Full Beards and Red Petticoats

1886

People who can remember back of the civil war must know that shaving was almost universal in those days, and that when the contrary practice began it so agitated the country that the newspapers were filled with leading articles on "The Beard Movement" and "The Mustache Movement."

Probably most of our older readers can remember when they first saw a preacher in the pulpit wearing a mustache and the shock it gave them. It was, if possible worse than the other sacrilegious act of bringing fiddles into the choir.

The event which started the beard movement was the visit of the wonderful Hungarian orator, Louis Kossuth, who was extremely handsome and picturesque in the full beard and mustache and soft felt hat with curling feather. He introduced the soft hat as well as the mustache, and as he traveled all over the country in 1854 and 1855 and spoke every where to great crowds whom he powerfully impressed with the masterly English which he had learned from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Webster's dictionary while he lay in an Austrian prison he advertised both his hat and his hair very widely. It would seem rather trivial nowadays for the newspapers to gravely discuss the "beard movement," but that was not the most trivial matter with which the newspapers of thirty years ago busied themselves.

Prominent among their themes shortly before the war was "the Red Petticoat Movement." It became the sensible fashion for women to wear red flannel petticoats instead of the white cotton one which had been the universal wear before. This was an innovation that worried the newspapers seriously. Many of them held the red garment to be, if not actually immodest, at least bold and daunting, and a symbol of the degeneracy of the age. Charles Mackay, then visiting in the country, published an earnest poetical appeal for "the white, the modest petticoat," which went the round of the press. — Buffalo Express.


1858

The Red Petticoat and the White

Charles Mackay sends the following lines, on an absorbing subject, to the public press:

Oh, the red, the flaunting petticoat,
That courts the eye of day,
That loves to flare and be admired,
And blinks from far away;
It may delight the roving sight,
And charm the fancy free,
But if its bearer's half as bold,
I'll pass and let her be;—
With her red, her flaunting petticoat,
She's not the girl for me!

But the white, the modest petticoat,
As pure as drifted snow,
That shuns the gaze in crowded ways,
Where follies come and go.
It stirs the primrose on its path,
Or daisy on the lea;
And if the bearer's like the garb,
How beautiful is she!
With her white, her modest petticoat,
Oh, she's the girl for me!

A Humorous Sketch of Pompeii's Troubles with Vesuvius

1886

A Brief Sketch of Pompeii

Pompeii was founded by Pompey II, hence its name. It was built at the foot of Mount Vesuvius to catch the tourist traffic in lemonade, peanuts, palm leaf fans and other articles necessary for those who came to Mount Vesuvius.

One day when this frolicsome mountain was in a state of violent eruption, like a boy taken down with the measles, it became sick at the stomach and threw up such a quantity of ashes that Pompeii with all its pomp was buried quite out of sight. A prohibition candidate in a distillery district could not be more completely snowed under.

Never was there such a tumble in ashes as was observed that day. They were absolutely a drug in the market. Folks wouldn't cart them away as a gift.

And still ashes continued to fall. Everybody was panic stricken. They began to wail and put on sackcloth, but the disparity between the limited amount of sackcloth and the illimitable quantity of ashes was ludicrous in the extreme. People demanded with ashen faces, when is this to end? But it came to an end after a while, and Pompeii too.

You have heard of ashes of roses? Well, nobody ever rose from those ashes.

For nearly eighteen hundred years Pompeii lay asleep, and it would have been an ash-heap to this day had not some scientific explorers come scratching around the base of Mount Vesuvius — for to such base uses do they come at last — and discovered surface indications of the lost city. They continued digging, and it was not long before the Phenix arose from its ashes.

This was the Phenix Hotel, the most popular in Pompeii. The guests were all in their rooms; although many of them had left orders with the porter to be called for the early morning train. Eighteen hundred years waiting to be called! Many hotel porters are that way now.

The head clerk of the Phenix had disappeared, but they found his mammoth diamond pin, by the illumination of which they were enabled to continue their explorations.

They kept on digging and pretty soon they unearthed a theatre with a whole minstrel band seated in a row on the stage. The audience were in their seats, too, entirely petrified — an end man had gotten off a new joke. The stage was thickly covered with chestnuts, all of which were carefully collected and shipped to America, where they were eagerly bought up by the minstrels, who continue to use them, encrusted, as they are, with the ashes of Pompeii.

And still they dug and dug.

A newspaper office was the next thing that came to light. The editor was discovered in the attitude of holding up his right hand before a notary, swearing that his circulation exceeded that of all the other papers combined. "Old Subscriber" was sitting in the editor's chair writing a communication for the wastebasket, too much absorbed in his work to notice the fall in ashes. "Veteran Observer" was at another desk preparing an article on the subject of "Strikes." On the bulletin board in front of the office was an announcement that Susan B. Anthony would speak that evening on the subject of "Woman's Rights."

We hare not space to enumerate all the curious things that were brought to light by the excavations at Pompeii. The spade revealed the ovens where those venerable but athletic pics were baked that now adorn so many of our railroad lunch counters. The genuine have the letter P fly-blown on the crust.

The number of skeletons actually found among the ashes of Pompeii was small when compared with the census of the city, and this was a mystery until posters were found on the dead walls announcing a lecture by "Eli Perkins," when all was explained. It was the day before the fatal tempest of ashes when these posters were discovered, and on reading them thousands of the panic-stricken inhabitants broke for the woods, and in this way their lives were miraculously preserved. — Texas Siftings.

Overworked Brewery Employees

1886

To the ordinary tramp, who has to obtain his supply of beer by pouring stale stuff from beer kegs in front of saloons into empty tomato cans, from which he quaffs, and runs chances of having the ragged tin cut a hair lip for him, it would seem that the brewery employees, who are allowed unlimited beer free of cost, have a soft thing.

And yet those men, who can drink beer all day without being compelled to put up the regulation nickel, struck for less hours of work and higher wages. To read the accounts in the papers of the amount of beer the workmen about a brewery drink during the day, the reader does not wonder that the men are overworked and asked a reduction of hours.

It is said that some of the men drink forty glasses of beer per day. Considering that they have to walk nearly a block to the extreme end of the brewery yard, where a gentlemanly agent of the brewing company waits upon them without price, it will be seen that considerable valuable time is lost, besides the wear and tear on the men. Of course the brewery employees are able-bodied men, or they could not stand the strain.

Forty glasses of beer put into a stomach in ten hours would seem to be hard enough work for any one man, if he did nothing else. Then the necessity of walking forty blocks and returning to work, makes eighty blocks per day of pedestrian exercise. This of itself is enough to make an ordinary man tired, if he did not have to carry in his overworked stomach forty glasses of beer.

From the statistics it is plain that the brewery laborers are the most overworked of any class of citizens, and something should be done for them. It may be outside the province of the humane society to step in and protect those men, but certainly there should be some organization that can stand between those men and overwork. What is the matter with the temperance societies, in taking hold of this grievance? If the temperance societies are true to their motto, of "Faith, Hope and Charity," they will see a chance to do a great work.

Let each society detail enough of its members to man a brewery, and do all the work. This would leave the regular employees with nothing to do but walk back and forth between the places where the temperance apostles are at work, and the place where the beer is given away. The temperance people could work for nothing, for Charity; they could have Faith that the regular brewery men would draw their salary all right; and Hope they would have a good time.

If the temperance people kick on this idea, it is possible the brewers might employ temperance men to make the beer and do the work, discharge the old employees who strike, and thus save oceans of beer. But if it is impracticable to employ temperance people, and the brewers feel that things must go right along as before, they can save at least the time that the men lose in marching on the beer keg forty times a day, and save the wear and tear on the men, by a simple device which The Sun will suggest.

Each man could be provided with a coil of hose, the small rubber hose such as is used on infants' nursing bottles. A reel could be fixed on the back of each laborer, containing enough of the small rubber pipe to reach from a central tank of beer to any part of the brewery, with a spring, so that when the pipe is uncoiled, and the laborer returns toward the tank, the slack will be taken up on the reel. A nozzle could be arranged near the mouth of the overworked laborer, so that he could take his sustenance at any moment, wherever he happened to be.

Of course a hundred men with hose reels on their backs would look odd at first, but the oddity would soon wear off. Some may think that the employees of a brewery should pay for their beer, the same as bakers pay for the bread in a bakery where they work, shoemakers pay for their shoes, and journeymen tailors pay for their clothes, but this would be plainly a violation of the constitution of the United States. The strike of the brewery laborers has shown that they are the beat treated of any class of laborers in the country. The only thing the public wonders at is that the brewing companies have not been compelled by their employees to give them a house and lot and horse and buggy each. — Peck's Sun.