One day in 1897 a man working as a coroner’s assistant in New York City was approached by his eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, and found himself coming face-to-face with one of the most difficult questions the father of such a young child might have faced during that period: does Santa really exist? Philip O’Hanlon arguably took the easy way out by lobbing the heavy weight of this question back onto his daughter by suggesting that if she really wanted to know the truth she should write a letter of inquiry to the editors of what was then one of New York’s most successful newspapers, the Sun. After all, he was quite fond of telling his daughter “If you see in the Sun, it’s so.”
Virginia subsequently penned that soon-to-be-famous letter (although some have questioned whether the language used in the missive might not have included some assistance from her father) and when it arrived, a supervising editor handed it to one of the newspaper’s many writers of editorials, Francis Church. The Sun usually published editorial pieces crafted by its team of writers anonymous, but within the offices of the paper itself, Church had acquired the reputation of a man who was profoundly skeptical of faith, might possibly have been an atheist, and lived by the personal motto “Endeavor to clear your mind of cant.”
It cannot be stressed strongly enough how important it is to keep this motto in mind when reading “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” because one of the various definitions the Merriam-Webster dictionary supplies for the word cant is “the expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments.” Therefore, the writer of this most famous, beloved, and republished editorial op/ed in American history lived by a motto which can be translated as “make sure you always reject the expression of trite opinions expressed with great sentimentality.”
Upon learning he had been tapped to write a reply to Virginia’s letter, the ironically named Church is said to have lurched back to his desk with an air of resignation. He also immediately requested that his name not be attached to the reply and that his authorship remain securely anonymous afterward. What he proceeded to write has been joyously regarded as a sincere expression of support for blind faith despite the fact that just a cursory skimming of the final result reveals it is little more than a repetition of trite opinions expressed in an absurdly oversentimental way.
It cannot be determined with any sense of complete factual accuracy whether Church intended his reply to Virginia to be an exercise in Swiftian heights of ironic satire. Perhaps, he was indeed gripped for the first time in his career as a writer of editorial opinions on the subject of embracing cant by a sudden sincere belief that not seeing something is simply not hard evidence that the something does not exist. Whatever the actual truth, the latter scenario is the one that readers have taken to heart. In the process, the most famous thing Francis Church ever wrote—a sermon that stands in direct opposition to everything he ever preciously expressed a belief in—went on to become the single most famous editorial of all time in American newspaper history. And that success has gone on to inspire the only classical music cantata known to be inspired by a newspaper article, an Emmy-winning animated TV special, a highly fictionalized live-action made-for-TV movie, a hit country and western song and, of course, an idiomatic expression put into use whenever someone wants to make a point of the factual veracity of a topic.
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a work of satire too ironic to be recognized for what it is.
