New York invented Christmas. Washington Irving turned a bishop into St. Nick. Clement Moore gave him reindeer. Madison Square Park hosted the first communal Christmas tree, in 1912 (later moved to Rockefeller Center). But few remember John Duval Gluck, who popularized another bit of modern lore — writing to Santa Claus. In his new book, “The Santa Claus Man,” author Alex Palmer reveals the man who was part St. Nick and part sinner.
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.
Soon enough, children started writing back, generally placing their letters on the fireplace, where they believed smoke would transport the message to St. Nick.
By the 1870s, scattered reports appeared of the receipt of Santa letters by local post offices. But with no actual fur-coated toymaker 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?
In the face of negative publicity, however, New York City’s postmaster finally relented. Every year, for the entire month of December, any approved organization could answer Santa’s mail. No one volunteered. Then, in 1913, just as the Post Office was about to give up, a man named John Duval Gluck stepped forward. He’d be Santa Claus.
He was also a con artist.
A strange candidate for Santa Claus, Gluck had no children of his own. He was a bachelor, once divorced, and though a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Gluck was not particularly religious.
The oldest of five brothers, Gluck had lived for two years in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, before his family moved to Westfield, NJ. He described it as a happy home with few wants and where every holiday was a huge deal, especially Christmas, when kind gestures both within the family and toward less-fortunate outsiders were a tradition.
At 5-foot-6, he was the shortest of his brothers by several inches and also the only one losing his hair, for which he began to compensate with a lustrous mustache, maintained with an assortment of combs, brushes, and clippers.
Gluck inherited his father’s custom brokerage business, but, at age 35, he was restless for fame and hungry to do something with his life. Picking up any day’s newspaper or stopping in at one of the movie theaters in Manhattan, one encountered thrilling stories of heroes, self-made men, and adventurers. Gluck sensed he was destined for great things too, to bring delight to the city, help his fellow New Yorkers, and garner himself some public esteem in the process.Santa might offer just the route.
Gluck was a natural showboat, and after the Post Office gave its approvals and he started the “Santa Claus Association,” he proved adept at delighting the reporters who dropped by the headquarters, in the back room of Henkel’s Chop Shop on 36th Street.
When Zoe Beckley, a reporter for the Evening Mail, arrived, Gluck told how children wrote in asking for sleds or dolls and more unusual things. Several children even asked for coal; so cold and desperate were the letter writers that they would consider it a blessing, rather than a punishment for naughtiness, to receive coal in their stockings. Kids addressed letters to Ice Street, Cloudville and Behind the Moon (it would be a few more years before the North Pole was accepted as Santa’s home).
Gluck boasted the process he had devised, drawing on years of exacting customs work, was what really made the Santa Claus Association special. A team of volunteers would go through each letter, flagging any repeats from the same child. If the child described starvation, homelessness or abuse, the volunteer set it in a special stack, which was forwarded to the Public Charities Commission for further investigation.
If the writer asked for excessive gifts or gave some other indication of not really needing Santa’s help, it was set aside in an investigation stack. If the missive passed all inspection — Gluck estimated 70% of them did — the letter was finally ready for a response.
Association members did not actually touch the gifts these children would receive. Each approved letter was sent out to a potential donor — drawn from a list of names and addresses Gluck compiled from his own business along with suggestions made by the association’s directors and volunteers.
Gluck revealed to Beckley something unmentioned to other reporters, a credential that made him almost cosmically qualified to play New York City’s Santa Claus: He had been born on Christmas Day.
“[Gluck] never had a birthday,” Beckley would write after her tour. “He had one of course, in a way. But nobody noticed it because it fell upon the 25th of December. Deeply Master Gluck pondered on this left-handed compliment of fate. He finally decided that while it was tough luck to be done out of birthdays, it would be tougher yet to be done out of Christmas.”
The Santa Claus Association was an enormous hit. By Dec. 24, 1913, the association had coordinated the delivery of gifts to 13,160 kids in the city. Two years later, that number had ballooned to 50,000 in 16,000 families. The papers were filled with stories of delighted kids receiving gifts in the tenements.
The city’s richest families were eager to give to the organization because they saw the results of their charity firsthand — the Santa Claus Association sent them specific letters, letting them deliver the gifts themselves if they wanted.
The group moved, first to donated space at the Hotel Astor, then to the Woolworth Building, then the tallest in the world. As the group’s work wound down on Christmas Day 1915 and the piles of letters in the office dwindled, suddenly the space began filling with reporters. Gluck stopped his volunteers and informed them he was going to make an announcement. He dropped his big news: “The peculiar nature of our work calls for a building of our own.”
“Gluck legitimately wanted to help kids. But he also craved the fame and fortune the Santa Claus Association provided him.”
Gluck had commissioned architects George and Edward Blum to create “the most unique building in America.”
The Santa Claus Building, in Manhattan, would be made of white marble, with a massive arched portal, nearly 20 feet deep as a front entrance. The façade would depict versions of Santa Claus from all the countries of the world, each created by an artist native to that country.
The ground floor would house the offices of the association as well as other willing charities. On the second floor would be the Lilliputian Bazaar — a huge market where toys from around the world would be sold or given away. “The proposed Santa Claus Building will be a national monument,” Gluck declared — a real-life Santa’s workshop, as well as a place of international celebration of the “Christmas spirit.”
Every detail seemed to have been carefully considered and provided to the press — except how to pay for the $300,000 building.
But then raising money was always Gluck’s gift. He would run a series of fraudulent charities, often with the help of the astounding database of 76,000 New York donors, — including Astors and Vanderbilts — that he put together through the Santa Claus Association.
He would run groups like the Defense Reports Committee, Crusade against Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Serum Control of Cancer, Anti-Prohibition Group, and something called the Window Crib Society — which promoted cages that apartment dwellers could attach to their windows to allow their infant to play outside in a chicken-wire box.
Gluck even tried to organize a bullfight on Coney Island. But after the bull charged into the crowd, then knocked itself by slamming a wall, Gluck was arrested and fined.
One of Gluck’s most notorious associations was with the American Boy Scout organization.
The group sprouted from the competitive spirit of William Randolph Hearst. The newspaper baron founded the scouting group in May 1910 as a challenge to Chicago publisher William Dickson Boyce, who had incorporated the Boy Scouts of America three months prior.
The boys in both groups went on outdoor trips, volunteered in the community and read Boys’ Life. But their practices differed in at least one significant way: Hearst’s scouts carried loaded guns. Partly because Hearst believed boys should cultivate skill with firearms, and also to help prepare members for eventual service in the military, rifles became standard accessories for American Boy Scout members.
But after a 12-year-old American Boy Scout shot and killed a 9-year-old in The Bronx during a fight, membership plummeted.
Gluck, who used scouts as volunteers at the Santa Claus Association, fought to keep the United States Boy Scouts alive, exaggerating its membership and the luminaries who backed it. He would attach the names of prominent politicians and businessmen as “executive vice presidents” without their knowledge, even as Gluck himself went around town calling himself a member of the Secret Service.
After a long court fight and dwindling finances, the USBS folded.
Gluck retreated to his Santa Claus cave, but the Boy Scout debacle had attracted the attention of many authorities, including Bird Coler, the city’s public-welfare commissioner.
Unlike its first years, when Gluck directed wealthy patrons to needy kids, the Santa Claus Association now asked for direct donations. In 1927, Coler found that the group brought in $106,000 (about $1.4 million today) but didn’t detail its spending. Salaries kept increasing, and a $10,000 fund had simply vanished. The “Santa Claus Building” was never built, but the group had still accepted donations for its construction.
Gluck legitimately wanted to help kids. But he also craved the fame and fortune the Santa Claus Association provided him.
Coler brought his findings to the Post Office, which rescinded Gluck’s contract. By Christmas, the letters coming into the office and the public’s support of the group evaporated. Without the endorsement of the Post Office, the association lost its logistical ability to collect letters to Santa. But more importantly, it lost the city’s faith.
Like a reversal of the climax of “Miracle on 34th Street,” the letters to Santa on which Gluck prided himself were taken from him. His right to claim the title of Santa’s secretary had been revoked as the postman literally walked into his office and removed the missives delivered to Gluck days before.
If Gluck has a legacy, it is that once he moved the children’s wishes out of the Dead Letter Office, it proved hard to send them back. For years, the Post Office continued to offer the letters on an informal basis, with occasional help from private charity groups.
Then, in 1962, the New York City Post Office formalized the process of answering Santa letters. Today, hundreds of local groups handle the answering of letters across the US under the umbrella of Operation Santa Claus.
Adapted from “The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York” by Alex Palmer, published by Lyons Press.