The vogue for greeting cards that marked religious holidays might at first glance seem to be an expression of the era’s profound piety. Many people did attend worship services then, but more also did so out of a desire for conformity, status, or sociability. Moreover, the dominant Protestant, low-church culture had a long-standing aversion to lavish Nativity celebrations and the popish veneration of saints. Despite the new cards’ iconography, they had less to do with spiritual considerations than with worldly ones, including cheap postage, high literacy, mass production, and technological advances, such as brilliantly colored inks and cheap paper made from pulped wood. In short, certain religious holidays became secular ones as well, and the cards were the gaudy hybrid flowers of America’s new industrial, postal, and consumerist cultures.
Exhibit A is the valentine. The earliest commercial ones, which were produced in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, were elaborate handmade affairs assembled in factories. Americans of that era had to make their own cards or buy the expensive imported ones. Then, in 1847, Esther Howland, a new graduate of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, turned the British custom into a homegrown craze. While living in her parents’ home in Worcester, Massachusetts, she received a fancy English valentine. Howland sensed a business opportunity, ordered some imported paper lace, trimmings, and other decorations from Britain, and made some sample cards of her own, which she hoped to sell through her father’s stationery and book business. Her brother, the firm’s salesman, agreed to test the market while on the road, and when he returned with five thousand orders, she got down to work. By the end of the decade, Americans were mailing some three million valentines per year.
Howland’s cards were frilly, but her approach to their production was thoroughly businesslike. At first, she took over the third floor of her family’s house, where a corps of women friends operated an assembly line that churned out small collage-like cards. One of her later mass-produced valentines might feature an elegant young couple surrounded by ribbons, cupids, bluebirds, and flowers and some light verse of the sort that Howland had exchanged with fellow students at Holyoke. Some were sweet and sentimental:
Oh, could I hear thee once declare
That fond affection lives for me,
Oh, could I once delighted share,
The sweet return of love from thee.
Others were saucy:
Weddings now are all the go,
Will you marry me or no?
Howland and her valentines were soon a great success, and by the end of the decade, Americans were mailing some 3 million of them per year. She went on to run her New England Valentine Company for forty years, which was a significant achievement for a single woman of the day; this famous merchandizer of romantic love and courtship never married.
The new greeting-card industry grew quickly. Louis Prang, a Prussian lithographer who settled in Boston, was one of its early masters. The artistry of his color process was the envy of American and British rivals alike into the 1890s, when cheap imitators put him out of business. Manufacturers in the increasingly competitive environment tried to diversify their offerings by catering to niche markets, such as valentines for children or Christmas greetings for the wealthy. The cards’ imagery and messages, now produced by stables of artists and writers, grew more contemporary and, like America in general, more sophisticated.
Greeting cards were made for mass consumption, but they shaped as well as reflected public sentiments, including unsavory ones. Valentine’s Day wasn’t just about love and friendship but also had a mischievous, even dark, dimension. Some people cherished that one special card from a sweetheart, but others saw an opportunity for the kind of rowdy behavior that’s tolerated on particular occasions, such as Mardi Gras and Halloween. Well into the twentieth century, pranksters sent a stunning number of “vinegar” or “poison” valentines. Some cards were misogynistic, mocking spinsters, childless women, and “old hags.” Others featured ethnic slurs and stereotypes, such as “Aunt Jemima” and minstrel-show imagery. Many were simply mean or sarcastic:
Hey, Lover Boy, the place for you
Is home upon the shelf
’Cause the only one who’d kiss you
Is a jackass like yourself!
Or:
You claim you’re good at anything!
So come on, show some proof
And let me see how good you are
At jumping off the roof!
Perhaps the most surprising thing about vinegar valentines is that so many of the bad-natured cards have been carefully saved.
• • •
NOT ALL OF THE nineteenth century’s new stamps were stuck on letters and cards. The handsome miniature portraits also created the hobby of philately: the collection or study of stamps and other postal materials. The exacting pursuit was perfect for Victorians’ taxonomic eye and passion for observing, gathering, and sorting all manner of things, from ferns to fossils to Britain’s “Penny Blacks,” which depicted the eponymous queen’s silhouette in dramatic black and white. Just as their contemporary Charles Darwin examined and categorized finches’ differences, the first stamp collectors peered through their magnifying glasses in search of anomalies, which they classified and catalogued. The hobby grew more interesting as the number and variety of stamps increased and their design and engraving became more intricate, mostly to foil counterfeiters. Some collectors began to specialize in technical issues, such as the errors and variations in dye color and engraving that can occur during production, and others concentrated on aesthetics. In time, however, most philatelists organized their treasures around a certain theme or subject, such as a historical era, famous persons, or particular locations.
The same economic and social developments that fostered letter writing helped to popularize philately. The Industrial Revolution had expanded the ranks of a literate middle class that had enough time and money to indulge in such pursuits. Moreover, stamp collecting’s joys could easily be shared with other enthusiasts at a time when people eagerly joined voluntary organizations. (Interestingly, China now has the world’s largest number of stamp collectors, who, like the Victorians before them, belong to a growing bourgeoisie whose members can afford to pursue a scholarly interest and enjoy belonging to clubs.)
Stamps generate revenue for a government, of course, but they are also little bits of propaganda that express its values and tell stories about the society that produced them. From the beginning, America’s stamps have been carefully designed to deliver such political and social messages. The subjects of the very first ones—the five-cent Franklin and ten-cent Washington—have appeared more frequently than any others over time. (The National Postal Museum owns a cover holding two Washingtons that was postmarked just a day after they were issued, on July 2, 1847, distinguishing the cover as what philatelists call “earliest known use.”) They certainly seem like obvious choices, but when the two subjects were initially selected, antebellum tensions between the North and South were high. Washington was a perfect compromise, being both the father of the United States and a proud Virginian. Postmaster General Cave Johnson, a native of Tennessee, had initially preferred Andrew Jackson to Franklin, however, and he ordered the printer Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson to use a portrait of Old Hickory for the five-cent stamp. In the end, however, the fiery southern slaveholder, also only recently deceased, was tactfully superseded by the universally beloved northern postmaster general. As the printer explained in a letter to an assistant postmaster general, “In accordance with your suggestion, we have substituted the Head of Franklin for that of Gen. Jackson, which our Mr. Rawdon was requested to use by the Post Master General.” In 1851, Thomas Jefferson entered the philatelic pantheon simultaneously with the American eagle.
Philately is pursued for profit as well as pleasure, and nearly all collectors covet America’s rarest and most valuable stamp, which wasn’t even produced by the federal gov
ernment. The “Hawaiian missionaries” stamps were first issued in 1851, when the islands were still more than a century away from statehood, and were locally printed for the use of preachers and planters, who had no other access to postage. The beautiful Hawaiians, which are emblazoned with “H.I. & U.S. Postage” to establish their validity in both places, have that charm peculiar to many small blue and white objects and have inspired many forgeries. (The National Postal Museum owns a Hawaiian whose backstory adds to its appeal: the treasure, also known as the Dawson cover, was discovered in the furnace of an abandoned tannery.)
• • •
THE BALLOONING VOLUME OF letters in the mid-nineteenth century had a profound impact on America’s antiquated postal facilities, many of which had changed little since Franklin’s day. Back then, post offices weren’t separate buildings, much less specially designed for their function. In 1642, Great Britain had established New York City’s first one in a coffeehouse, and long after independence, the new republic’s post offices conformed to that tradition of doubling up in an existing business. Mail handling was problematic in these informal quarters. Letters could be lost or stolen, and, as discussed, recipients could simply refuse to collect them because they didn’t want to pay the postage.
Dedicated, or stand-alone, post offices gradually became more common in large cities by the 1820s and ’30s, when increased mail volume began to require one or more clerks in addition to the postmaster. These facilities were usually located in commercial districts that were convenient for the merchants and businessmen who could afford the high cost of sending letters. In the early 1850s, the explosion of correspondence transformed the urban post office from a men’s club into a tumultuous civic circus crammed with male and female citizens of high and low degree—including notorious pickpockets—who waited in long, clamorous lines to retrieve their mail. These large operations were generally housed in buildings that had been built for different purposes and were ill-suited to their new postal function; in New York City, mailbags nestled among the crypts in a former Dutch Reformed church. Worst of all, these improvised post offices hadn’t been designed to hold massive amounts of paper safely, which contributed fuel to devastating fires in Chicago and Boston as well as New York City’s Wall Street district.
The great postal reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, especially cheap postage, called for a new type of public architecture. The Treasury Department, which was in charge of constructing and operating all major federal buildings, had previously been cautious about undertaking grand projects outside Washington, D.C., particularly in the South, where they could be seen as federal incursions. As hostility between the North and South steadily mounted in the 1850s, however, the department’s new Office of Construction manifested the Union’s power and grandeur by creating the first of many of the long Victorian era’s greatest public works.
The office’s “supervising architects,” first led by chief designer Ammi Young and Army engineer Alexander Bowman, took on the ambitious task of designing and building forty-six grand new “customs houses.” These facilities had traditionally handled matters pertaining to the shipping trade, such as the payment of duties and the logging of vessels. The new, far more ambitious structures also housed other federal services, including courts and post offices. Moreover, unlike the capital’s sober neoclassical government buildings, these customs houses were designed in the far more opulent, fashionable Renaissance Revival, French Second Empire, and Victorian Gothic styles that were popular in Europe. This spectacular architecture was meant to give proud Americans a new kind of grand public space that reflected the federal government’s achievements and their own aspirations as a great people, second to none.
A jewel in the crown of public architecture, the stupendous granite U.S. Custom House in New Orleans occupies an entire city block. It served as the town’s main post office as well as housing the department that dealt with the Mississippi River port’s business and other federal offices. The central Marble Hall, lit by a vast skylight and bounded by giant Corinthian columns, is one of America’s finest Greek Revival interiors, albeit with some Egyptian Revival overtones. The building’s elaborate, eclectic ornamentation includes sculptures of Mercury, the god of communications and commerce; the moon goddess Luna, whose crescent crown symbolizes the city’s location on the river bend; Sieur de Bienville, its founding father; Andrew Jackson, its hero; and the pelican, the state symbol. Construction was begun in 1848, but during the Civil War, the Confederates manufactured gun carriages in the glorious public palace, then the Yankees made it a military headquarters and prison. In the end, it took eight architects working more than thirty-three years to complete the vast project. Not everyone was impressed, notably Mark Twain, who thought it resembled a state prison.
• • •
BETWEEN 1790 AND 1860, America’s population had soared from 3.9 million to 31.4 million. Its post offices had increased from 75 to 28,498, and its post roads from 1,875 miles to 240,594. After the War of 1812, settlers had begun the accelerating westward migration that would eventually end only at the Pacific. Establishing the communications link between the country’s two great oceans would be an epic enterprise of song and story. Yet the post’s steady if less dramatic expansion into the regions in between was no less important: Little Rock, Arkansas, and Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1821; Rock Island, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri, in 1826; Dubuque, Iowa, in 1836.
7
GROWING THE COMMUNICATIONS CULTURE
AS AMERICA’S FRONTIER continually expanded, mail service played a major role in organizing the physical and social landscape, just as it had since colonial days back East. Washington, D.C., was a vague concept for pioneers, farmers, and settlers of small towns and villages, but the local post office, like the church, school, and general store, was a vital part of life. As Postmaster General John Wanamaker said, whether great or small, a post office was “the visible form of the Federal Government to every community and to every citizen. Its hand is the only one that touches the local life, the social interests, and business concerns of every neighborhood.”
Just as postal routes were often the only spatial coordinates in frontier America, post offices were often its only addresses. To start the petitioning process for mail service, local people had to form a community, then name it. This posed a challenge at a time when many places were merely identified by a physical feature, such as a river bend, a rocky promontory, or a business. “Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania” took its poetic name from an early inn, and “Carson’s Tavern, Ohio” is self-explanatory (perhaps as were the small communities in Indiana and Ohio once called “Henpeck”). Some villages adopted the name of a leading citizen, while others, like Ideal, Georgia, and Admire, Kansas, indulged in boosterism. By the 1840s, there were so many post offices that, to avoid confusion, no two in any state could have the same name. One Texas town gave up after six tries and settled for Nameless. Many small rural and frontier settlements came and went, which further complicated the situation, as did the fact that others changed names, as when Dry Diggins, California, became the more dignified Placerville.
Most post offices were in rural areas, and most of those were situated in general stores whose proprietors were often also postmasters. In 1817, the government started publishing the biannual Official Register of the United States, which listed all federal employees, most of whom worked for the post, along with their salaries and other accounting data. The books were published five times as frequently as the census records, and they’re particularly important in chronicling rural places, which the census tended to slight. Despite their dull appearance, the thick books offer valuable insights into country communities, especially the ebb and flow of their economies and media consumption reflected in the careful records of their postmasters, who were the federal government’s local representatives.
To re-create a sense of what rural America’s multitasking community hubs were like, the Smithsonian Institution painstaki
ngly restored the general store−cum−post office of Headsville, West Virginia. (The building has been relocated to the American Philatelic Center in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.) The shutters of the eighteen-by-thirty-foot 1860 structure still bear poems and inscriptions left by the Union soldiers who stopped by during the Civil War to send and receive letters. Country people generally bought only what they couldn’t grow, shoot, catch, or make themselves, so the shelves of the Headsville store would have been stocked with coffee, spices, and tobacco, as well as boots, patent medicines, tools, and sewing notions. The smaller the post office, the less federal funding it received, and most country postmasters, unlike their big-city colleagues, had to supply their own “official” furnishings, which might consist of a shelf or two or a small desk with some pigeonholes. (Prosperous general stores might feature a fine oak “window unit,” manufactured by the Postmasters Supply Company, which came with a barred service window, a built-in letter slot, and numbered, locked post boxes.) Some were slapdash shanties, and others, spacious “mercantiles,” but the Smithsonian curator Carl Scheele grants these public-private community centers equal status: “The Postal Service is the single institution that has been common to virtually every American’s experience throughout more than 200 years, and the most representative type in American history—the most numerous and widespread—has been the country store–post office.”
• • •
RURAL POSTMASTERS WERE OFTEN proverbial pillars of the community. They were nominated by their fellow citizens, including their predecessors and congressmen, then officially appointed by the postmaster general. Some were town elders in more than one sense. Roswell Beardsley, of North Lansing, New York, was born in 1809 and first appointed during the administration of President John Quincy Adams at a starting salary of less than ten dollars per annum. He went on to serve for seventy-four years in his general store, and his customers valued his equanimity: “He is a Democrat in politics,” said one, “but is not offensive.” Like Beardsley, most postmasters owned property and businesses, such as shops or inns, so they understood something of accounting and had the resources to be bonded. They took an oath to uphold the Constitution and perform their duties diligently, which included keeping regular business hours. If mail was delivered to their offices on Sunday, they had to remain open for an hour afterward; should church services be going on, that time was adjusted to an hour after the end of worship, lest smoking and card-playing at the post office compete with prayerful contemplation.
How the Post Office Created America Page 11
