerks, salesmen, and cash boys are busy serving them, and the buz [sic] and hum of human voices under the vast roof sounds like the droning of a hive of bees.”
That buzz could have been much louder. It was the custom in New York stores at the time for clerks and patrons to wrangle over the price of the items for sale, turning every hat shop in Manhattan into the souk of Algiers. Stewart found the practice gauche and unrefined, and in his Marble Palace he initiated a policy of fixed pricing. He knew what each item in his inventory had cost him to acquire and how much the current market would bear, and he set his prices accordingly. But having banned vulgar haggling from his store, Stewart needed to find another way for his sales clerks to nudge reluctant purchasers. He decided to use sex. A contemporary business writer described it in more elegant terms: “He had noticed that the ladies, in ‘shopping,’ were given to the habit of gossiping, and even flirting with the clerks, and he adopted the expedient of employing as his salesmen the handsomest men he could procure, a practice which has since become common. The plan was successful from the first. Women came to his store in greater numbers than before, and ‘Stewart’s nice young men’ were the talk of the town.” Fortunately for Stewart, it was easy in New York to procure handsome young men who liked to gossip and flirt.
In the 19th century, the city’s population exploded, increasing from 200,000 in 1830 to more than half a million in 1850. By 1870 that number had almost doubled. Clerks were the third-largest occupational group in New York, drawn primarily from the ranks of newly arrived immigrants and strapping country boys fresh off the farm. They were young: In a sample taken from records covering the period 1850 to 1855, between sixty and seventy percent of the clerks were under the age of 25, almost all of them unmarried and living unsupervised in ramshackle boardinghouses. In the past, clerks had been primarily apprentices, starting at the bottom rung with a dream of eventually climbing to the top. But now there were not enough ladders to climb, and any young man hired as a clerk faced the prospect that he might not ascend much higher in his profession.
The sudden influx of young single men living without parental control set off alarms and triggered a barrage of conduct books aimed at alerting young men to the dangers of city life. “The newly-arrived boy or young man plunges into trouble and danger the hour he sets foot in the city,” one book warned. Perhaps the gravest danger lurked in the young man’s own boardinghouse:
Evil company is often elegant, delightful, and fascinating; and inexperience cannot escape the coils of the gilded serpent. What is greatly to be deplored is, that associates of this sort do not wait to be sought out, but make the first advances, and not unfrequently lie in wait for the new arrival. Unless the novice is on his guard against these seducers, he will certainly fall. Most deadly is the poison, when evil companions are under the same roof, perhaps at the same table, or even, by a wretched custom, in the same bed. Better to be chained to yellow fever or small-pox, than joined to a vicious room-mate.
Clerks who managed to fend off their bedmate’s gilded serpent might still become enmeshed in New York’s rampant sex culture, and for heterosexual men working in department stores, being familiar with the city’s brothels and sex workers could actually improve one’s chances of advancement. Stewart’s strategy of employing handsome clerks to flirt with his customers was only one nod to the adage that “sex sells.” There were also cruder applications of the principle. Buyers from Chicago and St. Louis and Cincinnati would travel to New York twice a year to order inventory for their local stores. These men were far from home, well aware of New York’s “sporting” culture of gambling dens, saloons, and brothels, and eager to sample the sins of the big city during their brief visits.
Store owners often turned to their young clerks to act as sex guides to the back alleys and elegant bordellos of Manhattan. Clerks would trade tips with one another about the best places to engage sex workers, both for themselves and for their out-of-town clients, frequently sharing unnecessarily detailed descriptions of their encounters. Historian Patricia Cline Cohen writes: “the intense curiosity about each other’s performance suggests that for these young men, heterosexuality had a homosocial dimension.” It was, Cohen maintains, as though the clerks were saying to one another: “Look at the prized woman I sleep with, have sex with her, and thus learn something of how I experience sex. Their eagerness to imagine friends having sex … suggest[s]the culture of sexuality in this circle of young men had homoerotic dimensions.”
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In the cities of 19th-century America, store clerks were so numerous that they became a recognized subcategory of the labor market, one with its own amusing stereotype. By at least the mid-1830s, many were being referred to as “counter jumpers.” It began as a term of mild mockery, but as the decades passed and the phalanx of retail clerks grew and developed distinctive traits in the public imagination, the epithet became more aggressively dismissive, slowly curdling like sour milk. At first it made gentle fun of the obsequious young men so eager to serve customers that they scurried from counter to counter, smiling and bobbing, abasing themselves to make a sale. As the workforce expanded to include more farm boys and aspiring immigrants posing stiffly behind the counters of elegant department stores, the term was used to deride the hayseed rubes and striving foreigners who ludicrously aped their betters—counterfeit gentry whose thin veneer of sophistication could so easily and humorously crack.
When store owners like Stewart encouraged their clerks to charm their female customers through smiles and banter, counter jumpers began to be viewed as dangerous seducers. Female customers tended to shop in the fancy department stores without male companions, and handsome young men showering them with attention could, it was feared, turn the heads of impressionable girls and neglected wives. Particularly fraught were encounters involving the sale of perfumes or intimate apparel. At the end of a day of flirting with respectable women, a stereotypical clerk decked himself out in the latest garish fashions—much of which he could barely afford on his salary of five dollars a week—and strutted the streets of Manhattan, a raffish dandy who sported with his pals in taverns, gambling “hells,” and brothels. Counter jumpers were maligned as predatory rakes and foppish seducers. They were unmanly and unambitious parasites, afraid of hard work and motivated only by the pursuit of pleasure.
On the eve of the Civil War, the public’s disdain for department store clerks had fallen far below gentle ridicule and taken on toxic—though utterly confused—gender implications. Explains historian Brian Luskey: “Male clerks were at once heterosexually rapacious as well as effeminate, deviant dandies who lingered on the margins of Victorian America’s sexual categories. The sporting press responded to their ambiguous sexual identities by coupling them with sodomites whose ‘unnatural sexuality’ also troubled contemporaries.” A reputation for seducing female customers and for riotous carousing in brothels was no protection against the suspicion of secret sodomy. Some even suggested the opposite: that clerks who “spent their leisure hours curling each other’s hair” used their effeminacy as a clever ruse “to get otherwise respectable young ladies to spend the evening in their boardinghouse rooms.” In a society obsessed with ferreting out fakes and confidence men, store clerks were seen as masters of deception, men adept at hiding their true selves, effeminate wraiths only pretending to be real men—or dangerous seducers hiding behind a pansy façade.
Even Walt Whitman disparaged store clerks as milksops who fell far from his ideal of the brawny blue-collar worker. In an 1856 article in the magazine Life Illustrated, Whitman depicted them as “a slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest—but trig and prim in [the]great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts … [and]startling cravats, and hair all soaked and ‘slickery’ with sickening oils. Creatures of smart appearance, when dressed up; but what wretched, spindling, ‘forked radishes’ would they be, and how ridiculously would their natty demeanor appear if suddenly they could all be stript naked!” Of all the many critics of New York’s retail clerks, perhaps only Whitman would picture them with their clothes off.
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Comments on the effeminacy of store clerks were common in the popular press. Alice B. Neal in Godey’s Lady’s Book wrote sardonically of an imagined visitor to New York who had been “introduced to the wonders of Stewart’s marble palace” and “the smiles, and bows, and politeness of the perfumed and bewhiskered young gentlemen who unfolded the muslins, and rolled up the ribbons, and sorted the gloves for you. Did it not strike you as an exceedingly noble and manly employment, so befitting masculine strength and energy?” Freeman Hunt, writing in his Merchants’ Magazine, was more pointedly dismissive: “I almost lose my temper when I see a fellow standing six feet in his stockings, or a neat dapper-dandy of less dimensions, ‘dressed to kill,’ measuring out a yard of ribbon or tape, or descanting on the color or shade of a piece of silk, placing it in folds to hold in different lights, in order to show ‘how beautifully it would make up.’”
It was the satiric magazine Vanity Fair that subjected store clerks to the most demeaning treatment in the form of a vicious, yearlong assault of articles, poems, and cartoons, most written by Fitz-James O’Brien and illustrated by Frank Henry Temple Bellew. O’Brien and Bellew were the first American journalists to carry on a sustained, targeted attack on a profession perceived to be dominated by gay men. The issue for January 28, 1860, was savage in its denunciation. “These wretched effeminate, mostly uneducated, creatures, smirking and smiling all day long across a counter; these fellows whose highest ambition it is to be able to measure merino with grace, and sell sarsenet with suavity; these muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds are at the bottom of one of the greatest social evils of the present time.” O’Brien let it be known that he would be publishing no gentle satire in the coming issues of Vanity Fair, and that he had no intension of backing off his campaign. “The subject is one so important that we cannot, even if we would, be funny while treating it. But we do not intend to let it drop. We will, if we can, kill these heroes of the ell-wand [measuring stick]by inches.”
Over the next months, O’Brien labeled retail clerks “the knights of simperdom,” and wondered: “Could they get their bread and butter, their lemon-soda and cinnamon cigars, by working as men, after having so long been something less than women?” His articles dripped with contempt for the men’s appearance. “They are curled and dyed and dressed and scented, regardless of all expense. … Their hands are white and their nails oval. They all look as if each was the twin brother of the other.” (Evidently the clone look has a long history.) One particularly derisive poem announced: “I am the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate/ … I am the shelves on which lie the damaged goods;/ the damaged goods themselves I am,/ … For I am the creature of weak depravities.”
The most revealing of Bellew’s illustrations for Vanity Fair was titled “Shakespeare for the Counter-Jumpers” and was captioned with a quotation from Macbeth’s first encounter with the three Weird Sisters: “You should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.” The drawing shows the interior of a dry goods store in which customers are being waited on by five clerks, all of them men with beards, mustaches, or muttonchops, and all wearing billowing Victorian dresses. The facial hair is significant. These are not O’Brien’s “muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds,” nor Whitman’s “wretched spindling forked radishes”; they are closer to Freeman Hunt’s “fellow standing six feet in his stockings.” The counter jumpers in Bellew’s drawing are clearly not lacking in testosterone. They are just men doing something that society tells them men shouldn’t do.
The disconnect between text and image hints at the irony of O’Brien’s repeated attacks on the counter-jumpers. O’Brien was himself something of a parading peacock, known for his signature loud plaid suits, and he was a fixture at Pfaff’s beer cellar in Greenwich Village, the most popular hangout for New York’s artsy bohemian crowd. Historian Ruth L. Bohan suggests there was a reason store clerks were singled out for so much unearned hostility:
Despite their considerable animosity toward the counter jumper and the world he represented, the writers and artists at Vanity Fair saw in this much-maligned figure’s oppositional posture toward the dominant culture visceral reminders of their own precarious status as members of the city’s Bohemian community. Like counter jumpers, Bohemians operated on the margins of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. … Like the counter jumper, the writers and artists at Pfaff’s continually flouted society’s norms, performed no hard physical work, and often attracted attention with their flamboyant attire. They were also journeymen in their fields who spent their evenings socializing in the saloons with their male friends while simultaneously striving to propel themselves up the next rung of the literary ladder.
The close parallels with the lives of silk-and-ribbon clerks were unsettling for these men, so the public’s attention needed to be redirected, distinctions needed to be made. The men in New York’s bohemian crowd prided themselves on their blithe refusal to bow to societal norms, including those concerning sex—but there were limits. It was fine to vogue and camp and frighten the horses, so long as one didn’t actually have sex with another man. Whitman was called out for crossing that non-negotiable line. When O’Brien reviewed the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, he praised its “manly vigor, its brawny health,” and yet denounced it also as “the coarsest indecency.” Whitman, he charged, “roots like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts” and returns “with a seemingly exhaustless prurient pleasure to the same licentious phrases and ideas.” Whitman might insist to the public that he is merely being frank and natural “with all this muck of abomination soiling the pages,” but O’Brien was led to ask, “What Centaur have we here, half man, half beast?”
In this early review O’Brien revealed the animus he would later unleash on retail clerks. Men who were perceived to be having sex with other men were not just unmanly, they were not even a “third sex.” In O’Brien’s view they were an entirely separate species. On the Origin of Species had recently been published and its theories had begun to seep into New York’s intelligentsia. Perhaps the cruelest assault in Vanity Fair was published under the title “Natural History, the Counter-Jumper.” The debt to Darwin is clear.
This truly singular and beautiful animal exists throughout the civilized world, but is only found in perfection in large cities. Its favorite haunts in this region are about the middle of the metropolis—in Broadway, Grand and Canal-streets, the Bowery, and vicinity. It is generally about the size of the human species, and bears a resemblance to man, as well as to the ape tribe, with which it is often classified, I think erroneously. So far as my studies go, I consider the counter-jumper no more an ape than a man; but belonging to a distinct tribe, somewhere between the two.
O’Brien compares store clerks to orangutans in appearance and behavior and warns of the importance of putting these obnoxious creatures in their proper place. “Many of the handsomest specimens become quite intolerable on the least encouragement, and it is to be regretted that they are frequently petted by inconsiderate ladies. The counter-jumper, thus spoiled, changes from a harmless, pretty, and agreeable creature, to an insufferable, chattering, noisy nuisance; and goes strutting about, with airs of alternate self-admiration and contempt for others of its kind.” O’Brien zeroes in on the question of gender. “A great peculiarity with the counter-jumper, and one which it would be almost impossible to believe, were it not firmly established as a fact, is its total want of sex. It is neither male nor female, though its manners are more feminine than masculine.” He ends with a suggestion that was to grow in popularity: “Much has been said about the usefulness of the Counter-jumper, as a domestic animal, but I know of nothing that it does, which might not be much better performed by human beings—say young women, for instance.”
The attacks on male sales clerks ran parallel to a campaign to replace them with women. Social reformers recognized that it would be a significant economic and social step for a woman if, instead of sewing blouses in a sweatshop, she could sell them from behind a counter. Many store owners approved of the notion because they believed that female customers would be more comfortable buying from a female clerk—and because they knew they could pay a woman less than a man for doing the same job. In Philadelphia and in Boston, the change was eagerly adopted, but in New York, the old ways prevailed. Male sales clerks outnumbered female clerks in department stores until the 20th century.
With these twin campaigns to denigrate and to replace them, why did so many young men go into the retail sales profession in the first place, and why did so many stay? Why seek a clerkship in a department store, rather than in a bank, a law office, or a construction firm? Here we can only speculate, but for gender-nonconforming men, there was a type of sanctuary behind the counter. As they had for generations, men in 19th-century America who were attracted to other men migrated to the cities, where a larger population offered both anonymity and options. By the late 1860s, A. T. Stewart & Co. alone employed over a thousand sales clerks, so there were always openings. The long-running disparagement of counter jumpers may even have served as a recruitment tool, with men assuming they could find others of their kind waiting behind the notions counter. These men were “damaged goods” in the eyes of the public—and perhaps even in their own—but under the dome of the Marble Palace many a queen found a place to reign.
References
Cohen, Patricia Cline. “Unregulated Youth: Masculinity and Murder in the 1830s City.” Radical History Review, vol. 52, 1992.
Luskey, Brian P. “Jumping Counters in White Collars: Manliness, Respectability, and Work in the Antebellum City.” J. of the Early Republic, vol. 26 no. 2, 2006.
Luskey, Brian P. On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America. NYU Press, 2010.
Resseguie, Harry E. “A. T. Stewart’s Marble Palace: The Cradle of the Department Store.” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 48 no. 2, 1964.
William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail, and the forthcoming When We Found Each Other: Gay Men in 19th-Century America.
