CHAPTER 2
To send these appeals to the Dead Letter Office, to be opened and returned to expectant children merely as an empty message, seemed to be a cold and heartless thing, and the Postmaster-General was unwilling to do it.
—JAMES BRITT, THIRD ASSISTANT POSTMASTER GENERAL
Gluck should have expected his Santa Claus scheme would run into trouble so soon. Although he had a charmed birthday, some clever ideas about charity, and a natural salesman’s skill for telling stories, the Post Office Department gave Gluck the duty of answering Santa’s mail for one reason only: Unlike any other, possibly more qualified, New Yorker, Gluck had asked for the position.
On December 2, 1913, Gluck sent a letter to US postmaster general Albert Burleson, outlining his idea for the association. Like a kid writing to Santa, Gluck’s request brimmed with hope and a bit of naïveté, and its writer only half expected a response. Days later, William J. Satterfield, acting fourth assistant postmaster general, informed Gluck that city, not federal, officials decided who played Santa Claus. He assured Gluck that he had forwarded the request to New York City’s postmaster, Edward M. Morgan, for consideration. What Gluck, and even Satterfield, may not have appreciated was that at the moment Morgan was dealing with some of the greatest difficulties the postal department had ever seen—concerns far greater than the junking of a few hundred Santa letters.
Morgan was a friendly but exacting man who had overseen New York City’s postal system since 1907. He wore a bushy mustache that hid his upper lip, and a generous paunch jutted from below his vest. Morgan received Satterfield’s call in his cramped office on the second floor of the city postal department’s main headquarters, downtown at Park Row and Broadway, directly across the street from the months-old Woolworth Building.
The headquarters, which the organization had occupied for almost forty years, was an elegant Doric and Renaissance-style structure of light granite and iron, with domes up top modeled after Paris’s Louvre Museum. But scanning the building’s interior, Morgan’s eyes took in the wear and dilapidation caused by decades of use. The number of workers and volume of mail had swelled with the city’s population. The cramped office had become inadequate for the needs of the modern postal operation that Morgan was determined to lead into the twentieth century.
This inadequacy never felt more acute than in the first days of December 1913, as Morgan prepared for the largest volume of mail in the city’s history. Eleven months earlier, the Post Office Department had introduced the parcel post, allowing not just envelopes and postcards but also packages and merchandise to be delivered through New York City’s mail trucks and underground pneumatic tubes at lower rates than ever before. For Morgan, this meant rural and suburban residents flooded his offices with orders for medicines, clothing, and furniture from New York department stores. It meant his men delivered fresh eggs and produce to New Yorkers who now bought them from upstate farms. And, three weeks before Christmas Day, it meant an eye-popping mountain of presents.
“Mail Xmas Parcels Early” read the sign Morgan ordered hung in every post office in the city beginning November 8. A month later, he could see this public-awareness campaign only made a small impact on the flood of gifts filling his offices. This was not just a torrent but a tidal wave of letters and packages—double, even triple, the volume that the New York City postal department had processed just a year earlier.
Making Morgan’s job no easier was the ongoing controversy surrounding his wagons. Only recently introduced, New York City’s 250 mail trucks proved a godsend to the department, speeding up delivery times and reducing the wear on Morgan’s men. They made rounds quickly because they obeyed no speed limits. Since mail trucks were government vehicles, the peculiar law of the time determined that, like fire engines and ambulances, they handled urgent business and should be exempt from the fifteen-miles-per-hour rule of the day. The illogic of giving mail trucks on their quotidian routes the same privileges as emergency vehicles took some time to reveal itself to the city’s policymakers. But by late 1913, reports of accidents and deaths caused by careening mail wagons mounted, and a special committee on speed regulation was formed to investigate. The committee discovered that while one out of every 230 regular vehicles killed a New Yorker annually, one of every eighteen mail trucks proved lethal. Despite the pleas of the department, the city aldermen unanimously adopted on November 25 a resolution to remove mail trucks from the speed-limit exemption. Morgan’s men had to slow their pace just as the Christmas rush struck.
Despite these challenges, looking about his office, Morgan could draw strength from tokens that testified to a long career of challenges met. A framed photograph of him and Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock—Burleson’s predecessor—taken on September 23, 1911, showed the two men as they stood next to pilot Earle Lewis Ovington seated in his Biériot XI monoplane. Minutes after the camera shutter snapped, Ovington flew a sack of 640 letters and 1,280 postcards less than three miles—from Garden City to Mineola, Long Island—dropping his sacks of letters from sixteen feet in the air, thereby completing the country’s first airmail delivery.
Near the photograph sat a small ladder of dried immortelle plants, a gift from his colleagues. It held ten rungs, one for each position Morgan had served since beginning at the postal department, as a letter carrier in 1873. He was the only New York City postmaster to begin at the bottom and work his way to the top, rather than simply receiving the appointment as a political favor. A few months before, after Woodrow Wilson beat out his three rivals for the presidency, the New York Times declared, “it is to be taken for granted that Mr. Morgan will continue to be Postmaster, because under him the office has been admirably administered.” Indeed, here he remained.
His optimism could also be stoked by the fact that on the horizon lay a far more impressive home for Morgan’s postal department than the cramped Park Row headquarters: the General Post Office, a grand beaux arts edifice under construction for more than two years. Once opened, it would be the largest, and by all accounts the most majestic, post office in the country, with two pavilions, connected by a row of twenty pillars rising two stories and stretching from Thirty-First to Thirty-Third Streets. The building set twenty-two feet above street level and far back from Eighth Avenue; visitors felt they approached not an administrative office but a venerable monument. It would be the third-largest building in New York City after the Pennsylvania and Grand Central Stations. It was far larger than his staff of 1,666 needed, and that was by design; Morgan wanted to ensure the congestion his postmen currently struggled under would not plague them in the decades ahead.
But solving these logistical puzzles was only part of the building’s importance. It served as a lofty symbol not just of New York City’s Post Office Department but of all letter carriers. It represented the universal value of delivering messages and conveying meaning—as much a simple post office as Grand Central was only a train station. William Mitchell Kendall, of the celebrated architectural firm McKim, Mead & White and the chief architect of the General Post Office, turned to ancient Greece to add a noble touch to the new headquarters. Across the cornice, he ordered engraved: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Not the official motto of the Post Office Department, as popular belief holds today, the lines were just a borrowed flight of inspiration from the building’s designer. The phrase captured the sense of universal importance this post office served. It elevated the work of Morgan’s men to something more than a job—it was a calling. Like the Persian couriers to whom the quote from Herodotus’s Histories originally referred, New York City’s postmen were not just disciplined workers but also parts of the engine propelling this changing city.
And how the city was changing! The post office was just the latest in a series of impressive new buildings transforming New York’s Midtown over the past couple years. All the mail going into and out of the city now traveled on trains through the newly transformed Grand Central Station. It had reopened ten months earlier after a decade of renovations, switching locomotives from steam to electric and introducing a soaring main terminal complete with special “kissing galleries” running along the inclined walks. The design maximized the efficiency of foot traffic as well as the majesty of the structure. The New York Times called it “Without exception . . . not only the greatest station in the United States, but the greatest station, of any type, in the world.”
It sat just up the street from the New York Public Library’s main branch building (“the greatest public library in the world,” per the Evening World ), which had opened just two years earlier, replacing the distributing reservoir of the Croton Aqueduct System. A few blocks southwest was the other beaux arts achievement of Pennsylvania Station (“the largest building in the world ever completed at one time,” according to the Times), opened in August 1910. The Hudson tubes, North River tunnels, and East River tunnels, had all opened in the previous few years and made it easier than ever to enter and exit Manhattan. If one strolled Midtown in 1908 and visited again in 1913, it would feel as if the city had experienced not five years of change but fifty. All these great buildings shared another characteristic: They were open to the public. A poor man unable to afford a book about classical architecture could now stroll through structures as stunning as any ancient Roman temple or Greek theater.
Across the street from Pennsylvania Station, the General Post Office was scheduled to open to the public the next year, and in the meantime the postal department thankfully had use of some of its facilities for processing Christmas packages. Morgan and his staff had to prepare for the move sometime between January 1 and 15 of 1914, as soon as Postmaster General Burleson gave the order. Morgan had surely already begun to pack by the time he received Gluck’s request to play Santa.
In addition to his photos and memorial ladder, Morgan would box up a large horseshoe bearing the words Deo Gratias, or “God be thanked.” He had received the gift after surviving an attack from a paranoid lunatic five years before. The assailant, Eric Hugh Boyd Mackay, worked as a stenographer for a Wall Street law firm when he became convinced that the postmaster deliberately kept his mail from being delivered. “The Postmaster withheld a registered letter addressed to me,” Mackay wrote in a note left in his Upper West Side apartment. “I therefore, as he is the most prominent man who has antagonized me, selected him as my victim now that I have decided to kill myself.”
On November 9, 1908, in a homicidal fury over missing mail he believed to be rightfully his, Mackay confronted Morgan as the postmaster walked to work with his young daughter. The stenographer shot Morgan in the abdomen, then shot himself in the head, dying instantly. Thanks to the quick response of his physician neighbor, Morgan survived, and kept the inscribed horseshoe given to him by his colleagues as he recovered, as a reminder of the precariousness of life and his own good fortune. Of course, Morgan had never hoarded Mackay’s mail—these were the ravings of a madman. But during his time as New York City’s beloved postmaster, Morgan had been guilty of systematically withholding and destroying thousands of letters belonging to another man: Santa Claus.
It’s impossible to say who wrote the first Santa letter, but it was almost certainly from the mythical saint, not to him. From the earliest conception of Santa Claus in the United States, parents used the voice of St. Nicholas as a means of providing advice and encouraging good behavior in their children. The earliest reference to a Santa letter in America that I could find came from Theodore Ledyard Cuyler, recalling his childhood in 1820s western New York when he “once received an autograph letter from Santa Claus, full of good counsels.” Fanny Longfellow (wife of poet Henry Wadsworth) regularly wrote her children Santa letters, commenting on their behavior over the preceding year. “I am sorry I sometimes hear you are not so kind to your little brother as I wish you were,” she wrote to her son Charley on Christmas Eve 1851. A few years later she wryly scolded, “You have not been so obedient and gentle and kind and loving to your parents and little sister as I like to have you, and you have picked up some naughty words which I hope you will throw away as you would sour or bitter fruit.” Soon enough, children started writing back, generally placing their letters on the fireplace, where they believed smoke would transport the message to St. Nick.
Having letters hand-delivered by postal workers, beginning for many urban areas in the midst of the Civil War, transformed how Americans viewed the mail—as a pleasant surprise arriving at one’s door, rather than a burdensome errand. The Chicago Tribune captured this change in perception in an 1864 story about the introduction to the city of thirty-five deliverymen. “[W]e were strangers to the varying sensations produced by ‘the postman’s knock,’” the editors gushed. “Though we had often read of his journeyings and followed him in imagination through his daily round, as he dropped his gifts like a genuine Santa Claus into other households on his beat.” It was only a matter of time before children began to view the post office as a direct conduit to the Christmas saint.
By the 1870s, scattered reports appeared of the receipt of Santa letters by local post offices. “The little folks are getting interested about Christmas,” wrote a correspondent in the Columbia, South Carolina, Daily Phoenix in December 1873, describing a few Santa missives. “Several letters deposited in the Richmond Post Office, evidently written by children, plainly indicated that they, anticipating the annual visit of Santa Claus, wished to remind him of what they most desired,” the New York Times reported the following year.
Each subsequent winter, as certain as snowflakes fell onto the city streets, a growing number of Santa letters ended up at post offices across the country, increasing every year. But with no actual fur-coated toy-maker to receive his mail, each January, the department destroyed them. It was a depressing business. But, officials asked, if mailmen began delivering Santa’s letters, to which other fictional characters would mail be shuttled?
By the turn of the century, the public and press complained about this destruction. “There are at present in the Post Office more than a bushel of letters to Santa Claus that the dear old mythical Saint will never receive,” the Times’ editors lamented in 1899.
When nothing changed, they raised the volume of their protests: “The Christmas season has no charm for the prosaic employes [sic] of the Dead Letter Office,” the Times wrote in 1906. “So the letters remain undelivered and the requests unresponded to, and Saint Nick overlooks thousands of children just because he has not received their petitions.”
Irked by the mounting negative press, then–postmaster general George von Lengerke Meyer announced on December 14, 1907, that he would allow the letters to be answered until the end of the year—for two weeks, give or take. For the first time ever, Santa would open his mail. Groups rushed to respond, and despite having little time to organize, that season saw the rise of organizations like one in Winchester, Kentucky, that began delivering Christmas goodies including nuts, fruits, and candy—as well as firecrackers and roman candles—to children. The Silver Belt Santa Claus Association dubbed Kris Kringle its “Chairman of the Board of Directors” and served the kids of Globe, Arizona.
But two weeks wasn’t enough time to get a solid operation up and running. The groups had little time to properly investigate the letters, and many that did found a large number of dubious requests—children exaggerating their needs or seeking to take advantage of public generosity in some other way. In some cities, groups fought over who had the right to play Santa. Almost before the philanthropies began their work, Meyer, at the urging of a number of established charity groups, criticized these upstarts for their lack of oversight and the fact that few verified if the letter writers were actually in need. Citing this failure to investigate the letters and the generally unprofessional approach of the Santa groups, Meyer ruled that the experiment failed and would not be repeated. “That vicarious activity of Santa Claus which last Christmas removed from the minds of some children in the community the deep-seated notion that the Christmas saint was a snob who confined his presents to rich children, is not to be repeated this year,” the Times morosely reported in 1908.
This was sad news for many, but perhaps no one was as devastated as Elizabeth A. Phillips. Prior to Gluck, she was the most famous Santa surrogate, affectionately known in the press as “Miss Santa Claus.” The former schoolteacher transformed into a local hero in her Philadelphia neighborhood when she brought small gifts to ill children in the local hospitals during the holidays. Phillips expanded her efforts in subsequent years, as she hosted a Christmas dinner for several hundred destitute children at Philadelphia’s grand Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. She even opened a seasonal Santa Claus store—with proceeds going to the needy, of course.
In 1907, when she learned that local Santa letters could finally be answered, Phillips claimed them, putting out calls to donors and recruiting what volunteers she could. Phillips herself delivered most of the gifts, in a borrowed automobile stuffed with presents that she drove through the city’s poorer neighborhoods. It was a warmhearted effort, but a disorganized one far cruder than the sophisticated operation Gluck would introduce six years later.
While she threw herself into helping Philadelphia’s children, Phillips herself needed help. She put everything into assisting those needier than she, which she found alleviated a chronic sense of depression that afflicted her. Meyer’s demand that Santa letters be returned to the Dead Letter Office ended Phillips’s work as Miss Santa Claus. Her Santa Claus store did not bring in enough donations to cover rent. On the morning of August 11, 1909, alone in her small apartment, Phillips stuffed old rags under the door and around the cracks of her window. She connected a plastic tube to the room’s gas furnace and gripped it in her teeth as she turned the valve, steadily inhaling the fumes. The proprietress, smelling gas and fearing a leak, burst into Phillips’s locked room. She was shocked to find Miss Santa Claus’s lifeless body on the floor covered in quilts, plastic tube still held between her teeth. On Phillips’s dress was pinned a notebook page:
No one knows my suffering. I cannot explain. I feel my mind growing weaker each day. I have pleaded with them to send me to an institution, but they would not. I have been in failing health for some time. I have always tried to do my best for mankind.
The death of Miss Santa Claus saddened the public and renewed calls for the unfeeling postal department to free Santa’s mail for good. Finally, in 1911, Postmaster General Hitchcock, a bit more of a romantic than his predecessor, decided that releasing the letters, in a limited and cautious manner, would pose few serious threats to the department’s operations, and ordered that the letters could be answered the final two weeks of the year. The consequences could hardly be worse than the negative attention they had already been receiving for the current policy. Two years later, the Post Office Department made the ruling permanent—every year, for the entire month of December, any organization approved by the local postmaster could answer Santa’s mail.
It was a triumph for those who sought to protect the hopes of New York children. But after Hitchcock’s ruling went into effect, Morgan was surprised to learn that nobody wanted the job. “Santa Claus Is Tardy Saint,” read the front page of the Sun. “Mail Men Disown Santa,” read the Tribune. Morgan entreated the public, asking that someone take these letters, but the only New Yorker to step forward was a clothier offering kid-sized suits and caps. “If Santa Claus doesn’t call soon for his mail, which is piling up at the main New York post office, many of his small correspondents who are confiding to him what they would like for Christmas will be forced to believe that there isn’t any Santa Claus,” bemoaned the Sun. After all the calls for the release of the letters, when the change was finally made, Santa Claus decided not to show up in New York City.
As the days of 1913’s final month ticked away, and Morgan rushed through his office managing the parcel post’s first holiday season, he likely assumed that this year Santa would again be a no-show. But on December 8, with so much else on Morgan’s list of tasks, Assistant Postmaster General Satterfield’s call about a clever customs broker with a well-conceived system for receiving, verifying, and responding to kids’ wishes caught Morgan’s attention. The postmaster wasted no time in granting Gluck’s request.
The windy afternoon of December 8, he dispatched to Henkel’s Chop House the extra load of envelopes from the Dead Letter Office. In addition to the city’s mail—and, this year, tens of thousands of packages and Christmas gifts—Santa letters would now be part of Gotham postmen’s appointed rounds.
And now it was up to Gluck to see that the letters were answered. Compared to the volume of parcels Postmaster Morgan expected, Gluck’s hundreds of correspondences were modest. But the Santa Claus Association did not have thousands of men or monumental new headquarters at its disposal. It had a few volunteers working frantically in the second floor of a Garment District restaurant.
Beyond the influx of letters to process, the volunteers faced the challenge of separating the worthy from the unworthy letters. Gluck would have been well aware that the main reason cited in 1908 for Santa letters returning to the Dead Letter Office was the lack of investigation into whether the recipients were actually needy. If the Santa Claus Association could not prove the worthiness of its recipients, or if the group seemed somehow unserious in its mission, the postmaster might revoke its right to answer the letters as fast as he had done to Elizabeth Phillips and the others.
Though it was easy enough to spot a “fashionable address” on gilded paper, not all letter writers of privilege were so easily identified. As Gluck had initially conceived it, a volunteer would go to any address in question and confirm with the child’s parents that they couldn’t afford to play Santa themselves. A few workers had done this. But by the group’s fourth day in operation, the opening and responding to appeals back at headquarters took up all of the volunteers’ limited time, and it became clear such investigations would not be feasible citywide.
Then, on the group’s fourth day, as challenges and envelopes mounted, the association office’s phone rang, with a call for Gluck. On the line was one of the city’s wealthiest men, with a surprising solution for the group’s troubles.