The tongue-in-cheek advertisement on the trade card above depicts a pompous gentleman declaring, “Yes Miss, when travelling, I always drink Van Houten’s Cocoa. It is so sustaining.” The scene takes place on a train in the 1880s, a period when the railroads were changing the social landscape, bringing strangers together in settings far from their homes and communities.1 The expansion of the railroads after the Civil War also facilitated industrial growth, causing the rise of a new breed of traveling salesmen called “drummers,” an Americanism whose origins remain obscure.
Alluding to a different kind of encounter on the train, the cartoon shown above, seemingly intended to stir up jokes and commentary over dinner, appeared on a menu for a small gathering of drummers in 1887. The Victorians were fascinated with the concept of duplicity, a natural by-product of their strict moral code that often surfaced in literary works like playwright Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a comic play about the hypocrisy of society when it came to the relationship between the sexes. Duplicity was also the theme of novelist Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey.
Given this backdrop, the emergence of drummers on the American scene must have been a fascinating social development in the Victorian imagination, for what could be more duplicitous, at least to their way of thinking, than a traveling salesman? Distinctly different from the old hawkers and peddlers, the drummers were a cultural phenomenon, the enterprising foot soldiers of capitalism, bringing its bounty to the hinterlands.2 First appearing in the 1840s, their numbers dipped during the Civil War, before skyrocketing during the post-war boom. By the late 1880s, there were somewhere between 60,000 to 100,000 drummers in the country, constantly moving from town to town. The traveling horde soon became part of the national lore, as reflected by several menus from their heyday, providing a rare glimpse into their world of fraternal relationships and professional associations.
The menu shown below comes from the first annual meeting of the Maine Commercial Travelers' Association on New Year’s Day in 1887. The drummers derived comfort and strength from gatherings, such as this one at the Preble House in Portland. Evenings spent telling jokes and stories, talking business, and drinking, could dissolved into boyish behavior, as suggested by the illustration and inside jokes listed alongside the dishes.
This menu confirms the popular image of these get-togethers that were renowned for their merriment. The illustration below, appearing in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly in 1885, portrays a small group sitting around the fire at a hotel, laughing at a joke, their sample trunks, called “grips,” piled high in one corner of the room. Also known as “bagmen” and “knights of the gripsack,” the salesmen carried their samples, catalogs, and a few personal items—things like a Bible, a flask, and a family picture—in the trunks for which they became known. Indeed, the drummers embodied a dichotomy, performing a delicate balancing act that required worldly knowledge of urban pleasures and shrewdness in rural customs. On one hand, they needed to project an upright image to gain the trust and respect of their customers, an essential component of success at a time when appearances were highly valued. And yet to be successful, they also needed to skirt the boundaries of Victorian morality, providing their customers with an escape from the strictures and mundane routine of their lives. Evenings of entertainment, entailing oyster dinners and expertly guided tours of the city’s nightlife, often ended in the "sample rooms" of the hotel, where salesmen laid out their goods for inspection, in order to complete the ritual of making a sale.3
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| “The Commercial Drummer’s Thanksgiving” (1885) |
There was also a serious side to their small conventions. The mutual benefit associations were formal organizations, addressing a myriad of issues confronting the traveling salesmen, such as securing special concessions from the hotels and railroads. By all accounts, the drummers were more than able to hold their own, as reported by the New York Times in 1887:
“Railroads and hotels have for the most part taken peculiar pains to propitiate the drummer, who alone of mortal men dares return the stare of the proud hotel clerk with a haughtiness equal to his own. The best rooms in the house are reserved for him and his samples. For him the barkeeper exhibits unwonted alacrity and produces recondite and exclusive bottles. For him, when he takes the Sunday dinner which is his one leisurely meal of the week, the waiter hastens to secure the choicest cuts and what the drummer knows as ‘a full line’ of the earliest vegetables. And this the waiter does uncheered by the sordid prospect of tips. ‘There are two levers for moving men,’ remarked the great Napoleon, ‘interest and fear.’ Most men approach the waiter through the former; the drummer alone wields the latter.”4
Featuring a textured illustration of a drummer’s grip, this menu shows that the traveling salesmen did not always wait until Sunday to enjoy an extravagant dinner. Honoring one of their colleagues, this “complimentary banquet” was held at the Bangor House in Maine on Thursday, November 20, 1890. The bill of fare features distinctive dishes like partridge stew a la Richelieu, marrowfat peas, and steamed hickory-nut pudding with brandy sauce.
The bill of fare below for Thanksgiving dinner at the Commercial Hotel in Chicago in 1885 goes well beyond what was normally served at hotels specializing in business travelers. Serving an exclusively male clientele that included drummers, wholesale agents, and buyers, this type of hotel offered affordable prices, sample rooms, and a relaxing atmosphere where the men could enjoy the camaraderie that filled the gap left by the absence of a domestic life. Despite such moments of respite, however, life on the road was hard, requiring grueling hours on the train, or in a carriage behind a horse, only to arrive at another low-cost hotel where you could often hear the wind whistling through the sparsely-furnished rooms at night. In fact, the weather affected more than their comfort, it also had an impact on their income, for the nation’s agricultural-based economy was still highly sensitive to the vagaries of weather. Nevertheless, life on the road was easier than life on the farm, neatly summarized in a letter from salesman William Hutton to his brother Lineus in 1884, “I have made plenty of money since I’ve been off the farm & don’t have to work half so hard…Come out and see the World.”
The “Drummers' Banquet” at the Texas State Fair and Dallas Exposition in 1889 was held by the Travelers Protective Association, an organization addressing issues like the license fees and other anti-drummer statutes that popped up in local communities, especially in the South where the traveling salesmen were seen as encroaching on their way of life. This menu features local delicacies. such as wild turkey, buffalo tongue, and Westphalia ham, a dish reflecting the large number of German-Americans living in Texas.
Labeled “Drummer’s Day,” another ribbon from that day in 1889 features a small tin drum. During the next decade, the onslaught of harsh economic conditions and relentless market forces, the so-called creative destruction of capitalism, would change their world forever.
At first, the transformation was driven by the new mail order houses and the growth of advertising. Publishing their first catalog in 1888, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. shipped goods directly to rural households. Other changes were brought about by a severe depression that began in 1893. Manufacturing firms began to institute more control over their sales force, making life on the road much less improvisational. Required to record their every move in sales reports, salesmen were now taught sales techniques, assigned specific territories, and given quotas to meet. Moreover, large companies did not want their public image besmirched by “mashers,” the name given to men who made indecent sexual advances to women in a public places. The type of incident jokingly depicted on the menu in 1887 was soon a thing of the past, at least when it came to appearances.
Notes
1. The miles of track in operation in the U.S. grew from 53,000 miles in 1870 to over 163,000 miles in 1890, eventually peaking in 1916 at 254,000 miles.
2. The first drummers worked for the large wholesale houses in New York and Philadelphia. There was also a group of traveling salespeople known as “canvassers” who sold small items directly to customers. The culture was mostly male, with only a few women employed as canvassers in the book-selling industry.
3. Timothy B. Spears, 100 Years on the Road, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995.
4. New York Times, 26 June 1887.
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