How to Be Alone

by Jonathan Franzen

  THAT SYSTEMIC FAILURES could persist for ten years in the primary communication network for one of the country’s largest cities and financial centers, and that it took the combined impact of a maverick administrator, media attention, and a congressional delegation to force the system to address those failures, raises serious questions about the long-term viability of both the United States Postal Service and United States cities.

  Five years after the Chicago crisis of 1966, the old Post Office Department was reorganized as the United States Postal Service, a federally owned “corporation” over which Congress and the President had oversight but no direct control. The Kappel Commission had concluded that only by operating as a self-supporting business could the Post Office become flexible enough to survive in the modern world. Congress and the President lost the power of political patronage at the post office, but they also shed the burden of running it and covering its deficits. Instead of taking the heat when the public complained about rates or service, they could join in the criticism.

  The Chicago postal crisis of 1994 shows the results of this policy. The inhabitants of large cities are now, more than ever, second-class citizens. It’s poignant to see an old Congressman like Sidney Yates, who worked in Washington with Truman, shake his head with nostalgia for the days of patronage. The Postmaster Generalship used to be the plum awarded to the national chairman of the President’s party, and until 1971 all big-city postmasters were political appointees. If your mail service was bad, you could phone your ward boss and get action. By the early nineties, as Yates discovered, you could phone the Postmaster General himself and get nothing. With fifteen thousand employees, the Chicago post office was still a political power base, handing out applications for jobs the way precinct captains once handed out pounds of bacon; but it served no master except itself. The same reorganization that protected postmasters from political harassment, and allowed craft employees to aspire to high postal office, now effectively isolated a city post office from its constituents.

  In Chicago, machine politics has given way to racial politics. It escapes public comment but not private observation that unrest among white North Side postal customers began not long after Chicago got its first black postmaster, and that black postmasters have presided over increasingly strident complaints ever since. Earlier in the century, postal work was one of the few respectable careers open to educated African-Americans (Cross Damon, the main character in Richard Wright’s The Outsider, has Sartrean dialogues with three coworkers from 433 West Van Buren Street), and it remains a primary way out for poor inner-city blacks. By the late seventies, when much of the white middle class had withdrawn to the suburbs, the Chicago post office was predominantly black. The figure today is nearly ninety percent.

  Many of the problems at a station like Uptown—rampant absenteeism, rapid turnover of employees, poor morale—are aggravated by its distance from the black South Side neighborhoods where most postal workers live. Workers with tenure quickly transfer to more convenient neighborhoods. The same is true of supervisors and managers, who have been known to refer to Uptown as Siberia. The result is a perpetually inexperienced North Side workforce.

  Race shaped the crisis in more fundamental ways as well. The north-lakefront stations were perceived as “troubled” because the volume of complaints was so high. In fact, other stations in Chicago were equally badly managed, but residents in poor neighborhoods either worked all day or received little in the mail besides welfare or Social Security checks. On the North Side, there were self-employed people and people of leisure who noticed when the mail came late and when they missed a week of Wall Street Journals. The North Side had expectations. It had learned, in the decades of the Daley machine, how to organize and how to complain. But now the rules had changed. The post office, though it looked like a city service and had once behaved like a city service, was not accountable.

  In May, after the transfer of Mason, Rogers, and Green—all of them African-American—the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, noting that two of the three replacements were white and that Thomas Ranft, Green’s white boss, had survived the shakeup, denounced the moves as racist. The denunciation was specious in its implication that the thousands of dedicated black postal workers in Chicago owed their jobs to skin color rather than to competence. But it illuminated, behind the post office’s long reluctance to admit its shortcomings, the fear of losing black control. Gayle Campbell says that what made her a “traitor” was less her public betrayal of the postal family than the fact that she had, in the words of one manager, “brought the white man in.” The white men she brought in were not only William Good and David Fields, who replaced Rogers and Green, and white politicians like Simon and Smith and Yates, but the white media establishment, which many American blacks and almost all Chicago postal workers believe to be biased against them.

  In his first months in office, Rufus F. Porter, the new postmaster, has eschewed the rhetoric of family, preferring the corporate vocabulary of “initiative” and “communication” and “the entrepreneurial spirit.” Porter, forty-six, is a native Californian, a onetime mail handler who earned a master’s degree at night school. Visiting him on the fourth floor of the Central Post Office, I see why Celestine Green, whose bureaucratic rank was equivalent to Jimmie Mason’s, had felt the need to redecorate. The Chicago postmaster’s office is a sprawling plain of deep-pile carpeting with scattered settlements of heavy, carved furniture. Porter, a stocky man with strikingly erect posture, sits on the edge of a chair with his hands folded on an enormous boardroom table. He answers my questions in the clipped, forceful cadences of a cadet being drilled. “You can’t teach initiative,” he says. “But what you can do is create an atmosphere, an environment, where people can feel empowered. And that’s what we’re attempting to do. We’re trying to create that atmosphere.”

  By most accounts, Porter is succeeding. He has removed precisely the faulty managers whom Campbell targeted in her reports, reinstituted disciplinary suspensions, and shown a willingness to spend whatever it takes to improve service in Chicago. Postal executives frustrated by their superiors may stick pins in straw dolls; but the transfer of a nonperforming administrator probably owes less to the power of voodoo than to Porter’s determination as a reformer. Even the uncompromising Campbell is a convert. “He’s the one that Chicago’s been waiting for,” she says. “We won’t be the last for long.”

  SIMPLY NOT TO BE THE WORST anymore: it’s an aspiration whose modesty must temper the optimism that Porter’s efforts inspire. When I ask Frank Brennan, a national Postal Service spokesman, why cities like Chicago have been neglected for so long, he speaks of his organization’s historical association with “small-town America,” where a community’s identity and connection to the republic were wrapped up in its little post office. Big cities, Brennan says, are part of an “evolving America,” where the daily personal connections that define the postal mission are far less workable. Viewed in this way, the neglect of the Chicago post office shows itself to be part of a larger pattern of federal frustration with cities. William Henderson, the Postal Service’s new chief operating officer, says, “There’s no subject in a major American city that’s not difficult to tackle, and the post office is one of them.” Henderson believes that high population densities, in the form of traffic jams and high-rises, inevitably impede the flow of surface mail. “It’s just a fact we face. Everybody is annoyed with cities, and we’re annoyed, too.”

  The urban impediments aren’t only logistical. In the early eighties, when a long-repressed urban minority gained control of the post office, many of its members were understandably less interested in attacking the deep structural problems they had inherited than in acquiring (like Celestine Green) the trappings of power long enjoyed by the old ruling faction. At the root of the troubles of the Chicago post office is the gap between the two tiers of American society, which is nowhere more visible than in big cities and which is bridged, nowadays, by little but the universal P
ostal Service. Maximal wealth and cutting-edge technology exist side by side with a second-and third-generation urban underclass for which employment at the post office may seem less a responsibility than an extension of its federally funded entitlements. Angry as Campbell was at postal management’s betrayal of the public, she was no less angry at the betrayal of the city’s entry-level workers. “They want instruction,” she says. “They want guidance. But if you’ve got somebody who’s back there in the office sucking on a cup of coffee and talking on the phone to Janie in the next station, you’re not going to get that production.”

  However much big cities vex the Postal Service, they still generate the high volume of mail that pays for universal service. If they are structurally doomed to slower service, as Henderson suggests, then something has to suffer—either the cities or the Postal Service. And it’s clear that the cities are suffering already. By subtracting from the quality of life and adding to the cost of doing business, poor mail service helps drive corporations and affluent individuals to the suburbs. It’s a process that dismays committed city dwellers, like Marilyn Katz. “To me,” Katz says, “cities are the lifeblood of culture, the lifeblood of democracy, because they’re one of the few places where you have a real integration of different kinds of people. One of the things that’s happened, as society has become more stratified, is that in almost every realm of public service cities have become second-class citizens. The Postal Service works in Wilmette. It doesn’t work in Chicago.”

  The Postal Service, for its part, is not harmed by the flight to Wilmette. What does pose a threat is virtual flight, the flight to alternative information-delivery systems. Business-to-business correspondence, which the Postal Service estimates has diminished by a third in the last five years, is where the impact of faxes and e-mail is most visible. So far, this loss has been offset by a robust flow of first-and third-class advertising mail. And boosters of the Postal Service, like William Henderson, sound confident that its usefulness will survive the development of the national information superstructure that Vice-President Gore so warmly heralds. “Mail is the most interactive product in the United States today,” Henderson says. “You can put a letter in your pocket, read it anywhere. It’s the ultimate in interactivity.”

  The problem is that the Postal Service need not lose much business to run into serious trouble. In his first appearance before Congress, in 1992, Marvin Runyon described how rising postal rates had already driven third-class advertisers to alternative forms of delivery, like television, or flyers hung from doorknobs. “As we increase our rates,” Runyon said, “the Postal Service will be privatized by outside sources. Not by us but by outside sources.”

  Because of its commitment to universal service, the Postal Service has large fixed infrastructure costs. It can’t shrink and grow like most ordinary companies. For this reason, the Internet won’t have to render it obsolete in order to throw it into crisis. The information superhighway need merely exist as an increasingly attractive alternative. If enough mailers, private and corporate, begin to use it, an economic thunderstorm of upward-spiraling rates and downward-spiraling service and mail volume will ensue. When this happens, Congress will have two choices: either subsidize or privatize. Returning to federal subsidy of postal rates would require an honest admission that universal flat-rate service is an expensive ideal; it would cost taxpayers money. The possibility exists, therefore, that the Postal Service will be privatized, with lucrative markets like Wilmette and the Chicago Loop being sold off to the highest bidder, and the post office remaining as an underfunded rump, a carrier of last resort, serving the rural and urban poor.

  AT 2:30 ON A HUMID summer afternoon, I drive west from the Loop on a superhighway. While staying in the city I haven’t spent more than twenty-five minutes traveling to an appointment, on the El or on foot. On the national transportation infrastructure, by maneuvering aggressively, I reach the city limits in just under an hour. Traffic in the suburbs is no better. Cars stretch bumper to bumper into the western distance on roads that are being widened, or widened further, even as we drive on them. Only at my destination, a new mail-processing plant in Carol Stream, have the industrial parks and condos paused in their advance across the cornfields.

  The Postal Service’s hopes of survival are pinned on growth. To avoid an upward rate spiral, losses in the volume of personal communication must be offset by gains in business-to-household mailings. Already, in the United States one in five advertising dollars is spent on direct mailing, and William Henderson believes that the figure will increase as companies realize the potential of sending out advertisements in envelopes that contain bills or that masquerade as bills. He’s particularly excited about the recent proliferation of credit cards.

  To keep pace with rising volumes, the Postal Service of the future will also have to be further automated, and at Carol Stream full automation is close to being a reality. The plant is a technological showcase, with conveyor belts and hoppers and pathways all painted in gum-ball colors, and a control room on whose friendly CRT screens you need only touch an interesting or troubled node with your finger and it interacts with you. There are machines that shuffle and reshuffle envelopes into the order in which a carrier delivers them. There’s a machine that sprays a phosphorescent bar code on the back of each hand-addressed letter and transmits a video image of the address to Knoxville, Tennessee, where workers read and key in the zip code, which is then beamed back to Carol Stream and applied to the front of the envelope in the form of a black bar code. There’s a din from facer-cancelers, from optical character readers, from letter-sorting machines, from passing motorized mule trains, from hook belts and flat-sorters and delivery bar-code sorters; but it’s a level din, a supportive din. The only product of this plant is order. The fluid to which order is brought is predominantly white. It conforms agreeably to friction belts and robotic claspers. It floats, it whispers. It’s called the mail stream, and, unlike the mail at Chicago’s Central Post Office, it has no discernible personality. I’m absurdly pleased when I discover, in a small-parcel sack labeled “Nixie,” a solitary padded mailer, somewhat torn, that is addressed to a pouch number in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and bears a return address of Uncertain, Texas.

  Leaving Carol Stream, I drive past soybean fields and a plant that bottles Zima. At the end of a strip mall thirty-seven hundred feet long and one store thick, I happen on K’s Mail Center, a bright, clean outfit that offers not only mailboxes and United States stamps but also a notary service, plain-paper faxing, desktop publishing, key duplication, wrapping paper, and humorous greeting cards. The proprietor, a personable Nigerian immigrant named Chris Kator, keeps long business hours and provides every imaginable shipping service. Kator tells me he acquired his franchise because of the synergy among the services he offers, the opportunities for growth. He says he has no complaints with the Postal Service, although few of his customers choose it for sending packages.

  In the air-conditioned cool of Kator’s store, amid unhumming beige equipment in its Powr-Savr mode, the march toward privatization—toward a fragmented republic of terrific bargains and unconscionable gougings—seems to me irresistible. So does the idea that the place to which Americans should go to participate directly in the system that governs them is not a small-town post office with Old Glory in its lobby but an exurban retail outlet with Day-Glo banners (WE SELL BEEPERS) in its plate-glass window.

  Back in the city, however, after another unpleasant superhighway experience, I succumb to nostalgia. I think of the delight with which Mary Ann Smith describes the Christmas card, “with a gold-foil envelope and a gold-stamped return address,” that a former alderman sent her from prison. I think of my own delight when I discover that before Debra Hawkins became a communications specialist she was a clerk in the Central Post Office who sorted mail for the neighborhood of Pilsen, and so may have personally handled the letters I sent to my brother in his apartment there. I think of the Evanston carrier, Erich Walch, who says that
the customers on his new route all hated their ex-mailman and therefore hated him. “It took over a year for some of these people to look at me as a human being, to not grunt when I said good morning to them, but I’ve changed their perceptions,” he says. I think of the old Polish-American women who stand on their porches and break into smiles as they take envelopes from the hand of the African-American carrier who is also, in his other life, a minister. I think of the mail piling up for me at home in Philadelphia, and I feel a keen anticipation.

  What makes the sight of a person in postal uniform a welcome one is not simply the possibility that he is bringing us a billet-doux or a sweepstakes check. It’s the hope and faith that the Postal Service serves us. Ever since it came by stage rider to remote Appalachian settlements, the U.S. Mail has offered to a lonely people a universal laying on of human hands. It’s as sacred as anything gets in this country. The burning of mail in a viaduct deals the same blow to our innocence as the pederasty of priests; and as soon as a sacrament is administered virtually, in the manner of televised evangelism, it reduces worshippers to consumers. Of all the Chicagoans I’ve spoken with, not even the most despairing has suggested that the Postal Service be dismantled.

  On August 1, Rufus Porter granted Gayle Campbell’s long-standing request to be transferred from the Hyde Park station. She is now coordinator of the External First-Class Measurement Team. When Campbell told her doctor what her new job entailed—monitoring the pick-up and delivery of first-class mail without being able to affect what she monitors—he said, “They’re trying to kill you.” She recently paid $278 of her own money to a Kelly girl who entered measurement data for a day, and when even this didn’t satisfy her she got up at two in the morning to enter data herself in a notebook computer. “If I don’t do it,” she says, “who will?”