Charles Vernon Vickrey

Charles V. Vickrey came to Near East Relief on loan from the Layman’s Missionary Movement in 1915. Vickrey is credited with overseeing NER’s promotional campaigns in his role as General Secretary. Although Vickrey traveled to the Near East several times, his true calling was on the home front. Vickrey traveled more than 7,000 miles per year, spreading the NER message throughout the United States.

Vickrey launched one of NER’s most famous promotional campaigns in 1923. In six short weeks, he organized the first-ever Golden Rule Sunday on December 2. Families would eat a meal similar to those served in NER orphanages and donate to the relief effort the money that they would have spent on a traditional Sunday dinner. The New York Times reported that former President Wilson had promised to dine on beans and corn grits. Several members of Congress signed Golden Rule pledges. President Coolidge announced that the Coolidge family and the cabinet would participate. More than one million Americans partook of a simple four-cent meal on the first Golden Rule Sunday. Even John D. Rockefeller, Jr. ate an orphanage-style meal. Golden Rule dinners were held around the world.

The campaign was so successful that it was made into an annual event. Fifteen hundred prominent New Yorkers attended NER’s first official Golden Rule Dinner at the Hotel Roosevelt on September 25, 1924. The guests dined on macaroni, cheese, apricots with corn syrup, bread, and cocoa. They used tin plates and cups that orphanage children had made from empty condensed milk cans. The dinner was the first of 500 similar events held throughout the United States that year, culminating in the observance of Golden Rule Sunday in private homes on December 7. Even the children in NER orphanages participated, eating even simpler meals of rice and raisins and donated their usual food to children in nearby refugee communities.

Vickrey had created an immensely popular new form of philanthropy. NER published "Vickrey’s Golden Rule Sunday: A Handbook" in 1926. The book contained everything needed to organize a Golden Rule event, including instructions for recruiting prominent businessmen and clubwomen to serve on a leadership committee, poems and readings, and even sheet music for an original Golden Rule hymn.

Charles V. Vickrey left NER in 1929 to launch the Golden Rule Foundation, which raised funds to help poor children all over the world. Vickrey died at age 90 in 1966.