A hamburger heiress, Joan Kroc, who gave $1.5 billion to the Salvation Army. Gerard and Lilo Leeds, who came to America as refugees from Nazi Germany, started and sold a publishing company, and gave Teachers College at Columbia University $10.8 million to help improve teaching in public schools. A 91-year-old New Yorker, Morris Silverman, who made his fortune in the real estate business and is giving $50 million to create an International Center for Nursing in Albany.

These are some of the stories contained in the latest “Slate 60,” the list of the nation’s biggest charitable donations of 2003. We publish the full list at page four of today’s New York Sun.

When it began in 1996, the Slate list was aiming to be something of a counterweight to the Forbes 400. The annual Forbes list of America’s richest was thought to discourage philanthropy. Billionaires like Ted Turner complained that the list’s effect was to make the rich stingier for fear that giving money away would cause them to slide lower on the Forbes list. The idea of the Slate 60 would use the same competitiveness to encourage charity among tycoons and plutocrats. And the tactic just might have worked. In 1996, anyone who made a donation over $5 million made it onto the list. In 2003, the threshold was $10.5 million.

The list doesn’t include corporate contributions and it ignores gifts from estates. It does consider pledges even when they won’t be paid for several years. Moreover, the Slate 60 does not index income or total wealth, which might disclose that its top performers have donated but a sliver of their actual means. Still, the list paints a useful corrective portrait of America’s most generous philanthropists at a time when Democrats like Senator Kerry are busy trying to demonize the rich as part of an “economy of privilege.” The list illustrates one way that the rich voluntarily give back to America — not by paying taxes but by freely and generously donating to causes.

Despite the stereotype of the wealthy pouring money into glamorous causes like the arts, a lot of the contributions on the Slate 60 are aimed at improving public schools and fighting poverty. That may be because plenty of the donors on the list actually went to public schools and started out poor themselves. Of the entries, 12 created their wealth through real estate and eight through technology. Just six attribute their affluence to inheritance.

Last October, the Chronicle of Philanthropy — the same newspaper that worked with Slate to construct the Slate 60 — reported a 1.2% drop in donations nationwide for the year 2002. An analysis by the New York Sun, however, showed a healthy increase at New York-based charities. Given these statistics, and given the high concentration of New Yorkers on the Forbes 400 list, we found surprisingly few New Yorkers on the 2003 Slate 60. It may be that the donations to New York charities are coming from an unusually broad base, with lots of medium-sized contributions. Or it may be that New Yorkers are unusually discreet about their charity, giving away gifts that don’t show up on the Slate list because they are anonymous or unannounced.

In any event, there are still plenty of months left in this year for donors to negotiate and announce contributions big enough to make it onto the 2004 list. It’ll be hard to top Joan Kroc’s generosity, but in America, you never know.