This back-to-the-future strategy worked reasonably well in the burgeoning suburbs and exurbs, where the big trucks could sail into giant new mail processing centers that were custom-built for the purpose and conveniently positioned just off the new freeways. The gigantic urban distributing post offices, however, had been purposely built in densely developed downtown areas adjacent to the train stations through which most of the national mail had once passed; they didn’t even have docking sites for the semis. The long trucks struggled to access these old postal palaces amid heavily trafficked, narrow streets dating to horse-and-carriage days. Indeed, the department still employed some horse-drawn wagons in downtown Philadelphia until 1955.
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THE QUESTION OF WHY, year after year, the government refused to address the root causes of the looming implosion of one of its largest enterprises is a complicated one. The long austerity regimen imposed by a series of national catastrophes had caused grave practical problems for the post, but it had also contributed to its quieter identity crisis. Since the reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, if not implicitly before, the simplest way to describe the institution had been something along the lines of “the system that delivers things directly to the people.” In 1877, Supreme Court justice Morrison Waite had underscored the post’s open-ended nature by observing that its mission of binding the nation wasn’t confined to the means known to its founders—a principle boldly put to practice throughout the Progressive Era. Since the 1930s, however, the government, postal management, and the people had gradually lost touch with that traditionally flexible, expansive, forward-looking understanding of the post.
Years of national crises had accustomed postal executives to struggling along on short-term, bare-bones appropriations and steadily increasing deficits. The department’s centralized operations, once models of the sublime, had become as hierarchical and ossified as the rules and regulations in its two-pound Postal Manual. Some forty thousand postmasters had to deal directly with Washington over the most trivial matters. Without a Montgomery Blair or John Wanamaker to supply the vision and political will needed to keep pace with change, managers followed the example set in 1930 by Postmaster General Walter Brown and fixated on increasing first-class mail volume and reducing costs—despite the fact that, without automation, the first objective made the second one impossible.
The problem of the post’s lackluster leadership paled beside Congress’s seeming indifference to its plight. Politicians refused to pay for the enormously costly rejuvenation the department so desperately needed largely because such a bold step was not in their self-interest. Members of Congress knew that in the new postwar global superpower, huge defense contracts trumped postal patronage. (Republican president Dwight Eisenhower famously remarked about the fact in his farewell address: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”) That said, the spoils system, though waning, still provided some political clout, which modernizing the system along more businesslike lines would necessarily end. Last but far from least, politicians heard less about the post from constituents, who, even though they generated much more mail than previous generations, took the service for granted and weren’t as exclusively dependent on it. These taxpaying constituents, who now knew little of the post or its sorry state, might very well be riled by a big bill to fix it.
Instead of taking a long-term approach to the post’s looming crisis, Congress repeatedly opted for the short-term solution of paying for more and more workers to cope with the skyrocketing mail volume—a huge expenditure on labor that gulped down most of the department’s budget. The sacrosanct three-cent first-class postage for letters, unchanged since 1932, during the Depression, was raised three times between 1958 and 1968, to reach six cents, but the increases didn’t begin to cover the rising costs of labor and transportation, much less a massive modernization. Both revenues and costs had greatly increased over time, but the fact remains that the department’s total deficit for the years preceding 1930 could have seemed unremarkable for a single year in the 1950s and ’60s. In a vicious circle, Congress’s refusal to address the root of the post’s crisis forced its managers to operate within the limits of short-term appropriations, which further discouraged foresight and innovative thinking.
Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, an Eisenhower appointee who served from 1953 to 1961, was an exception to midcentury postal management’s generally uninspired rule. This energetic son of a rural mailman had been the owner of one of the Midwest’s largest car dealerships as well as the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Like Wanamaker, he was a self-made Washington outsider who understood business, salesmanship, and the importance of the latest technology. He quickly signaled his intentions to run a more modern, businesslike post by resigning his position with the committee, downplaying patronage, and hiring talented people from private enterprise.
On his second day on the job, Summerfield attempted to assess his department’s condition. However, he found that no operating statement for recent months would be available for almost a year and a half, and that the huge staff did not include a single certified public accountant. The department was the world’s largest buyer of transportation services, but it had not examined those costs in twenty-five years. The average post office was fifty years old, and many were older, but no money had been appropriated for their upkeep since 1938. The department’s organizational chart listed the Bureau of Research and Engineering one step below what amounted to the employees’ suggestion box. Worst of all, Summerfield realized, unless the post was automated, it would have to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to keep up with the ever-accelerating mail volume, which had climbed to forty-nine billion letters and one billion parcels that year.
The prospect of mechanizing a huge, specialized enterprise like the post was fraught with problems beyond politics, bureaucratic inertia, and even sheer astronomical expense. The institution was a monopoly, so it would be the only customer for the complex machines it needed. This fact had naturally discouraged manufacturers’ interest; it also helps explain why advances in postal tools had been relatively limited in the earlier twentieth century to things like electric postage meters and stamp cancelers, stamp vending machines, and pneumatic tubes— pipelines that sped urban letters underground. Little progress had been made regarding the post’s major problem of mail sorting.
Summerfield did his best to end this institutional stasis by enthusiastically experimenting with mechanizing the post. Previously, the department’s own engineering staff had designed prototypes for the necessary machines, then contracted with outside companies to have the equipment built. The results were much less sophisticated than what outside industrial designers could have achieved on their own, as well as very costly. Summerfield changed the status quo by telling the private manufacturers what the post wanted its new machines to do, then letting their experts design and build them. He also reached out to posts in other nations as well as to other government agencies and private industry to develop the numerical coding systems that automated mail processing required. By 1959, the post had contracted for the first workhorses of mail automation: the Pitney-Bowes facer-canceler, which oriented letters for processing and canceled their postage, and the Burroughs Corporation’s letter-position sorting machine (LSM), which helped sort them for delivery. Assured of the department’s financial support, manufacturers now kept teams of engineers busy with improving the equipment. A proud Summerfield used this cutting-edge technology, which doubled clerks’ efficiency, to turn Detroit’s main post office into a showcase for the future.
Considering the grave problems confronting him in the here and now, Summerfield’s ability to think big and far ahead is all the more impressive. In 1959 and 1960, he briefly experimented with a postal program called Speed Mail, which used the new facsimile (fax) technology to transmit d
ocuments in mere instants. The sender could dispatch a fax from his or her local post office to the recipient’s, where it was printed and delivered. The service was lightning fast and potentially cheap and could even drastically reduce the volume of paper mail. The sanguine postmaster general anticipated that fax machines in every American home and business would transmit most of the nation’s first-class mail. In a harbinger of the future regarding the post’s forays into new communications technology, however, the promising Speed Mail project was halted in 1961. The start-up had been expensive, yet it had not been given adequate time to recover its costs. More important, air and rail mail carriers as well as Western Union had loudly voiced the traditional protests of unfair “socialistic” government competition with private industry.
Summerfield had made real progress in the post’s automation, but its worsening finances limited his big plans to modernize the entire system to Detroit and a few other cities. In 1960, toward the end of his tenure in office, Summerfield, who regarded traditional post offices as “monuments in stone to political patronage, designed more for curb appeal than functionality,” had the satisfaction of dedicating America’s first fully mechanized mail facility, in Providence. The futuristic building’s large, open bays and swooping roof anticipated Eero Saarinen’s famous TWA terminal at New York City’s Idlewild Airport. The work area was the size of two football fields, yet few employees were required to operate its equipment.
Much like Wanamaker, Summerfield was a strong-minded executive whose efforts to update the post were compromised by a troubled relationship with Congress, not least because of his own ego. (One day, he and James “Big Jim” Farley found themselves alone in a hallway lined with pictures of former postmasters general. When Farley observed that there had been only three great ones, Summerfield said, “Who was the other?”) Something of a latter-day Comstock, he had also been ridiculed for filling a room across from his office with confiscated pornography, purportedly to educate visitors about the perceived moral menace, and for trying to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the mail long after it had been published. Many of his efforts, including a TV series called The Mail Story: Handle with Care and the department’s jazzy new red, white, and blue graphics, were highly creative, but others ranged into the realm of science fiction. In 1959, he got the Navy submarine U.S.S. Barbero to transport some letters via a Regulus cruise missile, then announced, “We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.” (The first high-velocity letter was quickly delivered to President Eisenhower.) Like the best of his predecessors, however, Summerfield had a robust sense of the post’s mandate and its future expression, and he had literally as well as figuratively tried to propel the venerable institution into the space age.
The next postmaster general to take over the still-struggling department was J. Edward Day, a Kennedy appointee who was less interested in costly experiments in mechanization. Nevertheless, he introduced one of the midcentury post’s simplest yet most important technological advances. The ZIP (zone improvement plan) code system was a more sophisticated version of the basic “zone numbering system” already used by some big cities. By adding two digits to an address—N.Y. 12, N.Y., for example—a letter could go directly to the city’s mail zone No. 12, thus speeding up the delivery process. The new five-digit ZIP went further. The first three numbers identified a particular area’s central mail processing facility, and the second two either a certain post office there or, in larger cities, a particular postal zone. Americans were still getting accustomed to telephone area codes, and some initially bristled at the ZIPs. Like the new, more efficient two-letter abbreviations for the states, the codes struck them as Big Brother’s latest effort to turn the person into “just a number.” Most people soon accepted the ZIPs, however, and this small addition to the traditional address produced a surprising number of large effects.
Because its numbers could be read by machines as well as people, the ZIP code was a giant step toward streamlining mail processing. By 1965, an early “optical character reader” helped sort letters by translating typed addresses into coding that a computer could understand. The ZIP was also a major refinement in the post’s organization of America’s physical and social environment, which had become much more sophisticated since the days when addresses often consisted of the name of a town or hamlet. Moreover, the new categorization system revolutionized the mass-mailing and marketing industries and greatly assisted the work of the U.S. Census Bureau, public health agencies, and other demographic research groups.
The goal of automated mail processing had been somewhat advanced by the mid-1960s, but even in the department’s few mechanized oases, the work would remain brutally hard for years to come. An LSM operator had to look at a letter’s ZIP code, then key in the three numbers that directed it toward its next destination—either a certain city or another LSM in that same post office; then a second operator typed in its last two numbers. Much like the RMS clerks who preceded them, these workers also had to memorize the codes for every state and country in the world, so that they could process ZIP-less mail. Moreover, they were expected to handle a letter every second; their only relief from this grueling regimen was a ten-minute break each hour, during which they carried their processed mail to a distribution station. Not surprisingly, the extraordinarily stressful work had an error rate of about 30 percent.
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THE MIDCENTURY POST tried to conduct business as usual amid steadily worsening conditions, but the inevitable meltdown finally occurred in Chicago in October 1966. Ten million pieces of mail, rising in mountains and cascading into halls and basements, backed up in the enormous Old Main Post Office, which shut down for almost three weeks. The chaos also spread outside the dysfunctional facility into the city, where workers had dumped piles of undelivered mail, much of which was third-class material past its delivery date, on side streets and even in the river. (It was whispered that an assistant postmaster general had ordered all third-class mail to be burned and the postage returned to the senders, but this shocking step was never taken.) The entire nation was riveted, and appalled, as an ominous ripple effect perturbed service in other big cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and St. Louis.
The story of the Chicago debacle is not well documented, but one description that’s frequently used is “perfect storm.” During that era of civil rights demonstrations and urban rioting, many were quick to blame racial strife at a big-city post office where most employees were African American. Others pointed to the rumor that the previous postmaster, who was white, had deliberately left his successor, Henry McGee, Chicago’s first black postmaster, understaffed. Ethnic tensions certainly simmered there and in some other major urban facilities, but it’s unlikely that race per se was the main problem. The post had long attracted many highly educated, able black career employees who lacked opportunities elsewhere, but by the 1960s, they had other options. Their replacements included many inexperienced, less skilled part-time workers, often women whose child-care responsibilities contributed to high rates of absenteeism. Chicago employed a high number of these inexpert workers, who simply couldn’t handle the annual autumn onslaught of bulk advertising mail. In hindsight, such postal breakdowns in big cities at a time of “white flight” to the suburbs, where the spoils system remained stronger and service was generally good, suggests that many urban facilities no longer had the political clout to get the necessary funding, staffing, and equipment.
After the Chicago disaster, the truth about the post’s desperate state was finally out. Americans wanted to know why a major government institution that was also one of the country’s biggest businesses and employers suddenly seemed almost unable to function. Even Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien, who served in the Johnson administration from 1965 to 1968, declared the department to be in a race with catastrophe. In a high-profile speech to a publishing group in April 1967, he proposed a new model for the post; the historic department should be depoliticized,
removed from the cabinet, and turned into a government-owned, nonprofit business along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Association or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This new agency would be run by a board of directors and competent managers, its employees would have the right to bargain collectively, and it would be authorized to issue bonds to raise money for its modernization.
At first glance, the idea that the post—explicitly defined as a public service entitled to government support since 1851 and implicitly so long before—should suddenly be turned into a self-supporting, government-owned corporation seems startling, especially when put forward by the postmaster general himself. The concept of the post as a business, however, had been in the air since O’Brien’s predecessor Walter Brown had advanced it back in 1929. Indeed, management had long focused on this formula of increasing first-class mail volume and cutting costs. Moreover, the perennial theme of “business works better than government” was back in vogue again after the end of the New Deal era. The anti-institutional culture of the 1960s teemed with protests against various powers that be. Even academics turned their attention from the state and its policies toward social dynamics, whether expressed by the civil rights movement or managerial capitalism. If government was not regarded as the outright enemy, as the opponents of the Vietnam War and others cast it, it was increasingly seen as inferior to private enterprise—a sentiment that soon helped send Republican Richard Nixon to the White House.
The post had run deficits for most of its history, more or less as a matter of course as far as Congress was concerned, despite its periodic blustering. Not even ten years before, the Postal Policy Act of 1958 had flatly stated that the post office “clearly is not a business enterprise conducted for profit or for raising general funds” but is, rather, a public service meant to promote “social, cultural, intellectual, and commercial intercourse among the people of the United States” that should be supported by the Treasury, not its own revenue. Now, however, the magnitude of its shortcomings and shortfalls, combined with society’s increased pro-business orientation, cast the post’s bottom line and raison d’être into high relief.
How the Post Office Created America Page 26
