Revisionist History - Twas the Night Before Christmas

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

For nearly 200 years, we have credited the most famous poem of the Christmas season to Clement Clarke Moore. But what if we got the wrong man? This holiday season: A centuries old family feud, a bold claim from an English professor, and the true meaning of Christmas.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. December is a busy time of year. People traveling to see family, others traveling to escape the cold. Me, I think I'm going to take the whole family up to Toronto, see my mom and my brothers. But remember, if you're heading out for a holiday trip or even just a quick winter getaway, your home doesn't have to sit empty. Instead, you could host your home in Airbnb while you're away.

It's simple and stress-free, and what you earn could help fund your children. next adventure. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca slash host. Do you ever wish your office felt better? BuzzySpace designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make work spaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, BuzzySpace has you covered. Head to buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I-D-S-E-I-D-Space.

There are some sure signs that the holidays have arrived. The lights go up on Main Street of the town where I live. People pull their coats a little tighter around them as they go from shopping. to shop. And my colleague, Ben Nadav Haferi, shows up to tell me some absolutely crazy story about Christmas. Twas the night before Christmas. Oh, my God. And all through the house. Not a creature was stirring.

Not even a mouse. That's right. This, of course, is a visit from St. Nicholas, more commonly known as Twas the Night Before Christmas. A poem that Ben has, let's just say, learned a little too much of. about over the past few months. Have you read the Stuart Little version of this where, to save Stewart's feelings, the Little's rewrite it as not even a louse.

They don't want it as too demeaning to my staff. There's poems everywhere. It's in Stuart Little. It's in die-hard presidents read this poem. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there. The children were nestled all snug in their beds while visions of sugar plums.

It's in their heads. My ma and her kerchief and I in my cap had just settled our brains. Very weird choice of words there for a long winter's nap. This went on for a while. I knew in a moment it must be Nick.

This is the poem that creates fully launches the modern Santa Claus. It's the first time the rainiers are named. It's the first time he gets eight and not one. Yeah. And it is the blueprint for American Christmas. Everyone thinks Christmas is this ancient thing. There's no evidence that Jesus

Christ was born on December 25th. The whole thing is this invented tradition. And it is this poem that gives us the modern American Christmas, written by Clement Clark Moore in 1822, published in Upstate New York, in the Troy Sentinel, in 1823. Until you mentioned this to me, hadn't fully understood how extraordinary this accomplishment of this poem is. I don't even like Christmas. So we've established this in prior versions of our Christmas episode. But I can get halfway through that from memory. I suspect that an insanely high percentage of Americans can get a significant way into this poem from memory.

I would stake my life on the fact that more people, this is the only poem that most people know. Totally agree. And I was going to say that, that an incredibly high percentage of people of Americans not only know this poem from memory, but know no other poems at this length from memory. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. So, but the first thing people would have read of the night before Christmas is not even the poem. In fact, it begins, it is introduced by an editor's note that starts with the line, we know not to whom we are indebted for the following description of that unwearied patron of children, dot-da-dot Santa Claus.

Yeah. It starts by acknowledging that they don't know who wrote it. Yeah. So it begins with an authorship mystery. And the authorship mystery persists. Yes, though I propose to end it here today. Yeah. You're listening to Revisionist History.

My podcast is about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today we bring you our annual holiday spectacular, which this year is not about sugar plums, but about a historic theft, a literary crime that begins with a bold accusation. For nearly 200 years, have we attributed this immensely famous poem

to the wrong person? My colleague Ben Didaffaffrey has a story. Oh, one last thing. If you're listening with young children, familiar with Santa Claus, this episode might challenge their sense of reality. Proceed with caution. Sometime in the late 1990s, a woman named Mary Van Dusen logged onto the internet. She was looking up her great, great, great, great, great, grandfather, Major Henry Livingston, Jr. That's right, seven generations back. And while browsing the World Wide Web, she came across a piece of information

that changed the course of her life. One of the pages that came up was just a very short little page, but it said two things. It said that Henry Livingston was a possible author of Night Before Christmas, and it said that he had named his reindeer for the horses in his stable. Who would believe it? Henry Livingston, Jr. was a gentleman farmer and poet from a prominent early American family.

He was reputed to be a great lover of Christmas, and, crucially, for our purposes today, not Clement Clark Moore, the person who had claimed authorship of the poem not long after its publication, and who for almost two centuries the general public has believed wrote it. So to marry and others in her family, it seemed he was also the victim of a historic injustice. Just a couple decades after a visit from St. Nicholas, the poem, was published, his granddaughter came across a best-selling holiday edition

and saw the author's name clearly printed. Clement, Clark, Moore. At which point, she brought it in a hurry to her mother, Henry's daughter-in-law, who said, someone has made a mistake. Clement Moore did not write the night before Christmas. Your grandfather, Henry Livingston, wrote it. They saw a wrong that needed to be righted. So then you start looking into this.

Right. Now, Henry had never claimed authorship himself, but he died in 1828, so no one could ask him about it. but the family remembered it as Henry's poem, and they took it upon themselves to do the research to prove it to the world. And so began the Great Livingston Quest. This is Montague's and Capulets,

Hatfields and McCoy's Christmas edition. The first person that took it up were the children of Catherine, my fourth-grade grandmother, so I was always pleased about that. that. At the beginning, all the family had was recollection. Relatives who said that Henry Livingston Jr. had read the poem aloud to them when they were kids, but they needed to establish a record. The gold standard would be a copy of the poem written in Henry's hand. They decided they would

collect as many pieces of paper as they could, and this is really a godsend, because they were able to contact two of Henry's children before they died. They heard. They heard the that someone had gotten a copy of the poem that had Henry's handwriting on it. And do we have that today? Or? No, we don't. Because they're living on the frontier. And the original

burned in one of the house fires. But the Livingston's didn't quit. When we talked, Mary walked me through the generations of people who've taken up the quest since. The next search for proof of Henry's authorship is from

Henry Livingston of Babylon, Long Island. I began to understand that this search was a kind of livingstonian rite of passage. Something handed from generation to generation like a precious gemstone or like a futile title, a matter of destiny. Having your name in your birth announcement as having to research night before Christmas puts burden on your shoulders that is very heavy. After all, this is an eminent family. The genealogical tree Mary has put together includes George H.W. Bush, W. and Jeb, as well as a congressman and the mayor of New York.

Eleanor Roosevelt was also in the mix somehow, but alongside the campaigns and inaugurations, there was a single golden thread, the authorship question. And I think part of that fixation must have had to do with what poetry meant at the time. Malcolm and I talked about that over a glass of eggnog at the annual revisionist history holiday party. One of the things that interests me, it is a poem created in a very specific moment in time, the early

19th century. Right. And because poetry plays a role in public life in back then in a way that it doesn't know. Right. Well, so newspapers are the mass media, right? There's not television, radio, recorded sound doesn't exist. So,

you have poems all over the place in newspapers, and they are, they are off, they can be satirical, they can be funny. They're these very concise, pithy ways of expressing popular sentiments. And the ones that are really, can I give you a good example? Yeah, please. My mom grew up in Jamaica during the Second World War, has all these hilarious poems written about the Second World War from a Jamaican perspective. This one might be an English, might be an English, one. You know, there all these Americans come over and are stationed in England before the 4D Day.

So she would, as a kid, my mom would, his recited as one, the gum chewing yank and the cud chewing cow, very alike, but different somehow. What is the difference? Ah, I've got it now. The intelligent look on the face of the cow. But no, it's to the point, right?

Right. That a lot of these, what the English are trying to navigate is the indignity of this huge country of what people they consider to be their inferiors, uncultured, coming and saving their bacon, right? It's humiliating.

And how do they make sense of that humiliation through these poems? Poems are doing all this work. Very much like almost like a meme today where it's like you see a thing and you're like, that gets it. That somehow ineffably puts its finger right on the pulse. Yeah. And the pulse this poem had its finger on? was that there was a crisis of Christmas

at the very moment of its publication. Before the visitants from St. Nick, Christmas was celebrated in a very different way. Stephen Nissenbaum, author of the Pulitzer Prize shortlisted The Battle for Christmas. In his book, he argues that Christmas was always about these social inversions.

So lower-class people would live like kings for a day, the best food, the best ale, presents, provided they were peasants from then on. But those traditions were better suited to grand old country estates where everyone knew each other and kind of accepted where they fit in the pecking order. That was not the case in modern American democratic cities. It was commonly celebrated as what I would call something of a cross between Halloween and New Year's Eve because of what amounts to trick or treat. bands of young men, most of them poor from the working classes, went roving around town.

They'd stop at the more prosperous homes where they'd ask for food and alcohol. But if they didn't get what they wanted, they would ostentatiously withhold that goodwill. Or they might even threaten to do some small damage. Grismus was getting out of control. And so, a group of elite New Yorkers took the matter in hand. We're talking about a small group of people who called themselves Knickerbockers after the Dutch origins of the city. But this was a kind of a density that they tried on to create, again, a sense of the good old days of New York, when the classes did get along, and the meshing worked very well.

The Nickerbockers were a conservative organization trying to, invent new American traditions and also great names for basketball teams. Go Nix. And they found a figurehead for their new version of Christmas in St. Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of merchants, bakers, brides, the falsely accused, and children. In the 1820s, the lines between St. Nicholas and the sort of scary figure of Santa Claus, a mythological gift giver, began to blur. But how were the Knickerbockers going to unleash this new invention upon the huddled masses? The answer came, in 1823 with the poem we've been talking about in this episode. 542 words about a guy named St. Nicholas,

terrifying a well-to-do father by showing up in the middle of the night and instead of demanding the best grog in the house, leaving a bunch of presents. Exactly the kind of poem Clement Clark Moore, an eminent New Yorker and friend of the Knickerbockers, would write at precisely that moment. Moore was a Bible scholar. He lived on an estate in Manhattan called Chelsea,

which later did in fact become the neighborhood. of Chelsea. The new Christmas that Clement Clark Moore was promulgating continued in a very innocent way, the old social inversion. But in this case, it wasn't the rich changing places with the poor. It was the grown-ups changing places with the kids. So the children have really replaced the working class in the new Christmas. This was a version of Christmas. This was a version of Christmas that worked. And it just got bigger. Clement Moore's estate shrank, but his legend and the legend of his poem grew until the Livingston's caught wind of it. The problem was that despite all their efforts, no Livingston had been able to turn up any conclusive historical or documentary evidence

proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Henry Livingston Jr. had written the poem. But what if there was another approach? An ancestor of Mary Van Dusen's hit upon this idea in a letter from the 1920s. She had been interviewed for an article in the Christian Science Monitor on the authorship question, one of the first times this claim that Henry Livingston Jr. had written the poem

went national. This, it turned out, was kind of a jarring experience for her. So she wrote to her cousin William who'd set the whole thing up. Quote, I am writing from my bed. I could not sleep last night and thinking over our conversation.

I got drawn into this cross-examination which was quite inquisitorial in its nature for the problematical authorship of that poem. It is a very delicate question to handle, and I am not at all in favor of a writer for a Christian science paper handling it. It ought to be touched on very delicately, and by some man of eminent literary attainments.

Wait till you find the fit man to do it. We relatives would only have dirt thrown at us by press and people, for see more is a demigod almost in their eyes. almost a century has this fetish been adored and I will not have myself or my family mixed up in it it is too delicate a subject to be dragged and raked about except with great tact and reverence

wait till you get someone of high literary merit to write about the authorship do not make this any but a first-class writer end quote without documentary proof the Livingston's needed to make a stylistic argument that this poem sounded like Livingston and not like more.

And only someone of eminent literary attainments could really land it. The Livingston's would wait nearly 80 years until Mary Van Dusen came across that website, took up the family quest, and found such a scholar at last. I figured I needed a poetry expert. So I went to the Internet, and I looked at a archive poetry. I saw in Lancashire as the expert of the website and sent him email.

And I said, I have this problem. What do I do? And he said, you find Don. When we're back, Dawn, the man of eminent literary attainments, and the very best thing the Livingstons could ever hope to find in their stockings. December is a busy travel month for so many of us. Holiday trips, family visits, a little getaway before the year ends. I'll be going up to Toronto to see my mom and my brother. But while in my way, I realized my home will just be sitting empty

when it could be doing so much more. Hosting on Airbnb while you travel is an easy and simple way. to make some extra income. The money could even go towards another vacation while you're preparing for the new year. If you're planning a trip soon, consider hosting your home on Airbnb while you're gone. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. It's 523 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack. Another is building a fort out of your clean laundry, and you're staring at a half-empty fridge and thinking, what are we even going to eat tonight. Or you could just hello fresh it. With over 80 recipes to choose from every week,

including kid-friendly ones, even for picky eaters, you'll get fresh ingredients and easy step-by-step recipes delivered right to your door. No last-minute grocery runs. No, what do we even have fridge staring? And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause anytime, pick what works for you. It's dinner on your terms. The kids can even help you cook. Yeah, it's going to be messy but somehow they tend to eat the vegetables they made themselves try hellofresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping go to hellofresh.ca and use promo code dinner 50 that's hellofresh.ca promo code dinner 50 hellofresh.com.combeau here at pushkin there's no better gift than an audiobook if you feel the same i have good news for you all pushkin audiobooks are on sale through

December 23rd. Whether it's for you or loved one, all titles are 25% off with code gift, that's lowercase G, 2025, gift 2025. The Pushkin Library is vast, from the ever-relevant the big short to the celebration of comedic genius in Douglas Adams, the ends of the earth. Or if you're looking to sharpen up your conversation skills, there's the art of small talk, and then there's miracle and wonder. Conversations with Paul Simon, where I sat down with the man himself and heard stories about his childhood, his collaborators, and his music.

Give the gift of an audiobook this season. Search the Pushkin audiobook library at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks and enter the code, gift 2025 at checkout. It's the week before Thanksgiving, the year 2000. A group of people file into a bookstore

in Washington, D.C. to have their very sense of reality challenged. The event aired on C-SPAN. Thanks. It's great to be with you this evening. This is Don Foster. At the time, he was an English professor at Vassar. He's straight out of central casting.

Blazer, khakis, tie, handsome in a dead poet's society kind of way. When he makes a particularly devilish point, he shrugs his shoulders almost imperceptibly, as his eyes wandered to the corner of his great big glasses, as if to say, do I dare to eat a peach? Do I dare disturb the universe? I do. My office is what you would expect in English professor's office to be, piled high with student papers and with writings I have studied by poets and playwrights, some still unknown. But intermixed with the literary texts are others by felon, zealots, or nameless resentnics, whose identity or actions were of sufficient interest for someone to ask, who wrote this thing?

Professor Foster made his name arguing that an anonymously published poem called A Funeral Elegy was actually written by William Shakespeare. He'd used modern computer analysis to argue it so forcefully

that anthologies were updated and the press took note. Foster's phone began to ring. Professor, do you know that you're going to be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow and I said, well, no, Professor, do you know? A star was born. Foster practiced a kind of forensics

called literary attribution. The premise was that each of us has a style, a kind of fingerprint in the way we write that, if revealed, would prove conclusively that we wrote something. Dusting for that fingerprint relied on two key methodologies. First, computer analysis, where statistical patterns could be detected in an author's work, kind of like large language models now.

Second, an investigator would marshal their own powers of close reading. For instance, just weeks after the shape, Shakespeare story blew up, Foster was asked to identify the anonymous author of a dishe novel called Primary Colors, a thinly veiled account of the Clinton campaign. Foster had a list of suspects. He fed samples of their writing into his computer and began to look closely at how the book was written. The anonymous writer showed a preference for adverbs with L-Y endings, like vaguely. He used dashes to make compound words like triple back over Somersault and Pander Pirouette. He liked zany adjectives.

His prose, thought Foster, revealed certain racial ideas. And all those signs pointed clearly to the journalist Joe Klein. Foster nailed it. Klein eventually fessed up. And this was when things started to get weird for the professor. And at that point, prosecutors and defenders and police and other investigators saw in my work an application that I had not really thought of myself, question documents. and criminal cases and other kinds of anonymous libel's harassment

were suddenly being sent to me and saying, can you figure out who wrote this? Soon Foster was teaching by day and by night working the Unabomber case, the John Bonae Ramsey case, the Anthrax case, and few major news items of the late 1990s were beyond the literary forensics of Don Foster. ...that Monica Lewinsky wrote the three-page document. So I now go back and...

to ask the question, did she really? The crowd in the bookstore is wrapped around his finger. And that's when he starts talking about Mary Van Dusen, the great, great, great, great, great, granddaughter of Major Henry Livingston, Jr. I got a phone call in August of 1999 from a woman who said that she thought that her ancestor wrote the night before Christmas, not Clement Clark Moore.

Mary and Don teamed up. She traveled the country searching for proof. every version of the night before Christmas that was ever written. She made a corpus of Henry's work. She got a microfilm machine for her house, for her house, and read every single newspaper she could find from 1775 to 1830

in order to establish a documentary record. She put it all on a website, which ran ultimately to over 15,000 pages by her count, in hopes that Don could do his detective work and find an answer. And he did. He began, to look into questions of style, just like he did with primary colors. What sort of adjectives

were used? What kind of adverbs? What sort of attitudes were expressed? He compared a visit from St. Nicholas to other poems by Moore in Livingston. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written on this subject, and we all have holidays to get to. So I'm going to be selective about what we talk about here. But a good example of the case he made is the question of anapestic detrameter. an extremely tedious matter that of course is the only thing Malcolm wanted to talk about

when I saw him I want to be in the graduate seminar with you where this poem is taking seriously Okay let's let's uh let's break down the formal qualities of this poem first there's the meter which is sort of the crucial thing here this poem is in a extremely popular meter

used for light verse and satire called antipestic tetrameter so rhythmically give me lines at show. T'was the night before Christmas when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, da-da-da-dum-d-d-d-dum. And you, as a parent, might be familiar with this

from, like, all of Dr. Seuss. So, like, Horton, here's a who. On the 15th of May in the jungle of Newell in the heat of the day and the cool of the pool he was splashing, and this kind of like, it trips off the tongue. Anapest is a line, it's two unstressed syllables and a stressed one. So it's da-da-dum, da-da-dum. That's like a da-da-dum. That's an antipest. Detrameter, tetra from the Latin for four, it means there's four of those per line of an antipestic detrameter. It's such an infectious meter. It's easier to memorize. And so it can transmit through word of mouth much more easily, which is what happens with this poem as well. In fact, it is so good for the spoken word that the way many people probably know it today, other than twas the night before Christmas, is the way I am by Eminem.

Oh, yeah. Da-da-dam, da-da-d-d-dam, da-da-d-d-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-twas the night before Christmas and all through the house. You see, it's like, it's just like, it hooks you in. Yeah. So Foster alleged that Moore was way too serious to be a big antipestic detrameter guy. He says that Moore condemned the, quote, depraved taste in poetry of those who read anapestic satire, end quote. In essence, Livingston was way more likely to write an Anapest than more, not least of all, because he was just a really fun guy. Here's a little sample of Henry Livingston's verse. This is the way he closes one of his many Christmas and New Year's poems.

But his time that I bid you goodbye till next year by wishing you happiness, peace and good cheer. And he has kind of poem after poem after poem in this vein, many of them Christmas or New Year's poems. Then he turns his attention to Clement Clark Moore. Clement Clark Moore, I thought, was pretty Santa Claus kind of guy, too. But as it turns out, this is part of the lore that's arisen after his name was associated with the poem. It was quite the curmudgeon. One might even say Scrooge. I might even say Grinch.

He writes things like humble the praise and trifling the regard, whichever wait upon the moral bard. And then he goes on to scold women for wearing cosmetics or to chastised children for being too noisy, quite a severe man. So according to Foster, on the one hand, we have a good cheer to the ladies kind of guy. And then there's the Grinch, Scrooge. You could say maybe Moore didn't stand a chance just based on this character assassination. But there was more. In his book, Foster compared the two men further. Henry Livingston Jr. fought for independence.

Clement Moore was allegedly a slave owner. Livingston was a, quote, friend of the Indians. Moore descended from the guy who talked the Mohawks into selling Long Island. And stylistically, even setting aside the slam dunk of the antipestic detrameter, the poem was Livingston all over, the use of the adverbial all, as in the children were nestled all snug in their beds, and then some funny business with the reindeer names. It all looked very, very suspicious.

Don Foster, the man of eminent literary attainments, had apparently solved the mystery at long last. The press went wild. Finally, tonight, the mystery of a visit from St. Nicholas. It has been a holiday tradition since 1822, but who really wrote the famous poem? He was in the New York Times twice. It was on network television. Don Foster is sort of a literary sleuth.

He was the one who discovered journalist Joe Klein was the anonymous author of the bestseller primary colors. He studies the author's words and styles. And in this case, he says Henry Livingston's literary. fingerprints are all over the night before Christmas. Don Foster's arguments spread. The city of Troy, whose newspaper famously first published the poem, hosted as a kind of Christmas media event, a mock trial, in a real courtroom presided over by a former New York Supreme Court judge and argued by actual lawyers on the question of who wrote the poem.

Has the jury reached a verdict? The jury naturally decided that the author was a night before Christmas is Henry of Levincent Jr. This prompted the mayor of Troy to issue a proclamation, quote, that December 23, 2014 is Henry Livingston Jr. Day in Troy, New York. Famous musicians have reportedly announced on stage that Henry Livingston, Jr. is the real author of the poem. The Freaking Poetry Foundation website has a page for Henry Livingston Jr., credited. him as the author of the poem unambiguously.

This is not ubiquitous, but through Don Foster, Mary Van Dusen and the Livingstons had achieved something her ancestors could only ever have dreamed of. And even if people stopped short of denying Moore's authorship, everywhere people began to question it. After nearly two centuries of injustice, the Livingston family quest was paying off. I had myself come around to the view and that this old family legend was right.

In fact, has, I think, finally been vindicated, and Bible professors claim to this film, I think, is not just highly suspect, but waiting to see what the opposition might have to say. Oh, but the opposition was watching, and they didn't like what they saw. December is a busy travel month for so many of us. Holiday trips, family visits, a little getaway before the year ends. I'll be going up to Toronto to see my mom and my brother. But while I'm away, I realized my home will just be sitting empty

when it could be doing so much more. Hosting on Airbnb while you travel is an easy and simple way to make some extra income. The money could even go towards another vacation. while you're preparing for the new year. If you're planning a trip soon, consider hosting your home on Airbnb while you're gone. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host.

It's 5.23 p.m. One of your kids is asking for a snack. Another is building a fort out of your clean laundry, and you're staring at a half-empty fridge and thinking, what are we even going to eat tonight? Or you could just hello-fresh it. With over 80 recipes to choose from every week, including kid-friendly ones, even for picky eaters, you'll get fresh ingredients and easy step-by-step recipes delivered right to your door.

No, last-minute grocery runs. No, what do we even have, fridge staring? And the best part, you're in total control. Skip a week, pause anytime, pick what works for you. It's dinner on your terms. The kids can even help you cook. Yeah, it's going to be messy. But somehow, they tend to eat the vegetables they made themselves.

Try HelloFresh today and get 50% off the first box with free shipping. Go to hellofresh.c.a and use promo code Dinner50. That's HelloFresh.ca promo code Dinner50, HelloFresh.C.A. HelloFresh, Canada's number one meal kit delivery service. Do you ever wish your office felt better? Buzzy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make workspaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, buzzy space has you covered.

Head to buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I-D-Space. A couple months ago, I visited Seth Collar, a famed dealer of historic documents in White Plains, New York. Statues of Abraham Lincoln were strewn about the office, advanced copies of Martin Luther King's I have a dream speech, an original prince of the Constitution

hung on the wall. The Constitution, I have a dream. Twas the night before Christmas. At the time the controversy erupted because of Don Foster's book, I owned what was thought to be the only copy in private hands, written by Clemency Moore.

Caller became embroiled in the authorship question. And so a New York Times reporter called me and asked me about it, and, you know, said I didn't know. Let me look into it. And I was totally open-minded. I mean, if I had been convinced, I would have changed my description of it and or mentioned the controversy. But the more I got into it, you know, the more upset I got by the by the dishonesty of the arguments made

against Clement Moore. So I kept going even after I thought this is sufficient to, you know, make the case. You just sent me quite a long document in preparation for this conversation. Yeah, and I could have sent you a lot more. Caller began to go through the claims in Don Foster's book, and he soon found that most of them were deeply suspicious. The comparable phraseology, that table confused me. Would you explain the origin of that table? Let me find it. Caller got out of binder stuffed with papers. Nobody is taking this matter lightly. In fact, we spent an entire afternoon going, through this. But let's stick to the big-ticket items today. First, style. Moore wouldn't write

like this. But Caller showed me a chart comparing parts of the poem with other poems Moore had written. Here's another, from another one of his writings, twas an autumnal morn, celestial bright, all snug and from something else he used to snug and tidy. Night before Christmas, he talks about visions of sugar plums dance in their heads. One of the rhymes in night before Christmas is a clatter and matter, and in another poem is clatter and spatter, words, feelings, thoughts, phrases. These would all be evidence that Moore could have written the night before Christmas and, in fact, did write the night before Christmas, as opposed to, you know, just making the arguments that he couldn't have because he didn't use these words. So maybe Livingston as author can't be proven stylistically, but that's not all he and his colleagues found. The historical argument about when Henry would have needed to write the poem

in order to be the author didn't line up either. But the fact that all the stories that the Livingston family have told can be actually disproven, you know, oh, was taken by a nanny, and then you prove that, well, the nanny wasn't there for another eight years. Also suspect, Foster's finding that Moore was a humorless scrooge, which was often a clear case of taking something more had written out of context. What I found wasn't just that it was misinterpreted, but that it was elated to the point where if you just read the full sentence, it actually proves the opposite of what it's being used to argue. Now, I can't know the mind of Don Foster, but there were at least a few examples of his attributions not exactly panning out.

A couple years after his book Author Unknown came out, he retracted his famous claim that Shakespeare had written the funeralology under mounting skepticism. And after he wrote an article seeming to suggest an innocent government scientist was responsible for sending the anthrax letters after September 11th, he was sued for libel, settled for some undisclosed amount of money, and went back to being predominantly a Vassar English professor. I had hoped to interview him for this story, but he declined to speak with me through a colleague. He'll keep Christmas in his way, and I'll keep it in mind. But in my view, Foster's argument has done a grave injustice to Clement Clark Moore that we, the staff of revisionist history and associates in the rare documents trade, refuse to leave unchallenged.

And his book, Author Unknown, is still referred to and still used by, you know, people who are looking into it. And then so many other reporters go with it as the story. if he said she said, that I don't blame the family as much as I blame some of the scholars who should know better. But it does still bother me. Like if I bring up, or last time I did was years ago, bring up the idea of a museum exhibit and Clement Moore's authorship, some accepted outright. But others have been, well, we have to be careful. We have to talk about the controversy. No, you know, you have to acknowledge that there was one. but you should not pretend that it's actually real.

Christmas is all about your dreams coming true. Maybe Foster tried to do that for Mary. But to my mind, in the end, I think what they set in motion was a satisfying end to the mystery. It just wasn't the conclusion they'd hoped for. It's fine with me that you come to a different position than I do. I don't ever say flatly that Henry wrote the poem. I say, I believe that Henry wrote the poem, and here's the data and make up your own mind.

So if you use it to come to a different conclusion than I do, that's fine. At least you examine the issue, and you feel peace in yourself at the answer you come to. Ben, was there one bit of evidence that for you really sealed the case? Yeah. This whole argument against Clement Clark Moore relies on the idea that he's a Scrooge, who would never write about Christmas, he would never write light verse, never write about fairies, certainly never write about Santa Claus and Christmas.

And these researchers found not just one, one but two effectively Christmas poems by Clement Clark Moore that predate or are in tight sequence with a visit from St. Nicholas. So the first is a letter called From St. Nicholas, which is literally in the voice of Santa Claus to Clement Clark Moore's kid, which I guess true to his haters is about why she's not getting any presents that year, though it is very sweet. And crucially, it's an antipestic datremeter. But this one is the one that I actually really love.

The Melville scholar, Scott Norsworthy, thinks that this poem and a visit from St. Nicholas were written at the same time. There was a snowstorm in New York on December 21st. It was a Saturday in 1822. I wrote this poem called Lines Written After a Snowstorm. I'll read it to you. Come children, dear, and look around. Behold how soft and light. The silent snow has clad the ground in robes of purestorm. white. The trees seem decked by fairy hand, nor need their native green, and every breeze appears to stand, all hushed to view the seam. You wonder how the snows were made, a dance upon the

air, as if from purer worlds they strayed, so lightly and so fair. Perhaps they are the summer flowers and northern stars that bloom wafted away from icy bowers to cheer our winter's gloom. Perhaps they're feathers of a race of birds that live away, and some cold, dreary, wind-tree place, far from the sun's warm ray. And clouds, perhaps, are downy beds on which the winds repose, who, when they rouse their slumbering heads, shake down the feathery snows. But see, my darlings, while we stay and gaze with fond delight, the fairy scene soon fades away and mocks our raptured sight. And let this fleeting vision teach truth you soon must know, that all the joys we here can reach are transient as the snow.

I say something Christmas is a made-up holiday The core of it is these weird social inversions that last for a day and then melt like the new fallen snow In that sense I think it's easy to see why the story

that Henry Livingston Jr. actually wrote this poem gets retold so often It's another Christmassy inversion One about as old as modern Christmas itself Just another story about a thing that's not as it seems. Fat men in velvet robes sliding down thin chimneys, everything you ever wanted under a tree that's indoors,

in your great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandfather's forgotten role in inventing Christmas. I don't believe it. But then again, tis the season. Revisionist history. is produced by me, Ben Natt of Haffrey, with Nina Bird Lawrence and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Chikurgy, fact-checking by Onica Robbins. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith, production support from Luke Lamond.

Engineering by David Herman at Good Studios and Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music was composed, arranged, and recorded by Luis Gera. Mixing and mastering by Marcelo Di Olivera. I have stood on the shoulders of giants for this absurd episode. All credit to the scholars and writers who made this possible. Scott Norsworthy of the Melvillianna blog, Tom German, and Justin Fox. To our friends in Troy, the incomparable Duncan Crary, and city historian Kathy Sheehan. If I've left you unconvinced about Moore's authorship, you can read the latest salvo from the Livingstonians in the book, Who Wrote the Night Before Christmas?

By Professor MacDonald P. Jackson. Just be sure to read it. read Scott Norsworthy's response to it on the Melvillianna blog right afterwards. From revisionist history, happy holidays, and we'll see you all in the new year. Do you ever wish your office felt better? Buzzy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make work spaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm,

BuzzySpace has you covered. Head to Buzzy.Space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I-S-E-I-S-E-E-I. space. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.