How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  As soon as the ice begins to form, I feel eager to get out one of the “ironclads” and fight my way across. An “ironclad” is a flat-bottomed skiff. There’s a sail in the bow to carry us through the water or over the ice when conditions are right. There are two iron-shod runners on the bottom so the boat may be used as a sled. The sides are sheathed with galvanized iron. This is very important, because thin ice will cut a boat like a knife.

  The Star Route system was plagued with the problems endemic to transportation contracts, starting with the objective measurement of actual mail-related costs, especially in rural regions. The post tried to exert some control over the process with very detailed contracts, which in turn generated Talmudic arguments over interpretation. (In 1900, the economist H. T. Newcomb estimated that the cost of sending a letter bearing a two-cent stamp from New York City to Circle City, Alaska, was $450.) In the 1880s, the “Star Route Scandal” focused the nation on a florid example of collusion between corrupt officials and contractors. Assistant Postmaster General Thomas J. Brady and other department bureaucrats conspired with equally venal carriers and politicians, including former Arkansas senator Stephen Dorsey, to get rich by exploiting the difficulty of monitoring transportation costs in remote areas. The contractors falsely claimed the need for faster or more frequent mail service in their regions and, in exchange for kickbacks, were awarded exorbitantly inflated sums. A route that had previously cost about $1,200 per year, for example, might suddenly command $11,200. Congress had periodically investigated such overt fraud since Grant’s administration, and Brady and many others were tried, but few were convicted. However, public outrage over the scandal that had bilked taxpayers of millions fueled the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, which helped to reduce internal corruption and incompetence throughout the federal government.

  Despite its flaws, the Star Route system remained a vital part of postal service and the development of America’s rural and wild places into the twentieth century. The history of communications in Yellowstone National Park, in what was still vaguely called the Montana Territory or the Upper Yellowstone when President Grant established the park in 1872, suggests the challenges. For some time after its founding, a kind of chaos reigned in the park, which is the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Poachers hunted the protected animals, tourists brought by the new railroad helped themselves to geological souvenirs, and guides set up impromptu camps where their clients bathed and washed laundry in the pristine hot springs.

  America’s postal and transportation networks had always been linked, and the Yellowstone region had precious little of either. Communicating with the outside world and obtaining goods of any kind were formidable challenges. Letters for the park initially went to Bozeman, in the Montana Territory, where they waited for a rancher, tourist, boatman, or stagecoach driver willing to carry them closer to their destination. In 1880, a post office was established at “Mammoth Hot Springs, National Park County,” and a Star Route contractor began to circulate mail to various stations within the park. Nevertheless, service remained erratic. A carrier based in tiny Cooke City, just outside the park’s remote northeast corner, quit after the postmaster rebuked him for warning some locals that they were about to be arrested for illegally fishing in the sanctuary. Then, in 1882, the railroad reached the new town of Livingston in Montana—still seven years away from statehood—and daily mail service to Mammoth began a year later. In 1884, Clarence Stephens, the park’s first postmaster, was succeeded by Jennie Henderson Dewing Ash, who held the position under three names during her three marriages.

  The park’s civilian superintendents proved unequal to the task of imposing order in their portion of the Wild West, and in 1886, General Philip Sheridan sent in the U.S. cavalry. The soldiers established Fort Yellowstone at what’s now the trim, pleasantly martial village of Mammoth Hot Springs, and within the year, the rule of law was restored. A “snowshoe cavalry” patrolled the park during its brutally hard winters, and even the soldiers’ wives and children had to get about on skis.

  Young private Edwin Kelsey, a future editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, sent a charming holiday letter to his niece that suggests the difficulty of communications in the region. He explains that he had ridden a horse forty-six miles through deep snow in temperatures that sank to −22 degrees F. in order to reach the fort a few days before Thanksgiving. Then he rhapsodizes over a feast that was “a beaut. . . . Turkey, roast pork, sweet spuds, cranberry sauce, oyster stew, chocolate, three kinds of cake, pie, pickles, nuts and apples—how’s that for soldiers?” He allows that “there’s something about life in the wilderness that fascinates me,” but he doesn’t sugarcoat the privations of being off the grid: “Don’t suppose you will hear from me before Xmas, so I’ll wish you all a Merry one. . . . One can buy nothing here and as the troop has not been paid for two months I have no money or I would send it to you to spend with my compliments.”

  The Star Route system that served such wild places had many colorful contractors, but “Stagecoach” Mary Fields remains one of the most remarkable. The sturdy, six-foot-tall African American woman had been born into slavery in Tennessee, then was taken in by Ursuline nuns after the Civil War. The sisters chose wisely when they brought her to Montana to help them establish St. Peter’s mission and school for Native Americans. Fields was a capable, well-respected jack-of-all-trades and a crack shot who, like teamster Polly Martin before her, was not one to be trifled with. When her propensity for fisticuffs earned the local bishop’s ire, the nuns helped her relocate to nearby Cascade and get the job of driving the mail between there and St. Peter’s, which she did from 1895 until 1903; the sisters even supplied the necessary wagon and horses. Fields was a popular figure, known for cigar smoking, sharpshooting, and buying candy for children, and her obituary in 1914 was front-page news in both of the area’s papers.

  Fields relished her work as a Star Route contractor, but young N. C. Wyeth, later a famous painter, illustrator, and father of artist Andrew, had a far briefer and less enjoyable career as a postal carrier. The easterner was fascinated by the West’s vistas and iconography and traveled there several times just after the turn of the century. On one excursion, Mexican bandits robbed the trading post where he had secured his money, leaving him penniless. His only recourse was to sign on to carry the mail between Fort Defiance, Arizona, and Two Gray Hills, New Mexico. His diary records that he received “$1.25 a day above horsefeed” for making this eighty-five-mile trek through a barren, sandy waste on horseback. The entry on his final day of service reads: “My last trip! Thank God.”

  • • •

  BY THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the inescapable fact that urban and rural Americans now lived in different worlds had become an issue of great domestic importance. Residents of cities and towns increasingly enjoyed the world’s most modern homes, equipped with clean water, indoor plumbing, and central heat and light. They had good roads, rail service, municipal utilities, and libraries, as well as access to mass entertainment and the latest consumer goods. The post brought the latest news and information to their doorsteps and enabled many to carry on same-day correspondence.

  The lives of many of the farmers and settlers who still made up 65 percent of the population were nearly medieval in comparison. Maintaining a home equipped with a hand-cranked cold-water pump, a woodstove, and an outhouse was backbreaking labor for women, who fled in droves to find work in the industrial cities. The awful roads and distance from the railroad kept country folk immured in tiny hamlets that offered few choices of things to do or buy. Their postal service differed little from that of the founders a century before, yet these Americans paid the same postage as town folk, which added injustice to the hardships of being cut off from the rapidly modernizing mainstream culture.

  America needed its farm families to provide food, so stopping their flight from unrelieved isolation and drudgery became a national concern. Powerful new ag
ricultural organizations, such as the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance, joined high-minded East Coast social reformers and the leaders of the new home economics movement in an effort to improve the quality of rural life. Using the post to reconnect these overlooked Americans to the society that had left them behind became one of the great achievements of the liberal-minded “Progressive Era,” which lasted roughly from 1890 to World War I.

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  THE GOLDEN AGE

  Messenger of Sympathy and Love

  Servant of Parted Friends

  Consoler of the Lonely

  Bond of the Scattered Family

  Enlarger of the Common Life

  Carrier of News and Knowledge

  Instrument of Trade and Industry

  Promoter of Mutual Acquaintance

  Of Peace and of Goodwill Among Men and Nations

  —“The Letter,” by Charles William Eliot, as revised by President Woodrow Wilson. Inscription from the façade of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, in Washington, D.C., formerly the city’s main post office and the companion building to Union Station.

  THE POST’S DYNAMISM and centrality to America’s public and private life were most fully realized between 1880 and 1920. During these glory days, the institution’s success in bringing more public services to many more people both supported and reflected an America that was tapping the riches of its vast West, moving to the center of the international stage, and exulting in its position as the world’s leading industrial powerhouse—all achieved in little more than a generation. Yale University’s president Arthur Hadley had to agree with the sentiments his institutional rival Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, expressed in “The Letter,” his paean to the post. In Hadley’s opinion, “our whole economic, social and political system has become so dependent upon free and secure postal communication, that the attempt to measure its specific effects can be little else than a waste of words.” Cushing went further and used the language associated with Burke’s notion of the sublime to describe the post’s annual growth as “enormous, resistless, inconceivable,” proudly adding that “we beat the world.”

  A few numbers suggest the turn-of-the-century post’s growth and scope. Between the Civil War era and circa 1890, the number of post offices doubled to 62,401. In 1860, the Railway Mail Service had operated on 27,000 miles of track, employed 600 workers, and cost $3 million per year; in 1891, it used 160,000 miles of track, had 6,000 employees, and cost $21 million per year. Between 1866 and 1891, registered letters increased in number from 275,103 to 15 million (with only 1 in 12,227 lost); the number of post offices that handled money orders rose from 766, producing $4 million in business, to 30,000, generating $140 million. Just between 1889 and 1892, the network added 8,120 new offices and 2,480 new routes and increased its revenue by 26 percent.

  The postmaster general officially controlled this enormous business, but since Andrew Jackson’s day, he had also been much concerned with political matters. Four assistant postmasters general, who were in charge of post offices, transportation, finance, buildings, and other affairs, actually ran things on a day-to-day basis. Each of the Post Office Department’s many divisions, including money orders, dead letters, contracts, inspection, and foreign mail, was a major enterprise in itself. The Division of Supplies, for example, handled the entire department’s printed forms, stationery, ink, stamp pads, twine, scales, and so forth. (In 1890, this complex operation was under the command of the formidable Major E. H. Shook, a former “printer’s boy” who during the Civil War had fought in thirty-one battles, been taken prisoner, and escaped.) The fabled Dead Letter Office alone required the services of more than a hundred of the five hundred clerks employed at postal headquarters. Many of the others bent over the ledgers of what was one of the world’s largest accounting offices, keeping track of the quarterly statements of all the nation’s post offices, which in 1891 did $450 million in business; money orders just from New York City numbered 80,000 per week.

  The post’s ascent began during the Civil War. Despite its terrible toll, the conflict had temporarily relieved the department of its costly responsibilities in the rural South and enabled the launching of expensive new programs, such as Free City Delivery and the Railway Mail Service. The huge simultaneous demands of the South’s repatriation and the West’s development caused a brief retrenchment, but by the 1880s, the department was ready for more major advances. The railroad system, too, had greatly expanded and, despite the chronic complaints of overcharging on one side and underpayment on the other, had become the post’s functional linchpin. In addition to its sheer efficiency, the RMS enabled the post to exploit the modern bureaucracy’s economies of scale. Back in 1830, Andrew Jackson’s often-vilified postmaster general William Barry had recognized that once the post had established its centralized national network, it could increase its revenue simply by adding more local offices and mail routes. As the frontier pushed westward, the railroads greatly accelerated this cookie-cutter growth by helping the post to mechanize its development in more and more places.

  The long joint apogee of the post and the railroads not coincidentally overlapped with the expansive, open-minded Progressive Era and its broad-based, largely bipartisan effort to rethink democracy’s meaning and goals for a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing America. Between 1860 and 1900, the country’s total and urban populations would both double, and its young people were primed to embrace new, modern ideas and ways of doing things.

  If the raw young republic had initially been intent on maximizing development, America was now increasingly focused on the problem of how to continue growth without succumbing to slums, sweatshops, and the powerful new businesses that economist Henry C. Adams described in 1887 as “natural monopolies.” Jay Gould of Western Union, Andrew Carnegie of U.S. Steel, William Vanderbilt of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and other titans of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age bought up thousands of small companies and consolidated them into a few hundred corporations; they gleaned enormous profits largely because their costs declined as their scale increased, which enabled them to knock out smaller competitors and dominate the market. These huge nationwide enterprises soon virtually controlled the economy, threatening the order of what had long been a country of farms and small businesses. That both the railroads and Western Union were involved with the all-important dissemination of information only heightened the public’s anxiety.

  The severe depression of 1893, which caused high unemployment, violent strikes, farm foreclosures, and generally hard times, further increased the people’s concern over the consequences of industrialization and urbanization and drew supporters to the Progressive movement. This unusual affiliation of very different social, economic, and political groups recoiled alike from the prospect of becoming cogs in the Industrial Revolution’s monstrous wheel. Members of the new urban workforce employed in factories and offices; the growing professional class of businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and teachers; the isolated, underserved agrarian population; and the reform-minded Protestant churches—all looked to government to protect them from vast new forces beyond their control, especially corrupt political machines and the greedy monopolies that posed a threat to affordable utilities and public services. As a result of this widespread concern, the Progressive Era saw some of American history’s liveliest policy debates, many of which concerned the proper spheres of government and private enterprise.

  Where the post was concerned, the stage for the latest installment in the perennial government-versus-business drama had been set by earlier spirited exchanges over control of the telegraph. Even after Congress had initially declined to buy his invention, Samuel F. B. Morse, President U. S. Grant, and many other prominent citizens continued to assert that the telegraph was a natural extension of the post’s mandate and that the government should redeem it from private hands. After all, such a step would conform to the often-invoked “post office principle”
of serving all the people at a uniform rate, including those in less populous regions. Illinois senator Stephen Douglas had put forward the basic argument in 1857: the telegraph “is for the transmission of intelligence, and that is what I understand to be the function of the Post-Office Department.”

  In 1866, Congress responded to the surge of antimonopoly sentiment by passing the National Telegraph Act, which was meant to curb Western Union’s hegemony by sparking competition from its much smaller rivals. The bill authorized the postmaster general to set telegraph rates for government agencies, but, more important, it gave companies that agreed to let Congress buy them out after five years the right-of-way to string their wire along post roads. This policy made the post’s acquisition of the telegraph seem almost inevitable; indeed, Great Britain would take the step in 1868. Grant himself stressed that the telegraph circulated information as well as communications, and that the federal government had an obligation to foster public education. Other advocates emphasized that a postal telegraph would improve the free flow of news, which was obstructed by private deals between the telegraph companies and the New York Associated Press, an agency that restricted its reportage to select member papers.

  Two Republican postmasters general, both appointed by Grant, expressed opposing views on the postal telegraph. John Angel Creswell agreed with his boss. Creswell might have been a highly partisan wielder of patronage, but he was a creative executive who even briefly succeeded in abolishing the wasteful franking privilege that allowed congressmen to generate tons of self-serving mail at the department’s expense. He also believed that the post should offer more public services, including a savings bank that would help to fund a postal telegraph. Creswell’s view reflected his larger conviction that certain resources belonged to the people and should not be privatized. In one memorable example, he described electricity as “that most subtle and universal of God’s mysterious agents”; as to using it to generate private profit, he said, “As well might a charter be granted for the exclusive use of air, light, or water.”