How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  Postmaster General Marshall Jewell argued against a postal telegraph by falling back on the traditional argument against increasing federal power, especially at the expense of corporate profits. “There must be a limit to government interference with private enterprise,” he said, “and happily it better suits the genius of the American people to help themselves than to depend upon the state.” Leonidas Trousdale, a prominent Tennessee journalist, enthusiastically agreed: “Let us adhere, as closely as changing events and shifting scenes may permit, to the wise maxim of our patriot fathers, that ‘that government is best which governs least.’”

  Soon to become Alexander Graham Bell’s father-in-law and the first president of both the Bell Telephone Company and the National Geographic Society, Gardiner Greene Hubbard took a measured stance on the telegraph’s ownership. He argued that the system should become what would later be called a public utility, an enterprise that’s regulated but not owned by the government. In defense of federal supervision, he wrote: “It is not contended that the postal system is free from defects, but that it removes many of the grave evils of the present [telegraphic] system, without the introduction of new ones; and that the balance of benefits greatly preponderates in favor of the cheap rates, increased facilities, limited and divided powers of the postal system.”

  These early debates over control of the telegraph had failed to settle the question, but after 1881, when Jay Gould, the Gilded Age’s deeply unpopular robber baron par excellence, took control of Western Union, the public’s mounting antipathy to monopolies and their scandalous profits thrust the issue back onto the national stage. Western Union’s supporters countered with the familiar argument that it was both unfair and impractical for the government to compete with business. However, social critics stunned by such huge corporations’ growing might increasingly disagree. To them, the natural monopolies, much like government itself, had the power to transform society, and therefore should be either owned or regulated by the government for the public’s good. The Populist Party, which advocated public ownership of utilities, was defeated in elections during the 1890s, but its pro-government sentiments endured well into the next century among a huge, diverse swath of Americans, including Republican presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft as well as the Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

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  TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith called the post at its zenith “the greatest business organization in the world,” but unlike a private company, its aim was expanded public service, not profitability. The long-neglected majority of Americans who lived in rural areas were the first to benefit, thanks largely to Postmaster General John Wanamaker, the self-made, fabulously rich Republican founder of the namesake Philadelphia department store. A pioneer of modern marketing and advertising as well as one-stop shopping (“Everything from Everywhere to Everybody!”), he had made a fortune from inventive strategies, such as charging low prices to generate a huge volume of sales, and catchy innovations, such as the price tag, the money-back guarantee, the in-store restaurant, and even the annual “white sale.” Wanamaker was the very personification of industrious, upwardly mobile, business-oriented, forward-looking, turn-of-the-century America, and he was determined to modernize the post, now more than a century old, just as he had revolutionized merchandising.

  After making his own fortune, Wanamaker had deployed his skills on behalf of the Republican Party’s finance committee, which for the first time was dominated by businessmen. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison duly rewarded him with a cabinet position, but instead of the Department of State, as had been rumored, Wanamaker got the Post Office Department. The merchant prince proceeded to become one of the nation’s most gifted postmasters general, but he had timing as well as talent on his side during the Progressive Era, when the public was more receptive to ambitious plans for improving the commonweal than at any time before or since.

  Like all postmasters general, Wanamaker wanted the mails to go faster—so much so that he ordered that if no mailman were available to attend immediately to a letter sent via special delivery, a service added in 1885, the postmaster himself must deliver it. (When he heard that one such letter had taken ten hours to travel from Philadelphia to its destination in New York City, he ordered an investigation.) Wanamaker was also a business genius, however, who had become rich by anticipating what the public most wanted and needed next. He was determined to use his combination of acumen and chutzpah to update the post with the telegraph that his predecessors Blair and Creswell had coveted and more, including telephone service, parcel delivery, savings banking, and especially the free delivery of letters and newspapers to long-neglected rural homes.

  Most politicians interested in the idea of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) had been Democrats, but the new Republican postmaster general became its doughtiest champion. His passion for such public services had complicated roots. On one hand, Wanamaker was a businessman who had made a fortune through private enterprise and a tough politician who vigorously exploited the spoils system on his party’s behalf. On the other, he was the son of a religious family of hardworking brickmakers, who had had just three years of schooling before starting to work at fifteen for $1.50 per week. He was also a fervent, activist Presbyterian and patron of the Young Men’s Christian Association, who attributed his fund-raising success for the Republican Party to the same techniques he employed on behalf of Protestant missions.

  Wanamaker’s cultural and religious roots inspired his unshakeable belief that all people were equal before God and deserved the same fair treatment, whether from government or from business. This powerful conviction fed the hatred of monopolies that he shared with many contemporaries—in his case, particularly the railroads and private express carriers that had troubled the post he now ran. He regarded such huge companies as robbers who had carved the nation into sections under their control, then amassed fortunes by depriving average folk of competitively priced goods and services. Thus, the hardheaded merchant whose government office had a direct telegraph line to his business headquarters nevertheless insisted that the post office had a higher purpose than merely making money: “I do not think it essential, and do not know why we should be self-supporting any more than the Interior and other Departments.”

  Wanamaker believed that establishing RFD to connect more than half of the American people with modern mainstream society was first and foremost the right thing to do, but it also made good political and business sense. Home delivery would help keep country folk on their vitally important farms. Employing one carrier to bring the mail to fifty customers was far more efficient than requiring all of them to drop everything and walk or ride a horse to fetch it, and would also allow thousands of small, unprofitable fourth-class post offices to be closed. Finally, RFD would be a tremendous stimulus to the economy. Simply by delivering a newspaper to every home, it would draw new customers into the national market and benefit businesses from publishers to the fledgling mail-order merchants and advertising agencies. As one of the nation’s foremost entrepreneurs, Wanamaker could defend RFD and his other progressive goals with a hard-nosed challenge: “See if each one does not commend itself to your business judgment. See if you don’t even feel sorry that politics and private interest stand in the way of these improvements.”

  The arguments for establishing RFD were as fair and commonsensical then as now, but Wanamaker failed to close the deal with Congress. Reflexively oppositional Democrats were part of the problem, but so was the postmaster general himself. He had a judgmental, puritanical streak—vividly expressed in his vigorous opposition to labor unions and the use of the mail by state lotteries—that rubbed some people the wrong way and even led to death threats. Many others were simply jealous of the rich, powerful man who was used to getting his way. They sniped that he had bought his way into the cabinet, that he ran his department too much like his department store, and even that he wanted to use the post to increa
se his own company’s mail-order business and ruin the competition. Not surprisingly, third- and fourth-class postmasters, Star Route contractors, and general store proprietors also vehemently opposed a service that would jeopardize their livelihoods, and they lobbied Congress against it.

  His opponents’ small-mindedness sorely vexed Wanamaker, and the capital’s corridors of power frequently echoed with rumors that he was fed up and about to resign. Petty concerns aside, however, there were also serious practical obstacles to initiating a huge program like RFD, starting with the huge expense. Like Free City Delivery, the service would require a new workforce of tens of thousands of mail carriers and incur other costs that no one knew exactly how to calculate, which gave squeamish legislators an excuse to equivocate. Wanamaker secured $10,000 to run a small test program in a few districts in 1891, then proposed nationwide RFD the following year, but Congress continued to dither and stall.

  Wanamaker left office in 1893 without the satisfaction of seeing his democratic dreams fulfilled on his watch, but he had planted the idea that the post could and should provide Americans with new services in the national consciousness. Congress was besieged by thousands and thousands of petitions for RFD and was forced to weigh the estimated costs against its benefits. In 1896, legislators authorized enough funding for a larger experiment on five routes in West Virginia, which just happened to be the home state of Postmaster General William Wilson. Within a year, there were forty-four routes in twenty-nine states. In 1902, RFD finally became a permanent postal service, which expanded over time.

  RFD was a wildly successful if initially costly boost to both rural America and postal efficiency. In 1901, the country had 76,945 post offices—the highest number ever—most of which belonged to the smallest fourth class; by 1920, RFD had cut the total to some 52,000. (Covers stamped in decommissioned “dead post offices” are prized by philatelists, especially those who specialize in particular geographic areas.) Just as the founders had foreseen, better postal service once again promoted local development. Citizens of rural communities first had to band together to petition for RFD routes, then provide carriers with the decent roads and bridges that had hitherto been few and far between. The improved transportation network changed agrarian America’s social and economic as well as physical landscape. Terrible roads no longer restricted people to their tiny villages. They could venture to towns that offered new experiences, more choices, and competitive prices, and their children could travel to larger, consolidated schools that offered better facilities and instruction.

  Like their urban peers, the new RFD carriers, whose numbers climbed from fewer than 500 in 1899 to more than 32,000 in 1905, worked hard—until 1923, even on Christmas Day. At first, they were paid only about $200 per year, on the assumption that theirs was primarily a part-time job for farmers. Most drove their own horse-drawn wagons over rugged terrain, stopping to deposit letters in the pails and cigar boxes that predated the familiar rounded rural mailboxes. The carriers also collected outgoing mail and postmarked it with a special RFD “cancel”—handwritten and hand-stamped markings that are another philatelic specialty—which meant that many local letters could be delivered without processing at the post office. The carriers’ job called for special inventiveness and fortitude during hard northern winters, when horse-drawn buggies might sport sled runners in front instead of wheels and drivers fended off frostbite with bearskin coats and brass foot warmers filled with hot coals. After 1908, carriers who began their careers behind a horse could end them in Model Ts, sometimes also fitted for winter with front skis.

  RFD changed the quality of life for many Americans more profoundly than mere facts and statistics can convey. Some of the most poignant tributes to the service concerned its impact on long-isolated rural people’s mental health. In addition to information from the outside world, the carriers brought friendly faces and news of recent events, from fires and floods to epidemics, as well as the latest gossip. As Postmaster General George Meyer observed in 1907, “medical men” declared that because of RFD, “insanity is on the decrease.” In the latest evolution in the founders’ vision of what the post was for, people who had felt cut off from the national and even local community suddenly had, right at their doorsteps, a bridge that united them with a larger America.

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  THE POST AT ITS ACME was generally regarded as an exemplary institution, public or private, and mostly enjoyed the support of the people as well as both political parties, some predictable partisan carping notwithstanding. During the presidential electioneering of 1880, Abraham Hazen, a postal official, tried to drum up support for the Republicans by contrasting the department’s affairs during the Democrats’ tenure between 1853 and 1861—“financial ruin, general demoralization of the service, and popular discontent”—with those of his party’s years between 1861 and 1880—“filled with great questions successfully grappled with . . . with immense strides in all avenues of human thought and action.”

  Despite the post’s high repute, a few problems drew disapproval from the citizenry and journalists alike, especially the continuing scandal of the spoils system. By 1880, most of the nation’s one hundred thousand federal workers were employed by the post and thus subject to partisan firings. In 1881, President James Garfield’s assassination by a disgruntled office seeker amplified the demand for reform, and in 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which created a bipartisan Civil Service Commission to ensure that federal jobs would be awarded on the basis of merit. The law turned out to have some conspicuous holes, however, particularly regarding the post. Its provisions applied to clerks and letter carriers in twenty-three big post offices, including New York City and Washington, D.C., but not to the rest of the department’s employees, including tens of thousands of postmasters and rural carriers. As Theodore Roosevelt, the commission’s director in 1890, rightly observed, apart from its gross unfairness, the spoils system also exacted an enormous toll on congressmen’s time and efficiency, as they were expected to recommend appointments for all of the postmasters in their districts, which could be a full-time job in itself. (Commissioner Roosevelt had been particularly infuriated by Postmaster General Wanamaker’s disregard of the new civil service rules, but in 1903, President Roosevelt would be embarrassed by a major scandal over postal corruption during his administration that resulted in much-publicized firings and indictments.)

  The welfare of the nation’s tens of thousands of postal clerks and carriers, who still worked long hours for low wages, was also a turn-of-the-century public concern. In 1902, President Roosevelt issued his infamous “gag order,” which prohibited postal workers from lobbying Congress for better pay and conditions. Nevertheless, in 1907, the department’s high turnover rate and slumping quality of service forced the government to give the clerks and carriers a raise. Much to management’s dismay, postal workers had also begun to organize labor unions in what was now an industrial nation. In 1913, about sixty black RMS workers founded the National Alliance of Postal Employees, which would become the broader National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees in 1965.

  Not all of the era’s postal workers were discontented. Postmasters who had begun their careers on the frontier wondered over the changes they’d seen and the pace of their institution’s progress. When Joel Newson was appointed to serve in Azalia, Indiana, in 1862, the mail arrived just once a week and a letter took five days to reach Washington, D.C. Just thirty years later, the mail came twice daily, and a letter could reach the capital in twenty-seven hours. Even post offices in remote regions could attract talented personnel. D. S. Richardson, a Massachusetts native who served as an assistant postmaster in Santa Fe, became a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle in Mexico in 1874, then America’s minister to Mexico between 1875 and 1876. He resumed working for the post, this time in San Francisco, interrupted by a stint as secretary to the city’s Japanese consul. In his leisure time, Richardson wrote for many western periodicals
. When a yellow fever epidemic broke out in the bustling postal-rail hub of Jacksonville, Florida, in 1888, Postmaster Harrison W. Clark was determined to maintain service despite the quarantine. It was thought at the time that contagion could be inhibited by dipping letters in vinegar, which incidentally turned black ink rosy, then slitting and fumigating them. Clark set up a station where the mail was perforated and smoked with sulfur for six hours and even sprinkled his post office floor with carbolic acid. Only one of his twenty-six clerks quit, though many got sick and two died.

  The ranks of rural postmasters, which have included both northern abolitionist John Brown and southern writer William Faulkner, continued to harbor some eccentrics. E. P. Page, of Ingersol, Texas, precipitately left his position after his wife gave birth to quadruplets, then wanted his job back. He appealed to higher-ups in the post, then controlled by the Republican Party, on the grounds that although he was a Democrat, his four little girls might one day marry Republicans; he was reappointed. The editor of the local paper in one southern town caused a fracas when he criticized the postmaster in print for burying his dog in the family plot at the cemetery. An outraged citizen then dug up the pet on the grounds of sacrilege. The angry postmaster retaliated by calling the editor names, refusing to sell him enough stamps, and threatening to kick him out of the post office.