The Bankruptcy Barrel: A Historical Debate
In recent years I’ve been keeping an unofficial list of once-commonplace iconic images and tropes that seem to have vanished completely from the culture. A man on stilts, for instance, who was usually dressed like Uncle Sam. I can’t remember the last time I saw a man on stilts, or even heard a reference to stilts. Quicksand is another. Time was you couldn’t see a jungle adventure or a wacky comedy that didn’t at some point include a scene in which someone gets stuck in quicksand. For one reason or another, they’re no longer part of our collective consciousness.
Most recently I’ve become a little obsessed with barrel suits (also known as barrel cloaks, barrel shirts, or bankruptcy barrels). You know what I mean—an image of a destitute and naked man, a man who has quite literally and figuratively lost his shirt, who for lack of any other form of clothing has been forced to wear a wooden barrel held up by a pair of attached suspenders. If the subject in question was once very wealthy (i.e. someone who lost everything in the Crash), he might also be seen wearing a top hat. It used to be an inescapable representation of bankruptcy, appearing in countless animated shorts, political cartoons, and comedies.
It seems like such a ridiculous idea if you think about it. There are easier ways to keep oneself covered. A burlap sack, say. A potato sack would be so much easier to craft into a wearable form, and would be more comfortable and practical to boot. With a barrel you need to knock out the bottom, find a way to attach the suspenders, and even after all that’s done it remains impossible to sit down or move very fast while wearing it. There is absolutely nothing practical about a barrel suit. Yet it was the man in the barrel suit who came to immediately signal poverty.
The origins of the image are today a little mirky and the subject of some debate. While most people simply shrug their shoulders as to the origins of the barrel suit, a few intriguing educated guesses have been put forward.
Some trace it back to the 4th century B.C., when Diogenes, founder of the school of Cynical Philosophy, made a virtue of poverty and among his countless other pranks, chose to live in a barrel in the marketplace. It’s a tenuous connection, but perhaps the first historical example of a connection being drawn between poverty, barrels, and cynicism.
Certain European fairy tales from the 16th century include scenes in which, as punishment, drunkards and gamblers are placed naked into barrels and dragged through the streets behind a horse. Some other sources, apparently inspired by the fairy tales, claim the origin of the barrel suits exclusively the domain of unlucky gamblers. Having lost everything in a game of chance and with nothing left to bet, the other gamblers would place the unlucky man in a barrel and roll him into the street as a form of humiliation. The image of the man wearing a barrel eventually came to represent someone who had, again, lost his shirt while gambling. This notion, however, is mostly the result of armchair speculation.
More readily documented is the fact that in the 18th and 19th centuries, public drunkenness in England and Germany was occasionally punished by forcing the inebriate in question to wear a barrel in the town square, a form of degrading spectacle akin to the more sophisticated stocks.
The barrel as humiliating punishment seems to have made the leap across the Atlantic by the mid-19th century, as revealed in Miles O. Sherrill’s account of being a Union soldier held in a North Carolina prison during the Civil War.:
“While we were standing in the snow, hearing the abuse of Major Beal, some poor ragged Confederate prisoners were marched by with what was designated as barrel shirts, with the word "thief” written in large letters pasted on the back of each barrel, and a squad of little drummer boys following beating the drums. The mode of wearing the barrel shirts was to take an ordinary flour barrel, cut a hole through the bottom large enough for the head to go through, with arm-holes on the right and left, through which the arms were to be placed. This was put on the poor fellow, resting on his shoulders, his head and arms coming through as indicated above; thus they were made to march around for so many hours and so many days.“
And while the connection remains a little fuzzy, that, perhaps, might lead to the next and final jump. The origins of the barrel suit as a symbol of poverty are today generally traced back to Will B. Johnstone. In the 1920s and ‘30s, along with being a successful song lyricist (best known for “How Dry I Am”) and a writer for the Marx Brothers, Johnstone was also a popular political cartoonist for the New York World-Telegram. Among the regular cast of symbolic characters who appeared in his panel was The Taxpayer (the date of his debut is unknown), a naked man wearing a barrel to illustrate his penniless state. With the Great Depression, it’s not hard to see how The Taxpayer may have come more generally to represent the millions who had lost everything.
But even if that answers the question of where the symbol as we know it first appeared, there is another angle to this whole debate. Several, actually. Some who’ve written on the subject claim the barrels being used as clothing for the poor were almost exclusively pickle barrels, whereas beer and whiskey barrels were used to punish drunks and, as noted above, confederate thieves were made to don flour barrels. And if in fact pickle barrels were reserved for the destitute, it might be read that someone in dire straits has found himself, yes, in a pickle.
Of course there is an easier and less product-specific answer to the question of why barrels were chosen as the adopted mode of dress. Today it’s become cliche to think of the homeless living in cardboard boxes. The reason is simple—cardboard boxes are plentiful and easy to come by. By the same token in the early part of the 20th century everything was shipped in barrels making them just as readily available as cardboard boxes are today. Maybe it only makes sense that something of that size and shape that was at the same time so ubiquitous and cheap might come to be seen as a potential clothing substitute when nothing else was available.
Still, though, why dress the downtrodden in barrels instead of the much more logical and functional burlap sack? From a cartoonist’s perspective, it’s an even simpler answer. Keeping in mind that during the Depression the nation’s poor did not actually dress in barrels save for comedies and cartoons, barrels were easier to draw, they were more immediately recognizable in a cartoon panel than a burlap sack would have been, and most important of all, they were funnier.
by Jim Knipfel