Top portion of a "Letter from Heaven," produced in England. Date uncertain. Text is nearly identical to one printed around 1795.

CHAIN  LETTER  EVOLUTION

Abstract: Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. Around 1900 shorter and more secular letters appeared that demanded the reader distribute copies. Billions of these "luck chain letters" have circulated since then. During thousands of generations they have accumulated remarkable methods of getting themselves copied. For example, complementary testimonials developed, one exploiting perceived bad luck, another exploiting perceived good luck. Using a sample of over 600 dated letters, predominant types are identified and analyzed for their replicative advantage. Key events in chain letter history are examined in detail, including the puzzling origin of money chain letters. A reconstruction of uncollected intermediate forms suggests that around 1932 a luck chain letter actually brought unexpected money in the mail to some who lived in small towns. In 1935 the first money chain letter appeared, the infamous "Send-a-Dime," which was copied over a billion times worldwide within a few months. Newly discovered sources are used to argue that the unknown author of Send-a-Dime was a Denver woman motivated by charity.

The collection of letters is presented on-line in HTML format in the Paper Chain Letter Archive. An Annotated Bibliography on Chain Letters and Pyramid Schemes contains over 350 entries. A Glossary facilitates the independent reading of sections.

CONTENTS

2. Luck Chain Letters
    2.1  Predecessors
    2.2  The Mainline
    2.3  Outliers

3. How Chain Letters Work
    3.1  Population Dynamics
    3.2  Distribution Networks
    3.3  Evolution
    3.4  Retention
    3.5  Compliance
    3.6  Mainline Testimonials
    3.7  Effective Copying
    3.8  Effective Distribution

4. Events in Chain Letter History
    4.1  Origin of Money Chain Letters (1922 - 1935).
    4.2  Divergence of Luck and Money Chains (1935 - 1939).
    4.3  Luck Follows Money (1952).
    4.4  Origin of Copy Quota Twenty-Four (1959 - 1973).
    4.5  The Media Chain Letter (1948 - 1995)
    4.6  The "It Works" Blitz  (1979 - 1982).
    4.7  The Mainline Since 1982.

TABLES

1. Contents of the Paper Chain Letter Archive.
2. Mainline types.
3. Feature linkage: terminology and consequences.
4. Good Luck to Send-a-Dime.
5. Selected Luck Chain Specifications.
6. Occurrences of D, L, LD, and DL postscripts.
7. Occurrences of Trust, Belief, Kiss, Wife's Money, Love and Car.
8. Collapse of the Paper Luck Genre.

Acknowledgments

I could not have conducted this study without the assistance and friendship of Dr. Michael J. Preston, University of Colorado English Professor and folklorist. He obtained scores of letters, gave me copies of his files and put me up in his home while I worked in the CU Boulder library. The help of Dr. William F. Hansen, folklorist and Head of the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University was also indispensable. He provided many useful chain letters and translations, and his interest and encouragement have been sustaining.

Special thanks also go to Alan E. Mays, who sent many chain letters, his bibliography on chain letters and the Himmelsbrief, and archived chain email. Paul Smith also provided scores of letters and an extensive bibliography. Anna Guigne sent a stack of chain letters and answered questions. Steve Glickman helped with microfilmed Denver Post articles at UC Boulder. Carol Petty copied local newspaper articles in Springfield, Missouri, where chain letters rampaged for a few days in 1935. John Burkhardt shared his thoughts early in the project and emailed digitized letters. James H. Patterson has provided photocopies of many rare chain letters from his collection of "unmailable" items. Sandy Hobbs recently sent photocopies of every chain letter that has appeared in the publications Dear Mr. Thoms and Letters to Ambrose Merton.

I have received much needed help with foreign language chain letters. Sarah Winter translated several chain letters and an entire article from French into English. Ianina Tishchenko found several Russian chain letters and articles, and translated published letters in Polish and Russian to English. Dr. Jean-Bruno Renard has sent chain letters from France and Brazil, and a bibliography of French publications. Natalia Kasprzak sent two Polish articles on chain letters and translated a Polish letter into English. Bill Clark translated some chain letter Tagalog. Recently Martinovich Vladimir Aleksandrovich has been sending Russian chain letters he collected, and has translated a Russian version of the Romance Game chain into English. 

Though I am solely responsible for the approach and presentation here, this effort was sustained because a few people expressed interest. I am especially thankful for the encouragement of Richard Dawkins, who suggested I write "a book on chain letters, with all your detailed examples and analyses." This is not a book, but likely it is enough detail for most readers.

A list of those who provided one or more paper chain letters appears on the information page for the archive.

1.1 Introduction.
Seeking paper chain letters.  Overview.  Files and Conventions.

Seeking paper chain letters.
If you have any information on where we may obtain more paper chain letters please email. Chain letters can be sent directly to D. VanArsdale, PO Box 2335, Lompoc, CA  93438. Include the date you received the chain letter and its method of delivery, as by enclosing the postmarked envelope if the letter came in the mail. Letters nearly identical to one already collected are very useful. Foreign examples, clippings, obscure or foreign references, beliefs and rumors about chain letters, stories of receiving unexpected money in the mail or other personal experiences with chain letters are also welcome. Your comments and suggestions for this article are appreciated.

Overview.
Texts that appeal to superstition to encourage their copying or publication have circulated for over a thousand years. Beginning around 1900, copy quotas and deadlines were added, and claims of divine authorship and magical protection were removed. The resulting "luck chain letters" still circulate, and in over four thousand generations of copying (with variation) they have accumulated ways to increase replication that challenge our understanding.

Using a collection of over 600 dated paper chain letters, we have identified types and variations that appear and disappear over the years. Unexpectedly, it was discovered that, repeatedly, a single letter bearing some new innovation will propagate so abundantly and rapidly that within just a few years its descendants replace all similarly motivated letters in our collection.

Subtle methods that increase replication include:

• The use of ambiguity and obfuscation to deal with such questions as:
• Does simply passing on the received letter avoid bad luck?
• Does distribution of copies after the deadline bring good luck?
• Is the letter from a Catholic or Protestant source?
• The transfer of key text from a foreign letter to an indigenous letter, cueing an ethnic minority to misidentify the indigenous letter as the "same letter" that circulated in their home country.
• The assemblage of complementary testimonials, such as
• One that exploits perceived bad luck by one who is holding the letter, another that exploits perceived good luck.
• One that motivates an office supervisor to comply, another that motivates a subordinate to comply.

Files and Conventions.
Here are the directories (folders) and files in directory /chain-letter/, all pertaining to paper chain letters.

evolution.html  ("Chain Letter Evolution" - this file)
bibliography.htm  (Annotated Bibliography on chain letters and pyramid schemes)
glossary.htm  (Definitions of terms used for paper chain letters)
/archive/  (Filenames in the Directory containing The Paper Chain Letter Archive - system generated)
/archive/!information.htm  (Information on The Paper Chain Letter Archive)
/archive/!search.htm  (Search through the /chain-letter/ directory. Provided by FreeFind.)
/e-archive/  (Filenames in the Directory containing the Chain Email Archive - system generated)

When chain letter text is given in-line it may be slightly edited. Complete texts are indented and may be reformatted. Hypothetical letters and events are given in red. In a sequence of in-line letters, changes over the prior letter are in italics. Italics are also used for text within a paragraph.

The following conventions help the reader decide whether to pursue a link.-

• Links to a chain letter that are not a functional part of a sentence are in square brackets. Example: "There are other examples [1959]."
• Links that are a functional part of a sentence are not enclosed. Examples "See 1959." "According to Budge . . ."
• Navigational links ahead in this documents begin with a ">". Example: (> Media Chain Letter).
• Navigational links back in this document begin with a "<". Example: (< Start of this section)
• Links to the bibliography are in parentheses, often using the author's name. Examples: (Budge), (NYT, 1935-20).
• Links to the glossary are by the defined word used in a sentence. Example: The Martin letter was self-terminating.
• Links to remote WWW pages are in curly braces. Example: {USPS}.

1.2 Motivational Categories
Piety.  Luck. Charity. Petition. Money. Exchange. Parody. "World Record." Chain Email.

A chain letter explicitly directs the recipient to make and distribute copies of itself. Examples reveal that the form and content of a chain letter are highly correlated with the principal motive for its replication. For paper chains the following seven motivational categories apply to almost all the examples one encounters.

Piety.
The Letters from Heaven  claim to have been written by God or some divine agent. They often command Sabbath observance and promise the bearer magical protection from various misfortunes. They have circulated  in Europe and elsewhere for centuries and were reprinted during World War II. The Letters from Heaven do not quite fit our definition of a chain letter since most do not ask that copies be made. However many ask the bearer to "publish" the letter, and threatened those who disbelieved. We discuss them later (> Heaven) as predecessors to luck chain letters. The filenames for the Letters from Heaven begin with the letter "h" in the Paper Chain Letter Archive.

Luck.
Luck chain letters appeal primarily to superstition, promising good luck if the letter is replicated and bad luck if it is not. They are often called "prayer" chains because many prior types started with a prayer or Bible verse. They may have developed from a requirement to distribute a prayer in a Roman Catholic Novena devotion [1898], or as a secularization of promises and threats in the Letters from Heaven. The English language paper luck chain letters of the twentieth century will be our principal topic. Most examples in the last few decades are highly traditional, having gradually accumulated varied devices to promote propagation. Luck chains have also been common on the Internet. Though originally these were simply digitizations of paper letters, they subsequently specialized to the email medium [e1995]. Filenames for paper luck chain letters begin with the letter "l" in the archive.

Charity.
A charity chain letter requests money or some item be sent to a fixed address, ostensibly for charitable, political or memorial purposes. An 1888 letter solicits dimes for the education of "the poor whites in the region of the Cumberlands." This letter states it is an adaption of a previous solicitation, and asks that four copies be sent to friends. For compliance ". . . you will receive the blessing of Him who was ready to die for us" [1888]. This is the earliest known chain letter. In an 1889 example an American college student solicited dimes and ten copies [Martin]. This letter claimed to be self-terminating: recipients were asked to increment a generation count at the top of the letter until it reached some preset maximum at which time the chain was to stop. This practice continued at least through 1916 [Billy]. But a few years after a letter was launched, only those circulated which had inflated the maximum (NYT 1917). We have two examples of a solicitation for used postage stamps to build a children's ward in Australia (OED). The first is from [1900] and is number 173 of 180 maximum. The second, highly modified, was still in circulation ten years later [1910] and is number 375 of 480 maximum. Many charity chain letters exaggerate the loss if there is a single failure to comply [1895]. Apart from intimidating recipients to comply, this may have been influenced by certain mail frauds of the time (Thomas 1900). Recent charity chains are "endless" and some do not ask for money. The Craig Shergold appeal requested get well cards for a dying child (since recovered), intending to break a Guinness world record that existed at the time. It was launched in September 1989 by FAX, email and chain letters. By December 1990 a record 33,000,000 cards had been received (Guigne). Despite efforts to stop the appeal, hundreds of millions have now been sent. Charity chain letters were an influence on early luck chain letters and, 40 years later, enabled the beginning of money chain letters. They are common on the Internet but most are hoaxes {Jessica Mydek}. We include in this category a single example of a request for prayers for missionaries [1905], this in form being very similar to the charity letters of the time. Archive filenames for charity letters begin with "c".

Petition.
In their modern form, chain petitions request their own reproduction, circulation and delivery of signatures. Earlier examples did less. A 1903 letter asks that recipients send their name and address to the "U.S. Moral Society" to be added to a petition to Congress to prohibit the sale of cigarettes to minors [1903]. Subsequently the initial communication is itself a petition, as in an attempt to draft Calvin Coolidge as the Republican nominee for President [1927]. The use of chain letters in political campaigns goes back at least to 1912 (NYT, 1927). Other chain petition causes include Czech independence [1949], nuclear disarmament [1985], protests of apartheid [1988], and a misinformed boycott of Proctor & Gamble [1986]. Chain petitions also appear on the Internet, including a perennial appeal to support National Public Radio [e1996]. Paper chain petitions have filenames beginning with "p" in the archive.

Money.
Money chain letters urge the recipient to send money to one or more prior senders, claiming that one can likewise benefit in the future. A managed list of names and addresses is provided. Money chain letters originated in the United States in the spring of 1935 with the "Send-a-Dime" letter, also called "Prosperity Club" [Denver]. We show how a prior luck chain letter [1933] was used as a model for Send-a-Dime (> Origin $). Money chain letters have influenced the content and distribution of luck chain letters up into the 1950's and possibly beyond (sections 4.2 and 4.3). They continue as an omnipresent nuisance to this day, both in paper [2002] and as E-mail [2001]. Money chains and pyramid schemes violate Federal {USPS} and State (West's CA) laws. If filenames in the Paper are ordered by name, money chain letter filenames will appear in a block, all beginning with an "m."

Exchange.
The exchange chain letters ask that an item small value, such as a recipe or postcard, be sent to one or more prior senders, promising that if the chain is not broken the sender will in turn receive many such items. They first appeared in 1935, modeling the infamous Send-a-Dime money chain letter [1936]. Within several years they had diverged in form, usually reducing the list of senders [1937]. Unlike luck chain letter types, the copy quota on exchange chain letters varies considerably, as does the number of names present. Exchange chains continue to circulate in paper [1996], but only one example in email form has been collected (a used paperback book exchange). Filenames for exchange chain letters begin with an "x" in the archive.

"World Record."
In the 1980's a certain postcard exchange chain letter specialized to circulate among children and falsely claimed that its faithful continuation would soon result in a Guinness world record for chain letters [1985]. By the new millennium the request for postcards had been deleted and the letter is now motivated solely by its promise of a world record (crediting each sender!) and the threat that anyone who breaks the chain will spoil this effort and be identified [2000]. Judging from ISP hit reports on my chain letter files, this chain is still circulating in considerable volume [2005]. Though extremely objectionable for its threatening exploitation of children, this chain bears curious features such as lists of names on the back of the envelope, stampless mail delivery and year of origin claims that sporadically progress. Most of its successful innovations are likely accidental or unintended. If you have received a copy of this letter, I will send you a self-addressed stamped envelope for it plus the postmarked envelope it came in. Just email me your postal address (email). Such examples will assist preparation of a WWW page that informs recipients and their parents about the letter's false promises and  meaningless intimidation. As for all chain letters here, children's names will be obscured in online versions. Filenames for the "world record" chain letters begin with a "w" in the archive. 

Parody.
Very soon after the first publicity (April 19, 1935) of the Send-a-Dime craze, parodies appeared that mocked both the language and the geometrical progression of Send-a-Dime. Examples mentioned in the press include "Send-a-Pint" and the "Drop Dead Club" (shoot the first person on the list). We have obtained complete texts of three early parodies [1935]. The next known examples are the familiar "wife exchange" [1953] and "Fertilizer Club: "go to the top address on the list and crap on the front lawn" [1971]. Perhaps these had circulated, uncollected, since 1935. Parodies are often published, but still circulate in different versions like photocopied office humor. There is no serious request for copies, thus technically they are not chain letters. Parodies have probably served to educate the public on the fallacies of money chain letters, and have influenced the content of luck chain letters. They are very common on the Internet [St. Paul]. Paper parodies of chain letters appear in the archive with filenames beginning with "j" (for joke).

Chain E-mail.
For "chain e-mail" (frequently forwarded e-mail) there are a large and growing number of motives for replication. Hoaxes, humor and expressions of friendship are prominent. The following is an alphabetic list of some of the many topics observed since 1993:  admonitions (duty to friends, sobriety, safe sex), anti chain letters, aphorisms, ASCII art and scrollers, communication experiments and demonstrations, consumer warnings, friendship, hoaxes (virus warnings, charity, giveaways, false quotations), human rights alerts, humor (single jokes and lists, office humor items, stories), inspiration, Internet protection (modem tax, phone charges, anti-censorship), good luck (often in sex or romance), missing children, money chains, number guessing tricks, parodies, patriotism, personality tests, petitions, poems, political commentary, practical jokes (especially April Fools Day), prayer requests, protests, rumors, school & exams, seasonal (Christmas, St. Valentine's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving Day), speeches, surveys, tag (snowball fight, mooning), urban legends (warnings, humor), Web page suggestions and voting recommendations. Many of these topics appear in combination, such as a humor item with a short luck chain attached.

Though some e-mail chains begin as digitizations of paper chain letters [e1994] or office humor items [e1995], their subsequent  history in the electronic medium, and the chain e-mail genre as a whole, differ significantly from paper chain letters. The main reasons for this are that email is usually reproduced exactly, and can be distributed in great numbers with little effort or cost. Another difference is that e-mail chains are often posted on various lists and group venues, and likewise if there are any denunciations and refutations these may also receive the same exposure. In comparing e-mail to paper letters, let us disregard the many "fun and friendship" type emails which have no counterpart in paper chain letters, and focus on superstition and deception. We then find that for chain e-mail: (1) few minor variations are present and virtually no accidental variations, (2) initial propagation is accelerated but items have a shorter life span, (3) readers replicate messages for a greater variety of motives, (4) motives for innovation are dominated by hoax and vandalism, (5) probably no innovations are introduced by believers, (6) the e-mail genre through time progresses by large jumps rather than modifications within an identifiable lineage. Though there are some "traditional" themes in chain e-mail, such as virus warnings, there is very little traditional text. Nor is there a future for tradition in e-mail replicators. Increasingly, incorporation of traditional text in a chain e-mail innovation facilitates its automated detection and deletion.

Most genres of chain email are reviled by veteran Internet users for their dishonesty and "waste of band width." On the last point, by reading denunciations one would judge that chain letters are far more despised than pornography. But a typical chain email, including some forwarding statements, uses about 2 kilobytes, whereas a typical color picture uses about 50 kilobytes.

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

1.3  SOURCES
The collection of letters .  Table 1 - Contents of the Paper Chain Letter Archive.  Foreign language letters.
Publications. Web Sites.  Interviews.

The Collection of letters.
I began collecting chain letters in 1973 with the hope they would reveal an evolutionary sequence. This effort was renewed several years later after discovering the folklore literature, particularly Michael Preston's 1976 article "Chain Letters" (Preston). This documented chain letters in a state of flux. Subsequently I placed ads for chain letters in collectibles magazines. Collecting large numbers of more recent letters began in June 1995 when Dr. Preston solicited chain letters for me from folklorists. In recent years I have also purchased old chain letters on Ebay, the immense on-line auction. Sometimes copies were provided free by the seller or buyer, or a transcript could be made from auction photographs.

All of the datable letters (except for some foreign examples and recent money chain letters) have now been digitized in HTML format and each is accessible on-line as a separate file in the Paper Chain Letter Archive. The archive directory also contains an information page. The entire /chain-letter/ directory can be searched, including the text of all the letters in the archive, using a site search engine provided by FreeFind. Transcriptions in the archive preserve the errors in the original letter unless otherwise noted. The medium of the letter, its date of circulation, how it was delivered, the provider and other information is documented after the text.

Table 1  - Contents of the Paper Chain Letter Archive.
Chain letters presently in the Paper Chain Letter Archive are tabulated below by year of circulation and motivational category. The Letters from Heaven (13 in number) and  foreign chain letters (25), though present in the archive, are excluded from the table.
 

Years	Luck	Charity	Petition	Money	Parody	Exchange	World Record
1885 - 89		3
1890 - 94		1
1895 - 99	1	4
1900 - 04	1	3	1
1905 - 09	6	4
1910 - 14	23	1
1915 - 19	12	7	1
1920 - 24	11	1
1925 - 29	7		1
1930 - 34	3
1935 - 39	3	1		41	6	17
1940 - 44	3	1		8		20
1945 - 49	4		1			6
1950 - 54	5	1			6	3
1955 - 59	4				4	2
1960 - 64	1	1			2	1
1965 - 69	5				1	2
1970 - 74	11				1	3
1975 - 79	27			6 (a)	2	6
1980 - 84	35			3	2	4
1985 - 89	36	1 (b)	11	2	6	7
1990 - 94	51	1	1	3	1	4
1995 - 99	50	1		3		16
2000 - 04	6			1			5
2005 - 08	2			1		1	7
TOTALS	307	32 (b)	16	68 (a)	31	92	12
	Luck	Charity	Petition	Money	Parody	Exchange	World  Record

(a) Over 150 money chain letters have been collected since 1975 but most have not been digitized..
(b) The Craig Shergold appeal circulated widely beginning in 1989 (Guigne). Only two are archived.

The numbers in the table are not reliable measures of relative circulation. An exception are the numerous money chain letters from 1935-1939, all from the 1935 "Send-a-Dime" craze. However the gap afterwards in this column means in part that I did not start saving money chain letters until after 1975. These can be collected by the bushel by answering sucker ads and thus getting on "opportunity seekers" mailing lists.

Foreign Language Letters.
Because of the ease with which letters are transmitted internationally, chain letters are, and have always been, an international phenomenon. Only by the extensive collection and classification of foreign language examples can an accurate genealogy of chain letters be constructed. It is also revealing to see how chain letters vary from one culture to another. There are some foreign language examples presently in the archive, but it is hoped that at some time in the future many more will be collected and subsequently translated into English. To highlight this nascent effort, subdirectories have been established in the archive for chain letters in some other languages.

In 2006 I was contacted by Martinovich Vladimir Aleksandrovich, head of the Center of  New Religious Movements Studies in Belarus. He has collected many chain letters in the Russian and Ukrainian languages. Transcriptions of these are currently being entered in the Paper Chain Letter Archive in the subdirectory /archive/russian/. 

Publications.
Of the over 600 letters in the Paper Chain Letter Archive, over 80 were found in publications, mostly from folklore sources and newspapers. The New York Times Index located a few older texts [1916] and a mention of a McKinley Memorial chain before it was collected (NYT 1906). Some French (Le Quellec) and Polish (Robotycki) publications contain many chain letters that have yet to be entered into the archive or translated. The Annotated Bibliography currently contains over 350 entries, many of them newspaper articles on money chain letters or pyramid schemes.

Web Sites.
There are many thousands of WWW sites that match a search on "chain letter." The vast majority of these are about email chains, which are not our topic here. A useful list of annotated links appears in Watrous, and we will not duplicate this. To find the texts of luck chain letters, paper or early email versions, one can search for traditional text such as "Dolan Fairchild" or "Dalan Fairchild." A few transcriptions of paper luck chain letters found this way have been entered into the Paper Chain Letter Archive [1998]. Others are present on the WWW, but it is difficult to judge if they are complete and unedited. An entertaining survey of chain letters appears in "Meditations on the Chain Letter" by John Burkhardt (link not available, 1/7/07). Included is a typical paper luck chain letter in which many variant readings have been added in parentheses. An article by Charles Bennett, Ming Li and Bin Ma, titled "Chain Letters & Evolutionary Histories" appears in the June 2003 issue of  Scientific American (Bennett). This uses phylogenetic inference algorithms to construct a cladogram for 33 DL type chain letters. The 33 chain letters used, and 8 additional foreign and outlier types, are available online {chain.html}.

Interviews.
I have obtained some information about chain letters and people's attitudes toward them by informal questioning of acquaintances. Several inquiries about foreign circulation have been made on USENET newsgroups. Much more could have been learned by systematic interviewing. However, people who send out chain letters, for luck or money, are often reluctant to reveal their activities and motives. Nevertheless, some interview material in newspapers and popular magazines has been very useful for understanding replication (Marilyn Bender, New York Times, 1968).

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

2.1  PREDECESSORS
Ancient documents that advocate their own perpetuation.  The Letters from Heaven.  Transitions to chain letters.

Ancient documents that advocate their own perpetuation.
Many ancient texts survive which provide diagrams, incantations or prayers that claim to benefit those who learn them. Some come close to our definition of a chain letter by urging that a personal copy be made. The Ancient Egyptian "Book of that which is in the Underworld" states (of a picture it provides):

The man who shall make a picture of the things which are to the north of the hidden house of the Tuat shall find it of great benefit to him both in heaven and on earth; and he who knows it shall be among the spirits near Ra, and he who recites the words of Isis and Ser shall repulse Apep in Amentet, and he shall have a place on the boat of Ra both in heaven and upon earth. The man who knows not this picture shall never be able to repulse the serpent Neha-hra. (Budge)

The world's oldest extant examples of printing are dharani, or magical incantations, printed in Japan between 764 and 770, during the reign of Empress Shotoku. A total of over one million copies of four different dharani from the Great Dharani Sutra of the Spotless and Pure Light . . . were printed to be placed in . . . [one million pagodas] built at the command of Shotoku. In this sutra it is stated that if a person were to build several million small pagodas and place copies of dharani in them, that person's life would be lengthened, evil karma would be expunged, and rebels and enemies would be vanquished.  (Mizuno, p. 172)

Another Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, is the oldest (868 AD) extant book printed by wood block reliefs. It promised great merit to those who "observe and study this Scripture, explain it to others and circulate it widely . . ." (Goddard, p. 96)

The Surangama Sutra states:

"Ananda, should any sentient beings in any of the kingdoms of existence, copy down this Dharani on birch-bark or palm-leaves or paper made of papyrus or of white felt, and keep it safely in some scented wrapping, this man no matter how faint-hearted or unable to remember the words for reciting it, but who copies it in his room and keeps it by him, this man in all his life will remain unharmed by any poison of the Maras." (Goddard, p. 275)

The Letters from Heaven.
The "Letters from Heaven" (often called by the German "Himmelsbrief") claim to have been written by God or some divine agent. Many authors restrict the term to apocryphal Christian letters. These often claim miraculous delivery to Earth, magical protection for the possessor, blessings to those who "publish" them and divine punishment for disbelief of their claims. The original copies are often claimed to have been written in gold letters, or with the blood of Jesus. Many published versions were illuminated. An early and frequent feature is the command for extreme Sabbath observance, as in the Madgeburg Himmelsbrief [text].

A German authority on the Himmelsbrief, H. Stube, said the letters long predated Christianity (Oda). Examples in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Syrian and Ethiopic have been published with German translations. Jewish and Islamic Himmelsbrief are also reported (Hand). These may all derive from an early Greek source (Bittner). A letter which was said to have fallen from heaven existed in the third century AD (Hippolytos, Refutation of All Heresies). The oldest Letter from Heaven for which we have a full text is the Latin "Letter from Heaven on the observance of the Lord's day," the original of which dates from the close of the sixth century (Priebsch). St. Boniface denounced this as a "bungling work of a madman or the devil himself." Eckehard (1115 AD) wrote that it had spread over the whole globe then known to man. It has circulated in English in many versions [1795, image available at link].

Jacob, organizer of the Crusades of the Shepherds, claimed (ca. 1251) the Virgin Mary appeared to him and gave him a letter. While in public he always carried it in his hand. A cult of uniformed flagellants appeared in Germany in 1261 claiming to possess a heavenly letter that had descended upon the altar of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem before a multitude. The text has survived: God, angry at human sin, has decided to destroy all life, but the Virgin intercedes and God grants humanity one last chance to reform. Any priest who refused to pass on the divine message to his congregation would be eternally damned. During the Black Death (1348-9) the same letter, with a paragraph on the plague added, was used as a manifesto by a revived flagellant movement. At gatherings the manifesto was read publicly, the audience being "swept by sobbing and groaning." (Cohn)

Some Letters from Heaven specialized in protection, and accumulated long lists of weapons by which the possessor could not be harmed. The Count Philip Himmelsbrief  [1895] granted protection against "spear, sword, sabre, cutlass, knife, tomahawk, rapier, helmet, burdon, . . . , and  everything prohibited by holy writ, that is from all kinds of weapons, artillery, cannon, musket, rifle, gun or pistol." A preamble mentions its use in the American Revolution and claims that Count Philip of Flanders sponsored it after he was unable to execute a condemned prisoner who had secreted a copy on his person. Various Letters from Heaven in German were printed in Pennsylvania during the 19th and early 20th century (Oda), [1887 image1 & image2]. American forces carried English language versions during World Wars I and II.

Letters claiming divine authority are also reported from India. Chain letters circulated in Shahabad in 1864 that condemned the breeding of pigs and consumption of alcohol.  They were said to be from Heaven. In North Tirhut, 1872, cow protection was advocated by "strange papers" which "warned that Jaganath (Lord of the World) would curse any one who did not pay heed to this message and would burn down the house of any one who failed to pass it along to other people." Letters advocating cow protection in 1893 mandated recipients "make and then issue copies to at least five villages" - a very early example of a copy quota.  (Yang)

An email chain posted to an Islamic coins mailing list [1999] consists of: (1) an Islamic "Letter from Heaven," which likely first circulated in paper, and (2) a reduced version (testimonials only) of a paper luck chain letter we call the Lottery24 type.

Transition to chain letters.
Edwin Fogel, writing in 1908, assumed that a luck chain letter [1908] was a new version of a Letter from Heaven (Fogel). There is little similarity in the texts, but perhaps Fogel was familiar with transitional forms now lost. Speaking of the apocryphal Letter from Jesus Christ [1915], Edgar Goodspeed wrote "it is sometimes sent through the mail with a request that the recipient send copies of it to three others, as some great misfortune is likely to befall him if he does not" (1931). Such a practice must have long predated 1931. Thus luck chain letters may have evolved from the preambles and postscripts to Letters from Heaven. At some stage the divine communication may have been replaced by a less pretentious "prayer," followed by entreaties to copy it. This is the form of the "Ancient Prayer" type (1905 - 1925) discussed in the next section. Some versions of Ancient Prayer promise deliverance "from all calamities" and threaten "eternal punishment" [1906] - as do some Letters from Heaven [Madgeburg]. Folklorists have generally followed Fogel in presuming that luck chain letters derive from the Himmelsbrief tradition (Ellis), though transitional examples have yet to be found.

More collecting, and examination of European sources, should clarify the transition to chain letters. The first luck chain letters may also have been influenced by early charity chain letters [1888], which likely introduced the idea of a copy quota.

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

2.2  THE MAINLINE
Features of 20th century luck chain letters.  The succession of types.  Table 2 - Mainline Types.
Ancient Prayer.  Good Luck.  Prosperity.  Luck of London .  Luck by Mail. Death20.
Lottery-Death.  Death-Lottery.

Features of 20th century luck chain letters.
Around 1900 chain letters were influenced by increasing literacy, international mail and postcards, and changing attitudes about religion and miracles. Also chain letters themselves accumulated new technologies of increasing replication. Whereas the prior Letters from Heaven often urged the reader to "publish" the letter, chain letters gained more exposure by relying on individual copying with specific copy quotas and deadlines. The following features characterize luck chain letters of the 20th century.

(1) Brevity. The Letters from Heaven typically had over 500 words and were often elaborately printed. By contrast, a widespread luck chain from 1905-17 had about 100 words and was usually distributed by handwritten postcards.

(2) Secularity.  Luck chains originating in the 1900's dropped claims of divine authorship, delivery from heaven to earth, granting protection from fire or weapons, divine punishment for disbelief, and miracles generally. A Saint, missionary or military officer may be attributed as the author of the letter, but never Jesus. Promises of good luck and threats of bad luck exploited vague popular superstitions rather than naive piety.

(3) Copy quota.  Chain letters state a minimum number of copies that the recipient is encouraged to distribute.

(4) Deadline.  This task is to be completed within a stated period.

(5) Waiting period.  But according to most letters, one must wait a certain number of days before receiving  good luck.

(6) Testimonials.  All English language luck chain letters since the 1930's contain accounts of fortune and misfortune allegedly experienced by prior recipients of the letter. These testimonials are told in the third person, usually of a named individual.

(7) Circumnavigation.  Almost all luck chains since 1910 have either (1) declared they are to go "all over" or around the world, or (2) claimed a certain number of completed circumnavigations.

(8) Lists.  When someone signs their name on a chain letter, a recipient may faithfully copy this name. And another person may sign on, and both names may be copied. The growing list suggests to others that they in turn sign on. Thus chain letters often accumulated long lists of senders [1922]. Initials, names of couples [1975], dates received [1982], and company letterheads [1990] have similarly accumulated. Lists may reach fifty or more names and become a burden to copy (Lardner). Some chain letters avoided this by instructing, for example, "Copy the above names, omitting the first, add your name last" [1933]. If obeyed, this maintains an escalating list of fixed length which we call a managed list. Other chain letters forbade "signing on" - notably postcard chains [1911] and Internet luck chains [e1994]. The presence of a senders list on a chain letter may change the motives for sending it and the choice of recipients.

Successive mainline types are listed in the table below. Note that there is little temporal overlap except for the 1960's when both quota five and quota twenty letters circulated. Nor is there any significant regional variation within the U.S., nor even between North America, Australia and England. For the standard example of a type we use the oldest letter that does not have a major deletion. These standard letters are needed to define exactly what we mean be a variation within a type. The word counts in the table are for the standard examples, and exclude names in any list that may be present. The deadline and waiting periods are measured in days.

Table 2.  Mainline types.
 

No.	Type	Sample	Years	Standard	No. Words	Quota	Deadline	Wait
1	Ancient Prayer	50	1905-25	Atwood	105	9 (a)	9 (a)	9 / 10 (b)
2	Good Luck	15	1922-32	Birmingham	66	9 / 5 / 4	1	9 / 4
3	Prosperity (c)	6	1933-45	Hyatt	102	5 (d)	1	9 / 4
4	Luck by Mail	11	1952-67	Halpert	132	5 (e)	1	4
5	Death20	7	1959-77	Bloomsbury	193	20	4	4
6	Lottery-Death (LD)	13	1974-75	Maryland	383	24 & 20 (f)	4	9 & 4
7	Death-Lottery (DL)	182	1973-08	AFC	351	20	4	4

(a) Two postcards from England and one from Australia have quota, deadline and wait all seven [1916, 1923, 1925]. Two late US examples have quota 10 copies, deadline 10 days and wait 11 days [1924].
(b) Some examples read nine days, others ten.
(c)  Includes two Prosperity type letters re-titled "The Luck of London," [1944, 1945].
(d) A 1937 postcard asks for ten copies [1937].
(e) "Send this copy and four others" - also on a Prosperity example.  [1939].
(f) Both numbers appear on the earliest examples.

Of our 293 examples of dated English language luck chain letters, 265 are from the mainline and 28 are outliers. Any paper luck chain letter received in the 1990's was very likely a mainline letter, and the product of over 4,000 generations of copying going back to an original letter perhaps composed in World War I. But this ancestry includes many deliberate innovations, and the addition of an entire Latin American letter onto a mainline letter around 1973. We now describe the mainline types and their inter-relationships. This also provides an opportunity to introduce some topics we will investigate in more detail later in this treatise.

1.  Ancient Prayer.
An early example of the "Ancient Prayer" chain is a letter postmarked in Leeds, Maine on January 6, 1905.

Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, we implore Thee, O Eternal God, to have mercy upon mankind. Keep us from all sin and take us to be with Thee eternally. Amen

This prayer was sent by Bishop Lawrence, recommending it to be rewritten and sent to nine other persons. He who will not say it will be afflicted with some great misfortune. One person who failed to pay attention to it met with a dreadful accident. He who will rewrite it to nine other persons commencing on the day it is received - and sending only one each day will on or after the ninth day experience great joy.

Please do not break the chain.  [1905]

An Ancient Prayer
Oh Lord I implore thee to bless all mankind.  Keep us from all evil and take us to dwell with thee eternally.

This prayer was sent to me.  It is being sent all over the world. It was said in Jesus time that all who would write it and pass it on would be delivered from all calamities.  Those who would not write it on would meet with some misfortune. Those who write it before nine days, stating the day received, to nine of their friends will on the ninth day receive some great joy.  So do not break the chain.
Received Oct. 6.  Name unsigned.   [1910]

Above we use italics for text that is essentially different from what is in the prior example. The false attribution to Bishop Lawrence has been dropped, and in its place two statements debut that will appear in various forms on millions of subsequent chain letters. We discuss the advantages to replication of "all over the world" later (> circumnavigation). The reward of  "great joy" for compliance is present on nearly all examples of Ancient Prayer we have discovered (even in Russia?, see Viola, note 59). Around 1909 the playful suggestion to copy it and "see what will happen" was introduced [1909]. This became common (but not universal) on Ancient Prayer [1911] and persists in the mainline to the present day [2005].  Early versions of ancient prayer suggest the influence of the letters from heaven. For example,  the 1909 letter claims that its rewards and punishments were spoken of "in Jerusalem." This was subsequently replaced in all examples by "in Jesus' time," possibly originating as a copying error.

An interesting feature in the above 1910 text is the word "stating," seen to be a copying error for "starting" by comparison to other examples [1908, 1911]. A  recipient has responded to this error by writing the date (Oct. 6). An abundant variation was soon established in which the date of receipt was recorded [1912, 1914, 1915]. The advantage to replication of this practice was probably that it reminded the recipient of the impending deadline, whereas postcards lacking the date of receipt could be more easily ignored until the recipient realized the deadline had passed with no ill effect. The role of copying errors in chain letter evolution can be overestimated, as compared to deliberate innovations. But for any copying error to produce a successful variation is remarkable, and we will investigate further possibilities of this (> Quota 24).

Some Ancient Prayer examples are self titled "The Endless Chain" [1911], or "The Endless Chain of Prayer" [Fogel, 1908,1923, 1925]. Chain letters as we know them were originally called "Endless chain letters" (NYT, 1906) to distinguish them from the then familiar self-terminating charity chains.

With U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, Ancient Prayer proliferated and differentiated. Some were exclusive within various fraternal organizations; some prayed for  "peace" and others for "victory." An unmarried woman in Ohio received at least three of the Victory postcards just in October of 1917 [Hers 1, 2, 3]. The chain was so numerous that the editors of the New York Times proposed that it originated as a German plot to clog the mails (NYT, 1917d). A wartime postage rate increase, from one to two cents for postcards, may have cooled the chain off and foiled the Huns. The same chain postcard with substituted titles had also served the martial spirit of the Central Powers. A German language version, postmarked in Austria a year before the start of World War I, begins "We Germans fear God, and Nothing else on Earth!" [1913]. After the war was over Ancient Prayer declined in the U.S. and England. Some resented that "during the First World War they and many people they knew had received letters threatening death or horrors to their loved ones in the trenches of France if the chain was broken." (Simpson 2000). Two closely related late examples have copy quota ten and a new prayer [1924-02, 1924-03]. This suggests that the war related prayers [1916, 1917] had completely captured circulation, and thus the end of the war required invention of a new prayer. Foreign collecting will likely reveal the worldwide circulation of Ancient Prayer.

Prior to uploading the first version of Chain Letter Evolution in 1998 there was no classification of luck chain letters into types. The abundance and duration of the Ancient Prayer type had been forgotten. The fact that it was usually written on postcards contributed greatly to its preservation. Almost all of our physical examples were purchased on Ebay from paper collectibles dealers.

2. Good Luck.
According to early reports (1948, 1968) and some chain letters, the Good Luck letter was started by an American officer serving in World War I [later, on a "Flanders battlefield," 1927]. However our earliest examples come from 1922, a boom year for the chain both in England and the U.S. These usually had long lists of paired names at the top, sender to receiver [1922]. Here is an example published by Ring Lardner (he omitted the names):

Good Luck
Copy this and send to nine people you wish good luck.  The chain was started by an American officer and should go three times around the world.  Don't break the chain for whoever does will have bad luck.  But do it in 24 hours and count nine days and you will have good fortune. (1922)

3. Prosperity. Folklorist Harry M. Hyatt reported (1935) that "during the latter part of 1933 a 'chain letter' fad appeared" and he gave a nearly complete text. This letter had a list of six sender's names and cities at the top of the letter and instructions to:

Copy the above names, omitting the first.  Add your name last.

The good luck of Flanders was sent to me and I am sending it within twenty four hours. This chain was started by an American Officer in Flanders and is going around the world four times - and one who breaks it will have bad luck. Copy this letter and see what happens to you four days after mailing. It will bring you good luck. Send this copy and four others to people you wish good luck. Do not keep this letter. It must be in the mail twenty four hours after receiving it.

Mrs. Gay Field received $5000, five hours after mailing.

Mrs. Ambrose received $4000, four hours after mailing.

Mr. Nevin broke the chain and lost everything he had.

Here is definite proof for the good luck sent prayers.

Good luck to you and trust in God. He who suffers our needs.

This brings prosperity to you in four days after mailing.

Do not send money. Cross the top name off and put yours
at the bottom.

[A list of 8 names and cities of residence follow, the first two crossed out.]

Note that  the command "Do not send money" has been added near the bottom. This appears on all subsequent mainline letters to this day. We analyze the replicative advantage of this command in Section 4.2 (> Divergence). Some text in this 1939 letter (. . . was sent to me, . . . see what happens) suggests it has been influenced in some circuitous route by an Ancient Prayer letter.

3a. The Luck of London (sub-type)
We have located only twelve luck chain letters that date from 1930 to 1951. Thus at present it is difficult to delineate a mainline in this period, or to estimate relative circulation. But we can rely in part on observations at the time. The previous Prosperity type was, according to Hyatt, a fad in Illinois in 1933, and hence we can presume it was a fad elsewhere. "The Luck of London" chain letter is said to have originated during the blitz (1940), was "frequent" in the U.S in 1944 (Collier's), and continued to circulate after the war (DeLys, 1948). The following example was collected by Jean Reherman in Oklahoma.

                                                                       One flag, One country
                                                                          The luck of London

The luck of London was sent to me, I am sending it on to you. This was started
by an American officer, -It has been around the world four times. Copy this and
see what happens four day's later! Send this and four copies to people you wish
luck.

Grace Field won $45,000 after sending it. Dr. F. A. Anderson won $25,000 but lost it
because he broke the chain. It will bring luck to you four days after mailing it. Do
not send money. Do not keep this letter.  It must be mailed 24 hours after receiving
it. Good Luck. The one who breaks the chain will have bad luck.  [1944]
 

Someone must have deliberately replaced the previous title, "The Good Luck of Flanders," with "The Luck of London" title as above. Some, or all, of the other changes may have already been made on the letter at that time, such as the updating from World War I to II. This is typical for successful chain letter innovations: not too much is added, and changed text often mimics the prior text. A traditional chain letter is exactly what has survived thousands of receipts. Successful innovation requires respect for this received tradition since the letter will bear adaptions that are not understood. Further, there will be recipients who have a magical loyalty to the traditional letter, perhaps because it seemed to work for them once. They will not remember the exact wording of the letter they used, but they are unlikely to tolerate a complete rewrite. Thus in the history of chain letters, certainly since the 1920's, successful innovations are overall conservative: they may be bold in updating themes, but are unlikely to introduce entirely new themes. We examine successful innovations very closely in this treatise. This reveals the mastery of those few anonymous folks who deliberately nudge chain letters along now and then.

The Luck of London letter may have given rise to a chain letter self-titled "Chain of Good Luck." These are discussed in the next section on outlier types (> Outliers).

4. Luck by Mail.
In 1952 Folklorist Herbert Halpert received a chain letter which we have designated a new type, "Luck by Mail," even though the numerical specifications were unchanged.  The text follows, with novelties in italics.

This Prayer has been sent to you and has been around the world four times.  The one who breaks it will have bad luck.

The Prayer. Trust in the Lord with all thy heart and lean not on thy own understandance in all thy ways acknowledge him and he will direct thy path.

Please copy this and see what  happens in four days after receiving it.  Send this copy and four to someone you wish good luck.  It must leave in 24 hours.  Don't send any money and don't keep this copy.  Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it.  Gen Allen received $1,600 and lost it because he broke the chain. You are to have good luck in 4 days.  This is not a joke and you will receive by mail.  [1952]

Note the famous General Patton appears here, and also, well known at the time, Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen. The implication that a highly esteemed General sent the letter out could certainly boost replication. The descendants of these testimonials still appear over fifty years later, the names and amounts having undergone countless variations due to copying errors. Such changes are often the first discrepancy noticed by observant readers, and thus may serve to discredit chain letters with the public.

The Luck by Mail type also introduces "this is not a joke" and the qualification that you will receive your luck "by mail." These are now mainline universals, and we judge the latter to have been the innovation most responsible for the predominance of this type in the 1950's. This hypothesis involves a possible relationship with money chain letters (> Luck Follows Money).

A less obvious innovation in Luck By Mail is the unconditional declaration that by receiving the chain letter "you are to have good luck." In contrast, the Luck of London letter promised luck "four days after mailing it."  This illustrates two contradictory beliefs about chain letters: in the first the letter is a talisman which by mere possession brings good luck; in the second only the act of distributing copies brings good luck. We give more examples of this dichotomy later (> Copy First, Copy Later), and discuss how textual ambiguity may benefit replication.

Luck by Mail continued to circulate well into the 1960's, in many variations. This is surprising since a potent innovation appeared in 1959.

5. Death20.
A chain letter mailed from Bloomsbury, New Jersey in 1959 has large blocks of text in common with the Halpert "Luck by Mail" letter given above, including the corrupted Proverb, four day deadline and nine day wait. But near the end a new testimonial has been added:

While in the Philippines, General Walsh lost his life 6 days after receiving his copy.  He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before he died, he received $665,000.00 he had won.  [1959]

Please send 20 copies and after see what happens to you on the fourth day.

It is reasonable to suppose that chain letter copy quotas have increased because of the availability of photocopying. But in 1959 copiers were not readily available - this is the same year that Xerox introduced its first plain paper copier (the Xerographic 914).

Our next example of Death20 is from 1967 (Ace). Without the 1959 Bloomsbury letter one might have guessed at a much later origin for Death20. Possibly it circulated largely in the business and professional communities in its early years. The Bloomsbury letter comes from a hospital and appears to be typeset.

The Death20 chain still circulates, but an entire chain letter has been added to it.

6. Lottery-Death  (LD).
Apparently in the early 1970's a quota twenty-four chain letter was translated from Spanish into English and put into circulation in the U.S. or Canada. Abundant copies of this letter exist combined with Death20, but no examples of it as an independent letter have been collected. We name this type "Lottery24" because of the original copy quota and its introduction of the "Boss Wins Lottery" testimonial:

Constantine Diso received the chain in 1953. He asked his secretary to make 24 copies and send them. A few days later, he won the lottery of 2 million dollars in his country.

Around 1973 Lottery24 (L) letters were combined with Death20 (D) on single pages in the two orders LD and DL. This event was documented with unedited multiple examples by Michael Preston (1976). Perhaps a motive for combining the chain letters was to reduce photocopying costs after the two had been received at about the same time. Our earliest example of the combination Lottery-Death (LD) is a letter mailed from Maryland in 1974.

This chain that comes from Venezuela was written by St. Antoine de Sedi missionary from South America. Since this chain must make a tour of the world, you must make 20 copies identical to this one, and send it to your friends, parents or acquaintances and after a few days you will get a surprise.

Take note of the following:
Constantine Diso received the chain in 1953. He asked his secretary to make 24 copies and send them. A few days later, he won the lottery of 2 million dollars in his country. Carlos Brandt, an office employee, received the chain. He forgot it and lost it.  A few days after, he lost his job. He found the chain, sent it out to 24 people, and nine days later, he got a better job. Zerin Berreskelli received the chain, not believing in it he threw it away. Nine days later he died.

For no reason whatsoever should this chain be broken!!!!!!  Make 20 copies and send them. In nine days you will get a surprise. Write  F.E.G.E. in the right hand corner of the envelope instead of a stamp.
 

THINK A PRAYER
Trust in the lord with all your heart and all will acknowledge that he will light the way. This prayer has been sent to you for good luck. The original copy came from the Netherlands. It has been around the world nine times. The luck has been sent to you. You are to receive the good luck within four days after receiving this letter. It is not a joke! You will receive it in the mail. Send 20 copies of this letter to people you think need good luck. Please do not send money. Do not keep this letter. It must leave within 96 hours after you receive it.

A U.S. officer received $7,000. Don Elliot received $68,000, but lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Philippines, General Walsh lost his life six days after he received this letter. He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before his death, he received $775,000, which he won.

Please send 20 copies and then see what happens the fourth day after. Add your name to the bottom of this list and leave off the top name when copying this letter.

[A four column list of 33 names follows, six struck out, several in different hands]  [1974]

The above device, "Write  F.E.G.E. in the right hand corner of the envelope instead of a stamp," appears on many LD chain letters. Various initials were recommended (some without the instruction to omit the stamp), and examples also come from France (Bonnet and Delestre) and the USSR. The instruction to omit a stamp seems severely counter-replicative. However the original initials may have been "F.M.B.H" standing for "Free Matter for the Blind and Handicapped." Current postal regulations allow free postage for legitimate purposes if the quoted sentence is written where normally a stamp would appear. Someone in the early 1970's probably misused the privilege in order to mail chain letters for free, protected from official reprisal by anonymity. Most recipients would be baffled by this suggestion, but many would repeat it to save postage. Since the initials were meaningless to most copiers, they would soon be corrupted. In disbelief, some copier dropped the instruction to omit a stamp and advised the initials be written on the upper left hand corner of the envelope. These versions may have benefited by being opened more often than a letter with nothing at all where one expects a return address. The mysterious initials may have themselves spurred interest in the chain. Current U.S. postal regulations require that an envelope claiming free matter be unsealed to allow examination of the contents. Dr. Jean-Bruno Renard has collected an interesting chain letter in France that revives the use of  initials as a substitute for a stamp [1999].  Posting without a stamp is also a feature of many of the current (2006) World Record chain letters that circulate among children. Post Office automation, rather than deliberate indulgence, may explain why many of these stampless envelopes are delivered to addressees.

The LD type was prolific in 1974 - 1975, and also circulated in the U.K (Times, 1974). Some Hungarian chain letters [1983], though much reduced, reveal descent from an LD source. By 1980 the Lottery-Death letters had been completely replaced in North America by our final mainline type, the "Death-Lottery" letters.

7. Death-Lottery (DL).
The DL combination first appears in our sample with a Canadian example [1973] published by John Robert Colombo (1975). However, since its ancestry had major deletions, we have chosen a letter supplied by the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, as our standard for the type [1974]. At first the Death20 block retained its customary senders list, now as an internal list, the Lottery block following. This awkward requirement was deleted in the mid 1970's and such versions were more propagative. Though we do not use formatting to infer relatedness, the most common paragraphing of a DL letter violates the unity of the Lottery24 block, placing the last sentence of the Death20 block ( "Please send 20 copies of the letter and see what happens in four days") as the first sentence in a new paragraph starting the Lottery block (right before "The chain comes from Venezuela and was written by . . .") [1983]. This may aide propagation by disguising the compound nature of the letter and its resulting redundancy and contradictory claims of origin.

The DL type was temporarily eclipsed by LD letters during 1974-75, but a hyper-competitive descent group of DL letters completely replaced them before the end of the decade (the It Works postscript described in > Section 4.6). Thus all mainline luck chain letters since 1980, certainly over a billion, have been the DL type. Within this type are variations that compete with each other for the attention and resources required for replication. The advantages of some of these variations are easy to explain (> Section 4.7).

The Death-Lottery type luck chain letter has proven to be the most successful paper chain letter in history, not only in the sheer numbers produced but also in its migration to other countries. Surely it originated in North America (around 1973), since this region nurtured the independent circulation of the Death20 component, and the many early variations, including the unsyncretized 24 copy quota in the Lottery24 component (in LD letters only, as < above). From North America it has spread to many countries. Examples so far collected are listed below - each of the foreign language texts is supplied with an English translation.

• A French chain letter [1979] is a translation of the early DL variation with an internal list of senders [cf. 1975] .
• A later French letter [1995] is based on another translation [cf. 1994].
• A Polish letter [from 1986] is a reduced and rewritten descendant of a 1970's DL translation [cf. 1973].
• A later Polish letter [1992] "has been sent to you to make you happy." [cf. 1987]
• We also have a much reduced Russian example [1989] that "has been around the world 800 times."
• A 1996 English language letter headed by devotional images [text, image], collected in the UK but presumably from India, asks that you ". . . make 30 copies and send them after worshipping Shri Saibaba in your house."
• An English language email post [1999], derived from some uncollected paper source, has an Islamic Letter from Heaven followed by a component containing descendants of three classic testimonials of the Lottery24 type (Boss Wins Lottery, Lost Job - Better Job, and Unbeliever's Death). These could have derived from an independent Lottery24 letter, but more likely derive from a DL letter in which the entire Death20 component has been replaced.
• A letter in Dutch [1989] is titled "Met Liefde is Alles Mogelijk" and is very close to English language DL letters of about the same time.
  
• A German chain letter [1994] is titled: "Mit Liebe ist alles möglich" and most of its contents are a translation of an English language DL chain letter.
• An English language version [2004], claiming to have originated in England, was circulating in Eritrea in 2004.
  

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

2.3  OUTLIERS
 St. Joseph.  Sabbath.  Anthony13.   Novena.  Chain of Good Luck.
The Brill Letter.  Mexican Letters.  Romance Game.  Others.

We have over twenty five examples of English language luck chain letters that lie outside the mainline. These group into several types.

No example of a Sabbath chain letter has been collected, but a commercial "traveling postcard" advocating temperance is present in the "various" category in the archive [1908].

Anthony13.
A brief article in the Pittsburgh Press (1938) mentions a "message to St. Anthony," that was "making the rounds." Though little text is given, it asked for 13 copies and circulated on postcards. It was very likely an ancestor of the following chain letter mailed anonymously on a postal card from Cumberland, Maryland in 1941:

This Prayer: Prayer of Safety must go all over the world by card. So when you get this card send it to thirteen persons and on the 13th you will receive $86 dollars. One woman made fun of it and on the 13th day her daughter went blind. So pray attention to this card. God bless you . Read Matthew 10th chapter.  [1941]

In 1941 the Post Office would have considered the Anthony13 postcard chain to be unmailable, as it violated U.S. Code Title 18, section 1718, which prohibited language of a "threatening character" on postcards or the outside of an envelope. However, this law was ruled unconstitutional in 1973 because it was "overly broad and violative of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of expression" (Tollett v United States, 485 F2d 1087, from USCS). Luck chain letters inside envelopes have always been mailable. Thus, despite many statements to the contrary, mailing luck chain letters, threats and all, is not against the law. Presumably this applies to E-mail also. The ethics of communicating threats is a different issue. Money chain letters violate various Federal and State laws {USPS}.

Novena.
A rare prayer chain letter from the closing months of World War II asks that one say a Hail Mary or Our Father once a day for nine days, this as a prayer for peace [1945-02]. Four copies are requested within four days, but the letter claims it is "not a chain letter." The sender gives her name and address, and also, as requested in the text, the name of the person from whom she received the "Novena." "Notice what happens to you on the fourth day."

From Canada and the new millennium we have another short chain letter that calls itself a "Novena" [2000]. It asks that you say four Our Fathers and four Hail Marys on the day of receipt. It also asks for four copies ("hand written") and denies it is a chain letter. "Watch what happens." This could be a distant relative of  the 1945 letter.

Chain of Good Luck.
We have collected two corrupted examples [1949-Burma, 1949-Japan] of the self titled "Chain of Good Luck." These bear testimonials about a private in the Philippine army and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. The first copy states a copy quota of 12, high for the time. The second copy, found in Japan, is close to the Burma letter but even more corrupted. It has even lost its copy quota, which is surely a fatal mutation. Both of these letters have managed lists at the bottom, though the number of names have been inflated to 12 and 20. That both examples are foreign letters (in English) probably represents more collecting bias than a feature of the letter's distribution. The Chain of Good Luck is probably the same type of letter that is mentioned in the Berkeley Daily Gazette, as cited in Western Folklore (1950).

The Chain of Good Luck may have developed from a version of the previously discussed "Luck of London" letters (< Mainline letters). This is suggested by an article in the Denver Rocky Mountain News (1947) in which a postmaster complains of  "Luck of London" letters attributed to "an English soldier in the African campaign." Our two examples of the Chain of Good Luck, and the Berkeley Gazette letters, are all attributed to a French officer in Africa.

The Brill Letter.
Starting around 1979 a comical rewrite of a DL letter circulated that featured a long list of celebrity names [Brill]. Said to have originated in the Brill Building, it asked for thirty copies and used entertainment industry parlance. All four of our examples date from 1979-80. Perhaps it died out because the celebrity names escalated off the list.

Mexican Letters.
English translations of Mexican letters circulate in the U.S. in low volume. A 1984 example [text] from Oxnard, California has a brief Tagalog addition at the end, and a comment on this in English. The letter has a quota of twenty-four copies, a deadline of nine days, and a thirteen day waiting period. I have been informed that older Mexican letters had a copy quota of thirteen. A recent related letter has two blocks of Tagalog and much transformation of the testimonials [2004].

An English only example [1995], from North Carolina, represents a separate tradition. It states: "This chain would be sent with five cents which will be donated to the church." There was a nickel taped head up on the letter. This request was also present in an untranslated Mexican letter mailed from Pasadena [1980]. A dime was taped on this letter. This sending forward of money seems to be unique with Mexican luck chain letters and is a striking contrast to U.S. mainline letters of the same period which instruct "do not send money." This command on U.S. mainline letters appeared in the 1930's and functioned to differentiate luck chain letters from the exploding population of money chain letters at that time (> Section 4.2). Thus this forwarding of a small coin may date from the 1930's also, and may be a different solution to the same discard problem that English language luck chain letters faced. It may also have served to differentiate Mexican letters from translated U.S. luck chains. Hopefully older Mexican letters will be discovered that can explain the origin of this feature.

Romance Game.
We have four English language examples of a classroom note typically passed between young teenage girls. The following was intercepted from a 13 year old girl by a teacher in California in 1995.

To a girl in school,
This is a romance game from 1812.  Copy this letter word by word within 4 days. Give it to 8 people (no guys). This is no joke. It has worked for 70 years. On the fourth day drink a glass of milk and say his name (the boy you like) 5 times. Within the 6th day he will ask you out. If you break the chain you will have bad luck. This starts as soon as you read this letter.
GOOD LUCK   [1995]

Others.
We have two examples of a chain letter requesting that prayers be said for missionary efforts [1905, 1906]. The first does not state a termination number, the second (which has doubled the quota from five to ten) is stated to self terminate at 1000. A luck chain letter titled "The Fortune Chain," featuring early testimonials, is a translation of a French language letter [1931]. We have collected only one circulating paper luck chain letter that is composed completely independent of any textual tradition [Xmas, 1975]. Though it is little more than an obsession with geometric progression, the photocopy appears to have gone through several generations. From the Southern U.S. comes a "prayer exchange" letter that asks the recipient to "say a little prayer for each of the five persons listed below" [1985]. Beginning in 1989, a quota five luck chain letter characteristic of those circulating twenty-five years before experienced a dramatic revival. We describe this "Media Chain Letter" in > Section 4.5. Like marine mammals, an email luck chain [1998] has returned to the paper medium from which it originally crawled in the early 1990's.

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

3.2 Distribution Networks.
Chain Letter Distribution. Core Networks.  Efficient Flow.

We will consider in Section 3.8 how certain chain letter content influences the selection of recipients (> Effective Distribution). Here we speculate about the flow of chain letters through a population, how flow patterns may persist and change, and how this may affect the circulation of variations.

Chain Letter Distribution.
The following individual behavior holds with regard to certain social replicators, and affects their overall pattern of distribution. This applies to photocopied office humor, jokes, rumors and luck chain letters.

(1) Single source: New items are first distributed by only one source: all subsequent receipts of this item derive from this initial source.
(2) Habitual transmission: If two people are exposed to the same replicator and the first person distributes it and the second does not, then the first person is more likely than the second to distribute a subsequent similarly motivated replicator.
(3) Habitual targeting: And this subsequent distribution is likely to include many of the same people to whom the prior distribution was made.
(4) Repetition taboo: People are disinclined to distribute a replicator to anyone whom they know has already received it.

For luck chain letters, "single source" is generally true for significant changes except, possibly, deletions. Evidence for "habitual transmission" can be found in some interviews (NYT, 1968). This may begin when an individual correlates some good or bad luck with receipt of "the letter." "Habitual targeting" can be a matter of convenience, and also compliance with targeting instructions in the letter, which may suggest copies be sent to "people who need good luck." In a hoard of nine linen exchange letters received by one person, the lists of senders contain 22 names and addresses but there are only 12 different ones [xe1940]. Finally, "repetition taboo" is in part a restatement of the immunization phenomenon, which explains the cessation of chain letter crazes. Immunization is understandably a refusal to expend one's own time and money on repeated demands for copies. But when transmission is not anonymous a respect for one's recipients will be a factor. This may still operate for anonymous distribution, though not as strongly. From about 1922 to 1977 the great majority of  luck chain letters contained lists of the most recent senders. After 1978 there is not a single mainline chain letter in the archive that bears such a list, and almost all the envelopes these chain letters were mailed in did not have a return address. So there was a dramatic shift to anonymous distribution. However most transmissions were still probably from friend to friend, with the prior "known friend to friend" networks still active.

Imagine the complete flow of a social replicator V through a population. We can represent this by a network of transmissions whose points (nodes) and directed connections (arrows) between pairs of nodes are specified as follows.

(1) Each person who sent or received V specifies one and only one node.
(2) If person A transmitted V to person B then node A is connected to node B.
(3) With each such connection there is associated the time of receipt of V.

Core Networks.
The core of a chain letter network of transmission can be roughly defined as the largest subnetwork of mutually connected habitual senders. Several formal definitions of the core of a network are given in Doreian and Woodward (Social Networks, 1994), but we have so little data compared to the number of participants that computational methods can not be applied. We suspect this core, as defined, is more numerous and richly connected than would result from random linkages because:

(1)  Various forms of social stratification (gender, age, race, religion, class) suggest the existence of different chain letter transmission networks, particularly when senders are identified. Some evidence of this can be found on chain letters and in newspaper accounts [gender: 1922, 1933], [race: 1935, 1936] [religion: 2001]. Given that different chain letter transmission networks co-exist, the success of a chain letter variation depends not only on its text, but also on the state of the network that delivers it. These transmission networks are not static entities, but change with changing conditions such as participant age and interaction with other distribution networks. Thus competition between chain letter variations is, in part, competition between the established transmission networks that deliver them. Such competition makes a case for the existence of core networks, since the dense linkage of hundreds of people who habitually and rapidly comply would accelerate exponential growth and sustain circulation by recycling. Transmission networks with a smaller or less cohesive core would more likely disappear or be captured by a rival transmission network.

(2) For over a half century, most luck chain letters had a senders list. And money chain letters require a managed list to function. Very early in the 1935 Send-a-Dime craze, women called friends to make sure they would re-transmit the chain letter and take the same precaution in choosing their recipients (DRMN-1). Such successful oral recruitment techniques would replicate along with the paper text. About the same time, this quest for prior consent appeared as a postscript in a Send-a-Dime letter [1935-04]. Such selection of recipients will link enthusiastic participants. And though the Send-a-Dime bubble soon burst, the transmission network that developed for money chain letters in 1935 probably survived for decades and influenced luck chain letter distribution as well (> Luck Follows Money).

Efficient Flow.
The "repetition taboo" implies that there will be an avoidance of duplicated arrows (A to B and A to B) in a chain letter transmission network. And short cycles (such as the dyad A to B and B to A) will be less frequent. This especially applies to letters with a senders list. If the list contains the last n senders, all cycles of length n + 1 or less can be avoided if one simply avoids distributing to anyone on the received list. Possibly, competition between networks will also develop this "efficient flow" since receipt of multiple copies by one person within a few weeks is wasteful. Those networks with long cycles should be favored. This could also involve a general westward movement of letters, or a tendency to move between three major cities in the same cyclic order. A very large sample would be needed to check for such patterns, nor should we expect that the repetition taboo and immunization alone could bring them about. But my guess is that more persistent structure exists in the transmission networks of folklore than is presently observable. Perhaps some systematized method of sampling will eventually enable the observation of flow patterns.

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

3.3  EVOLUTION
Descent.  Variation. Differential Replication.  Chain Letter Evolution.
Linked features.  Cladistics. Behavior that Affects Propagation.

Descent.
Until the 1970's most paper luck chain letters were copied by hand or typed. When photocopiers became more common there was some debate if one could use them for chain letters and still receive good luck (NYT, 1968). One chain letter innovator declared "may Xerox" in a footnote [1975]. Predictably, the mainline photocopiers won this debate [but not for one outlier], and almost every letter that has circulated since 1980 is a photocopy, including originally hand written ones. But late generation photocopies must eventually be retyped because of image degeneration. In recent years this retyping is often done with a word processor.

When we use the word copy we allow that there may be errors, deletions, innovations, and even translation. But we require that at least half the text of the parent letter is carried forward on the copy with matching details. Such a first generation copy may itself be copied, producing a second generation copy, and so on. We say letter M is a descendant of letter L if M is some nth generation copy of L, and then L is an ancestor of M. All descendants of chain letter L, plus L itself, constitute a descent group (or clade), with L the founder. If every letter in a clade, except possibly the founder, has exactly one parent we say it is uniparental. The ancestry of a letter M within a uniparental clade is the sequence beginning with M, then the parent of M, the parent of the parent of M, etc. until the founder of the clade is reached. Any two distinct chain letters in a uniparental clade have a unique "most recent common ancestor." This is the first member of the ancestry of one which is in the ancestry of the other. Because of the convention that a letter begins its own ancestry, two letters in the same ancestry also have a most recent common ancestor, which is the oldest of the two. On extremely rare occasions a chain letter may not have a parent [1975], or may have two (< e.g. the DL founder).

Two chain letters are regarded as identical if they have the exact same text, character for character. Differences in format, spacing or text style are not considered. Thus an identical copy of a chain letter reads out loud the same as its parent. Usually when chain letter L is photocopied, and possibly when copied by hand, an identical copy is formed, called a clone of L. A letter is not considered to be a clone of itself. For any letter L not a clone, the clone group with founder L is constituted by (1) the letter L, (2) all letters identical to L with the same parent(s) as L (identical twins of L), and (3) clones of any member of the group. Clone groups are the natural unit to consider when describing the descent of variations.

All hyper-competitive innovations launched since 1975 debut with a burst of a thousand clones! And this is assuming the innovator distributes no more than the quota, just 20 copies. We will suppose, as in a prior example (< Great advantage), that the innovation experiences initial exponential growth with a weekly rate of growth r = 1.2 (120 letters out for 100 received). We also assume: (1) all copies are photocopies, and all these are clones,  (2) all continuing letters are retyped after the thirteenth generation and not before, and (3) no retyped letter is a clone. After 13 generations the total production P of letters will have been:

P = 20 + 20r¹ + 20r² + . . . + 20r¹³ = 20[r¹⁴- 1] / [r-1]

The Paper Chain Letter Archive provides overwhelming evidence that chain letters inherit text from their ancestors. From a "Luck of London" letter we read "It has been around the world four times" [1944]. Over 50 years later we read on an Australian letter "It has been around the world nine times" [1997]. From a letter mailed in 1959 from Bloomsbury, New Jersey we read about money won but life lost in the Philippines [1959], just as we do on the 1997 Australian letter.

Inherited details reveal that the letters in the "types" we have designated are descended from a single founding letter for each type. If we start with the Good Luck letters [1922], these and all subsequent mainline letters form a single descent group that extends to the present, and whose founder may have been written in Europe around the time of World War I. This descent group numbers in the billions of letters and some of its ancestries contain thousands of generations (over four thousand, if there is an average of one generation per week).

All luck chain letters since 1900 are probably influenced by the first letter with both a copy quota and a deadline. Present day familiarity with these devices masks their ingenuity: copy quota probably began with a single letter and the concept spread only with the distribution and translation of this letter. The same is likely true for deadlines, dropping claims of divine authorship, statements that the letter is to go around the world and non miraculous testimonials. Such innovations distinguished luck chain letters from the Letters from Heaven with which early luck chain letters were once identified, though perhaps mistakenly (1908). The Letters from Heaven in turn probably have a conceptual founder, perhaps a Greek letter in the first century, and this in turn a pagan predecessor. If we presume there existed spoken rituals that demanded their own repetition [cf.. "He who will not say it . . ." in 1905], these may all have begun with a communication that claimed divine origin and contained an instruction for periodic repetition. As if echoing this primal origin, many of the Letters from Heaven [1863] and a very early "luck" chain letter [1902] emphasized rigid Sabbath observance.

Variation.
Hand written letters are often difficult to read and thus many variations are introduced as the copier tries to guess what is written. With photocopying, after some 15 or so generations the text becomes wiggly, spotted and unreadable in places. Titles and other text at the margins may be lost because of misplacement of a sheet in a photocopier or image expansion [1991]. Thus photocopied chains, to survive, must be retyped periodically, which introduces errors and wrong guesses at illegible or missing words [e.g. "faxed" for "faded" in 1997]. Lines of text are often omitted when copiers lose their place in the source letter [compare Newark1 to the close Newark2 - the later has omitted "of receiving this letter" and "He failed to circulate the letter"]. Or the copier may notice the omission, and enter the missing line in a new position in the letter. For example in 1979  "Do not keep this letter" has been transposed with "It must leave your hands . . .".  In 1985 a misplaced period has shifted an important ethnic cue (the Philippines) from one testimonial to another. A few changes are the result of copying what was not intended to be copied, such as a date, personal postscript or signed name.

In addition to such copying errors, there are many intentional changes. The testimonial of The Unbeliever's Death is often deleted, presumably for ethical reasons [1981]. Attempts to improve the writing style are seen [1995], and reformatting is common [1991]. Often a brief salutation [1989] or postscript [1997] is added, usually never to appear on another letter in our sample. Sometimes a whole new title [1997], sentence [1991], or testimonial appears [1975]. With the use of photocopiers, and possibly before, a recipient of two chain letters may combine them on one page (Preston 1976). This process produced the "Death-Lottery" (DL) type letters that were extremely abundant from 1975-1998.

Probably there are thousands of  major innovations every year, but most do not replicate sufficiently to find their way into our sample. There are so many variations, accidental and deliberate, that most retyped letters differ from their parent. We have never collected two identical luck chain letters. Paradoxically, ancestors can still be identified after hundreds of generations, and across translations and subsequent cultural modification [compare the ancestral 1974 to Hungary 1986, or to the second part of 1999].

There is convincing evidence in the archive that on rare occasions, in copying parent letter X to copy Y, text from a third letter (the "donor") is also placed on copy Y. This process, and the text involved, is called a transfer. Here are some examples.

• The "lost his wife" version of the Death and Money testimonial was translated and transferred to a quota 24 Spanish language letter that circulated in the U.S. and probably Mexico.  (> D & M transfer)
• The "Kiss" title was transferred to a  "Love" titled letter.  (> KLC transfer)
• Both the Kiss title, and the "she had won" version of the Death and Money testimonial, were transferred to a Love titled letter. (> KCL transfer)

Differential Replication.
Very clear evidence that chain letter content affects replication is present in Table 6 and Table 7. These show that letters bearing certain variations have greatly increased in frequency over a few years, and letters without those features have totally disappeared from our dated collection. The succession of luck chain letter types (< Table 2) is also proof of the effect of content on circulation. The range of years in Table 2 records the earliest and latest year of circulation so far collected. Thus all the dozen Good Luck type letters were received during the 1920's, and you are no more likely to receive one today than to be asked to dance the Charleston at the senior prom.

For most variations we can be fairly sure that after some initial appearance, all subsequent appearances of this variation within some group of letters under discussion are descendants of the initial example. Or if the variation re-appears as a result of a transfer or re-invention, we may always be able to verify this by analyzing other variations present. We call such a variation a feature (or character). Features are variations that can be used, at least in part, to infer that two letters bearing the variation had a common ancestor that also bore it.

Some variations are not features, or at least their use in diagnosing ancestry poses difficulties. For example, deletion of  the Unbeliever's Death testimonial occurs independently in separate lineages. Certain corruptions and varying forms of numbers may also appear and re-appear, such as $755,000, $755,000.00, $755000.00 or $75,500,000. The words "Philippines," "receive" and "ignore" are frequently misspelled in the same way. "St. Jude" may be added to a letter, and also removed.

Descent groups (clades) are often considered when their presence significantly increases or decreases in our dated sample. Members of a descent group are recognized by the presence of shared features. Some of these features may have a positive effect on propagation, others neutral, and some may have a negative result. Features that are neutral or negative in an increasing clade are called riders, since they proliferate without themselves motivating replication. Usually there is one key feature judged to be primarily responsible for the increase of the group. Sometimes it may be difficult to select a key feature from two or more positive features present.

Small copying errors will generally be neutral, but some may have had a positive effect on propagation and increased in frequency as a result. Here are three candidates for this curious phenomenon:

• On [1910] "stating" was written for "starting."  See Ancient Prayer (< stating).
• On [1979] "Sol" was written for "St." and later "Sol" was changed to "Saul" [1982-01]. See It Works (> Sol).
• On [1989] "51 days" was written for "six days." See the example below for "post-linked" (> 51 days).

• The claim of Divine authorship was probably dropped from a parent resembling a Letter from Heaven in this way (< Section 2.1).
• An internal list of senders was deleted from a DL letter (> Section 4.6).
• The "Trust" prayer was deleted (or replaced) on a DL letter (> Section 4.7)

The descendants of a single letter have repeatedly replaced all other mainline letters in our sample. We call such a descent group (or its founding letter, or the key feature) hyper-competitive. For example, all mainline letters after 1983 are the descendants of a single letter that first appeared around 1979! This descent group numbers over two billion letters. The key feature responsible for this spectacular replication was probably a new postscript (> It Works). We say this "It Works" postscript  (or the first letter bearing it, or its clade) captured the mainline. Such striking examples of differential replication are surprisingly common in chain letter history.

• Each new mainline type eliminated the prior type in a few years, except Death20 which took about 8 years (< Table 2).
• According to Donald Wickets, a harsh threat was added [around 1902] to the Sabbath letter and this version captured circulation of this early uncollected prayer chain and spread internationally.
• Both the addition [1905], and subsequent removal [1910], of "Bishop Lawrence" captured Ancient Prayer circulation in the US.
• By the 1950's (possibly as early as 1939), all mainline luck letters were descended from a letter on which "Do not send money"  had been added (> Section 4.2).
• The earliest letter that bore "The original is in New England" captured the mainline in a few years (> Kiss & Love). This feature was, however, a rider on two new titles that appeared in 1983.

The term "funneling event" from population genetics may be applied to captures, since they reduce the inheritable variation present in a population. These events not only establish highly replicative innovations, but also reset details of text with the features that happen to be present on the founding letter, for better or for worse. Chain letter evolution is characterized by a succession of funneling events through single letters. If a variation, a "small improvement," is merely increasing in the population of letters, it is subject to total elimination by the next hyper-competitive variation. Nevertheless, small improvements do appear to accumulate on chain letters, for example with the mix of testimonials (> Office) or with instructions on to whom the letter should be sent (> Effective Distribution). This appearance requires explanation.

(1) Small improvements may be needed to increment the effectiveness of a letter bearing a key innovation to hyper-competitive power.
(2) Variations that are more frequent because of small improvements are more likely to receive a hyper-competitive innovation.
(3) A universal feature that appears to be a "small" improvement may have previously been hyper-competitive, perhaps during a period of low circulation. Low circulation events are difficult to document.
(4) The author of a key innovation may have also composed small improvements, or selected and transferred them from other letters.

Chain Letter Evolution.
We have described the descent and variation of chain letters, and their differential replication depending on copied features present in the text. These processes assure that chain letters "evolve" - that is, they accumulate inheritable features that increase or sustain propagation. It is this evolution that ultimately explains "how chain letters work," and why they worked even as public attitudes and beliefs changed over generations. This success is even more remarkable considering the universal condemnation of chain letters from both secular and religious authorities, and the lack of any real service they provide to their hosts apart from dealing with the false hopes and empty threats that chain letters themselves created.

Richard Dawkins describes the mechanics of chain letter evolution in River Out of Eden, while also emphasizing that chain letters "are originally launched by humans, and the changes in their wording arise in the heads of humans" (1995, pp 146-150). Our collection reveals that there are a great many such changes but very few that significantly increase propagation. And very few of those that do are the result of an innovation designed to work in the way it does. Indeed, some successful changes are the result of accidents in copying. As in biological evolution, successful chain letter "mutations" are rare events that can exploit an opportunity for replication in a variety of unpredictable ways. So chain letters do "evolve," and apart from computer simulations, are probably the best documented and simplest example of evolution known. Yet, unlike computer simulations, chain letters are readable documents that exploit human hopes and fears. This provides chain letter evolution an unlimited palette of invention, and makes their history intelligible in human terms.

Are the similarities between chain letter evolution and genetic evolution worth our attention? In the previously mentioned (< S. 1.3) article "Chain Letters & Evolutionary Histories" (Bennett, Li, Ma), algorithms used for genetic sequences are applied to reconstruct the ancestry of 33 DL type luck chain letters. The authors state " . . .  if algorithms used to infer phylogenetic trees from the genomes of existing organisms are to be trusted, they should produce good results when applied to chain letters. Indeed, their readability makes them especially suitable for classroom teaching of phylogeny (evolutionary history) free from the arcana of molecular biology."

The following biological phenomena suggested or prompted guesses about chain letter adaptions.

• Parachutes and hooks on seeds => chain letter circumnavigation claims were a method of dispersion
• Balanced polymorphism (e.g. sickle cell anemia) => chain letters use ambiguity to maximize propagation
• Symbiosis => some luck chain letters circulated within the transmission network of money chain letters

A tempting mistake is to presume that two features first appeared together on one letter. Every letter in the archive which bears feature H may also bear feature G, and visa versa, but this does not imply they appear together on all letters ever produced (if so we say G and H were concurrent). It is quite possible that G could have appeared first and later H was added to a letter bearing G, but no example of G without H has been collected. For chain letters there is no way to deduce concurrence of two features solely from texts, unless one had every letter ever produced. If features G and H are both present in a group of letters under discussion, the following table lists the five possible ways they may appear with relation to each other. The symbol {G, GH}, for example, means that within the group of letters: (1) G appears without H on at least one letter; (2) G appears with H, in any order, on at least one letter, and (3) H does not appear without G, otherwise we would have written {G, H, GH}. The five possible relationships between G and H are all hypotheses, subject to revision depending on subsequent collecting or verification of certain deletions or transfers. None of these relationships depend on recorded dates of circulation for letters, though dates may be used in arguing for or against spoiling exceptions. However, the pre-linkage of feature G to feature H implies that G appeared before H.

Table 3. Feature linkage: terminology and consequences.

Example 1: The DL letters with an early It Works postscript read "I, myself, now forward it to you." But this never appears on a letter with a Kiss or Love title. "I, myself, . . ." is thus unlinked to these titles. When these Kiss and Love titles were introduced they were first added to letters from which "I, myself, . . ." had been deleted. 

Example 2: Our earliest Death20 type letter [1959], and all thereafter, bear both the Death and Money testimonial and the demand for 20 copies. No letter has been found which bears either of these features singly. Thus we say these two features are co-linked. They would be concurrent, if, say, they were both transferred from a foreign letter at the same time. If not concurrent, then one appeared without the other. But only if such a letter is collected would we then say the first is pre-linked to the second.

Example 3: Around 1988 a new testimonial, "Car," was added to a letter bearing the title "With Love all things are possible" ("Love"). The Car testimonial proved to be hyper-competitive within the clade of Love titled letters. The earliest example of Car [1988] (and almost all thereafter) also bears a duplication of the admonition against sending money, a feature we call "send no money," which reads:

You will receive good luck in the mail. Send no money. Send copies to people you think need good luck. Don't send money, as fate has no price.

While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife 51 days after receiving the letter. [1989]

Example 5: In the early 1980's two titles, called "Kiss" and "Love," captured the mainline (> in Section 4.7). For about 10 years a mainline letter bore either one or the other title, so during this time these features were unlinked. However around 1993 both titles began to appear together on single letters. They now formed the combinations {Kiss, Love, (Kiss)(Love)} which implies a transfer had occurred, since deletions from (Kiss)(Love) had certainly not produced all the single titled Kiss or Love letters. In this case, the Kiss title had been transferred to a Love titled letter at least three different times. Kiss and Love were now transfer-linked.

We use the linkage of features to argue (with inherent uncertainty) for or against assertions of the following forms.

• all letters bearing a certain innovation are descendants of just one letter that initially bore it
• a certain universal or frequent feature may not itself motivate replication
• two letters are "close," that is, they are only a several retypes removed from their common ancestor
• one feature appeared before another
• a feature has been deleted from a letter.
• a feature has been transferred to a letter
• the author of a key innovation did, or did not, make other changes as well

Cladistics is a method of classification that utilizes a "sister" relationship between two "taxa" (named groups of organisms), this holding when the two are more closely related to each other (have a more recent common ancestor) than either has to any third taxon. For cladistic analysis, a taxon must be a clade - an ancestor and all its descendants (a descent group). Sister relationships between "nested" taxa (taxa contained in taxa) are expressed by a bifurcating diagram called a cladogram. A sample of taxa appear at the terminal nodes of a tree, and two are connected to a hypothetical ancestor taxon if they are deemed sisters. Often these relationships are determined using characters (what we have called features) present in some but not all of the taxa in the sample. Cladograms are chosen which account for the distribution of characters in the "simplest" way, a principle called parsimony.  In one approach,  parsimony is defined as minimizing the number of non-inherited appearances (transfers) plus the number of losses (deletions) of features. Instead of using characters, pairs of items may be compared by a numerical measure of their "relatedness," and from these numbers a consistent cladogram is constructed. This later method might apply when instead of taxa we are comparing genomes.

(1) Each clone group V of C specifies one and only one node.
(2) If any member of the clone group V is the parent of a founder of clone group V' of C, an arrow connects node V to node V'.

Behavior that Affects Propagation.
In 1966 Alan Dundes described these universal components of chain letters: (1) a proclamation that the letter is a chain letter, (2) an injunction to send a specific number of copies, sometimes within a definite period of time, (3) a description of desirable consequences of compliance with the injunction, and (4) a warning of undesirable consequences if the injunction is ignored or disobeyed (Dundes). Mainline luck letters contain these components, though the method of identification may not be by proclamation.

We first identify behavior of a recipient that promotes the propagation of a chain letter, isolating these six components:

Say a chain letter is first taken in hand. For its successful propagation the recipient must: (1) retain the letter, (2) eventually decide to comply with its demands for distribution, (3) make faithful copies in (4) abundance, and (5) effectively distribute them so that they will in turn be distributed. Further, from receipt to final distribution, these acts must be accomplished (6) promptly.

• Section 3.4: (1) Retention
• Section 3.5: (2) Compliance
• Section 3.6: (2) Compliance - mainline testimonials.
• Section 3.7: (3) Faithful copying, (4) Copy quotas
• Section 3.8: (5) Effective distribution, (6) Deadlines.

3.4  RETENTION
Identification.  Differentiation. Woe to scoffers.

By retention of a received letter we mean keeping it in an undamaged state, accessible for copying. The bane of chain letters is immediate discard. If the recipient just saves the letter, as time passes it may work its will by playing on circumstances such as bad luck. The importance of first impressions for chain letters is revealed by the leading sentence in a version of the classroom Romance Game: "You touched this letter so you have to keep it!" [1998].

Identification.
Retention of a chain letter may depend on its identification as a luck chain letter, and perhaps as a certain luck chain in which the recipient believes. Quick recognition seems largely based on what is at the top: titles, initial text or rarely, images. Reputed authors and places of origin may also serve to identify a letter. A Brazilian letter is titled "Oracao De Santo Antonio" and a capitalized prayer follows [1994]. A 1996 English language letter originally from India has Sai Baba devotional images at the top [text, image]. Two translated Mexican letters have the title "St. Jude Thaddeus," one underlined, the other in a large font [1984, 1995]. Below this title, both these letters begin with about the same sentence:

Before anything else, I would like to tell you that St. Jude Thaddaeus will help you in everything you encounter.

The final words of a text likewise have added significance for quick identification, as shown by the replicative success of certain postscripts (> It Works). Placing "St. Jude" at the far bottom of a letter, a pretense of authorship, attempts to lock the conclusion [1996]. The Book of Revelations "seals" itself with: "If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book" (Rev. 22:18). Some interpret this as sealing the entire Christian canon.

If identification as a particular luck letter aids replication, then we may expect a highly adapted chain letter will have multiple identities, depending on who is reading it. Several years may have passed since the recipient received a previous chain, so only one or two highlights may be recalled. These might be leading text, alleged geographical origin, or one of the numerical specifications. New types typically retain some of these, and thus may appear as the traditional letter to some and a novelty to others. Neither recipient is wrong - in recent decades successful mainline innovations are notably conservative, most adding just one or two new features to an existing letter.

A clear advantage results if a letter is identified, rightly or wrongly, by an ethnic group as the "same" letter that circulated in the old country.

A private in the Philippine Army won the first prize in the sweepstakes for complying with this chain. [1949]

While in the Philippines, General Walsh lost his life 6 days after receiving his copy. He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before he died, he received $665,000.00 he had won. [1959]

Dom Dimant, das Filipinas recebeu e nao deu importancia, mandou jogar fora, 9 dias depois morreu.  [Brazil, 1994].

"This started in Malabon and spread throughout the world" [1994]

The question of where a chain letter originally came from usually has no single answer. Though North America has been a creative source for innovations, especially since 1935, still most of the text on contemporary mainline letters is likely from various other countries. Perhaps the question of origins has an answer if we limit it in a reasonable way. Since 1970 the high copy quota letters (20 and over) have dominated international circulation. Where and when did they first appear? The first appearance of a high copy quota in our collection is on a letter mailed from Bloomsbury, New Jersey [1959]. Its demand for 20 copies is associated with, and enforced by, another innovation that first appears on this letter, the "Death and Money" testimonial. The events in this testimonial are purported to have taken place in the Philippines.

Differentiation.
We have discussed the advantage for a letter to identify itself with multiple traditions. It may also help circulation if a chain letter prominently distinguishes itself from another letter. The advantage of differentiation is very clear for post 1935 luck chain letters (the Prosperity type). In section 4.2 we explain how the hyper-competitive innovation "Do not send money" avoided immediate discard by distinguishing the luck chains from the boom/bust money chain of the day (> Divergence). Another innovation of these post 1935  letters was movement of the list of names from the top to the bottom of the letter, where they remained until disappearing in the mid 1970's. This provided a quick visual flag that the letter in hand may not be the abundant Send-a-Dime. Money chain letters retained the list at the top for several years (compare 1935 to 1941).

Woe to scoffers.
We see in testimonials that if one breaks the chain because of tardiness or unspecified reasons, misfortune may follow, but rarely death. However, all behavior that makes subsequent replication impossible is punished with a death.

• Zerin Berreskelli received the chain, not believing in it he threw it away, nine days later he died.  [1974]
• Isabel Buena lost her copy and lost her life. [Mexico / U.S., 1984]
• Madame Valée destroyed it and lost her son. [France, translation, 1950's]
• An Argentinean tore this card to pieces and after 13 days lost his son. [Poland, translation,  1988]
• Mademoiselle X receives it, throws it away and 9 days later kills herself. [France, translation, 1995].

Devices may be defined with varying comprehensiveness. The three testimonials above and the statement "For any reason, do not destroy or tear" [Mexico / U.S., 1984]  might be considered together as exemplifying the single device: "Warn against destruction or loss of the letter."

If the recipient takes the letter as a joke, its promises and threats have no power, and this castrating perception may itself replicate. Possibly some previous types have succumbed to changing attitudes and derision. The pious Ancient Prayer postcard chain, which circulated up through World War I, found few believers in the irreverent and fun loving years following the war. The first three text examples below discourage disbelief. The last three discourage a more serious threat to replication - the expression of disbelief.

. . . and if he believes not this writing, and the commandments, I will send many plagues upon him, and consume both him and his children and his cattle, . . . [Letter of Jesus Christ, 1915, but text is hundreds of years old]

M. Francesco Monthey, not having taken this letter seriously, saw his home ruined nine days after having received this letter.  [Translation, France, 1928]

El Presidente de Brasil las recivio y no le dio importancia y a los 13 dias se le muri su hija.  [Mexican / U.S. , 1980]

One woman made fun of it and on the 13th day her daughter went blind. [U.S., postcard, 1941]

Detective Segunda B. Villa now of the City of Baguie who laughed at this Chain of good luck, met instant death in accident on June 14th, 1948. [International, 1949. Baguio is a city in the Philippines]

Don't make fun or laugh at this because something bad might happen to you or your family. [Philippine / U.S., 1984].

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

3.5  COMPLIANCE
Motives.  Origin of Testimonials.  Classification of Testimonials.

In this section we presume one has received a luck chain letter and retained it, but has yet to comply with its demands for replication. By compliance we mean that the recipient distributes at least one copy of the letter (perhaps the copy received) within a month of receipt - thus contributing to its propagation. If the entire copy quota is distributed as instructed within the deadline we have full compliance. But partial compliance may be very common. In the previous section on retention we examined features of a letter that affect a recipient's immediate response to it. Here we focus on how chain letter content may influence the recipient's deliberations on whether to comply, particularly on his or her interpretation of ensuing circumstances.

Motives.
The Letters from Heaven motivated possession and publication by the promise of divine blessing or magical protection from various perils, combined with threats of divine punishment for disobedience or disbelief. These were identifiably Christian in Europe, and Hindu in India. After 1900 divine sanctions were downplayed, and by 1922 the mainline had only nonsectarian promises of good and bad luck.

Below are listed motives for replicating luck chain letters. These are based on statements of those who send chain letters, chain letter content, and known motives for sending certain postcards.

• Receive good luck.
  
A promise, explicit or implied, of some benefit for compliance is present on all luck chain letters collected. Indeed, this is close to our definition of a luck chain letter. Example: "He who rewrites this prayer for nine days will on the ninth day experience a great joy." [1906]


• Avoid bad luck.
Comments by senders of the 1990 Media chain letter (> Section 4.5) suggest that fear of bad luck is a common motive for compliance. Threats of bad luck for breaking the chain appear very early on chain letters: "Those who would not write it on would meet with some misfortune" [1910]·


• Wish someone good luck.
A desire to "send luck" is mentioned fairly often, sometimes as the leading motive for compliance (Sifford). This motive may be especially active if senders feel the letter has worked for them. An early genre of commercial postcard said little else than "Wishing you dear friend lots of Good Luck"  (Leather postcard, 1905). Explicit appeal to this motive is first seen in the Good Luck type: "Copy this out and send to nine (9) people whom you wish good luck" [1922]. This clever device has persisted ever since in the mainline.


• Malice.
Several people have mentioned that they send chain letters to people they do not like to annoy them or burden them with the task of distributing copies. No chain letter content addresses this motive, since for one this could compromise the more common motive of sending good luck. But malice may significantly aid propagation. Perhaps it has favored the high copy quota demands and implied death threats prevailing on letters since 1970.


• Curiosity.
"Copy it and see what will happen." [1909]. This is the first appearance of the "See what happens" device -  in a few years it became common, but not universal, on Ancient Prayer examples. It is absent on the brief Good Luck letters of the 1920's, but reappears on the Prosperity type of the 1930's and has persisted since. From the South American Lottery24 we find:  " . . . in nine days you will get a surprise" [1974]. The universality of such content is evidence for a curious and playful motive for compliance.


• Keep the chain going.
From around 1906 - 1911 remailer postcards, most commercially produced for the purpose, were sent friend to friend. There were slots for three or four addresses, often the last person sending it back to the originator. At the same time we see on a chain letter: "Please do not break the chain" [1905]. Most mainline luck chain letters before 1975 had lists of prior senders. Many people are interested in linkages of friends and where this leads geographically, and this surely has contributed to the propagation of chain letters bearing lists of names.


• Identification with celebrity.
The appearance of high status persons on a list of senders, and particularly a record of whom they sent copies to, enables a recipient to make known their friendship with celebrities by sending out this evidence on a chain letter. This happened with the Good Luck letters of the 1920's, and with the Media chain letter since 1989. The cover letters that circulated with the Media chain letter also allowed senders to share their humorous comments with downline recipients.

Some testimonials probably start as hoaxes (> "Car" below); but I suspect most started as rumors that are subsequently incorporated into the body of a chain letter. Say a chain letter has spread through a town, so much so that most people have received it. This can happen without anyone realizing it, as initially with Send-a-Dime in Denver, until Post Office officials noticed increased mail volume. In such a situation, most people have either broken the chain or complied with it. Now say John Doe is hit by a train and killed. There is a good chance he broke the chain. Suppose the letter is found among John's papers. It may then be said that "He broke the chain and was hit by a train a week later," and this may become a local rumor. The rumor may travel with the chain letter, orally or by telephone, each promoting the replication of the other. In this phase the most effective oral form of the rumor will develop. However, the advantage of distant transmittal applies if the rumor is written. First it may be on an attached letter. Next it may be incorporated into the body of the letter: "one person who failed to pay attention to it met with a dreadful accident" [1905]. Good luck testimonials spread in the same way - again the event of a lucky person also being a sender is not nearly as improbable as it may seem. However, should someone be killed who circulated the chain, news of the death may spread, but the compliance with the chain will not. Magic, like vice, is more talked about than is its absence.

Further, events that are not at all remarkable may be perceived by the public as prophesy fulfilled. The familiar "Unbeliever's Death" testimonial (< Woe to Scoffers) states that a person died exactly nine days after discarding the letter in disbelief. A simple estimate reveals that this is very likely true, in fact, it has likely happened at least 36,000 times just in English speaking countries in the last 25 years. Using the above approximations, a typical person received about 10 DL type luck chain letters in the last 25 years (4 per decade); and let us estimate, conservatively, that 6 of those receipts were discarded in disbelief. Assuming a quarter billion English speaking adults, this gives 6 x 2.5 x 10⁸ = 1.5 x 10⁹ disbelieving discards for the last 25 years. According to the The World Almanac and Book of Facts, the U.S. death rate per 100,000 population in year 1999 was 877. This gives the probability that a person will die on a random day as .00877 / 365  = .000024. Multiplying this by the number of times a person discarded a luck chain letter in disbelief gives 36,000 estimated deaths on the ninth day following!

Once a testimonial is established on a luck chain letter, details may vary considerably over the years, such as names and amounts of money won or lost. But the basic structure of the story is surprisingly persistent, suggesting that traditional testimonials play a major role in winning compliance.

Classification of Testimonials.
To analyze how testimonials promote replication, I classify them by the following five structures: Win, Comply-Win, Lose, Win-Lose, and Lose-Win.

(1) Win: person X received the letter and had good luck.
Example: General Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. [1952]
The Win testimonials are consistent with a belief that chain letters are a "charm" whose mere receipt brings luck, much as possession of a Letter from Heaven might grant a woman an easy delivery. They suggest a recipient interpret good luck as caused by the letter, creating an obligation to pass the charm on to others. A Win testimonial may thus recruit a previous nonbeliever who has good luck. Alternatively, readers may assume that a Win testimonial is about someone who previously complied with the letter's demands, as in our next structure.

(2) Comply-Win: X distributed the quota of copies within the deadline and received good luck.
Example: Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected for the third term as president of the United States 52 hours after he mailed this letter. [1949]
Comply-Win testimonials promote the belief that dutiful replication of a chain letter will bring good luck. This particularly appeals to those who hope for gain from some forthcoming event, such as a lottery drawing.

(3) Lose: X failed to circulate the letter and after the deadline passed had bad luck.
Example: Mr. Nevin broke the chain and lost everything he had. [1939]
Lose testimonials promote the belief that only replication of the received letter can save one from bad luck. They particularly exploit those who feel that this is not a time they can risk bad luck. This insecurity could due to a life threatening illness in the family, a job interview or a son in the military during war.

(4) Win-Lose: X received the letter and had good luck. But X failed to circulate the letter and lost what was gained, or much more.
Example: Dr. F. A. Anderson won $25,000 but lost it because he broke the chain. [1944]
A Win-Lose story promotes the belief that receipt of the letter brings good luck, but in return one must circulate the letter or lose what they received, or more. It reports two connected events that imply the letter is a causal agent, in contrast to Win and Lose testimonials that can much easier be dismissed as coincidences. Win-Lose is persuasive with those who perceive themselves to have received good luck but have yet to comply. Such good luck could be escaping injury, recovering from sickness, success in an examination or winning a bet (Renard, 1987).

(5) Lose-Win: X received the letter and procrastinated or forgot to comply within the deadline. X had bad luck. X belatedly distributed the quota and received good luck.
Example: Mr. ASC received this letter. He forgot to post.  A few days later he lost his job. After that he understood the significance of this letter and he sent 30 copies. He found a new job within 3 days. [India/UK, 1996]
The Lose-Win device encourages the belief that failure to comply causes bad luck, but this can be reversed, even after the deadline, if one complies in full to the copy quota. Like Win-Lose, the reversal of fortune points doubly to the letter as a cause. Lose-Win preys on those who perceive that they have had bad luck since failing to meet the deadline. Such bad luck could be an accident, loss of a bet or sale, illness, car trouble or not being hired. .

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

3.6 Mainline Testimonials
Early Versions.  Officer Wins.  Elliot Wins and Loses. Death and Money.  Boss Wins Lottery.
Lost Job - Better Job. The Unbeliever's Death. Car.

Early Versions.
On an early Ancient Prayer chain letter we read that "one person who failed to pay attention to it met with a dreadful accident" [1905]. This is the only testimonial, win or lose, that we have collected on the Ancient Prayer type or the following Good Luck letters of the 1920's. Testimonials reappeared in North America during the Great Depression with brief accounts of gain and loss of money. The two known Prosperity letters [1933, 1939] have three, with the pattern Win / Win / Lose. One of our two versions of the World War II Luck of London chain letter [1944] introduces the now classic pattern Win / Win-Lose, possibly having combined the latter two testimonials from the Prosperity type. From our earliest Luck by Mail type:

"Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. Gen Allen received $1,600 and lost it because he broke the chain" [1952].

Officer Wins.  Elliot wins and loses.
With the remarkable Bloomsbury letter of 1959, our early example of the Death20 type, we get the canonical versions of these two testimonials. By some unknown path of corruption or design, the chain breaker is now a civilian with last name "Elliot."

"A U.S. officer received $7,000.00. Don Elliott received $60,000.00 but lost it because he broke the chain."  [1959]

Death and Money.
This Win-Lose testimonial first appeared in North America on the Death20 founder around 1959 and was associated with inflation of the copy quota from five to twenty copies. It was the first implied death threat in the mainline.

While in the Philippines, General Walsh lost his life 6 days after receiving his copy. He failed to circulate the prayer. However, before he died, he received $665,000.00 he had won. [Bloomsbury, NJ]

The variant "wife" (for "life") first appeared around 1975, possibly as a corruption, though it is curious that this 1975 letter had a list of names of 17 couples. It was present on the Kiss and Love founders in the early 1980's and thus became universal. We have no examples of corruption or correction back to "life." Whether "wife" was simply a rider on the successful new titles, or instead carried some replicative advantage over "life," is a difficult question whose answer could be darkly revealing. The "wife" version of Death and Money has been translated and transferred to a Spanish chain letter.

En Felipinos el Gral. Combi perdio a su esposa despues de 6 dias de haber recivido y roto la cadena pero las envio mas tarde y recivio una alegria de $750.00 pesos.  [Mexico / U.S., 1980].

Win-Lose testimonials like Death and Money exploit those who perceive themselves to have received good luck since receipt of the letter. If a gambler wins big at the track after receiving the letter, he may comply to avoid being jinxed his next time out.

We now consider the three traditional testimonials that first appeared in the Lottery24 (L) block of the "DL" and "LD" compound letters of the 1970's. Like the Death and Money testimonial, we have no prior history of these invaders.

Boss Wins Lottery.
This Comply-Win testimonial provided the first mention of a lottery in an English language letter.

Constantine Diso received the chain in 1953.  He asked his secretary to make 24 copies and send them.  A few days later, he won the lottery of 2 million dollars in his country. [1974]

The above phrase "in his country," apparently an early North American addition, disappeared in the 1980's, thus allowing the recipient to believe the lottery was won in his own region. However this deletion was first present with some potent innovations (It Works, Kiss, Love) and hence prevailed in part, if not entirely, as a rider. Other changes have been minor, including the more usual "Diaz" for "Diso" and the syncretization to 20 copies.

The so called "sweepstakes" promotions likely also increase chain letter circulation. These are sponsored by American Family Publishers, Publishers Clearance House and other firms. Tens of millions participate in these, hoping to win a fortune. Promotion is by television advertising in conjunction with a direct mail campaign of incredible magnitude - almost all adults in the U.S. get this pitch (1998). Recipients are lead to believe that they have already won a huge prize, and that they only need send in an application to receive it. For example, I received a letter from American Family Publishers that displayed through a cellophane window a formal looking document decorated with eagles on each side. It proclaimed:

"Witness That On This 17th Day Of December 1993 . . .  D. VanArsdale Has Been Certified As A Grand Prize Finalist For TEN MILLION DOLLARS."

". . . if you now have and return the grand prize winning entry, we'll announce. . .
     DAN VANARSDALE HAS JUST WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS!"

In addition to its appeal to gamblers, Boss Wins Lottery makes compliance easy for some by suggesting they have a secretary prepare and distribute copies. And it assures them that the good luck still belongs to the boss. This testimonial, and the next one we discuss, show that Lottery24 was well adapted to an office environment.

Lost Job -  Better Job.
The following Lose-Win testimonial appears after Boss Wins Lottery on Lottery24.

Carlos Brandt, an office employee, received the chain. He forgot it and lost it. A few days after, he lost his job. He found the chain, sent it out to 24 people, and nine days later, he got a better job.  [1974]

From the above scenario, we see that Boss Wins Lottery and Lost Job - Better Job function together in dealing with an office environment. The concerns of both supervisors and subordinates are dealt with by example. Just as quota 20 first appeared in the U.S. in association with Death and Money, perhaps copy quota 24 first developed in Latin America in association with these complementary office testimonials.

The Unbeliever's Death.
After the Lost Job - Better Job story we usually find the following "Lose" testimonial:

Dolan Fairchild received the chain and not believing threw the letter away. Nine days later, he died.  [1997]

Car.
The following Lose-Win testimonial first appeared around 1988 on DL letters with the Love title. Thus it is not a traditional part of the Lottery24 block, but is usually formatted continuous with it.

In 1967 the letter was received by a young woman in California; it was faded and barely legible. She put it aside to do later. She was plagued with various problems, including expensive car repairs. The letter had not left her hands within 96 hours. She finally typed the letter and, as promised, got a new car. [1988]

We have mentioned the image degeneration that results from successive photocopying. In my experiments, after 15 generations (all with the same photocopier) there was significant loss of legibility. However, more recently, packets of forwarding letters with the Media chain letter are often legible after 25 or more generations (different photocopiers). In any case, contemporary chain letters are creatures of photocopying, and they must be retyped from time to time. This testimonial is the only one we have seen that explicitly encourages retyping. Evidence that it succeeds in this is present on 1995, which adds to the Car testimonial: "I have retyped it again today in 1995." Another letter gives 20 alleged retype dates, including ten just in the year 1992 [1995]. Presumably, the propagative success of Car is due to this more frequent retyping. Similar letters without it would more often become partially illegible, and therefore more likely to be discarded, or to be retyped with fatal mutations. With a larger sample we could test this by comparing image quality of Love titled letters with and without Car. Our present sample is inconclusive on this.

Though less appealing theoretically, the most effective feature of this testimonial may be its use of the automobile. If someone holds the letter past the deadline, there is a fair chance they too may be "plagued with various problems, including expensive car repairs." Car repairs often occur unexpectedly, always seemingly at the worst time, thus evoking the specter of bad luck. Like any Lose-Win testimonial, Car implies that no matter how late you may be, compliance will turn bad luck to good. By using car trouble as its example of bad luck, this testimonial may be particularly effective in activating late compliance.

Further, for many the desire for a new car is greater than their respect for reason. Suppose John Doe plays the lottery. Then likely he has already given careful consideration to which vehicles he will purchase after winning. The Car testimonial, in its original form, is clever in not specifying how the young woman gets a new car. She may win it, or win the money to buy it, or perhaps receive it as a gift from a man she is to meet. Thus this testimonial may activate compliance by interacting with the fantasies of lottery players and others.

Notes that one has retyped a chain letter occasionally appear as postscripts. This appears on a Brill parody letter:

Re-typed 5/7/79 by Joan Agundez / L.A. [1979]

This letter has been typeset and reprinted on May 26, 1987 for better reading. The copy received was just too shabby looking.  This was done in Newport Beach, Calif. by a person with the initials A.J.B. [1988]

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

3.7  EFFECTIVE COPYING
Faithful copying.  Self-correcting text.  Copy quotas.  Copy First versus Copy Later.

Faithful copying.
Successful replication of a chain letter requires copies be legible, accurate and complete. We examined in the last section how the Car testimonial suggests retyping, and thus upgrades the legibility of a photocopied chain that contains this testimonial. The following instructions also promote faithful copying of text.

Make seven copies of it exactly as it is written.  [1902]
Copy this in full and send to nine friends . . . .   [1923]
Copy this letter word by word.  [Romance Game, 1995]
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, . . . (Rev. 22:19)

Names and numbers are usually highly variable on chain letters because if partly illegible there is no context for the copier to infer the correct form. But as they vary they may at some time assume a form that allows the whole to be reconstructed from a part. We call such text self-correcting. Consider:

Mrs. Gay Field received $5000, five hours after mailing.
Mrs. Ambrose received $4000, four hours after mailing.  [1939]

Names may also be self-correcting, as by widespread familiarity.

Mr. Owen, from Sordt (Victoria), won the first prize of the Michigan lottery, 1,200,000 pounds sterling. [Switzerland, 1928, translation from French]
Mrs. Barnes of Victoria won the big prize in lottery of 20,000 golden liras on the ninth day. [Florida, 1931]

Below is a list of variations on the name of the victim in the Unbeliever's Death testimonial.

Zarin Berrachille [1973], Zerin Berreskilli, Zarin Rurreasville
Zorin Barrachilli, Zerij berreskelli, Caren Wichile, Zerim Berreball
Zarin Borracbilt [1975], Brian Barbialle, Brian Barabiaila
Dalin Nairchild [1979], Colin Holschild, Darinn Meirchild,
Dalan Fairchild [Kiss-Love founder], Darin Hairchild, Dolon Fairchild

We pause here to note that the family name "Fairchild" is self-correcting since it is a compound of two familiar English words and a familiar name. Fairchild predominated from 1983 onward. We designate it by "F" below, and continue with the tortuous transformations of the first name, which never settled.

Dalon F,  Delan F, Sobon F, Dalah F, Dallan F, Davan F, Galan Pairchild
Bolan F, Blaine F, Olean Lauchild, Dales F, Dallas F, Galan Paircheild
Dian F, Dilan F, Daln F, Darlene F, David F, Delri F, Mr. Fairchild
Deian F, Delea F, Dala F, Karen F, Nolan Foarohald, Darron F, Mellisa Horton [1994]
Carl Daddit (name from the prior testimonial, which was deleted), Colan Fatchild [France, 1997]
Brian Fairchild [2003]

Despite the great initial variation in the family name, and continuing variation of the first name, clearly almost all copiers are trying to get it right. Some are probably working with a highly degenerate photocopy. Perhaps "Fairchild" has more going for it than just self-correction. It is an innocent and virtuous sounding name, yet this seeming virtue offers no protection if one destroys the letter. On a translated Mexican letter: "Isabel Buena lost her copy and lost her life" [1984]. Again the family name is a word in Spanish, and a virtuous one (Buena = good). Such a tactic may boost propagation slightly, but recall that chain letter evolution is characterized by the rise of new variations that eliminate their cousins and establish their incidental features on every letter. If the founder of the Kiss & Love titles [1983] had read "Zarin Rurreasville" instead of something close to "Dalan Fairchild," Zarin would have been everywhere until obliterated by copy errors. And if "Rurreasville" had ever stumbled on a self-correcting form, it would not have been "Fairchild." Self-correcting text does not increase propagation, it only preserves itself from corruption. Its only chance for predominance is to ride a successful innovation, self-correction preserving it in the outflow where another name would soon disappear in the copying noise. This is how "Fairchild" became near universal, by riding the hyper-competitive Kiss-Love founder and enjoying near immunity from corruption in the process.

The name "Elliot" (as in the Elliot Wins and Loses testimonial) also appears to be self-correcting. This may be due to the scarcity of common surnames that begin with the letters "Ell." Also it seems some letters remain more legible in late generation photocopies than others; upper case "E" for example.

Self-correction applies to most of the text of a chain letter, since there is inherent redundancy in language. Some words and phrases are often corrupted, others rarely. Spoken replicators transform to a more memorable form, written replicators to a more self-correcting form. However, it is difficult to formulate general principles to assess the self-correcting power of any given text. We will rarely make use of self-correction, instead focusing on text whose meaning increases propagation.

Copy quotas.
All known luck chain letters specify a fixed number of copies that the recipient is directed to produce.

. . . make seven copies of it . . .    [U.S., ca. 1902]
Send this one and 4 others.  [U.S., 1929]
Make 12 copies and mail it to your friends. [International, 1949]
Voce deve fazer 24 copias . . . [Brazil, 1994]
Photocopiez la ou copiez en 28 fois.   [France, 1995]

Do luck chain letters threaten punishment if you distribute fewer copies than the quota?  I have yet to find an example. Often the only implied threat is for "breaking the chain," which could be interpreted as requiring only that one pass on the received letter to avoid bad luck. Partial compliance to the copy quota may account for many distributions. Thus it would probably reduce propagation for a chain letter to explicitly threaten this behavior, since then some may reject the letter entirely as too demanding. Yet it is essential to get recipients to produce the full quota of copies as often as possible. This dilemma has resulted in the survival of chain letters that are ambiguous on this issue. You are told "you must make twenty copies." And after his secretary made twenty copies  and sent them out, Constantine Dias won a lottery. But in the same letter, bad luck comes only to those who distribute no copies at all, as in Death and Money where life is lost after one "failed to circulate the letter." An explicit statement of this option appears on a Russian chain letter [Homily, 1990], where just passing it on is considered a "neutral" act.

Copy First versus Copy Later.
So by just passing on the original letter, perhaps one may avoid bad luck. How many copies must one distribute to get good luck? Again chain letters are ambiguous; by one reading you need not distribute a single copy! The contemporary mainline letter is a compound of two differing folk beliefs or susceptibilities: Copy First views the work of replication as bringing subsequent good luck, Copy Later sees the letter as a charm whose mere receipt brings luck.

COPY FIRST text requires one first distribute copies of the letter before receiving good luck, as if in compensation. "You must make twenty copies . . . and after a few days you will get a surprise." One cannot refuse to send copies just because no luck is received: "For no reason whatsoever should this chain be broken!" However, ambiguously, bad luck may be reversed by late compliance to the letter's demands, as in Lost Job - Better Job.

The Copy First orientation places the recipient subordinate to Fate. Hope for good luck and fear of bad luck are about the only motives for replication. Copy First testimonials are of the Lose, Comply-Win, and Lose-Win structure. Much of the text of Lottery24 is Copy First.

The Copy First structure also appears on other social replicators. Devotional messages have been placed in the classified advertisements of U.S. newspapers for many years. Here is an example (my italics) from the "Religious Announcements" category of The Los Angeles Times (Nov. 25, 1991):

SAINT JUDE NOVENA.  May the Sacred Heart of Jesus be adored, glorified, loved and preserved throughout the world now & forever. Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us. St. Jude, Worker of Miracles, pray for us. St. Jude, Helper of the Hopeless, pray for us. Say this prayer 9x a day for 9 days, then publish & your prayers will be answered. It has never been known to fail. R.P.

In the Copy Later orientation, one is almost bargaining as an equal with Fate. If no good luck is received in the stated interval, the charm has failed, and perhaps no copies need be distributed. If luck is delivered, the motives for replication now include gratitude and benevolent transmission of the charm to another. Hope and fear are less active, though not absent. The great taboo is to receive luck but then neglect your side of the bargain and fail to distribute the letter. You may lose what you received: "Don Elliot received $60,000 but lost it because he broke the chain" - or you may lose much more " . . . before his death, he received $775,000 which he had won." Copy Later testimonials are of the Win and Win-Lose type. The notion of simply passing on the original letter to avoid misfortune is associated with the Copy Later belief (as expressed by Boris Pasternak in 1959, see also lr1990). The chain is a chain of benevolence, not of fear. Equity is maintained by granting it to one more person. In the Death and Money testimonial a life is lost after General Walsh "failed to circulate the prayer (letter)." But this is not punishment solely for not complying, rather it is for not complying after receiving a large sum of money. Thus the letter grants luck by mere receipt, but exacts a dreadful toll from ingrates who do not then pass it on. This view of chain letter magic is outside the mindset of some revisers. Two letters collected by folklorist Paul Smith modify Death and Money to read: "Before her death he received $7,775.00 after circulating it just prior" [England, 1992]. This attempts to cast the events in a Copy First frame, but implies the wife died despite prior circulation of the letter. A North American revision fails in the same way [1991].

Other social replicators display the Copy Later structure. The following example (my italics) was published in The Los Angeles Times classifieds (Feb. 7, 1990):

TO THE HOLY SPIRIT. You who made me see everything and showed me the way to reach my ideals. You who gave me the divine gift to forgive and forget the wrong that is done to me. And, you who are in all instances of my life with me. I thank you for everything and confirm once more that I never want to be separated from you, no matter how great the material desires may be. I want to be with you, and my loved ones in your perpetual glory. Thank you for your love towards me and my loved ones. Person must pray this prayer 3 consecutive days without asking for favor. After 3rd day favor will be granted no matter how difficult. Promise to publish this dialogue soon as favor is granted. My prayers have been answered.    P.L.I.

Copy First and Copy Later may not be folk beliefs, but rather susceptibilities to one or the other side in a branching that naturally develops when supernatural promises compete for replication. A currency chain is a short message on paper money that encourages the reader to copy it on other bills (Olbrys). These varied replicators have appeared on U.S. bills for several years. Here are two examples:

When you receive this bill you will be blessed with a lot of money if you rewrite this saying on ten one dollar bills. (U.S., $1 bill, June 1998).

Anyone that receives this bill will be blessed with lots of money. Then write this on ten other bills. (U.S., $10 bill, June 1998)

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3.8 Effective Distribution
Targeted distribution. Deadlines.

The manner in which chain letters are distributed may significantly affect  propagation, but chain letters have little to say about it. Mainline letters have always just said  to "send" the copies. In practice they are sent by mail, placed in work mail slots or left where they will be found, such as on car windshields or desks. In Brazil they may be left in elevators and on doorsteps. When a choice of recipients can be made, the persons selected obviously will affect the number of second generation copies produced. Chain letters have evolved instructions for this choice that probably work better than anything a mere mortal could design.

Targeted distribution.
By targeted distribution we mean any preference or exclusion in the selection of recipients. Chain letters usually have something to say about targeting. The most common recommendation is "send these to your friends" [1902]. This may seem of little help to propagation, but note that at the least it discourages sending to a celebrity - an almost sure waste of a copy. The next major innovation in mainline letters appears on Good Luck: "Copy this out and send to nine people whom you wish good luck" [1922]. Though this opens the door to celebrity distributions, it may also target people who need good luck. During the Great Depression "whom you wish good luck" was changed to "whom you wish prosperity to" [1933]. During the perils of World War II  "prosperity" changed back to "luck" [1944]. With the Death20 letter this was improved to read ". . . to friends you think need good luck" [1959]. With this targeting the chain letter will seek out those in a desperate situation and who are thus more vulnerable to its promises and threats. But some recipients may give up on the letter if they have fewer than twenty friends. On the It Works innovation of 1979 "friends" has changed to "people," giving the current and stable reading "Send copies to people you think need luck" [1997].

The Lottery block originally stated: " . . . send it to your friends, parents or acquaintances." With new titles in 1983, "parents" was deleted, and "friends and associates" now appears (> section 4.7). The classroom Romance Game addresses girls, so "Send this to 7 people, no boys" [1998]. There is, however, an Internet version that is genderless [e1995]. The same letter also specified "You can't send it to the original person" meaning the sender. Others chains specify the copies are to be sent to "diferentes personas" [1980]. When a list of prior senders is present this by itself aids in effective targeting since one may avoid sending a copy to any of these people. This may be explicitly instructed: "Important: Do not address your letter to persons already on the list" [International, 1949].

We should emphasize that evidence from the dated collection shows that chain letters do NOT evolve by a series of small (secondary) improvements. Instead, a killer variation comes along every few years, swamps all its rivals, and universal details are set by what was linked to it. But small improvements can still accumulate for reasons previously discussed (< Section 3.3).

All the above targeting instructions likely increase propagation over no suggestion at all. However, the following, which appeared on a luck chain letter, seems counter-replicative: "Limited to Masons" [1954]. A similar restriction arose in the course of the Springfield, Missouri pyramid craze (1935), and during World War I the Ancient Prayer split into specialized versions that circulated within various fraternal organizations (NYT, 1917). The Send-a-Dime craze manifested letters that were restricted to people with last name "Smith," another for "Johnson" (DP, 1935). This "over-specialization" phenomenon probably arises when there is a chain letter boom and a recipient has many versions to choose from. One which then makes a personalized appeal may be chosen over others. But this is a recipe for extinction since targeted groups will be the first to overdose on the letter. The last three examples of over-specialization were definitely during chain letter booms; perhaps "Limited to Masons" is evidence that there was a luck chain boom around 1954, soon after the innovations of the Luck by Mail type appeared.

In Section 2.2 we listed as a characteristic of luck chain letters that they contained some language about going around the world.

This prayer was sent to me and is being sent all over the world. [1910]
This prayer was sent to me and must be sent all over the world. [1912]
The chain was started by an American Officer and should go three times around the world. [1922]
Prayer of Safety must go all over the world by card. [Postcard, 1941]
It has been around the world four times. [1944]
Since this chain must make a tour of the world, . . .  [Lottery24 block, 1974]
It has been around the world nine times. [Death20 block, 1974]
This was sent by a priest from Columbia around the world . . .
This started in Malabon and spread throughout the world.  [Mexico / Philippines / U.S., 1984]
Cette chaine a fait 7 fois le tour de la terre. [France, 1995]

It would be advisable to send one to a nearby friend and the others to friends as far away as possible, in order to send the plan broadcast.  [Oct. 1905]

Deadlines.
Chain letter events in the 20th century reveal that for propagative success it is not enough merely to reproduce in quantity - it must also be done quickly. Repeatedly a new variation will flood potential senders, thus starving out competing variations for the attention, energy and respect needed for compliance. Consequently we included a time limit in our measure of propagation: the number of descendants produced within a month. Around the turn of the century a deadline appeared on a chain letter, and ever since they are near universal.

Now, within seven days after you receive this letter, make seven copies of it exactly as it is written and send these to your friends. [1902]
Those who wrote it and passed it on before nine days, starting the day received, and mailed to nine of their friends, on the 9th day re-ceived some reward.  [1911]
Do not forget this day for the next nine days.  [1917]
Do it  within twenty-four hours and count nine days and you will have some great good fortune.  [1922]
Do not keep this letter. It must leave within 96 hours after you receive it.  [1959]

Some versions of the Ancient Prayer postcard chain ask the sender to date copies: "No name sign date only" [1912]. This would remind recipients of the day of receipt, discouraging shifting deadlines. On some luck chain letters the deadline has been measured in hours, as in the last two examples above. This may just be a stylistic rider, or perhaps there is some self-correction, especially for the 24 hour deadline that held from 1922 until the arrival of quota 20 letters in 1959.

Many Ancient Prayer versions prescribe sending a copy one day at a time: ". . . he who will write it for nine days, commencing the day received . . ." [1908]. This keeps track of the deadline by counting it out. It also associates the chain letter with the Roman Catholic Novena devotion, which involves daily observances for nine consecutive days. This would have been apparent to Catholics at the time, but invisible to most Protestants. Collecting has revealed a small but long lasting niche in North America for an explicit Novena devotional chain letter [1945, 2000]. As discussed in Section 3.4, there is an advantage for a letter to be identified as one's own by different ethnic or religious groups. A similar device (ambiguity) may be at work in "This prayer was sent by Bishop Lawrence, recommending it to be rewritten and sent to nine other persons" [1905]. Bishop William Lawrence was the Episcopalian Bishop of Massachusetts and an author, well known among American Protestants of the time. Likely many Catholics would have presumed by his title that he shared their faith. Incidentally, Lawrence had nothing to do with the chain letter, but received complaints from all over the world for his alleged endorsement (Lawrence).

Can one still receive good luck, or escape bad luck, by distributing copies after the deadline? The answer is a clear "maybe." Considering first the "Copy Later" Death20 block, the only explicit deadline statement is "Do not keep this letter. It must leave your hands within 96 hours." As noted above, this seems like you only need to pass on the original. And there is no mention of someone suffering misfortune on the fourth day after receipt. Examining the "Copy First" Lottery24 block, there is no explicit deadline statement. Nine days seems to be the implied deadline, judging from Lost Job - Better Job and the promise of a "surprise" in nine days. Thus again, it appears ambiguity is the optimal policy. The letter needs to encourage promptness and does so with a deadline and accounts of bad luck for tardiness: at the same time it needs to encourage late compliance and does this with a Lose-Win testimonial. We will say more about the missing deadline on Lottery24 (> quota 24).

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                                 Typical Send-a-Dime money chain letter, this posted May 8, 1935 in Beaumont, Texas. Archive item 1935.

4.1  THE ORIGIN OF MONEY CHAIN LETTERS (1922 - 1935)
Introduction.  Transitions to Prosperity Club - texts.  Table 4 - From Good Luck to Prosperity to Prosperity Club.  Good Luck for Men.  Good Luck for Women.  Easy version.  The Miracle letter.  Prosperity.  Prosperity Club.

Introduction.
In the spring of 1935 a chain letter craze developed that was to sweep the world. This was the advent of money chain letters. Post Office officials first became aware of the existence of the craze when "floods of send-a-dime chain letters threatened to swamp the Denver mails" (Denver Post, April 19). The name "Send-a-Dime" has stuck, even though this name never appeared on the letter, and most were titled "Prosperity Club." Despite immediate threats of prosecution, on April 28 alone the Denver Post Office handled an estimated 165,000 chain letters (DP-9a). The craze rapidly spread to other cities - on May 8 the "chain letter splurge" had increased the St. Louis daily mail average from 450,000 to 800,000 letters (DP-19). Probably more letters were passed hand-to-hand then mailed (NYT-39). The world wide distribution of money chain letters, just in 1935, probably far surpassed a billion letters.

Transitions to Prosperity Club - texts.
In this section we will show, as everyone assumed at the time, that Send-a-Dime was a composed letter. But, ingenious as this composition was, it was closely based on an existing luck chain letter, and this letter itself was very likely producing money for insiders. We have but one example [1933] of this Prosperity type letter from before the Send-a-Dime craze, published by folklorist Harry Hyatt (Hyatt, 1935). Finding more pre-1935 Prosperity letters should be a prime goal of ephemeral paper collecting, since they could tell quite a story. For one, they should reveal the development of the Prosperity type from the previous Good Luck type of the 1920's. That such a step-by-step development took place is fairly certain. We will make a guess at this development here, and hypothesize some intermediate letters. But the history of chain letters is not deterministic, and this reconstruction will likely have to be changed when more letters are collected. However we can reliably state that the key innovation that led to money chain letters was the managed list, where senders are instructed to remove the top name and address and insert their own at the bottom. Our earliest example of such an escalating list is Hyatt's 1933 letter, but likely a managed list had appeared a few years earlier on a letter that was closer to the Good Luck type. The presence of a managed list of names and towns on a luck letter leads to an amazing consequence: for a brief period at least, luck chain letters worked! That is, some people living in small towns received unexpected money in the mail. We will make the case for this "Miracle" letter in detail below. Other key innovations that led to money chain letters were the reduction of the copy quota from nine to five, and the change in the gender of listed prior senders from all male to all female.

For detailed comparison we first give the texts of these three key letters.

(1) Our starting chain letter is Good Luck, which according to legend was started by an American Officer during World War I  (du Von, 1935) (Bender, 1968). However our earliest examples are from 1922. Good Luck was apparently the first luck chain letter to make a complete break with religion, and the first to mention "luck." Good Luck used the same copy quota nine as the previous Ancient Prayer, but sped up circulation by reducing the deadline from nine days to "twenty-four hours." Most versions had a leading list of prior mailings in the format "X to Y" as below.

(2) The next text is Hyatt's 1933 luck chain letter from Illinois (Hyatt). A key feature is a managed list of six names and towns (Hyatt left out two names and two towns for privacy). We will detail below how the Hyatt letter differs from the prior Good Luck type. These changes reveal a pecuniary motivation masked as superstition and charity. Throughout this section, features shared with prior letters (disregarding wording and order) are in the normal font, and innovations are in bold italics.

(3) The concluding letter of our trio is an example of Send-a-Dime that probably comes close to its original form. This was published in an obscure periodical on direct mail (Postage and the Mailbag). Most published versions left out the list of names. I have made a few minor changes to conform to earlier letters. Send-a-Dime is clearly based on a letter very close to Hyatt's 1933 Prosperity example. Both have a leading managed list of six prior senders, a copy quota of five and a promise of "prosperity."

(1) Good Luck ---------------------------------------- [1922] -----------------------------------------

                            Birmingham, Ala. June 8, 1922

Claude Sanders            to           Phil Gleischman
Phil Gleischman           to           M. H. Starr
M. H. Starr               to           J. V. Allen

[25 pairs of names omitted here]

Walter S. Coleman         to           A. A. Gambill
A. A. Gambill             to           J. F. Suttle

Copy this out and send to nine (9) people whom you wish good luck. The chain was started by an American Officer and should go three times around the world.

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN, for whoever does will have BAD LUCK. Do it within twenty-four hours and count nine days and you will have some great good fortune.

                           "Let all go smiling through 1922."
 

 
We trust in God. He supplies our needs.

Mrs. F. Streuzel..., [omitted]... Mich.
Mrs. A.Ford........, Chicago .....Ill.
Mrs. K.Adkins......, Chicago .....Ill.
Mrs. R.Arlington..., [omitted]....Ill.
Mrs. [omitted]....., Quincy.......Ill.
Mrs. [omitted]....., Quincy.......Ill.

Copy the above names, omitting the first. Add your name last. Mail it to five persons who you wish prosperity to. The chain was started by an American Colonel and must be mailed 24 hours after receiving it. This will bring prosperity within 9 days after mailing it.

Mrs. Sanford won $3,000.
Mrs. Andres won $1,000.
Mrs. Howe who broke the chain lost everything she possessed.

The chain grows a definite power over the expected word.

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN
See what happens on the 9th day.

(3) Send-a-Dime (Prosperity Club) --------------------------- [1935] -------------------------------
 

         PROSPERITY CLUB
          In God We Trust

Mrs. Christine Galuppe   828 29th St.        Denver, Colo.
Miss Alice Ferguson      1440   Marion St.     "       "
Mrs. Carl Ferguson       1440  Marion St.      "       "
Miss Katharyn Wiley      2317 Dexter St.       "       "
Miss Thelma Hardy        2317 Dexter St.       "       "
Mrs. Villa Pickens       1320 St. Paul St.     "       "

          Faith          Hope          Prosperity

This charm was started in the hope of bringing prosperity to you.

Within three days make five copies of this letter, leaving off the name and address at the top and adding your name and address at the bottom, and mail to five friends to whom you wish prosperity to come.

In omitting the top name, send that person ten cents (10c) wrapped in paper as a charity donation. In turn, as your name leaves the list you will receive 15,625 letters with donations amounting to $1,562.50.

Now is this worth a dime to you?

Have the faith your friend had and the chain will not be broken.

Michael Preston observed (Preston) features shared by Good Luck (1928), Prosperity (1933) and French letters from 1928. Both Good Luck and Prosperity instruct you to copy the letter and send it to people to whom you wish luck / prosperity, this to be completed in 24 hours. This will bring you luck / prosperity within 9 days. Both attribute the letter to an American officer and warn against breaking the chain.

Here we hypothesize missing phases between two letters by (1) identifying all the changes required to transform one letter to the next, and (2) grouping together changes that share a single common motivation, consistent with necessary order relations among the changes. We ignore reordering and differences in word choice  (e.g., "American Officer" equates to "American Colonel").

The following hypothetical changes transform the Good Luck letter of 1922 to the Prosperity letter of 1933.

In Table 4 we assign a motive to each of these five groups of changes as numbered above, and hypothesize the circulation of three intermediate chain letters between Good Luck (1922) and Prosperity (1933). Clearly the order of the innovations could vary some, and transfers from foreign letters could further complicate matters. Even if all the innovations were in the order shown, it is unlikely that just one person made all the changes in each group. But it simplifies explanation to assume so, and introduce fictional scenarios below for each new hypothetical letter.

Table 4 - From Good Luck to Prosperity to Send-a-Dime.
 

Changes	New Motive	Name of resulting letter	Date	Link to text
Initial	Status	Good Luck for Men	1922	Alabama
1.1	Propriety	Good Luck for Women	1926?	Hypothetical
2.1 - 2.4	Economy	Good Luck for Women - Easy	1928?	Hypothetical
3.1 - 3.2	Faith	Miracle	1932?	Hypothetical
4.1 - 4.5	Money	Prosperity	1933	Illinois
5.1 - 5.6	Charity	Send-a-Dime	1935	Denver

Good Luck for Men.  (Motive: status, Initial changes)
We guess that the Good Luck letter did not have a leading list of names when it first started, perhaps during the Great War. Say in 1922 a celebrity X sends a Good Luck letter to friend Y and happens to head the letter "X to Y," probably not expecting this will be copied. If you are Y, if you include "X to Y" on your nine copies, you display to others that you are a friend of X. But you don't want to be too obvious about this, so you write "Y to Z1," Y to Z2," etc., each below the "X to Y" on the letters you send to Z1, Z2, etc., as if this were the required form. The process can repeated downline. In our example (< above) there are thirty pairs of names. In his syndicated weekly column, Ring Lardner said he had received twelve such letters and recognized some names on the lists (Lardner). A British example from 1928 contained 99 names, including officers and judges (Burrell).

Of the 31 different names on our example, all 18 that have identifiable gender are men. It is the same on other examples - all men. So we call this letter "Good Luck for Men." We identify the principal motive for the circulation of this variation as status display, though the initial innovation (X toY) was likely whimsical or merely someone's habitual form for letters.

Good Luck for Women.  (Motive: propriety, Change 1.1)
All names on Prosperity (< above) are of married women, and women dominated early Send-a-Dime as well (RMN 1935-1). The change in gender could have occurred when a copy of the "Good Luck for Men" version was sent to a woman and soon only women's names appeared on the list. Or a letter could have been restarted by women. In either case, when all names began with "Mrs.," both propriety and precedent would dictate copies be sent only to other women. We do not know when the Good Luck gender change happened, but it was probably necessary for the continuation of the letter into the 1930's. Reports from England in 1928 suggest the Good Luck letter there had male and female branches (Burrell, Wright). A circulating English translation [1931] of a French language letter [1928], pre adapted to the Great Depression by having some financial testimonials, had a "from X to Y" leading list of 14 names, thirteen identified as "Mrs." and one as "Jean." Charitable appeals are important throughout the origins of Send-a-Dime, and presumably these could gain more sympathy from women.

Easy version.  (Motive: Economy, Changes 2.1 - 2.4)
There are 30 pairs of names in the above example of Good Luck for Men, listed in a vertical format as "X to Y." Suppose a secretary received one of the above letters with as many women's names and thought it would be fun to send it to her friends. But she saw no reason to burden herself, nor her friends, with more work than necessary. To economize she listed the names once, instead of using the prior "X to Y" format in which most appear twice. She also reduced the list to six names, and added a list management instruction so the list would not increase. To save further time she may have reduced the copy quota from nine to five. Why five copies?  According to a 1941 secretarial manual (Gregg), with standard weight paper only four legible carbon copies could be made, plus the first page makes five. The change from nine to five copies occurred during or before 1929, since we have a luck chain letter intermediate between Good Luck and Prosperity which has copy quota five [1929-06]. This letter, however, is probably not in the ancestry of Prosperity since it has no list of prior senders.

The Miracle letter.  (Motive: Faith, Changes 3.1 - 3.2)
With the leading list of names under control, a title could more conveniently be placed and retained at the top of the page. "We trust in God. He supplies our needs" was added above the six names. This was very likely done after the depression had started (1929), the initial intent being to bolster faith in response to economic peril. Letters with this timely message may have replicated more than untitled versions. Other titles may also have replicated, but the charitable implications of "He supplies our needs" were to be important. We guess that at about the same time the tradition developed to add one's town and state on the senders list. This was not possible with the "X toY" format on Good Luck for Men. The new title and a managed list of names with towns and states, innovations of seeming minor importance, produced an amazing result that in turn led to the greatest "mind virus" of the last century. We incorporate the changes so far, 1.1 to 3.2, in the following hypothetical "Miracle" letter which we guess actually circulated around 1932. The names are fictional. Recall that bold italics represent innovations over the prior form (in this case, over "Good Luck for Women - Easy").

The Miracle letter ------------------------ Hypothetical - around 1932 -------------------------------

            We trust in God.  He supplies our needs.

 
Mrs.  A. Allen    Chicago,      Ill.
Mrs.  B. Boyer    Chicago,      Ill.
Mrs.  C. Carter    Peoria,      Ill.
Mrs.  D. Doyle    Shelbyville,  Ill.
Mrs.  E. Edwards    Middleton,  Wis.
Mrs.  F. Fairchild  Small,      Idaho

Copy the above names, omitting the first. Add your name last. Mail it to five persons who you wish luck to. The chain was started by an American Colonel and must be mailed 24 hours after receiving it. This will bring luck within 9 days after mailing it.

DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN  See what happens on the 9th day.

This letter has been mailed by "Mrs. F. Fairchild, Small, Idaho" (call her Flora). Perhaps the Fairchild family has lost their farm and are impoverished. Willing to try anything, Flora obeys the instructions on the letter and sends out five copies with her name now at the bottom of the list of six names. She has removed a prior top name, but she did not send out any money, and there is no instruction to do so. Within nine days she begins receiving money in the mail from strangers, from all over. Dimes, quarters, even a five dollar bill! She remembers the luck chain she sent out. It has worked! Flora eventually receives a total of about $30. She accepts what has happened as divine providence. She placed her name on a list below the words "We trust in God.  He supplies our needs." To take the letter at its word would not be an unusual conclusion in 1932, especially since managed list instructions and money chain letters had never been seen before.

Why did Flora receive the money? Each letter that she sent out that was processed according to the instructions would result in five new copies with "Mrs. F. Fairchild, Small, Idaho" moved up one notch in the list. If every recipient fully complied, eventually there would be 5⁶ = 15,625 letters with her name at the top. Of course such a rate of compliance is all but impossible. But if just two of every five people complied, there would eventually be 5 x (2⁵) = 160 letters with "Mrs. F. Fairchild, Small, Idaho" at the top. That is a high rate of growth also, but possible during a "chain letter fad." Note also that Flora's name and town are self-correcting, so even after 5 generations of hand copying there is a good chance they would be preserved.

We have presumed the "Miracle" letter contained only names, cities and states (no street addresses), which is the form Hyatt gave for the subsequent Prosperity letter. This in not a deliverable address for someone living in a city or town of more than, say, twenty thousand population (such as all but the last town I selected above for the Miracle letter). But in 1932 it was an adequate address for people in small towns. I have seen many old covers without a street address. A person would not hesitate to address a letter to "Mrs. F. Fairchild, Small, Idaho" knowing it would get delivered. Alternatively, Flora may have received a version of the letter which had complete addresses, and followed the example.

So say there are over a hundred letters received with an adequate address for Flora at the top of the list, and many others received with her address further down on the list. Why would anyone send her money? After all, the "Miracle" letter does not request anything be sent. First, recall the tradition of charity chain letters. We have a divinity student's 1889 chain solicitation for money [1889], and there is a 1916 example soliciting for an "old railroad man" [Billy]. During the Great Depression there could have been a proliferation of charity chain letters of various forms, and begging letters. Some sympathetic recipients could have responded without careful reading of the Miracle letter. Above the names appeared: "We trust in God.  He supplies our needs." This suggests that all six of the people listed are dependent on religiously motivated charity. Thus some people, moved by the suffering wrought by the depression, might without reading further send all six people on the list a donation. This would explain the receipt of money "within 9 days after mailing," before there was time for one's name to work to the top. Partial literacy could also bring mistaken responses. And there could have been a tradition that sending money was necessary to receive good luck. Recall the Mexican letters that ask the reader to send a coin forward with each copy mailed out (< Outliers). Or such a recommendation could have been spread by promoters of the letter as part of a conscious scheme to obtain money. However, for our scenario we presume otherwise, since we are trying to reconstruct how such a scheme could have developed in the first place.

What is our evidence for this naive receipt of money? Given the form of the Prosperity type letters, once someone from a small town signed on, and their copies propagated well downline, it would almost have to happen. There is also lost evidence. Around 1975 someone told me that long ago a grandmother had sent out a luck chain letter and got a lot of money in the mail from strangers. At that time I had not seen Hyatt's publication, and did not know that in the early 1930's there were luck chains with lists of names and some mailable addresses. This fact had also been lost in the story I heard. The story seemed so ridiculous that I discounted it and eventually forgot who told me.

If our reconstruction is correct, there were one or two glory years when luck chain letters actually "worked" for some, as if by magic. The money received was not expected by the sender of the letter, nor even by the authors of the innovations that made it work. These surprise benevolences may have inspired a folk belief in the efficacy of luck chain letters that has sustained the genre for three generations.

Prosperity.  (Motive: Money, Changes 4.1 - 4.5)
We now consider the changes that complete the transition from Good Luck to  Prosperity. Stories of the naive receipt of money would circulate orally, or possibly as testimonials on versions of the Miracle letter. Some people would understand the exponential feedback process involved, and would use the letter to try to get money. We can reason out some of their behavior. They would restart the letter by replacing the names in the list with aliases; or with the names of conspiring friends and relatives, forming a "circle" of six people. The circle would not feel bound by the copy quota of five, but instead might distribute hundreds of copies. But first, what changes might be made to the prior chain letter to increase cash receipts?

Consider change 4.1: the Good Luck  letter stated it "should go three times around the world" and someone deleted this in the ancestry of the Prosperity letter. Every luck chain letter before and since has had some words about circumnavigation. However, letters that go overseas are unlikely to return a donation, so this deletion suggests financial motivation.

Next consider change 4.2: in two places someone changed "luck" to "prosperity" in the Prosperity ancestry. This could not be accidental - someone hoped, and wanted others to hope, that the letter brings money, not just "luck."

Change 4.3 suggests the same intent: three money testimonials have been added, including "Mrs. Sanford won $3,000."  Testimonials about receiving money accumulate on modern luck chain letters, and appeared in 1928 in France (Deonna). But the use of the word "won" (instead of "received") twice on the Prosperity letter is suspicious. Possibly it could encourage replication of the letter by people hoping to win a bet. The Irish Sweepstakes was very popular in the early 1930's. Or the letter itself could be some form of lottery, additional instructions being transmitted orally.

Change 4.4 also moves in the direction of money: the previous warning of generalized "bad luck" for breaking the chain has been replaced, functionally, by the third testimonial that associates breaking the chain with financial ruin.

Changes 4.1 to 4.4 show that in 1933 there was a replicative advantage for luck chain letters that suggested financial gain, and that de-emphasized the role and reward of luck. Less than two years later a completely rational promise of money, Send-a-Dime, flooded the mails.

However, if we consider the perceptions of a circle of six people who are knowingly "operating" a version of the Prosperity chain for money, it seems they would not want to disclose how the letter worked. Disclosure could generate competing circles, invite problems with taxes or the postal inspectors, and destroy the charitable aura of the letter on which they believed everything depended. Thus the interest of major distributors seems contrary to the disclosures on the Prosperity letter.

To resolve this seeming contradiction, first consider some numbers. Just because we have but a single example of a Prosperity letter before 1935, that does not imply this type of letter was rare. If it could be a "fad" in Adams County, Illinois, why not in any other county in the United States? For that matter, two of the names on Hyatt's Adams County letter are from Chicago. A confused article in Literary Digest (April 20, 1937) assumes the reader has received more than one luck chain with list management instructions. Prosperity letters were probably a nationwide fad, producing tens of millions of letters. Even if there were thousands of secretive operators, this is far more letters than they could generate. Next, which alternative would better replicate: secrecy about the money-making properties of the letter, or disclosure? Certainly the more one is convinced that the letter brings donations by an understandable process, the more copies one will distribute. Individual members of a circle would be tempted to tip their relatives about the letter, and stories of its success in obtaining money by rational means would spread along with the letter, boosting replication. Or, in some simpler form, this information may be placed on the letter itself, such as "Mrs. Sanford won $3,000." Such disclosures on the letter would outpace oral recruitment by reaching out at a distance, even to strangers. As people became privy to the opportunity, there may have been a growing core network that preferred secrecy to disclosure. But the letter replicates just beyond that core in vast numbers. The content of a prevailing chain letter is simply what has appeared that best replicates. This may not be what most people want on the letter. Nor can a growing population of initiates easily control content, since their Frankenstein monster of exponential growth will run away and discover unanticipated methods of reproduction.

Evidence for this trend toward rational disclosure includes not only changes 4.1 to 4.4 as discussed, but the last change, 4.5, completing the Prosperity letter. This is the addition: "the chain grows a definite power over the expected word."  This may be a corruption or mystification of a prior explanation of how the letter worked. The word "power" may have first appeared with a mathematical meaning. This trend away from providence or luck, and toward a shared hope for money through mechanism, culminated in the remarkable Send-a-Dime letter of 1935.

Send-a-Dime (Prosperity Club). (Motive: Charity, Changes 5.1 - 5.6  )
The Send-a-Dime money chain letter was a major rewrite of a Prosperity luck chain letter. Both have the word "God" at the top, a managed list of six names below that, and the instruction to mail it to five people "you wish prosperity to." We now discuss some innovations of Prosperity Club (5.1 - 5.6).

5.1. "Prosperity Club"
Likely this was the name chosen by the author for the letter, or for participation in it. "Prosperity" was the stated goal of the prior "luck" letter. Calling it a "club" gave the appearance of organizational reality and encouraged social contact along links. This probably served to unify the independent circles that were operating the Prosperity letter.

5.2.  Deletion of: "He (God) supplies our needs."
With Send-a-Dime, it was your friends, their friends, the "club" that delivered prosperity, not God or luck. A nod was given to tradition by the monetary subtitle "In God we Trust" (compare to "We Trust in God" on Prosperity). The author also deleted all references to good or bad luck that appeared in Prosperity, including the three money testimonials.

5.3.  Full street addresses were used. Now everyone could play the game, not just people in small towns.

5.4.  ". . . within three days . . ."
The deadline was extended from one to three days.

5.5.  "In omitting the top name send that person ten (10c) cents wrapped in a paper as a charity donation.
This explicit request that money be sent was the key innovation of Send-a-Dime, making it the first money chain letter. The explanation of sending (and receiving) dimes was deftly handled by associating it with the departure of a name from the list, as if in compensation. Note that these dimes were described as a "charity donation," revealing Send-a-Dime's early association with charity. Another key innovation over Prosperity was also present here (its ingenuity camouflaged from our modern eyes by its own success). Prosperity operators must have dreamed of getting a five dollar bill. To fix the amount of the donation, and at just ten cents, would never have occurred to them. However the request for a fixed donation, usually a dime, appears on all prior charity chain letters, such as [1916].

In turn as your name leaves the top of the list you should receive 15,625 letters with donations amounting to $1,536.50.
Instead of trying to explain the exponential feedback process (a lengthy and difficult task, especially in a corruptible medium), the author simply gives the maximum number of dimes one might receive. Thus the reader is challenged to verify this number, and in the process may become obsessed with exponential growth. Even today, tens of thousands of people are fascinated with exponential feedback, and pursue its promise of wealth with money chain letters or multi-level marketing. In 1935, the $1,562.50 maximum payoff would buy about what $25,000 does today.

Though it was to become the mother of all nuisances, the original Send-a-Dime letter was a work of genius. The author understood how chain letters were working then, probably better than we will ever know, and with amazing economy completely rationalized and transmuted this tradition. With a composition of no more than 120 words, a new communications process was introduced to the world. No prior example of this process has ever been discovered. It is related to the older "Ponzi scheme," in which the money of new investors pays the old investors. But a Ponzi scheme has a fixed center, as do pyramid sales and multilevel marketing. The Prosperity Club exponential feedback process does not have a fixed center, and could be called a "floating Ponzi."

Who wrote Send-a-Dime? In 1935, many people  wanted to know, including reporters and Postal Inspectors. Yet the author's identity was never revealed. There was one obscure report that we feel deserves credence - Donald Wickets writing in 1935 (Liberty). Based on Wickets' account, newspaper articles and the evidence from chain letters, we offer the following scenario for the launching of Send-a-Dime.

In early 1935, a woman living in the Denver area, call her Mrs. C ("C" for charity), has received versions of the Prosperity type luck chain. She learns that it is generating cash donations and completely understands the process. Mrs. C rewrites this letter, producing the first "Prosperity Club" text. She consults a Denver attorney concerning its legality and he gives her the green light (told to Wickets by the attorney). Mrs. C places the names of people needing money on the letters and distributes the letters, launching a worldwide money chain letter craze. In the first newspaper report on the craze, a Post Office Inspector states: "We intend to trace down the individuals responsible for starting the craze, and when we have the necessary evidence we'll arrest them for federal prosecution." Mrs. C keeps her authorship of the letter a secret, probably as she had planned from the start.

The 1935 money chain letter craze was not a single radiating wave, but several  pulsations as new methods were devised to recruit participants, thwart cheating and appear legal (as by avoiding use of the mail). "Pyramid schemes" soon developed in which the letter was purchased at parties or meetings organized by those higher on the list. Supervision guaranteed payment to the top person on the list and discouraged restarts. All pyramid schemes are now illegal, even if they never use the mail. A well known example is the "Circle of Gold," begun in 1978 in California. In this scheme one enters the process by buying a letter bearing a list of twelve names for $50. The seller assures that the buyer sends $50 to the name at the top of the list. Two copies of the letter are then prepared with the top name removed and the buyer's name inserted last. The buyer then becomes a seller, and attempts to sell these letters for $50 each, thereby recouping the initial $100 entry cost. We call this process a Springfield5 type pyramid, since it began in that Missouri city on May 8, 1935 with a $5 ante version. Reporter Allen Oliver recorded conversation about it moments after its inception (Springfield Leader and Press). Claims that pyramid schemes are an ancient invention (1958, 1980) have not been verified, though the "triangular" numbers (10+20=30, 10+20+30=60, 10+20+30+40=100)  in Mark 4: 4 - 9 (the Parable of the Sower) suggest some organized method of propagating "the word."

Money chain letters have greatly diversified since 1935 and many billions have been mailed worldwide. We have collected closely related examples from England that ask for a sixpence, bear a list of five names and addresses instead of six, and reassure the reader that there is " no further assessment or catch"  to the procedure [1935e1, 1935e2]. A 1988 study describes contemporary letters and attitudes of the "players" (Boles & Myers). Money chain letters have also invaded the Internet in great numbers [2001].

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4.2  DIVERGENCE OF LUCK AND MONEY CHAINS (1935 - 1939)
Send-a-Dime crash.  Identity crisis.  Identification by command.  A Demon appears.

Send-a-Dime crash.
The Send-a-Dime chain letter craze of 1935 peaked in the weeks after it received its first newspaper coverage (April 19 in Denver, April 21 in New York). Denver restaurant owner A. McVittie received 2,363 copies in two days (April 27). However, by May 28 the New York Times was reporting "Chain-letter fad on wane." Hopes to make money using Send-a-Dime quickly collapsed and the letters became a public nuisance. Parodies circulated that mocked the process and expressed intimidating hostility to senders [1935]. Despite the subsequent long term survival of money chain letters, surely there came a time in the mid 1930's when chain letters were quickly discarded with little examination.

Identity crisis.
While money chain letters were being contemptuously discarded by the millions, what was happening to the prevailing Prosperity luck chain letters? Many must have suffered the same fate since they looked so much like Send-a-Dime. After all, Send-a-Dime was modeled on them, with the leading list of six names. Here is a challenge for you: for a luck chain letter to survive then, how could it convincingly distinguish itself from the reviled and illegal money chain letters?

Identification by command.
You may suggest a prominent disclaimer. But contemporary money chain letters often claim that they are not a chain letter [1978]. Probably from thousands of variations there appeared "Do not send money" [1939, probably earlier]. In 1952 an observant reporter, writing about Send-a-Dime, noted that almost all luck chain letters had this sentence (Nelson), as all do now. It mattered little, for replication, whether a recipient sent money or not. The replicative power of "Do not send money" resided in its distinguishing the letter it was on from a money chain. What other sentence could so decisively inform a reader that the letter in hand did not ask for money? This use of a command for identification is a striking example of the creativity of the folk process. The contents of a traditional chain letter are not understood by their literal meaning, but by their affect on propagation.

Once "Do not send money" predominated on luck chain letters, they could not nourish hope of bringing money by some rational means. And the author of Send-a-Dime, the fabulous Mrs. C,  had removed all mention of good luck or bad luck, and removed all testimonials. Thus luck chain letters and money chain letters parted ways, and since this splitting of the motivational stream have radically diverged. Testimonials would reappear on money chain letters, but instead of third person tales of good and bad luck we now see first person fictions of riches gained. No luck is involved in these stories - getting rich allegedly follows by cause and effect if you obey the instructions.

A Demon Appears.
A recent (4/2003) discovery reveals that there was an early experiment (1935-36?) in asking for money and threatening bad luck for noncompliance.  The following "actual letter found among some mementos" appeared in the March 1977 issue of the nostalgia magazine Good Old Days (Esther Norman, 1977). The initial list of five names and addresses were not published.

                                              THE GOOD LUCK CHAIN

Dear Friend:
   This chain was started in the hope of bringing good luck to you. WITHIN THREE DAYS, make five (5) copies of this letter, leaving off the top name and address and add your name and address at the bottom of the list. Remember, faith, hope and charity!
   Mail or give these five copies to five of your friends or relatives to whom you wish good luck and prosperity to come. Be careful to choose friends who are reliable and dependable and who will be certain to keep the chain unbroken.
   An Army officer received $5,000 from sending out the letters. A housewife received $3,000 and a high school student received $1,000, so you can see that it pays off.
   Send 10¢ to the top name on the list, the one that you omitted. Wrap it carefully in paper, put it in an envelope, enclosing nothing else, as a charity donation. In turn, as your name reaches the top, you will begin receiving hundreds of dimes.
   Beware! If you break the chain you will have bad luck. One woman was in a car accident when she broke the chain. Another woman was sued for divorce. A man lost his job. A high school student failed to pass in three subjects. Bad luck will follow you if you break the chain!
   Send your five letters today! Pick good friends you can trust! The dimes will begin arriving if you do.  [1936uu]

But could a hybrid money / bad luck chain long survive, and if so, what might it evolve toward? Surely the most malignant combination of the many motivations for complying with a chain letter is the joining of money with fear. A grim evolutionary potential of a such a letter is extortion, real or simulated. An internet informant told me that a hundred quota money chain letter existed (1996) in India that, as they recalled, contained bad luck warnings against breaking the chain. But threats on money chain letters are not mentioned in over a hundred U.S. newspaper articles, many dating back to 1935. There is the curious suicide of Cecil Headlee, 39, who "shot and killed himself because he thought 'a mob was going to get him for breaking the chain' " (DP, 1935-26). This brief account does not tell us what type of chain letter was involved. I had always presumed it was a "standard" Send-a-Dime type, which we should expect for May 15, 1935. But perhaps some more sinister version of money / bad luck had reached Mr. Headlee, perhaps one that mentioned an unsolved murder. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Norman letter given above, and thus likely more threatening versions did circulate. But if so, they would have been brought to the attention of the postal inspectors, who in 1935 had tremendous discretion as to which transgressors to pursue. A "send money or die" letter would surely have annoyed them, and thus any such demon may have been squashed as it emerged from its egg.

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4.3  LUCK FOLLOWS MONEY (1952)
The Luck by Mail type. Follow-up letters.  Design or Self-organization?

Though luck and money chain letters diverged in content after the 1935 Send-a-Dime boom / bust, some features have appeared in luck chain letters that may have special appeal to distributors of money letters.

The Luck by Mail type.
Our principal text will be a letter mailed anonymously from a town in Tennessee in April 1952 (Halpert). Unlike most chains of the time, the letter did not have a list of senders.

This Prayer has been sent to you and has been around the world four times. The one who breaks it will have bad luck.

The Prayer. Trust in the Lord with all thy heart and lean not on thy own understandance in all thy ways acknowledge him and he will direct thy path.

Please copy this and see what  happens in four days after receiving it. Send this copy and four to someone you wish good luck. It must leave in 24 hours. Don't send any money and don't keep this copy. Gen Patton received $1,600 after receiving it. Gen Allen received $1,600 and lost it because he broke the chain.

You are to have good luck in 4 days. This is not a joke and you will receive by mail.  [1952]

• The letter refers to itself as a "prayer," and the King James translation of Proverbs 3:5-6 has been added.

• The Win and Win-Lose testimonials both use the names of generals and the amount $1,600.

• "This is not a joke and you will receive by mail." has been added near the end of the letter.

Follow-up Letters.
Many direct mail campaigns will follow-up a first solicitation by another. I have mentioned the massive "sweepstakes" mailings of American Family Publishers, Publishers Clearing House and other companies, which try to convince people (without exactly saying it) that they will win a huge cash prize if they respond (< Sweepstakes). I have received a follow-up letter stating that prize winners had asked about giving a gift to members of the "prize patrol." The letter explained that this was against company policy, but suggested that the purchase of a magazine subscription would be an appropriate gesture instead. Several years ago, after receiving a "you may already have won" letter, my mother received a follow-up that purported to be from an attorney who had obtained the public information of her being a "finalist." The "attorney" offered his services as a financial adviser, implying that it was likely my mother would soon be in need of his services.

Suppose that John Doe is operating a Send-a-Dime letter, say in 1950. Our sample of money chain letters contains over 30 from 1935, but only four from 1936 to 1974. The nearest date I have to 1950 is 1943. However many things happened in 1935, within weeks of the start of the craze in April. The initial Send-a-Dime restriction to five copies was immediately ignored by chain letter operators. No formal copy quota is present now, but money letters often suggest mailings of hundreds. Also in 1935, the ante was often raised from a dime to a dollar, five dollars and more. But probably there remained a niche for the dime chain in 1950. Based on the price of a first class postage stamp (three cents), a dime then would buy what a dollar does now. And dollar antes are common now on money chain letters.

So John Doe mails out a couple hundred money chain letters, perhaps similar to the original Send-a-Dime in that they ask for a dime and, for tradition sake, ask that five copies be sent out. He has aliases or relatives in all the slots for prior senders - no reason for strangers to get in on the money. John is disappointed that his previous response rate shows the letter is not quite propagating on its own, and wonders if he could increase response by a follow-up letter. What would work as a follow-up?

First, the follow-up letter itself should be a chain letter - otherwise John will only reach those on his mailing list, and the big money comes if his Send-a-Dime letter multiplies downline. But there is no point to sending another money chain letter so soon. Could using a luck chain letter as a follow-up increase response to the money chain letter?

With all exponential feedback processes, whether money chain letters, pyramid schemes or multilevel marketing, the most lucrative product to transmit downline is faith. Suppose someone has received the money chain letter, and then, fatefully, an anonymous letter arrives proclaiming he or she will soon receive a mysterious cash bonanza by mail. Surely this increases the temptation to try the Send-a-Dime letter. Even if the follow-up letter persuades just one additional person in ten, this could bring hundreds of extra responses. Those so persuaded, if they do not restart the letter like John did, will leave most of John's aliases on the list and mail five copies to people they know. And then, would not many of those on John's mailing list also comply with the luck chain letter they had received? If so, who would they send it to? Likely the same people they sent the money chain to, either naively, or realizing that as the luck letter motivated themselves, so too it may motivate others and thus increase their downline compliance to the money chain. Conveniently, both the luck and money letters asked for five copies, not surprising since the second was modeled after the first in 1935.

So a luck chain letter may be a good follow-up to a money chain letter. Are any innovations of the 1952 Halpert letter designed to better serve this purpose? First, Proverbs seems doubtful, though it may have helped by creating the impression that this was a letter no one had seen before. As for the new testimonials, both generals get $1,600. The maximum payoff for Send-a-Dime was $1,562.50, a figure present in the original Send-a-Dime text. Rounded off, as in memory, this easily becomes $1,600. Thus we should expect this number would encourage fantasies of hitting it big with Send-a-Dime. Finally, Luck by Mail states you will receive your good luck ($1,600) by mail, the very medium that delivers the Send-a-Dime bonanza. Thus the 1952 Halpert letter may have been a modification of a circulating chain letter designed to follow-up Send-a-Dime.

If so, it could have had a high replication rate among money chain players, and its distribution was highly targeted to this group. The paths of prior money letters had left loosely connected transmission networks totaling perhaps 10 million people, some links going back to 1935. The Halpert letter, and subsequent variants, may have surged through these networks, also spinning off letters into the general public in sufficient quantity to kill off all its luck chain letter cousins by immunization.

Money letters setting higher antes probably followed transmission paths of Send-a-Dime in 1935. In North Dakota, Miss Elma Bergrud received a quilt patch exchange letter [1935-10] from the same person who had previously sent Send-a-Dime [1935-05]. In 1978, the $1000 ante pyramid scheme "Circle of Abundance" followed the earlier $100 ante "Circle of Gold" (Marks 1978). It is easy to see why all this happened. For example, pyramid schemes are illegal and flow along social contacts in the early going. Thus the lower ante Circle of Gold established a tree of trusted prior participants that was available to the same "circle" for the higher ante next round. Of course this second tree was pruned of all those who lost money in the first round.

Symbiotic distribution occurs if for two replicators within a network of transmission, the receipt of one favors the replication of the other. Recall that quota five and quota twenty letters circulated simultaneously during 1959 - 1967 (<  Table 2). Perhaps this was possible because of niche differentiation. Luck by Mail (quota five) may have been a symbiotic resident within the old money chain network, while Death20 was establishing itself among offices workers and professionals..

Design or Self-organization?
Apart from suggestive bits of text, there is no other direct evidence that luck chain letters ever followed money chain letters. If we had samples of all the chain letters received by a few people, then by examining postmarks the phenomenon might be confirmed. Even if this symbiotic distribution could be proved, that does not prove someone deliberately modified a luck chain letter to serve as a follow-up to a money letter. For if among the thousands of variations present in the chain letter population, some happen to appeal more to money chain letter players, then these will flow in the money chain transmission networks. Thus it is difficult to decide if some features are the product of calculating human design, or the product of selection from a vast pool of accidental or uncalculated variations.

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4.4 ORIGIN OF COPY QUOTA 24 (1959 - 1973)
The Lottery24 type.  Missing deadline.  Accidental origin hypothesis.
Table 5 - Selected luck chain letter specifications.

The Lottery24 type.
We have previously discussed the Lottery24 type chain letter, its South American origin and its combination with the Death20 type in North America in the early 1970's (<  LD Type). As noted by Preston, the original copy quota of this type was twenty-four. From one of his examples: "You must make twenty-four copies . . ."  [1975, B4], and many other examples retained twenty-four in the testimonials (Preston). But within a few years, variations predominated in North America which had eliminated this inconsistency in the copy quota, reading twenty copies instead. Mexican [1984, 1995] and Brazilian [1994] letters, and we suspect most indigenous South American chains, still retain copy quota twenty-four.

Missing deadline.
A curious fact about Lottery24 is that its early North American forms have no explicit deadline. Nine days seems to be the implied deadline, since that interval brings a better job to an office worker and death to an unbeliever. But there is no statement commanding the recipient to complete distribution of copies within a specified interval of time. On the Lottery24 block of contemporary DL letters you find: " . . . an office employee, received the letter and forgot it had to leave his hands within 96 hours." However the italicized deadline is an internal transfer from the Death20 block that first appeared around 1983 (a rider on Kiss). Except for Lottery24, all English language luck chains, and most foreign examples, have an explicit deadline.

Accidental origin hypothesis.
The origin of high copy quotas (20 and over) is puzzling. In North America, quota 5 letters dominated circulation from around 1929 on into the 1960's. But a quota 20 letter had appeared by 1959, and eventually captured mainline circulation near the end of the 1960's. The origin of the South American quota twenty-four is also a difficult question. Just one example of a Spanish or Portuguese letter from 1955-1979 would be a great help. Still we venture this hypothesis:

Copy quota 24 originated by accident when someone mistakenly used the "24" from a 24 hour deadline as the copy quota.

Table 5.  Selected luck chain letter specifications.
 

No.	Location	Years	Quota	Deadline	Wait	Type	Link
1	U.S & U.K.	1922 - 1929	9  copies	24 hours	9 days	Good Luck	Brittain
2	France	1928	9      "	24   "	9 days	Good Luck	Deonna
3	U.S.	1929	5      "	24   "	4 days	Good Luck var.	Patterson
4	U.S.	1933 - 1945	5      "	24   "	9 & 4 days	Prosperity	Reherman
5	U.S.	1952 - 1967	5      "	24   "	4 days	Luck by Mail	Hansen
6	Venezuela	1930? - 1968?	5      "	24   ":	9 days	Hypothetical
7	Venezuela	1965?	24    "	24   "	9 days	Hypothetical
8	Venezuela	1965?	24    "	None	9 days	Hypothetical
9	U.S.	1973	24    "	None	9 days	Lottery24 block	Preston
10	Brazil	1994	24    "	None	9 days	Unnamed	Savio
11	Mexico / U.S.	1980 - 1995	24    "	9 & 13 days	13 days	Unnamed	Montenyohl

(1) Letters with the a 24 hour deadline had circulated internationally since the 1920's, and were still very common in North America during the 1960's (Nos. 1 to 5 in the table). Though uncollected, very likely a luck chain letter circulated in South America that also had this 24 hour deadline (No. 6 in the table).
(2) At some time, perhaps around 1965, someone mistakenly used "24" for the copy quota on No. 6, producing the hypothetical letter No. 7 with quota 24 copies and deadline 24 hours.
(3) In this mutated letter the prior 24 hour deadline did not allow enough time to produce and distribute 24 copies. So new variations quickly appeared, one of  which deleted the deadline, producing letter No. 8.
(4) Hypothetical letter No. 8 was translated into English producing the Lottery24 block No. 9. Another branch of No. 8 was translated in Portuguese and was an ancestor to the Brazilian letter No. 10.
(5) Another variation of the mutated 24 copies in 24 hours (No. 7) extended the deadline by using the waiting period (9 days). This was an ancestor of the Mexican letter No. 11.

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4.5  THE MEDIA CHAIN LETTER (1963 - 1998)
How an obsolete chain letter survived in obscurity for twenty years, became famous in 1990, and now pushes jokes on the Internet.

For over 65 years, humorous texts have circulated from office to office and person to person [1935]. One such item, which  we call "Play Golf," lists the illustrious positions of several tycoons at the height of their careers in 1923, the same year that golfer Gene Sarazen won the PGA tournament. Sarazen died in 1999 at age 97.

Are you stressed out?  Read on!
Do you know who, in 1923, was:

1. President of the largest steel company?
2. President of the largest gas company?
3. President of the New York Stock Exchange?
4. The greatest wheat speculator?
5. President of the Bank of International Settlement?
6. The great Bear of Wall Street?

These men should be considered some of the world's most successful men, at least they found the secret of making money.  Now more than 65 years later, do you know what became of these men?

1. The president of the largest steel company, Schwab, died a pauper.
2. The president of the largest gas company, Howard Hopson, is insane.
3. The president of the Ne York Stock Exchange, Richard Whitney, was released from prison to die at home.
4. The greatest wheat speculator, Arthur Cooper, died abroad, insolvent.
5. The president of the Bank of International Settlement shot himself.
6. The great Bear of Wall Street, Mr. C. Riverhore, committed suicide.

That same year, 1923, the winner of the most important golf championship, Gene Sarasen, won the U.S. open and PGA Tournament.  Today he is still playing and he's solvent.

Conclusion: Stop worrying about business and play golf!!!! [first part of 1988]

The 1988 version Play Golf, whose text is given above, has a short luck chain letter added to it, forming what we call "Play Golf Plus."

This letter originated in the Netherlands, and has been passed around the world at least 20 times, bringing good luck to everyone who passed it on.  The one who breaks the chain will have bad luck.  Do not keep this letter.  Do not send money.  Just have a wonderful, efficient secretary make four additional copies and send it to five of your friends to whom you wish good luck.  You will see that something good happens to you four days from now if this chain is not broken.  This is not a joke.  You will receive good luck in four days. [second part of 1988]

In the 1970's and thereafter, the Golf Partner had become a living fossil, surviving only in the mutually beneficial relationship with Play Golf. Considering the class associations of golf, Play Golf and Play Golf Plus may have always appealed more to people who commanded the labor of a secretary. But no one could have predicted that in 1990 the chain letter was to go on its own again, and be mailed by such people that it would be called: "The Media chain letter" (Joseph Nocera, New Republic, Nov. 12, 1990), "The Chain Letter of the Rich and Famous" (Diedre Fanning, New York Times, Oct. 7, 1990), and "The VIP Chain Letter" (Charlie Clark, Washington Post, Nov. 16, 1991).

We have collected four samples of the Media chain, the earliest dating in June, 1990.  But we have eighteen accounts of it in newspapers and popular periodicals. Dates are rare in these sources, but the following events occurred, perhaps some simultaneously or in a slightly different order.

(1) Play Golf Plus started accumulating Hollywood celebrity names in the summer of 1989.
(2) The Play Golf part was deleted, leaving only the chain letter (the former "Golf Partner," now usually called the "Media chain letter").
(3) The list of names was deleted from the chain letter.
(4) A cover letter, usually on company stationery, was attached which contained: (a) the date sent,  (b) the names of the five people the letter was sent to (and often the firm employing them), (c) a brief comment on the chain letter, and (d) the name and signature of the sender
(5) A copy of the received cover letter was also attached, making two cover letters.
(6) Recipients imitated this behavior and the chain accumulated large packets of successive prior cover letters.

Our samples of the Media chain letter have 17, 21. 34 and 48 cover letters, and there are reports of 50. The stacking orders new-to-old and old-to-new both appear. As you progress back in time the images of the letters become more and more corrupted from successive photocopying. The older letters often refer to illustrious prior senders whose letters have since become illegible and were removed from the stack. Occasionally you encounter a FAX or a photocopied business card. The average time from receipt to receipt was a little less than eight days.

Our oldest example of the Media chain letter contains many names of celebrities and executives in the entertainment industry [1990]. But the oldest letter in the stack was sent by Pierre Salinger, former Press Secretary for President Kennedy. For narrative convenience, we assume that the celebrity attributions are reliable. However it should be kept in mind that the signatures present are all corrupted photocopies and hence unverifiable. Another Media chain letter bundle [1990] circulated in American real estate and investment firms, crossed over the Atlantic and returned. Many comments are musings on the utility of good luck. "Some of us in the securities and real estate businesses forgot that it's better to be lucky than smart." Another theme, common in published reports on the Media chain, is admission of fear of bad luck. "A man will do anything out of fear" (Newspaper editor). Most reporters accepted these comments at face value: "Media Barons Knuckle Under Superstition" (AP headline, Aug. 29, 1990). But some observers noted social reasons for the letter's success.

1. Identification with celebrity.  "The real reason behind the letter's success, of course, is not fear, but the thrill of having written certification that, yes, indeed, you do belong to the inner circle" (Esquire, Dec. 1990). "It's more a kind of media status game, filled with unseemly overtones of see-how-famous-my-friends-are" (Joseph Nocera, New Republic, Nov. 12, 1990). If one receives the letter from a high status person, one can boast of this association by sending out the chain with the prior cover letter. The chain letter states "send it to five of your friends," and the forwarding letters prominently display the five recipients. Little status is gained by having sent the letter to someone of much higher status than oneself, and probably few such letters replicated.

2. Exercise of wit.  "These accompanying documents, most recipients admit, are what prompts them to play the game and write their own 'I can't believe I'm doing this' notes, as they pass the letter on" (Kathleen Hendrix, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1991). Almost all of the comments on forwarding letters attempt humor, and the early self-deprecation theme is often carried forward. "Tell me why I am doing this" (Feb. 1991). "The name for this is idiocy. But hopefully not many will know" (May 1991). Growing lists of thematic humor also appear on graffiti, photocopied office humor and E-mail chains [e1996].

Status motives were present with other chain letters. Many copies of the Good Luck chain contained long lists of "X to Y," so that if you are Y, any downline recipient can conclude that X knows you [1922]. A striking later example has 113 different names. These start out with Japanese naval officers, phase into a European venue, and half way through shift to Hollywood celebrities such as Sid Graumann, Harold Lloyd and Mac Sennet [1926]. The half serious 1979 Brill chain [1979] had no real threat but many entertainment industry stars in its list of prior senders. Perhaps many of the listed celebrities never actually sent out the Good Luck or Brill letters. But forwarding letters with the Media chain were on corporate stationery and usually signed, thus providing a more convincing display for identification with celebrity.

The Media chain letter continued to progress through hierarchies for several years. A note in the British Medical Journal (March 25, 1995) complained of its "wad of memos." Infected organizations included the Ministry of Defence, the Metropolitan Police and the National Health Service. Like chickenpox, the Media chain letter is usually a one-time infection, leaving a trail of immunity. As the paper form of this chain letter works out its extinction, the text has crossed over into the vast new territory of the Internet.

Though we have not located an example, probably sometime in the early 1990's Play Golf Plus was digitized and transmitted via E-mail. Many photocopied office humor items have also crossed over to the Internet. A July 1993 chain E-mail consists of a series of ironic questions, later versions of which are titled "Why ask why?" By mid 1995 this item had been pasted on the beginning of  Play Golf Plus [e1995]. Since then the "Media" chain letter, with continuing modifications, has been attached to other email jokes, including "The Gift" [e1995-12], and "The Frog":

Subject: Only Because It Is funny
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 1997 09:13:39 -0500

READ THIS MESSAGE AND PASS IT ON....
A man takes the day off work and decides to go out golfing. He is on the second hole when he notices a frog sitting next to the green. He thinks nothing of it and is about to shoot when he hears, "Ribbit. Nine Iron" The man looks around and doesn't see anyone. "Ribbit. Nine Iron." He looks at the frog and decides to prove the frog wrong, puts his other club away, and grabs a nine iron.  Boom! he hits it ten inches from the cup. He is shocked. He says to the frog, "Wow that's amazing. You must be a lucky frog, eh?" The frog reply's "Ribbit.  Lucky frog." The man decides to take the frog with him to the next hole. "What do you think frog?" the man asks. "Ribbit. Three wood." The guy takes out a three wood and Boom! Hole in one. The man is befuddled and doesn't know what to say. By the end of the day, the man golfed the best game of golf in his life and asks the  frog, "OK where to next?" The frog reply, "Ribbit. Las Vegas." They go to Las Vegas and the guy says, "OK frog, now what?" The frog says, "Ribbit Roulette." Upon approaching the roulette table, the man asks," What do you think I should bet?" The frog replies, "Ribbit. $3000, black 6." Now, this is a million-to-one shot to win, but after the golf game, the Man figures what the heck. Boom! Tons of cash comes sliding back across the table. The man takes his winnings and buys the best room in the hotel. He sits the frog down and says, "Frog, I don't know how to repay you. You've won me all this money and I am forever grateful." The frog replies, "Ribbit, Kiss Me." He figures why not, since after all the frog did for him he deserves it. With a kiss, the frog turns into a gorgeous 15-year-old girl.

"And that, your honor, is how the girl ended up in my room."

The origination of this letter is unknown, but it brings good luck to everyone who passes it on. The one who breaks the chain will have bad  luck. Do not keep this letter. Do not send money. Just forward it to five of your friends to whom you wish good luck. You will see that something good happens to you four days from now if the chain is not broken. You will receive good luck in four days. [e1997]

Around 1967 the predominant chain letter was too long, too threatening, and demanded too many copies (twenty) to be added successfully to an office humor joke about golf. Instead someone added the text of a brief quota five chain letter, a type that was soon to become extinct as an independent chain letter. Surely no one could have anticipated the career of this letter.

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

4.6 THE "IT WORKS" BLITZ (1979 - 1982)
The rise of the It Works postscript.  Table 6 - Occurrences of D, L, LD and DL variations.
Why did "It Works" work? Associated features.

The rise of the "It Works" postscript.
In the mid 1970's four structural types of luck chain letters circulated in English speaking countries:

(1) Death20: A letter purporting to come from the Netherlands that contained a death threat and asked for 20 copies.
(2) Lottery24: Presumably, an English translation of a letter purporting to come from Venezuela that contained a testimonial of a lottery winner and asked for 24 copies. We have yet to collect such a letter.
(3) Lottery-Death (LD): The Lottery24 and Death20 types combined on one page in that order.
(4) Death-Lottery (DL): The Death20 and Lottery24 types combined on one page in that order.

To document this sudden population change we tabulate the four types above, sub-classifying the DL letters into five mutually exclusive and successive variations. Letters with uncertain circulation dates are not used.

Table 6. Occurrences of D, L, LD, and DL variations.

D:    All Death20 type letters
L:     All Lottery24 type letters (none collected so far).
LD:  All Lottery-Death  type letters
DL-n:    Death-Lottery (DL) letters with a list of names.
DL-0:    DL letters with no list of names, nor any of the following three postscripts.
DL-m:   DL letters concluding with "Do not send money" or variants.
DL-i:     DL letters concluding with "Do not send money. Please do not ignore this" or variants (none collected so far).
DL-w:   DL letters concluding with "Do not send money. Please do not ignore this. It works" or variants.
 

Years	D	L	LD	DL-n	DL-0	DL-m	DL-i	DL-w
1959 - 1971	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
1972 - 1973	2	0	0	1	0	0	0	0
1974 - 1975	1	0	13	3	0	0	0	0
1976 - 1977	0	0	0	1	2	0	0	0
1978 - 1979	0	0	0	0	2	1	0	3
1980 - 1981	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	7
1982 - 1983	0	0	0	0	0	0(a)	0	13
1984 - 2005	0	0	0	0	0	0	0 (b)	138

(a) One letter apparently had "Please do not ignore this - It works" deleted in its ancestry [1982-01]. It is not tabulated.
(b) A few later letters have had the final words "It works" deleted [1984-08]. These are not tabulated.

We name the complete postscript "Do not send money. Please do not ignore this. It works", and its variations, by the  concluding phrase "It Works." The earliest It Works postscript in the archive was mailed anonymously in May 1979 to an Oxnard, California address [text]. Likely it had appeared a few months before. Measured by the number of participants, the It Works founder is the most copied document in human history, if we consider its varying descendants as the same "document" (and do not so consider ancestors of It Works). The It Works descent group monopolized mainline circulation up until the millennial collapse of paper luck chain letters (> All fall down). Versions were translated into French [1995], Spanish [1996], Polish [1992], Italian and likely many other languages. A highly modified DL letter, amusingly adapted to an Indian audience, has been collected in England [1996]. This probably also derives from the Its Work founder, though all that remains of the full postscript is "Please don't neglect this." It Works descendants also invaded the Internet, but in this medium the postscript was soon deleted [e1994].

The progressive development of  the It Works founder in North America proves that this is where it was launched. It is extremely unlikely that successive translations could have produced such examples.

Why did "It Works" Work?
The tabulated data suggest that each of three successive innovations (DL-0, DL-m, and DL-i & DL-w) increased propagation.

DL-0: The internal senders list in DL letters was an awkward liability [1975], especially since photocopying was rapidly becoming the dominant method of replication. When a letter must be typed or hand copied, it is not that much additional bother to update a list of names. But if one is photocopying, instructions to revise the letter in any way may prompt discard. Further, asking for one's name is not consistent with anonymous distribution, which has since completely prevailed. Deletion of the internal list also gave the resulting text the appearance of a single chain letter, making the contradictions between the D and L blocks less likely to be observed.

DL-m: Then adding a postscript repeating the injunction against sending money provided a highly visible flag that the letter was not a solicitation for money.

DL-i & DL-w:  The failure to collect a "DL-i" letter suggests that "Please do not ignore this" and "It works"  first appeared concurrently. Together they constitute a polite affirmation of the power of the letter, in contrast to the previous bossy conclusion: "For no reason whatsoever should this chain be broken." This was retained, but now was much less prominent.  A money chain letter circulating at the time contained "Do it . . .  it really does work" [1978]. Perhaps It Works luck chain letters followed this money chain (> Section 4.3), each increasing the other's circulation. "It does work" is a common variant of the luck chain letter postscript, and is the form on our oldest example [1979-05]. Many radio and television advertisements use "It Works."

Associated features.
Recall (< Section 3.3) that a "feature" is very unlikely to be created more than once. Recall also the terms we introduced to relate one feature to another: unlinked, pre-linked, co-linked, post-linked and transfer-linked (< Table 3). As Table 6 reveals, by 1984 all circulating mainline luck chain letters were the DL-w type (Death-Lottery with It Works), our group under consideration here (the "in-group"). In cladistic analysis, one is usually concerned with post-linked features (shared derived characters, or synapomorphies) which determine taxa within the in-group. Here, instead, we will list pre-linked and co-linked features (primitive characters, or plesiomorphies) which, in addition, differ from those present on most of the DL letters prior to the in-group launching. We call these "associated features." For a standard of contrast to these associated features we use the early DL-n letter [1974-10]. For the It Works founder we use [1979-05]. Of course the most prominent of all variations pre-linked to It Works were (i) the deletion of the internal list of senders (which probably happened many times), and (ii) the single postscript "Do not send money" and its variants. We have not listed these.

(1) DL-n:  You will receive good luck within 4 days of receiving this letter.
It Works:  You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter provided in turn you send it back out.
Note:  This "provided" clause is co-linked to It Works on [1979-05].

(2) DL-n:  Send twenty copies of this letter to people you think need good luck.
It Works:  Send copies of this letter to people you think need good luck.
Note:  This deletion is pre-linked to It Works, appearing on the DL-0 letter [1978-04].

(3) DL-n:  Please do not send money.
It Works:  Do not send money, for fate has no price on it.
Note:  Co-linked on [1979-05].  "Fate / faith" is not diagnostic of phylogeny.

(4) DL-n:  It must leave (you) within 96 hours.
It Works:  It must leave your hands within 96 hours.
Note: "Your hands" is pre-linked to It Works on the DL-m letter [1979-01].

(5) DL-n:  This chain comes from Venezuela, was written by St. Aptine de Cade . . .
It Works:  This chain comes from Venezuela and was written by Saul Anthony De Cadif...
Note:  "Sol" is pre-linked to It Works, appearing on the DL-m letter [1979-01].

(6) DL-n: . . . a missionary from South America. Since the chain must make a tour . . .
It Works: . . . a missionary from South America. I, myself, now forward it to you. Since the chain must make a tour . . ..
Note:  Co-linked on [1979-05].

Having listed the features associated with the advent of the full It Works postscript, we can now argue that the DL-m letter [1982-01] has had "Please don't ignore this - It works" deleted in its ancestry. This seems apparent since all of the above associated features appear on this letter, except for (4) "your hands." And in this case the entire containing sentence, "Do not keep this letter. . . . It must leave your hands within 96 hours" has been deleted. Thus it is reasonable to assume that the It Works founder was present in the ancestry of 1982-01. Supporting evidence comes from Table 6 above, where, if otherwise, 1982-01 would be a late and last holdout against the It Works blitz.

Alternatively, the ancestry of 1982-01 may never have had the full postscript. There could have been a common ancestor of 1982-01 and the It Works founder which concluded with "Remember no money" [like 1979-01] and also bore all the above associated features. If this were the case, all these six features would be pre-linked to It Works. Any one of these could also manifest as pre-linked if a letter is collected that bears it and whose ancestry is free from It Works. Quite possibly this may happen, as the co-linkage of two features is always a tentative and suspect status. We see from this example that despite our large dated sample of letters, varying hypotheses of ancestry may not be easily resolved

In any case, the universal appearance of all these six features at the advent of the It Works descent group is convincing evidence that the full postscript was added to just a single letter, and that all subsequent letters bearing it are descendants of that letter. For example, on a late DL letter collected in North America [2004] we can recognize the first five of the above pre and co-linked features though some are modified after 20 years of retypes. For the sixth listed feature, "I myself now forward it to you," we have noted previously that this disappeared from circulation around 1984 when new titles must have been added to a letter without it (< Example 1).

In assessing propagative effect, one might argue that we have succumbed to a bias that overemphasizes beginnings and ends (titles and postscripts), thus missing more critical features within the body of a letter. However, recipients are subject to the same bias. Still, let us examine if associated feature (1) above, "provided in turn you send it back out," is the main reason for the success of the "It Works" letters. It appears early in the letter, and fundamentally changes the operating superstition about the letter from a lucky talisman to a fateful obligation (see Copy later versus Copy first). Perhaps the provided clause did have some positive effect on propagation, since Copy first language appears to be gaining in recent decades. But we have one, and only one, letter on which it appears without the It Works postscript, the puzzling [1982-01]. Whatever the genealogy of this letter, it did not replicate sufficiently to show up again in our sample, something we should expect if the "provided" clause were highly effective by itself. However, the potency of the full postscript is itself challenged by the rapid propagation of a variation that deleted the last two words ("It works"). This deletion, co-linked to a transfer of the Kiss title, appears in the "KCL" variation of the 1990's (> Section 4.7, item 7). But the KCL letters begin with the Kiss title and conclude with the Love title, thus combining the appeal of both. This may more than make up for the loss of "It works."

It could be claimed that the de-sanctification of Anthony, change (5) in our list, had a negative effect. This was likely of accidental origin. As noted, "Sol" appears on a letter in the It Works ancestry, probably as a miscopy of "St." from a degenerate photocopy. A subsequent letter in the ancestry probably miscorrected this to "Saul" and so it has remained, a rider on the It Works blitz. On the other hand, "Saul" could be slightly positive, since visible Catholicism seems to be disfavored on North American chain letters. Our only record of re-sanctification of the Venezuelan author appears in a minor clade from the mid 1990's that featured a Catholic title (> JKLC).

The It Works funneling event eliminated the D, L and LD type letters from English language circulation (or possibly these succumbed to DL-0 or DL-m). Also eliminated were those DL letters that retained a list of names (DL-n), ending a tradition that had dominated luck chains since the 1920's. This mass extinction happened remarkably fast; after 1980 there are none of these doomed types and features in the archive. Finally, It Works also killed off its potent elders, DL-0 (no list) and DL-m (no money) in a year or two.

<  Start of above section       < Start of Chain Letter Evolution - Contents

4.7 THE MAINLINE SINCE 1980
Introduction. Table 7 - Occurrences of Trust, Belief, Kiss, Love, Wife's Money and Car. Trust expires.
Belief fizzles. Kiss and Love divide the territory. Kiss gets Wife's Money.  Love gets a Car.  Kiss jumps on top.
All fall down. Table 8 - Numbers of English language paper luck chain letters collected per year of circulation.

Introduction.
By 1981 almost all luck chain letters circulating in North America were the descendants of a single founder that had appeared a couple years before bearing the It Works postscript. In the next two years new titles appeared which rapidly dominated circulation, and later in the decade a very effective new testimonial appeared. If we assign the following names to these and other components, our allegorical section names (Trust expires, Belief fizzles, Kiss and Love divide the territory, Kiss gets Wife's Money, Love gets a car, Kiss jumps on top, All fall down) describe the major developments in mainline letters since 1980.

(1) Trust:  "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and He will acknowledge and He will light the way." This is the corrupted form of Proverbs 3:5-6 that appeared as a leading "prayer" on the hyper-competitive It Works letter in 1979.

(2) Belief: "And all things whatever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." This new title is the King James version of Matthew 21:22.

(3) Kiss: The title "Kiss someone you love when you get this letter and make magic."

(4) Love: "With love all things are possible." This title is probably a substitution in Mark 10:27: "With God all things are possible."

(5) Wife's Money: The following modification (in italics) of the Death and Money testimonial: "While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter. He failed to circulate the letter. However, before her death, she had won $50,000. in a lottery. The money was transferred to him four days after he decided to mail out this letter."

(6) Car:  The testimonial: "In 1987 the letter received by a young woman in California was faded and barely readable. She promised herself to retype the letter and send it on, but put it aside to do later. She was plagued with various problems, including expensive car repairs. The letter did not leave her hands in 96 hours. She finally retyped the letter as promised and got a new car."

Table 7.  Occurrences of Trust, Belief, Kiss, Wife's Money, Love and Car.
 

Years	Trust	Belief	Kiss	Love	Kiss -  Wife's  Money	Love -  Car	Kiss  transfers to   Love - Car
1972-74	1	0	0	0	0	0	0
1975-77	5	0	0	0	0	0	0
1978-80	9	1	0	0	0	0	0
1981-83	6	4	4(a)	1	0	0	0
1984-86	0	0	4	15	4	0	0
1987-89	0	0	1	2	10	3	0
1990-92	0	0	0	1	5	24	2 (b)
1993-95	0	0	1?	0	5	10	7 (c)
1996-98	0	0	0	0	2	11	15 (d)

(a) The earliest three (1983) do not have a title, but have other Kiss features, e.g. [1983-02].
(b) Date estimated. Kiss and Wife's Money transferred. Love deleted.
(c) Kiss-Car-Love  3,  Kiss-Love-Car  3,  Jude-Kiss-Love-Car 1
(d) Kiss-Car-Love  2,  Kiss-Love-Car  7,  Jude-Kiss-Love-Car  4,  Love-Kiss-Car 1, Kiss-Car 1

We now discuss these changes in frequency, following the allegorical subtitles.

Trust expires.
Proverbs 3:5-6  had appeared near the top of most mainline letters since 1952  in countless corrupted forms until the It Works blitz in 1979 fixed its form as "Trust" given above. This header probably had positive replicative effect at first, but by the early 1980's it seems to have become a liability. Perhaps quick recognition of a letter as the nuisance of the prior decade was a factor.

Belief fizzles.
Someone replaced Trust with "Belief" in 1980, placing this New Testament verse above the body of the letter. On our earliest version [1980] the verse is identified correctly as Matthew 21:22. "Belief" was immediately successful at the expense of Trust, but within two years its circulation seems to have ended. This was probably due to the appeal of two new secular titles we discuss next. The omission of the Unbeliever's Death was an early post-linked feature [1981] that apparently captured the Belief clade. This may have also contributed to the quick demise of the Belief title a couple years later..

Kiss and Love divide the territory.
Our earliest Kiss title is from October 1983 [Make Magic, 1983-10]. However there are three letters from earlier that year that have no title yet bear the same features of the 1983-10 Kiss letter. These titleless letters could have derived from an initial Kiss letter that had its title cut off, or the Kiss title could have been added to a titleless letter. We will take the "Untitled Kiss" letter 1983-04 as the standard for the Kiss descent group. For the Belief standard we take the oldest example, 1980, collected by Charles Bennett. The Love title first appears on a letter sent from Sweden to England [1983-06], which we take as the standard for Love. The following list compares text in these standard Belief, Kiss and Love letters to a prior It Works letter with the Trust title [1980].

(2)  Trust: The original copy is from the Netherlands.
Belief:  (same as Trust)
Untitled Kiss:  The original copy is in New England.
Love:  (same as Untitled Kiss)
Note:  New England is co-linked on the Untitled Kiss letter.

(3)  Trust: You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter provided you in turn send it back out.
Belief: You will receive good luck within 4 days upon receiving this letter, provided you in turn send it back out.
Untitled Kiss:  (same as Trust)
Love:  You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter, providing you, in turn, send it on.
Note:  "Send it back out" is pre-linked on Untitled Kiss and subsequently retained in the Kiss clade. "Send it on" is co-linked to Love.

(5) Trust: . . . send it to your friends, parents, or associates.
Belief:  Send it out to your friends, parents and associates.
Untitled Kiss:  . . . send them to friends and associates.
Love:  (same as Untitled Kiss)
Note:  The deletion of parents  is co-linked to the Untitled Kiss.

(6) Trust: Take note of the following:
Belief: (same as Trust)
Untitled Kiss:  Do note the following:
Love:  (same as Untitled Kiss)
Note:  Do is co-linked to Kiss.

(8) Trust: Carlo Raditt . . . forgot it and a few days later, lost his job.
Belief: Carlo Depot . . . forgot it. A few days later he lost his job.
Untitled Kiss:  Carla Dadditt . . . forgot it had to leave his hands within 96 hours. He lost his job.
Love:  (very close to Untitled Kiss)
Note: The insertion of had to leave his hands within 96 hours is co-linked to Kiss. 

This list strikingly illustrates the closeness of the early Untitled Kiss and Love letters. Kiss and Love also match on three variations we did not list (two small omissions and "copy" for "chain" in "Since the chain must make a tour of the world . . ."). Both Kiss and Love modify "Please send 20 copies and see what happens to you on the fourth day" to exactly "Please send 20 copies of the letter and see what happens in four days." Of the listed variations from the Trust standard, only number (3) reveals a distinction between Kiss and Love, with Love reading "send it on" rather than "send it back out" as Untitled Kiss, Belief and Trust read. These  features suggests that the Love title replaced the Kiss title on a letter that was at most a few retypes downline from the launching of Kiss. Perhaps a recipient of Kiss was inspired to produce the second new title after noticing that the long running Trust "prayer" had been successfully replaced. Or perhaps the Kiss standard [1983-04] was always untitled, and Love was added to this titleless letter at around the same time as Kiss was. Possibly both titles had the same author, but then what explains (3) "send it on"? In any case, a single letter (the Kiss-Love founder) was a near ancestor of both Kiss and Love, and hence an ancestor of over a billion letters that subsequently bore these titles.

The above features, though often corrupted, are identifiable on every mainline letter after 1984. For example, on 1998-07  "Gene Welch" has been corrupted to "George Welch," but we never again see "General" or "Gen." as was present in the 1970's. Even minor changes such as "copy" for "chain" have persisted. This is a remarkable demonstration of 15 years of faithful copying, and overwhelming proof that the progeny of the Kiss-Love founder completely captured the mainline. Yet at the same time, the 1998-07 letter has its own features that will mark all letters copied from it (for example, "the original is in England" as well as "George Welch").

Concurrence innovation can never be rigorously deduced just from texts. But the features associated with Kiss-Love are notable both for their number and for the prevalence of co-linked (rather than pre-linked) features. This suggests cautious rewriting by the Kiss-Love innovator. In item (1) above, changing "prayer" was needed when the Trust "prayer" was dropped. The earliest examples use "letter," but immediately after, "paper" prevailed. This history is difficult to explain. Possibly instead of being concurrent with the titles, "letter" was post-linked, along with other substitutions, including "paper." This suggests that the author of the Kiss title may have failed to change the referent prayer. "New England" for "Netherlands" could have been concurrent with Kiss, and may be the actual place of the innovation. But "New England" could also be a pre-linked corruption of "Netherlands." Or perhaps "New England" was concurrently chosen by the Kiss innovator because of this similarity to "Netherlands," thus ambiguously declaring a new chain letter and accommodating misidentification as the old one. Note that item (8),  "it had to leave his hands within 96 hours," is an internal transfer from the leading Death20 block to the Lost Job - Better Job testimonial of the Lottery24 block. This too could be the concurrent work of the Kiss innovator, and was imitated by the author of the Car testimonial. Or perhaps the same person launched Kiss, Love and Car!

Why were the Kiss and Love titles so successful? Did some of the above linked features also contribute significantly to the propagation of these letters? Consider the participant age of a social activity - for chain letters the average age of those who are replicating it. Participant age may regress (marijuana smoking), remain fixed (school traditions), or advance with time (canasta), perhaps even keep pace with calendar time (class reunions). There is a postcard exchange letter (an ancestor of the kids' World Record chain letter) whose participant age has regressed. You be the judge: here is some text from an example received by an eleven year old in Clarkston, WA:

It was started in 1986 if it goes through 1995 it will be in the Guiness Book of World Records (your name will be included). It has never been broken, so please don't spoil it for everyone . . . If you were to break the chain we would have to wait another nine years to be in record book.  [1996]

Kiss may have especially appealed to young people and been used for flirting. The sender may hope that a recipient will be emboldened to act on the suggestion, the sender getting the kiss. Love may have benefited by appearing to be a Bible verse to those somewhat familiar with the New Testament, yet appearing completely secular to others. Men may have preferred Kiss, women Love; or younger people Kiss, older Love.

Kiss gets Wife's Money.
Item (4) in the above list reveals that the "lost his wife" version of the Philippine Death and Money testimonial was pre-linked on both the Kiss and Love titled letters. As a result it rode these titles to universality in the mainline. Shortly after wife became universal, the "Wife's Money" modification of Death and Money appeared on a Kiss titled letter:

While in the Philippines, Cora Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter. He failed to circulate the letter, however, before her death, she had won $50,000. in a lottery. The money was transferred to him four days after he decided to mail out this letter. [1986]

Remarkably, this new version of the Kiss letter rapidly captured the Kiss niche within a couple years, as seen in the above table (< Occurrences). We are not counting as "Kiss letters" those on which the Kiss title was transferred (in the "KCL" transfer the Wife's Money feature was also transferred, on others it was not). From 1988 to 1999 there are 18 examples of Kiss & Wife's Money, and only one dubious example of Kiss without it (the rewritten 1995). I detect no significant new feature on these letters other than the "Wife's Money" modification. Why did this innovation prove to be so successful in the competition for senders? Whatever the answer (other than "genetic drift"), we are likely within the realm of the One-in-a-Hundred Rule. The suggestion that this reveals the secret wish that one's wife were dead does not work, for then it would seem a husband would hold the letter until after his wife died, which is negative for propagation. Perhaps the conversion to Copy First made the testimonial more understandable, especially to the younger readers that may have disproportionally circulated the Kiss title. More likely, this mentions a lottery winner in the Death20 block, well before the "Boss Wins Lottery" testimonial in the Lottery24 block. Of a hundred people, say two would fully comply to a chain letter if they read in it that it brought luck in a lottery. And say of these two people, one reads only the first half of the letter. Receiving the Wife's Money innovation, that one person will now encounter a lottery claim, providing the one-in-a-hundred fully compliant new booster.

The origin of "Wife's Money" may depend on a simple mistake. It would be very easy to shift the gender of the last pronoun from "he" to "she" in Death and Money:

While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter. He failed to circulate the letter. However, before her death, she had won $750,000. in a lottery.   [hypothetical]

Love gets a Car.
The Car testimonial is usually self-dated 1987, and first appears in our sample in July 1988, appended near the end of a Love titled letter [1988]. Only one Love titled letter thereafter fails to possess it! Despite this quick conquest of the Love subtype, the Kiss titled letters persisted without Car. This suggests that these two titles had a different audience, perhaps differing by motive, age or gender as speculated above. If Kiss and Love had the same motivational niche, Love & Car would have swamped Kiss just like it did Love. We discussed the replicative advantages of Car in Section 3.6 (< Mainline Testimonials). The Car testimonial has the following associated features, using 1983-06 for the "Love Founder" and 1989-03 as the standard for the "Love-Car" innovation.

(1) Love Founder: This is no joke. You will receive it in the mail.
Love-Car: This is no joke. You will receive good luck in the mail.
Note: "Good luck" is pre-linked to Car on 1987-06.

(2) Love Founder: You will receive it in the mail. Send copies to people you think need good luck.
Love-Car: You will receive good luck in the mail. Send no money. Send copies to people you think need good luck.
Note: "Send no money" is pre-linked on 1987-06. Discussed previously (< Example 3).

(3) Love Founder: While in the Philippines Gene Welch lost his wife six days after receiving the letter.
Love-Car, 1989: While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife 51 days after receiving the letter.
Note: Post-linked to Car on 1989. Discussed previously (< Example 4).

(4) Love Founder: Since a copy must make a tour of the world you must make twenty copies and . . .
Love-Car: Since the copy must tour the world, you must make 20 copies, and . . .
Note: Pre-linked on 1987-06.

(5) Love Founder: Please don't ignore this. It works.
Love-Car: Do not ignore this. St. Jude. It works.
Note: Pre-linked on 1987-06. "St. Jude" is also added to top or at the extreme bottom of some letters.

Feature (2) above, the early "send no money," is probably positive for propagation since it doubles and advances slightly this universal prohibition. It may have originated accidentally in re-typing, first as an exact duplication of "Do not send money . . .", then edited to "Send no money" to lessen redundancy. Features (1) and (4) are surely neutral. It is difficult to assess the effect on propagation of features (3) and (5). These are briefly discussed elsewhere (< 51 days), (> Jude). The absence of any co-linked features in our list reveals that the person who first added the Car testimonial to a letter made no other modifications.

Kiss jumps on top.
In the 1990's the Kiss letters still enticed senders despite the proliferation of the Love-Car combination. Surely Kiss circulation would have increased if the Car testimonial had been transferred to a Kiss letter. There is no example of this happening. However, more potently, the Kiss title was transferred to a Love-Car letter. This happened at least three or four times. These transfer events are designated below as (i) KCL, (ii) KLC, (iii) JKLC and (iv) LKC.

(i)  The KCL transfer (5 + 2? examples)
In two undated examples of this Kiss transfer the Love title was deleted [1991a, 1991b]. In later examples the Love title appears at the very bottom of the letter [1993-04], and the designation "KCL" refers to the order of the Kiss, Car and Love features on these letters. A detailed analysis is necessary to determine that a transfer took place, the totality of the transfer and to what base letter. Here is a list of some features linked to the KCL innovation, using the most common form of Love-Car [1989] and a typical Kiss letter [1986-05] as standards of comparison to KCL [1993-04].

(1) Love-Car:  With Love all things are possible.
Kiss:  Kiss someone you love when you get this letter and make magic!
KCL:  (Same as Kiss)

(2) Love-Car: You will receive Good Luck within four days of receiving this letter provided you, in turn, send it on.
Kiss:  You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter, provided you send it back out.
KCL:  (Same as Love-Car)

(3) Love-Car:  You will receive Good Luck by mail. Send no money. Send copies to people you think need good luck.
Kiss:  You will receive it in the mail. Send copies to people you think need good luck.
KCL:  (Same as Love-Car, using 1994 for KCL).
Note:  "Send no money" probably deleted on the KCL standard [1993-04].

(4) Love-Car (most): While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife 51 days after receiving the letter.
Kiss: While in the Philippines, Cora Welch lost his wife six days after receiving this letter.
KCL:  (Same as Love-Car)

(5) Love-Car:  However, before she died, he received $7,755,000.
Kiss (most):  . . . however, before her death, she had won $50,000 in a lottery. The money was transferred to him four days after he decided to mail out this letter.
KCL:  (Very close to Kiss)

(6) Love-Car:  (Car testimonial present)
Kiss: (Car testimonial absent)
KCL:  (Same as Love-Car)

(7) Love-Car:  Remember, send no money.  Do not ignore this. St. Jude. It works!
Kiss:  (Same as Love-Car but without "St. Jude.")
KCL:  Remember: send no money. Do not ignore this. With Love all things are possible.
Note:  The deletion of the phrase "It works" is co-linked to the original KCL Kiss transfer. The addition of "With Love all things are possible" as a postscript is post-linked to this transfer. "St. Jude" is not reliably diagnostic of ancestry.

The simplest explanation for the mix of features on these letters is that two transfers were made from a Kiss donor onto a Love-Car letter: (1) the Kiss title, and (5) the "Wife's Money" modification of the Death and Money testimonial. Note that such incidental features of Love-Car as (2) "send it on,"  the duplicated (3) "send no money," and (4) "51 days after" are present on KCL. This argues that Love-Car was the base letter to be copied since these features would not likely be chosen to transfer (from Love to Kiss). Initially the Love title was deleted from the recipient of the transfer forming a "KC" letter. Item (7) above records the subsequent restoration of the Love title to the bottom of KC forming KCL. The deletion of  "It Works" on KCL, likely co-linked to the restoration of Love, is probably negative for replication but is outweighed by having both titles present.

For two chain letters that are closely related but have varying features, an effective composite can be formed as follows. With the letters side by side, consider the components in order. For two homologous (related) components place the one considered most positive for replication on the composite letter. If a component on one letter does not have a match (homologue) on the other, place this component on the composite. This process is somewhat analogous to genetic sexual reproduction. If, around 1991, we started with the most common Love-Car letter and a typical Kiss letter, this would have produced the KCL letter, provided the Kiss title was preferred over Love (which is then dropped), and the default choice when homologous components were about the same was the Love-Car version. The format of an early KC (Love deleted) letter [1991b] has ten paragraphs mostly corresponding to components. This letter may be a remnant of this process.

One additional  letter with the Kiss-Car-Love order [1997] is not derived from the same transfer event as the above letters. It bears the pre-title "Magic."  A later Kiss & Car combination [1997] may also be a separate transfer.

(ii) The KLC transfer (10 examples).
Though the KCL transfer appeared earlier, the "KLC" transfer propagated more successfully. The earliest version of this letter [1994-12] was provided by the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. In these letters the Kiss title has been transferred to a Love-Car letter, with the Love title retained immediately below, hence the order "KLC." All of these KLC letters are derived from a single founder, with the co-linked:  "You will receive good luck within four days of receiving this letter, and you must, in turn, send luck." This replaces the more usual condition "provided you, in turn, send it on" [1989]. KLC also truncates Lost Job - Better Job, omitting Carlo getting a better job. This co-linked rider is likely negative for propagation. The KLC variation has been translated into Spanish [1996].

The propagative advantage of the KLC variation is clear: it adds the replicative power of Kiss to that of the powerful Car testimonial, and retains the Love title only slightly diminished in prominence. The Kiss-Love order combines sensibly: "Kiss someone you love when you get this letter and make magic. With love all things are possible." Prior to the millennial collapse of paper luck chain letters in North America, the KLC innovation was probably destined to capture the whole mainline, uniting the two sub-niches that developed with the Kiss and Love titles in 1983. Table 7 is reason enough to have believed this.

(iii) The JKLC transfer (5 examples).
Another Kiss-Love-Car combination, "JKLC," features "St. Jude" as a title above Kiss [1996-02]. The JKLC letters share with the above KLC clade the omission of Carlo getting a better job. Further analysis is needed to determine if this deletion is pre-linked to the KLC transfer and a hypothetical JKLC transfer event, or if JKLC is a modified KLC letter. The JKLC letters are co-linked to two notable features: (1) "Gene Wall lost his wife ten days after receiving the letter," and (2) "The chain comes from Venezuela and was written by Saint Anthony Degroup, . . ." (re-sanctification, see also < de-sanctification).

The proliferation of "St. Jude" in the mainline since 1987, usually as a postscript, does not prove it has positive replicative effect. Instead, it may be riding the potent Car testimonial [1988], on which it was pre-linked. "St. Jude" has been added more than once to North American luck letters [1991, 1992], and has been removed frequently [1993,1994, 1997]. Thus by itself it is risky to use for inferring phylogeny. On Mexican chain letters "St. Jude Thaddeus" clearly has replicative potency [1984, 1984, 1995]. The appeal of Jude to Latinos is fairly recent - one informant called him the "Patron Saint of Anglos" in the 1950's (Robert Orsi).

(iv) An additional Kiss and Love letter has the order Love-Kiss-Car [1997]. We have not determined if this "LKC" variation is descended from a separate transfer event, or is a re-ordering of one of the above transfers. The only example has rewrites and changes that appear to have resulted from the retyping of a very degenerate copy (e.g. "good luck in them all" for "good luck in the mail"). ,.

The KLC, JKLC, KCL and LKC combinations all probably originated with recipients of Love-Car who remembered the Kiss title (or retained a copy), perhaps associating it with some prior romantic or sexual success. Wishing to use it again, they added the Kiss title to the Love-Car letter. Such transfer of key text from one letter to another may often increase propagation and is a significant factor in chain letter evolution. Examination of foreign language chain letters should reveal more transfers both to and from English language letters. At the time of first writing this subsection on transfers, I thought that the KCL letters would capture the Love-Car descent group within a few years. However circulation of all these DL chain letters was soon drastically reduced and new evolutionary factors that are not yet clear came to play among the remnants.

All fall down.
Despite the success of the DL type letters in the 1990's, their circulation, at least in English, has collapsed since the new millennium, as the following table illustrates.

Table 8. Numbers of English language paper luck chain letters collected per year of circulation.
 

Year of circulation	Mainline	Outliers
1995	15	3
1996	20	0
1997	9	0
1998	1	2
1999	1	0
2000	0	1
2001	0	0
2002	0	0
2003	1	0
2004	3	1
2005	1	0
2006	0	0
2007	0	0
2008	1	0

Collecting efforts that had produced at least several circulating letters a year continued from 1995 to about 2000 - thereafter collecting resources for current letters were greatly reduced. Still it is significant that only six circulating examples have been collected since 2000. The primary cause for this population collapse must surely be the immunizing effect of exposure to the flood of email chain letters, hoaxes and parodies, especially among youth. This was the basis of a 1995 prediction that "the familiar 'prayer' or 'good luck' type chain letters will totally disappear from the US mail by the year 2000" [e1995-06]. A century of denunciation failed to eliminate paper luck chain letters (New York Times: 1916, 1917e, 1931, 1959b). The Internet and email may have all but ended them in just a few years.

Postscript (9/8/2008). Five actively circulating mainline luck chain letters have been collecting from 2004-08. Two are very similar and noteworthy for a penultimate injunction not to sign on [2004, 2005]. One DL letter in English was circulating in Eritrea in 2004. A recent acquisition may deserve to be named a new type, though much of its text derives from a standard DL letter. This letter [2008], titled "The Financial Blessings Letter," (1) retains all DL testimonials except the Unbeliever's Death, (2) deletes much other DL text, especially at the beginning, and (3) has rewrites to promise a divine monetary reward for replication. Several transcriptions of paper versions are showing up on the WWW { search "Financial Blessing(s) Letter" on Google ). Possibly paper luck chain letter populations may now increase  because of two factors. First, their recent rarity has has reduced immunity, thus allowing for a rebound. Second, it appears that in the last few years very few email luck chains are circulating, and so there is much less cross immunization against the paper versions. If so, and there is a sustained economic downturn, the "Financial Blessings Letter" may be the next dominant paper chain letter, though internet searches probably preclude any paper chain letter from becoming as abundant as the dominant nuisances of the twentieth century. If you receive a paper chain letter, even one that is very similar to one already in the archive, please send it to me so that I can adequately document this phase in chain letter history.  Thanks, Daniel VanArsdale

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Daniel W. VanArsdale
PO Box 2335
Lompoc, CA 93438
            Telephone: 805-735-8323
            email: barnowl@silcom.com

Chain Letter Evolution:  http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html

Index page of Daniel W. VanArsdale:   http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/index.htm

Eat No Dynamite (A collection of college graffiti):   http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/graffiti.htm

Update at: C1,  C2,  C4, C5, C6, C7, C8, C9.
End: Chain Letter Evolution, Version 10/27/1998f  11/04/2002p 1/7/2007