GLR September-October 2025

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 de scriptions 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 ho mosocial 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.”

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. Fe male customers tended to shop in the fancy department stores without male companions, and handsome young men shower ing 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 ap parel. At the end of a day of flirting with respectable women, a stereotypical clerk decked himself out in the latest garish fash ions—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 preda tory rakes and foppish seducers. They were unmanly and un ambitious 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 depart ment store clerks had fallen far below gentle ridicule and taken on toxic—though utterly confused—gender implications. Ex

plains historian Brian Luskey: “Male clerks were at once heterosexually rapacious as well as ef feminate, deviant dandies who lingered on the margins of Victorian America’s sexual cate gories. The sporting press responded to their am biguous sexual identities by coupling them with sodomites whose ‘unnatural sexuality’ also trou bled 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 op posite: 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 board inghouse rooms.” In a society obsessed with fer reting 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 seduc ers hiding behind a pansy façade.

§ I N THE CITIES OF 19 TH - CENTURY A MERICA , 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 dis tinctive 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, smil ing 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 de partment 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. From Vanity Fair, January 28, 1860. The caption reads: “Shakespeare for the Counter-Jumpers. ‘You should be women./ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.’ — Macbeth , Act 1, Scene 3.”

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 de picted 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. § C OMMENTS 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

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