CHAPTER 8
Dear Santa Claus—Do you live far? Would you please come up my house Christmas day? I, Rose, ten years of age, wants a doll; John, seven, wants a engine; Alice, about five, wants a doll; Beatrice, just more than three, wants a set of dishes, and Andrew, not two yet, wants a Teddy bear.
—BEGGAR
Dear Santa Claus—I heard about your great kindness to poor children and I hope you will be good to us. I have a little cripple sister and a baby sister and brother. My little cripple sister is only five, and my papa has been out of work all summer. I hope you will answer soon and won’t forget us. Your little girl friend,
—MANIPULATOR
Dear Santy—I wants a nice small train, not a expensive one—one that’s just strong and will last long time. This is all I want, and we can’t afford nothing this winter. Yours truly,
—FRAUD
Christmas 1915, the day Gluck announced the Santa Claus Building, was one of the most tremendous days of his life. Rushing around the Woolworth office, he answered reporters’ questions and frantically sent press announcements to newspapers far and wide. He helped wind down operations for the year, and he and Symona Boniface likely enjoyed dinner together in celebration of his birthday. They had struck a fast connection—his larger-than-life personality and confidence and her wit and beauty pulled the two together. Boniface’s connection to the theater world was especially magnetizing to a man so enamored with Broadway and the culture surrounding it. Within a few months, the two would wed. It would be Gluck’s second marriage since his short nuptials with Katherine Wheeler a decade earlier. But uncharacteristically for a pair of showboats, no public announcement would be made of the marriage.
Amidst the Christmas Day hubbub, Gluck made time for his daily routine of reviewing the day’s papers. Despite the dozens of fawning stories about the group’s work and the avalanche of coverage depicting the Santa Claus Building, one piece caught his attention and irritation. In an editorial titled “Opens Wide Doors to Deception,” the New York Times’ editors questioned the approach taken by the Santa Claus Association and the ease with which someone could abuse it for private gain. The Times was not raising questions about Gluck or his increasingly dubious fund-raising practices; they worried about deceitful children.
The association, they wrote, “has been widely advertised, and the inevitable result has been the inspiration of not a few children quite without belief in the myth of the gift-bearer to exploit the obvious possibilities of the situation.” Most of these kids probably don’t even believe in Santa, they fretted, and Gluck’s work more likely provided “a lesson in mendicancy mingled with deception for the young plotters, and a worse lesson they could hardly learn.”
It marked a reversal for the paper that had a few years before been one of the most vocal proponents of releasing the letters to the public. They had once assumed the best intentions, pleading with the post office to see that the “trusting children,” who “never doubt[ed] that their missives received the proper attention from Santa Claus” not have their innocent letters sent to the Dead Letter Office. What had changed?
The likeliest explanation began with a winter stroll Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs took on Christmas Day 1911. The story went that, while walking off his turkey dinner, Ochs crossed paths with an unkempt man on the sidewalk who explained his tough circumstances and asked the newspaperman for a few dollars. Struck by the holiday mood and the man’s sad tale, Ochs obliged. The rush of pleasure Ochs felt inspired him to use the Times’ platform to launch a worthy charity of his own—one that would shift the focus from general city troubles to individual narratives of need.
The next year, the paper trumpeted that it was launching a campaign to help the Hundred Neediest Cases in New York. Unlike the Santa Claus Association, however, reporters would work with the city’s leading relief organizations (the same “old-line charitable agencies” Gluck dismissed as wasteful and inefficient) to determine the individuals or families most deserving of readers’ generosity. The very first case involved a father locked in a state asylum and an overwhelmed mother trying to care for seven children—two of them tubercular and the rest underfed—on $5 a week. The second case was a nearly blind widow, desperately holding on to her job as a brush maker to support two children at home. The paper dedicated pages to the individual stories.
The Times put a premium on conducting thorough investigations, partnering with select organizations known for taking an incredulous, investigative approach to figuring out who deserved charity: the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, the State Charities Aid Association, and the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, among them. These groups had the ear of the Times’ editors when it came to the subject of assisting the city poor. And most vocal among the five groups guiding the Times’ Neediest Cases campaign was the Charity Organization Society. The group had established itself as a vociferous enemy of inefficiency, charity fraud, and, strangely enough, Santa Claus letters.
The Charity Organization Society (COS) had been launched as a response to the urban poverty created by the Industrial Revolution—disease, starvation, and more violent dangers resulting from cities’ growing populations. Following the model of the London Charity Organization Society, the US version started in Buffalo, New York, during the “Long Depression” of the 1870s and expanded to major cities throughout the country.
Reflecting the industrial era in which it began, the COS made “efficiency” central to its alleviation of poverty. It maintained that charities should adopt a scientific approach to their efforts, and anyone requesting assistance should be investigated, registered, and supervised (much of these efforts were conducted by trusted volunteers, making door-to-door visits to those applying for charitable relief, a model Gluck imitated with the US Boy Scout). The COS aimed to be more than just a charity group; it was a hub connecting credible agencies and churches in each city with one another, identifying worthy recipients, and avoiding any duplication of effort. The “friendly visitors” were intended not just to aid but also to elevate the lower classes, providing them with positive influences and the “inculcation of habits of providence and self-dependence,” as its constitution stated.
One of the most outspoken branches was that in New York City, which viewed assisting unworthy recipients as a danger worse than poverty itself. It created a Committee on Mendicancy, which apprehended street beggars and investigated “Begging-Letter Writers”—the unemployed who sent letters to former employers asking for support. As emotional and ineffective charity blossomed during the holidays, the group pressured Gotham newspapers to discontinue their annual distribution of Christmas dinners, instead pushing them to run it through an approved charity group or abandon the practice entirely.
Those looking to make Christmas donations could instead visit the COS office or simply mail in their donation and be informed of exactly where the funds went. When a Miss Pollock living in Gramercy Park dropped in, the district secretary told her about Mrs. Dee—a single mother trying to raise six kids and keep her oldest daughter in school while on a cleaning-woman’s salary of $20 a month. Pollock cut a check for $10 and was later informed, “They had a very pleasant Christmas. The children had a tree which had been donated to us with all its trimmings. They had a good dinner and Joseph had substantial gifts in the shape of an overcoat, shoes and rubbers.” The secretary added that she hoped Pollock’s interest in the poor would not end with the Christmas season. These donations were not wrapped in elaborate paper and ribbons or delivered under the auspices of Santa Claus. They were tied in simple bundles with the family name plainly written on the parcel. COS members meticulously tracked the donations, keeping the focus on relieving essential needs, not on some vague notion of pleasing the emotions or spreading the Christmas spirit.
So in 1907, when Postmaster General George von Lengerke Meyer lifted the federal ban on Santa letters and the newspapers filled with unverified, woeful tales of children in need, the COS grew alarmed. Although the press and public applauded the letters’ release and the outpouring of generosity throughout the holiday season, the effort to answer these letters possessed all the hallmarks of the emotion-driven largesse the COS disdained.
New York COS superintendent W. Frank Persons had heard his fair share of pitiful tales from New York’s poor, and the reprinted letters appearing in the New York newspapers struck him as suspicious. While the Times and other New York papers criticized the “red-tape-bound officialdom” of the Post Office Department, Persons culled reports on letters to Santa from around the country and found “a commingling of sensationalism, bathos, and lack of humor,” as one COS executive summed it up. “Children were represented as being in alarming numbers fatherless, and, paradoxical as it may seem, fathers, in alarming numbers, were assumed to be indifferent to and incapable of taking any part in providing of Christmas cheer for their children. A carnival of gloom was the impression we got from reading some of the newspaper statements.” The coverage assumed the best intentions of the letter writers and cast them as the epitome of innocence. The COS superintendent knew better.
Persons and his investigators contacted the leaders of the groups who answered the letters. Little consistency, oversight, or even logic could be found. A representative for the Chicago Bureau admitted that its method “was superficial, and doubtless resulted in the rejection of some letters from extremely poor families and the inclusion in the charity list of some letters from families in comfortable circumstances.” Persons felt the whole approach to be elaborate and inefficient. Why ask that requests for help be submitted under this cover when existing systems—city relief programs, established philanthropy societies, or the COS itself—allowed for needs to be met, no silly invocation of a mythical saint required?
Persons needed a counterweight to the media’s naïve promotion of these letter-writers’ appeals, to show these sentimental stories were exaggerations and were pulling funds from people actually in need. He needed proof the kids were lying. Persons charged his organization’s Investigative Bureau to look into the letter writers, using the inspection methods the COS had refined over the previous quarter-century. This began with gathering a sample of the letters themselves. He looked no further than the morning news—with no Santa Claus Association to answer the letters in 1907, New York’s newspapers served as intermediaries between Santa’s mail and the public, printing children’s charming missives in their pages, along with home addresses.
“Dear Santa,” read a letter from Lizzie Cleary in the New York World. “Would you please give me something for Christmas, as we are very poor and have no papa? My mamma works downtown in offices and sometimes she takes in washing and does the best she can. You see, Santa, it is very hard for me also, for I get up very early and have to send my sister and brothers to school. I don’t care for much so long as my mamma and sister and brothers has a happy Christmas.”
Persons sent an investigator to Cleary’s home to see how difficult life really was for the girl. The visitor was invited in by Lizzie’s mother. She looked about the home, spotting a doll and “no evidence of want” and reported back that assistance from the public was hardly needed.
A woman wrote to Santa Claus of her friend, Mrs. Murtha, living at West Sixtieth Street, asking: “Will you help her to get work in behalf of herself and young boy? She wants cleaning, washing or any work. She is absolutely penniless.”
Upon investigation, the COS representative “felt confident that woman had a man lodging with her and she finally admitted that there was one there. . . . Mrs. Murtha made a very unfavorable impression on visitor.”
Looking into the Ross family, whose daughter had written to Santa Claus claiming the family was out of work, the investigator “Learned that family consisted of woman and daughter, both of whom went out for day’s work.”
In one case after another, the investigator found a letter writer who exaggerated his or her need or who was already receiving assistance from the COS or one of its charity partners. It was plain to the group’s leaders that the popularity of answering Santa Claus letters was a case of sentimentality over substance, and the campaign was draining precious resources—donations, volunteers, and press attention—from more vital relief work. On October 26, 1908, after several drafts, Persons sent a letter to Postmaster General Meyer asking he reconsider the “unwholesome publicity” that gathered around the release of the Santa letters:
Many of these letters delivered by the postal authorities to private individuals and even to newspapers were widely published without concealment of names and addresses of the writers. There was, as should have been expected, a very great increase in the amount of such mail, immediately following the first publications of these letters. Thousands of them were written obviously for the sole purpose of attracting attention and securing charitable assistance. This degradation of the Christmas spirit was further accomplished by the ostentatious, public distribution of presents by newspapers and other agencies in answer to these requests.
He added that there were “many obvious instances of parents teaching the children to beg for relief ” and that “a very considerable evil will result” if the letters continued to be released as they had been. Similar letters were sent by many of the society’s chapters. The postmaster general received them with great interest. They confirmed concerns he himself felt about the release of the letters and gave him the cover he sought to rescind their release in 1908.
“Complaints having been received from many charitable organizations of abuses of the privilege extended in Order No. 934, dated December 13, 1907, permitting delivery to such organizations of letters addressed to ‘Santa Claus,’ the privilege will not be renewed at this time,” Meyer wrote in an order to his department. It was back to the Dead Letter Office they went, and the Charity Organization Society claimed a strategic and moral victory.
The arguments made by the COS in 1908 were still true in 1911 when talk about releasing Santa letters resurfaced. But Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock, who succeeded Meyer in the position, had a different attitude toward the letters. When the question came up during his tenure, he decreed that in order “that many poor children may be blessed with a happy Christmas,” he would release the letters “and thereby assist in prolonging their youthful belief in Santa Claus.”
Alarm bells rang out in the COS headquarters. Fortunately, they knew just what to do—draft a letter to the postmaster general and explain, as they had so successfully before, why freeing these letters was a bad idea. “Grave harm resulted from the public use of these letters by private individuals, charitable agencies, and by newspapers in 1907,” COS executive Francis McLean wrote in a December 11, 1911, letter. The New York chapter’s W. F. Persons sent a copy to New York City postmaster Edward Morgan, noting that it was cosigned “by the heads of the six most representative and prominent charitable organizations in this city.” If the postmaster general moved fast enough, there would be time to reverse his position and halt the release of the letters this season.
But the 1908 strategy did not work in 1911. Hitchcock was a very different postmaster general than Meyer. He had a far sharper sense of how to manage the media and what made a great story: just a few weeks earlier he and Morgan had appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the country as they oversaw the first, dramatic, airmail delivery. At the time, Hitchcock was also laying the groundwork for the new parcel post, which was sure to excite the public.
The media itself had transformed in just a few short years, with an explosion of newspaper and magazine titles boasting record-breaking circulations. Readers liked the tales of Christmas charity, and it was easier than ever for these outlets to cast the Post Office Department as Ebenezer Scrooge for obstructing Santa’s work. Hitchcock was not interested in getting into a debate over the nuances of effective relief work; he just wanted the Post Office Department to be on the right side of Santa.
“With many thousands of poor children, the letter to Santa Claus is only an appeal for what their parents are unable to give,” James Britt, the third assistant postmaster general, responded to the COS, speaking for his boss. “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.” He concluded that “the Order will, therefore, remain unchanged.”
The shift in the postmaster general’s attitude between 1908 and 1911 reflected a larger shift, as Christmas became a more public, spectacular holiday during the first years of the twentieth century. “Santa Claus is a part of the family idea of Christmas, and from time immemorable children have written him their wishes and their parents have fulfilled those wishes as they were able,” a member of the COS wrote, urging that the letters remain in the home. Another executive added that giving these missives to the public “did seem to threaten a method of treating the Santa Claus legend that would work its destruction.” Although this position had won the day in 1908, within a few years the postal officials and the country as a whole had changed its opinion. At a time when holiday displays were more extravagant than ever and civic Christmas gatherings proliferated, most now felt that Santa was not restricted to the home. He belonged to the city.
In the face of these forces and the sentimental arguments from the Post Office Department itself, the COS was outmatched. McLean wrote back to Britt, accepting Hitchcock’s decision, and adding in a wounded tone one clarification: “The point of our letter was not to avoid the work or trouble which would be occasioned by receiving and dealing with the so-called Santa Claus letters but rather to protect the homes of the innocent writers of these letters from unnecessary visitation and molestation.” But the fight was over. The domestic Christmas spirit the group sought to protect had already escaped or, in the eyes of the COS, been destroyed.
From that point forward, the Charity Organization Society was sidelined from the debate. They lobbied newspapers, public authorities, and private philanthropies but could not compete with the sentimental tales of Christmas spirit the papers published each season. The COS’s relationship with the Times and its Hundred Neediest Cases provided a valuable opportunity to push back against the use of Santa letters as a meaningful charity strategy.
But these opportunities were rare. When Gluck launched the Santa Claus Association in 1913, the COS wrote that in light of the fact that “one man has recently started an organization to act as Santa Claus to these children,” there were “Four Things to Remember.” These included that “Nine times out of ten the really needy poor do not bring their wants to the attention of the public” and “the city child becomes sophisticated at so early an age that he soon ceases to believe in Santa Claus.” No major paper carried the release, and the COS instead published it in the trade journal Bulletin of the Merchants’ Association.
The same year, the Post Office Department made the release of Santa letters permanent, with the postmaster general’s assistant commenting in a letter to his boss that the practice “has been found to be a very happy method of disposing of that class of undeliverable matter.” That would be the final word on Santa letters—until fifteen years later, when the actions of Gluck and his Santa Claus Association forced the Post Office Department to change its position.
Despite having won the public debate, Gluck moved quickly to rebut any criticism of answering Santa letters. Upon reading the Times’ accusation that his association “opens wide the doors to deception,” Gluck grabbed up a red pen and underlined the sentence that his group offered “a lesson in mendicancy mingled with deception.” “To this conclusion I take entire exception and for my part assume that the writer of the article must be imperfectly acquainted with our work,” he wrote in a pointed response published the next day. After explaining how the system of matching individual New Yorkers to each child’s appeal helped to smoke out any cases of dishonesty, Gluck concluded that “This is a material age, but don’t you think it is a good thing to try and preserve as long as possible the children’s faith in the unknown, in their belief that once a year some one whom they never see will answer their prayers? Santa Claus may be a myth to us of mature age; to children he is a living reality.”
When Santa was involved, reporters and readers took virtually all Gluck’s claims at face value. “The association keeps a sharp lookout for fake letters,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported as the group ramped up for its 1916 season. “According to the results of the investigations made this year, about 2 percent of the appeals so far were found to be the letters of professional beggars.” This was about the same negligible amount of phony letters the group cited in previous years.
While Gluck explained that this was a sign of the trustworthiness of the letter writers, it was a strikingly small number when compared to the Charity Organization Society’s findings a few years earlier that virtually all the New York City requestors had exaggerated their needs in some way. It was also a fraction of the 34 percent of letters that had been rejected by the Baltimore Federated Charities, the 69 percent of letters rejected by the Chicago Bureau of Charities, and the 85 percent rejected by the Cleveland Associated Charities when they attempted similar operations to the Santa Claus Association. When it came to trusting childish innocence, it was clear Gluck’s group was the outlier.
The association did agree with at least one of the COS’s arguments: The release of Santa’s mail had led to more kids writing to him with each passing year. About twenty-five thousand letters were received and responded to in 1916—more than double that of the group’s first year. Despite the Santa Claus Association’s claims of its investigations and accounting, it ran a far less thorough operation than that of the COS and saw significant turnover in volunteers and leaders each year, making it hard to run a truly effective charity—and it did little to ensure its other chapters were being run any better. But as always, the press cared about the heart-wrenching letters, not accuracy.
Although COS criticisms remained focused on the letter writers, no questions were raised about the motives of the Santa Claus Association itself. Despite Gluck’s frequent claims that the group was a different type of charity, one that did not collect funds but simply facilitated the connection between donor and recipient, plenty of money was coming in to the group. Requests had begun for postage stamps, then to help pay for gifts that the association’s “gift-buying committee” handled, then to cover vague “administrative costs.” Though the association operated again from the Woolworth Building for its 1916 season, Gluck directed a number of its volunteers to help solicit funds for its $300,000 Santa Claus Building. Though the major announcement the year before had generated a burst of donations, the association made few reports on the progress made toward this grand goal.
To help raise awareness of the group and raise funds for the building, in 1916 the association began to publish the Santa Claus Annual, a souvenir book celebrating the group’s work, its supporters, and the magic of Santa himself. For twenty-five cents, anyone could buy a copy of the decorative volume. The cover featured a full-page photo of the Joseph Kratina sculpture of Santa Claus, made from the pulp of five thousand letters. It included dozens of portraits of the group’s officers and honorary vice presidents—elegantly attired ladies and suited men, many of who no doubt bought themselves a copy, or several. The list of honorary vice presidents only grew, now including representatives of societies such as the Betterment League of New York and Rainy Day Club (an organization advocating that women wear short skirts and high boots on drizzly days).
It also included photos of the group’s varied activities, with some questionable claims. The picture of the delivery of Postmaster Morgan’s twenty-five-pound plum pudding claimed “there were a thousand visitors with this committee,” despite the fact that newspapers reported only seventy-five in attendance.
The Annual included a story called “How Mary Katharine Became a Member of The Santa Claus Association,” in which “the Moonman” whisks away a young girl losing faith in Santa Claus and gives her a guided tour of the group’s operations. He shows her poor children with their noses pushed against the toy-store window and a cold tenement room where a child writes to Santa asking for coal. Then he takes Mary Katharine to the Woolworth office where she sees the volunteers in action, before joining one of the US Boy Scouts on his investigative rounds, as he brings cheer to a fatherless family. “Mr. Moonman,” she says on her return home, thrilled by what she saw, “I never knew before what happiness Christmas can bring.”
But Gluck’s attention was being drawn elsewhere, assisting with publicity campaigns and serving as a “consultant” to other groups in their charity and fund-raising efforts. Prominent among these was his continuing work with the United States Boy Scout. In the six years since the USBS and the Boy Scouts of America had been founded, the concept of scouting had spread fast, especially in large cities, as a positive way for poor newspaper boys and tenement dwellers to spend their free time and develop their character.
But as the United States entered the Great War, US Boy Scout patriotic efforts would help put it, and Gluck, into the national spotlight. It would soon be revealed that Gluck was mailing out his own fraudulent Christmas wishes, and that the Charity Organization Society should be less concerned about the deceptions of the children sending letters to Santa Claus than the man who was answering them.