Con artists, armed Boy Scouts and Santa Claus

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

Nobody knows who wrote the first letter to Santa Claus, but the practice didn’t catch on in mainstream America until a con artist named John D. Gluck became intertwined with this seemingly innocent tradition, which we still practice today.

Gluck, it seems, was destined to be involved with this important holiday, having been born on Christmas Day in 1878. The oldest of five brothers, Gluck was raised in a wealthy family in Brooklyn, and later New Jersey. He inherited his father’s customs brokerage business at an early age but didn’t enjoy the work, and, as a 35-year-old, changed his career by the early 1910s to go into the Christmas business.

From St. Nick to Santa

From the mid-1800s to the turn of the century, it had become more and more common in America to refer to St. Nicholas as Santa Claus. The concept of writing letters to Santa hadn’t caught on yet, but there are scattered references of letters written to kids from Santa. 

Volunteers answer Santa letters at the Santa Claus Association headquaters in its heyday. Courtesy photo.

Poet Henry Wadsworth’s wife Fanny Longfellow regularly wrote her children letters from the jolly old elf, with one to her son Charley in 1851 reading, “I am sorry I sometimes hear you are not so kind to your little brother as I wish you were.”

As this practice continued, kids inevitably began writing back, placing letters on the fireplace, where they believed the smoke would transport the message to St. Nick or Santa.

By the 1870s, local post offices began reporting that they were regularly receiving letters addressed to Santa. Considering there was no recipient to whom the missives could be delivered, postal workers began a long policy of destroying the letters after the holiday season.

However, some in the postal service found the act of destroying kids’ letters to Santa depressing. In the early 1910s, New York City’s postmaster faced negative publicity from the practice and decided to start a program in which an approved philanthropic organization answered Santa’s mail. The only problem? No one volunteered to do it.

Enter the con artist John Gluck.

Mr. Santa Claus

Gluck had no kids of his own, was unmarried and wasn’t religious. He wore a prodigious mustache, which he was famous for maintaining with a quiver of combs, clippers, brushes and tinctures.

Hungry for attention and a natural showboat, Gluck jumped on the post office’s new policy of answering Santa’s letters by establishing a nonprofit organization he called the Santa Claus Association, which he operated in the back room of a Chinese restaurant in New York City. 

The collection of volunteers would receive bags of letters addressed to Santa from the post office; verify if the letters came from needy children; and, ultimately, respond to them. 

The organization reached out to wealthy donors and served as a middleman between them and the kids, using the donors’ funds to dole out gifts and sometimes even facilitating the donors themselves delivering gifts to children.

It was a feel-good operation, with hundreds of volunteers spending hours wading through thousands of letters to find those with the most need. The organization grew quickly thanks to positive press, and they began receiving thousands of dollars in donations to help pay for supplies, postage and gifts.

At first, Gluck didn’t actually take financial donations into the organization, but instead acted as a conduit for those dollars to go directly to the children in need. But, as the organization and Gluck’s greed grew, he began a dubious scheme that would become his downfall.

Armed Scouts

In 1910, Chicago newspaper publisher William Dickson Boyce incorporated the Boy Scouts of America. Not to be outdone, New York Journal Publisher William Randolph Hearst founded a rival group three months later that he called the American Boy Scouts. One main difference between the groups is that in Hearst’s group, the scouts carried actual guns and conducted drills and training exercises in which scouts shot blank ammunition at one another. 

The organization was disbanded years later, after membership plummeted following an incident where one scout accidentally shot and killed another at a function in 1912. 

However, Gluck fought to keep the group alive, since he used the Hearst scouts as free labor for the Santa Claus Association (though the boys weren’t allowed to carry their rifles while working with the organization).

Gluck exaggerated the scouts’ numbers, and attached the names of prominent politicians and businessmen as “executive vice presidents” without their knowledge to lend gravitas to the group. He even used to refer to himself as a member of the Secret Service.

Ultimately, a series of lawsuits between the two scouting groups led to an injunction against Hearst’s boys using the term “scout” in their name. Following the accidental shooting incident, the group eventually folded completely.

A grift for every season

As more funds poured in every year, Gluck’s ambitions increased. He began skimming money off the top, lining his own pockets with the donations. In 1915, he announced a plan to build a massive structure he called the Santa Claus Building — raising $300,000 for the project — but no work was ever done. 

Meanwhile, the Boy Scout debacle attracted a lot of negative attention. Several attempts were made in the next dozen years to highlight inconsistencies in Gluck’s fundraising tactics, but it wasn’t until New York City Commissioner for Public Welfare Bird S. Coler investigated the organization in 1927 when the edifice began to crumble.

Coler found tens of thousands of dollars in unaccounted-for funds, as well as no oversight over Gluck’s usage of donors’ money. He also found that Gluck had embezzled most of the funds raised from the Santa Claus Building, as well as the postage and gift purchase donations the organization had been receiving for years. 

Coler brought his findings before the post office, which finally ended its long involvement with Gluck, eventually developing its own letter-answering service it dubbed Operation Santa Claus, a process that was formalized once and for all in 1962.

Aftermath

Gluck faced no formal charges for his crimes. The only time he ever officially ran afoul of the law was after he organized a bullfight on Coney Island that led to the animal charging into the crowd, after which he was arrested for animal cruelty and fined. 

Following the Santa Claus Association’s collapse and the press buried him in negative headlines, Gluck moved to Miami, where he became a real estate agent. He remained in Miami until 1951 when he died at the age of 73.

Gluck’s legacy is a complicated one. He stole donations intended for needy children and regularly engaged in fraud involving his association and the armed scout group.

Like many so-called “good” things in America, if you scratch deep enough, you’ll find fraud.

But it’s hard to deny that without Gluck’s grift, the millions of letters kids send to Santa Claus might still be thrown into incinerators at the dead-letter office, instead of answered by actual philanthropic organizations that still keep the magic of Christmas alive across America.