drummers, canvassers and knockers and mashers and post civil war

While America had to deal with the "hawkers," "pedlars," and "petty chapmen" beginning in the 18th century, it was not until the mid-19th century that "canvassers" and "drummers" began to show up. Their appearance reflected a new social reality in American culture in the late pre-Civil War period--that of the traveling salesman or the representative of an Eastern firm that brought goods to individual consumers. The culture was very male, except for a few female canvassers in the book-selling industry. Diaries and books describing this new life on the road started sprouting like sunflowers in a KS July, such as James Weldon's 1899 Twenty Years as a Fakir (double-entendre) or J. H. Mortimer's Confessions of a Good Agent; or Twenty Years by Stage and Rail (1906). Rather than describe this life in detail, I seek here and in the next essay to sketch some broad legal and social themes in the lives of these individuals. First, however, let's begin with some words.

Canvasser

The canvasser was, above all, a salesman of small goods. As Professor Friedman points out:

"Canvassers frequently sold goods that promised to lighten the burdens of agricultural work, such as mechanical butter, churners and incubators. They sold packaged seeds, bulbs, roots, shrubs, fruit trees and patent medicines. Printers and publishers, like Jacob Monk of Philadelphia, employed salesmen to sell books, maps, and atlases," Birth of a Salesman, 37.

Though the terms "canvasser, peddler, or agent" could be applied interchangeably and loosely, they all had the same goal--selling inexpensive goods directly to customers.

Let's take a brief detour on the meaning of the word "canvass." As the OED says, the development of the term is easy enough, starting from the literal notion of "toss in a sheet," i.e., to "canvass" someone. If you then play with this notion long enough, you have "canvass" mean the kind of things that happen when one is thrown in a sheet-- to toss to and frow or to agitate. Thus, it can mean "to knock about" or "to buffet, beat, batter." A figurative meaning, derived from these is "to shake out or discuss" something further; to "scrutinize fully." And, this then morphs into the reason why you "scrutinize fully"--i.e., to solicit, either votes, support, contributions or orders for goods. With this background, we can understand the 1865 quotation "book-hawkers known as canvassers."

Drummers

Drummers were traveling salesmen who worked at first for large New York and Philadelphia wholesale houses. As Friedman says, "They carried dry goods, whiskey, groceries, patent medicines, jewelry, chemicals, hardware, and leather goods" (Birth of a Salesman, 57). But the name drummer was, if not a derogatory term, at least not reflective of the image that merchants wanted to create for their traveling salesmen. The first appearance of "drummer" to connote a commercial salesman was, according to the OED, in 1827: "The Nos. of Lodge's book..were left by some drummer of the trade upon speculation." The word had made it across the sea by 1860, however, since John Bartlett, in his Dictionary of Americanisms, defined drummer as "a person employed by city houses to solicit the custom of country merchants." By 1882, they were so common throughtout the land that one could say "As enterprising as a Chicago drummer." Of course, the word referred to their enterprising, energetic, and possibly annoying tendency to "beat the drum" for whatever product they were selling.

Estimates of the actual number of traveling salesmen/drummers at various times are hard to come by, but Prof. Hollander, in a 1964 article ("Nineteenth Century Anti-Drummer Legislation in the United States, 38 Business History Review 479-500), gives us some likely figures. Though he says that all estimates of drummers after 1850 are simply that, some figures are useful. High estimates were:

1861: 1000 commercial travelers
1869: 50,000
1885: 100,000
1903: 300,000

However, the Census reports, which probably give a quite conservative number because it also had categories such as "agent" or "salesmen," showed the following:

1870: 7,300
1880: 28,000
1890: 59,000
1900: 93,000

Under any scenario, however, the drummer/traveling salesman probably emerged about 1840 as a cultural phenomenon, dipped during the hard days of the 1850s and the Civil War, and then skyrocketed in importance after that conflict. They differed from the hawkers and peddlers of earlier days (who still were out "hawking" their goods) in that they were representatives of large houses in the East, and they tried to present themselves as what we later would call a "profession."

One other indication that they were beginning to have an impact on the culture was the presence of "anti-drummer" statutes, which began to be passed by legislatures in the 1850s (PA in 1851; MD in 1852; VA in 1853). Anti-drummer legislation differed from the legislation relating to hawkers, peddlers and petty chapmen of the early 19th century in two particulars: (1) the drummers were not only to be licensed locally (as with hawkers) but had to pay a license fee (not required in earlier legislation); and (2) no distinction was made between selling of domestic and foreign goods (an important distinction in the hawker statutes).

The next essay describes more fully some of the anti-drummer feeling that was, well, drummed up in the post-Civil War period, and how the profession was "saved" by the Supreme Court.

1706