Why it matters
A fuller and more accurate understanding of the origins and emergence of “Is There A Santa Claus?” is important for several reasons. Notably, a better appreciation of the editorial’s emergence offers a reminder that newspaper editors are not always as perceptive as their readers in identifying and calling attention to journalism of significance and lasting value. The editorial’s popularity thus offers insights into the latent power of readers to influence content. Repeatedly over the years, readers asked the Sun to reprint the editorial; ultimately, the newspaper relented.
Viewed another way, the Sun’s reluctant embrace of “Is There A Santa Claus?” suggests a remoteness of newspapers from their readers, even though U.S. newspapers have long been keen to find out about their readers’ interests and preferences. In 1897, for example, the Boston Journal asked readers to complete and return questionnaires that asked about the occupation of the person buying the newspaper, the number of readers per issue, and the most appealing sections or content. The newspaper said it wanted “to know its readers better—their names, their occupations, and their tastes.”12 The survey attracted a fair amount of attention. The trade journal Fourth Estate said it represented “a most novel census of its readers, one of a sort we do not remember having heard of before.”13
More broadly, a better understanding of the origins and emergence of the iconic editorial is important because it has been described as offering enduring lessons14 for journalists. “Newspapers today need Church’s poetry on their editorial pages,” Eric Newton, then of the Freedom Forum’s Newseum, wrote in 1997, the centenary of “Is There A Santa Claus?” Newton added: “Too often journalists [in their writing] climb upon stacks of facts and fall asleep.” 15 Geo Beach, writing in Editor & Publisher in December 1997, said of the editorial: “It was brave writing. Love, hope, belief—all have a place on the editorial page.”16 That it appeared in September and was not held in the pending file until Christmastime signaled, Beach wrote, the importance of “never holding anything back for imagined future work.”17
Perhaps inevitably, some descriptions of the editorial’s enduring importance have bordered on the extreme. For example, Thomas Vinciguerra wrote in the New York Times in September 1997 that the timeless appeal of “Is There A Santa Claus?” seems “to suggest that what most readers of editorial pages care about are ruminations on single subjects like blizzards and the death of a princess. For such observations can constitute a national gathering of sorts, validating emotions that people want to share but can’t quite express.”18 A “national gathering of sorts” was probably far from what Church and the Sun had in mind in 1897, however. More likely, Church was guided by the contemporaneous view that editorials should be memorably bold. “Better no editorials than dreary ones,” journalists’ trade publication advised in 1894. “Audacity is a necessary feature of every good editorial.”19
It is important for other reasons to fill in details and clarify lingering questions about the classic editorial. Doing so presents a fresh reminder about the necessity of treating cautiously the accepted wisdom about U.S. journalism of the late 1890s. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how understanding of that period has been distorted by myth and imprecision.20 The notion, for example, that the Sun’s yellow press rivals in New York City fomented the Spanish-American War of 1898 is as implausible as it is irresistible and undying. The anecdote about William Randolph Hearst’s vow to “furnish the war” with Spain— purportedly contained in a telegram to the artist Frederic Remington while on assignment for Hearst in Cuba— is almost certainly apocryphal. Yet it endures.21 The notion that the Sun enthusiastically embraced “Is There A Santa Claus?”—and that the editorial was an immediate, often-reprinted popular success—are other, if modest, examples of the errors that distort understanding of a defining period in U.S. journalism history.
Moreover, a sharper understanding about the emergence of “Is There A Santa Claus?” offers insight into the differentiation that characterized U.S. newspapers of the late 1890s. Differences in appearance, typography, and content were marked among newspapers then, quite unlike the predictable homogeneity that typifies leading U.S. dailies of the early twenty-first century.22 The Sun’s reluctant embrace of the editorial indicates a senseofrestraint—and abiding respect for the anonymity of the editorial page—during a time of pronounced, even routine self-promotion in American journalism. The self-promoting impulse was notably evident in the yellow press of Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer23—and was apparent in other, more conservative newspapers of the time, including the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.24 The Sun largely (if not entirely25) abstained from conspicuous self-promotion, an inclination that helps explain its diffident embrace of “Is There A Santa Claus?”
Finally, a more precise understanding of the origins and emergence of American journalism’s classic editorial is important because it serves to highlight a little-recognized irony. The editorial that the Sun was reluctant to embrace has become the single artifact most often and unequivocally associated with the newspaper that went out of business more than fifty years ago.
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NOTES
12 . Cited in “An Interesting Journalistic Census,” Fourth Estate (22 April 1897): 7.
13. “An Interesting Journalistic Census,” Fourth Estate. The New York Times said the survey illustrated “the extremely remote connection between the conductors of a daily newspaper and its readers.” See “Newspapers and Their Readers,” New York Times (18 April 1897): 20. The Boston Journal reported receiving thousands of written responses that addressed a range of topics. The respondents also indicated that “about four people read each copy.” See “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate (6 May 1897): 6.
14. See, for example, Geo Beach, “Shop Talk At Thirty: ‘Yes Virginia,’ 100 Years Later, Provides Enduring Reminder of Print’s Power,” Editor & Publisher (20 December 1997): 48. See also, Neuzil, “In Newspapers We Don’t Trust Anymore, Virginia,” Star Tribune (18 December 1997).
15. Eric Newton, “Why ‘Yes, Virginia,’ Lives On,” Freedom Forum online site, http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=6220; posted 16 December 1997.
16. Beach, “Shop Talk At Thirty: ‘Yes Virginia,’ 100 Years Later,” Editor & Publisher.
17. Beach, “Shop Talk At Thirty: ‘Yes Virginia,’ 100 Years Later,” Editor & Publisher.
18 . Thomas Vinciguerra, “Yes, Virginia, a Thousand Times Yes,” New York Times (21 September 1997): WK2. Less reverently, Rick Horowitz wrote at the editorial’s centenary in 1997: “For a century now, readers have loved what Church created—but no more than journalists do. They’re ecstatic that they don’t have to crank out another Christmas essay of their own every year; they can just slap Francis Church’s ‘Yes, Virginia,’ up there on the page and go straight to the office party.” Horowitz, “Yes, Virginia, Faith Overcame Skepticism 100 Years Ago,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (21 September 1997): 3B. To be sure, “Is There A Santa Claus?” has attracted criticism and protest. In 1951, for example, participants at an anti-Santa demonstration in Lynden, WA, complained that the editorial encouraged Virginia O’Hanlon to view her skeptical friends as liars. See “Santa Survives Protest,” New York Times (23 December 1951): 24. A columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, in 1997: “Fie on Francis P. Church! Fooey to Virginia O'Hanlon! One hundred years ago, those two got together and cooked up what is America's best-known editorial. … It’s not that I don't hold stock in Church’s sermon. But allow me to add a little known but highly pertinent fact to the story: Francis Pharcellus Church had no children. If he had, he would have written something like, ‘Ginny, talk to your father.’ Then, he would have jotted down a note to the dad: ‘Nice try, pop. But reconciling lies is your job.’” See Andrew Herrmann, “It’s A Wonderful Lie,” Chicago Sun-Times (9 December 1997): 37.
19. The advice was published in the Missouri Editor and reprinted in “The Value of Editorials,” Fourth Estate (29 November 1894): 5.
20. For an examination of the myth and distortion that have come to characterize scholarly and popular understanding of American journalism of the late nineteenth century, see W. Joseph Campbell, Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001).
21. See for example, Ted Curtis Smythe, The Gilded Age Press, 1865–1900 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 187; David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 127, and Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 61–62.
22. For results of a detailed content analysis that traces the rise of uniformity among seven leading U.S. daily newspapers, see Campbell, Yellow Journalism, 151–173.
23. See, for example, “The World Inspires Charity for Cuba,” New York World (25 December 1897): 1.
24. See, for example, “Top Notch of Journalism: Praise of ‘the Post’s’ Inauguration Souvenir,” Washington Post (7 March 1897): 10, and “Join in the Jubilee: All Chicagoans Help ‘The Tribune’ In Celebrating,” Chicago Tribune (11 June 1897): 1. The Chicago Tribune marked its fiftieth anniversary in 1897. Its report about readers’ demand for its anniversary issue suggests a pronounced, overt attachment to newspapers that seems elusive in the early twenty-first century. No doubt indulging in hyperbole, the Tribune reported: “The scene at dawn was the liveliest ever witnessed around a Chicago newspaper office. The rapidity with which a certain supply of hot cakes is fabled to have been dealt out on some former occasion was a slow process compared with the celerity with which bundles of the Tribune were handed out to the distributors and newsboys. The latters were unable to supply the demand from women pouring into the city’s heart on their way to business, and these would-be purchasers sought their papers at the business office. The crowds grew until the police were compelled to form the people into double lines which extended in Madison street to State and in Dearborn to Monroe. Hundreds who couldn’t get into the lines thronged the streets until between 8 and 10 o’clock traffic on the sidewalks was blockaded.”
25. For a rare exception, see the brief article titled, “Praise for the Sun,” New York Sun (9 December 1897): 1. The article quoted William Lyon Phelps, a literature professor at Yale University, as saying, “’The Sun has the best accounts of current events of any newspaper in America.”
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