How the Post Office Created America
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By the early 1980s, the USPS’s modern technology was demonstrably modernizing the handling of traditional paper and parcel mail. The additional digits of the expanded ZIP+4 code, which debuted in 1978, had parsed delivery into even smaller zones, such as city blocks or corporate buildings, which cut the number of times a letter had to be handled and helped to sort mail in the right sequence for its carriers. The post needed more advanced machinery to read this more elaborate code, however, and by 1982, the first computerized optical character reader could “see” a letter just once, then print it with a bar code translated by a mechanical sorter at its destination post office. The USPS’s performance standards, which clock how fast letters and parcels arrive at their destinations, improved significantly, if still unevenly, and the service mostly supported itself while supplying universal mail service at relatively stable prices and sustaining a huge middle-class workforce.
The post’s productivity, which had risen in the 1970s and then flattened for a while, was surging by the early twenty-first century. The computerized system that keeps up with America’s forty million changes of address per year—previously, a very labor-intensive, costly business—is one example of the mechanized marvels responsible. In the past, if John Doe moved to Denver, some of his mail was inevitably sent to his old address in San Francisco, where it would have to be redirected to his new home in Colorado. Now, when a letter mistakenly sent to him in California enters the processing system, a computer checks the post’s enormous database of addresses, including those of people who have moved in the previous eighteen months, sees that Doe lives in Colorado, and sends the letter straight there—an advance that saves time, labor, and expense.
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THE 1960S AND 1970S were a tumultuous era for America as well as its post, which had to keep serving the public while coping with its own crisis and reorganization. The transformation of stamps is an engaging illustration of its resilience and capacity for change even in the face of grave challenges. By the 1940s, America’s philatelic iconography had begun to catch up with modern times. Stately portraits of dead presidents and war heroes occasionally gave way to those of different kinds of distinguished Americans. These high achievers included poets, scientists, artists, and inventors, as well as Booker T. Washington, an African American educator, and Jane Addams, a feminist and social reformer. By the 1950s, advances in the printing process had given artists much more latitude regarding color and the types of imagery that could be reproduced on stamps. The bright, contemporary commemoratives that resulted honored everyone and everything from the humorist Will Rogers to the American poultry industry.
Beginning in the 1960s, the post expanded its mandate to unite an increasingly culturally diverse America with stamps that celebrated widely shared themes from popular culture and promoted worthy causes. Elvis Presley remains the perennial best seller, but Robert Indiana’s “Love” and the Walt Disney, Star Wars, and Legends of the West series also became special favorites. (In 2013, the post was criticized for going too far with the Harry Potter issue, which some perceived as both lightweight and, being of British origin, “un-American.”) One stamp raised more than $79 million for breast cancer research, and although “duck stamps” are used on hunting licenses rather than mail, they have contributed $700 million to wetlands preservation. Holiday stamps expanded far beyond Christmas and Valentine’s Day to include Eid al-Fitr and Kwanzaa, and popular commemoratives celebrated great national achievements, such as the exploration of space. (The USPS owns an envelope, smudged with lunar dust and postmarked on the moon in 1971, that bears a proof for the Apollo 15 stamps yet to be printed.) The new eminently collectible stamps have been a financial boon to the post, although some serious philatelists lament the shift away from intricate engraving.
Like stamps themselves, the process of choosing their subjects from among the forty thousand or so proposed each year has been thoroughly democratized. Previously, members of Congress trying to highlight their pet projects, such as dams and bridges, submitted most of the requests to the postmaster general. In 1957, however, the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, an apolitical group of accomplished Americans, began to offer unbiased recommendations drawn from the enormous range of possible subjects. Until 2011, living persons were excluded, because even a seemingly sterling figure can end up tarnished, and timing remains an important consideration. Only when astronaut John Glenn had been safely pulled from the sea in 1962 did postal inspectors secretly deliver one hundred million Project Mercury stamps commemorating the event to post offices. The issue meant to honor the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980 had been printed and distributed for circulation one day before President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would boycott the games. The post pulled the rest of the stamps, but the disgruntled public demanded that they be put back on sale.
The USPS also responded to the turbulent American milieu of the 1960s and ’70s with changes in its employment policies. The number of African Americans in its ranks increased in 1962, when Executive Order 10988 gave some collective bargaining rights to government unions that did not discriminate based on race. Efforts such as the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961 and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 also expanded women’s employment in the postal service, and their numbers rose from just 22 percent of the workforce in the 1940s to 33 percent in the 1960s. Although the ranks of, say, female city letter carriers rose sharply, very few women still managed to become top postal executives.
In 1958, Postmaster General Summerfield had trumpeted, “With our near 16,000 women Postmasters representing close to half of our entire management staff, we believe it is fair to say the American Post Office Department . . . recognizes the management abilities of women perhaps more than any other private or governmental organization anywhere.” However, his disingenuous statement tried to equate postmasters and executives. The first woman to break that glass ceiling was Alice B. Sanger, who had been employed by Benjamin Harrison before he was elected president. He made her a clerk in the White House in 1889, which distinguished her as one of the first women to work there who wasn’t a maid. She joined the Post Office Department in 1894, rose up the ladder, and in 1925 became an assistant clerk to the department’s chief clerk—the first woman to hold that position. She handled a variety of clerical, budgetary, and other duties and even designed the postmaster general’s official flag. In 1953, Dr. Beatrice Aitchison, a transportation specialist, became the department’s first woman policy maker, and her work on more efficient, economical ways to move the mail led to significant savings.
Women executives remained seriously underrepresented in the post’s top administration until 1985, when Jackie Strange became deputy postmaster general, the department’s second-highest position. She was well prepared for the responsibility, having started in the department as a temporary clerk in 1946 while a college student. She ascended through the ranks, often as the first woman in various administrative positions; indeed, one of her male bosses had been fired for giving her the managerial job that was her first big break. In 2015, Megan Brennan was sworn in as America’s first female postmaster general.
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THE BIGGEST SURPRISE REGARDING the post’s role in the Vietnam War that roiled America throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and in subsequent wars, has been its great importance to the armed forces and their civilian supporters, despite other, more immediate means of long-distance communications. The modern phenomenon of mass correspondence between citizens concerned about the troops’ welfare and unknown service members at the front began when a soldier fighting in Vietnam wrote to “Dear Abby” to say that what he and his bunkmates most wanted was mail from back home. His request loosed a flood of letters, and by Operation Desert Storm, a huge volume of mail from civilians eager to contribute to the war effort were posted to “Any Soldier.”
The satisfactions of corresponding with a stranger may elude some people safe at home, but not y
oung soldiers and sailors who might lack supportive friends and families. They want to know that America is behind them, and letters and CARE packages from concerned citizens summon thoughts of a larger community to return to. Then, too, for emotional reasons, physical letters have a special importance for military personnel. Troops stationed abroad in locations far from major bases and cities don’t always have access to phone banks and computers and thus depend on paper mail. Moreover, for someone far from home and perhaps endangered, holding a letter that a loved one has written and touched is also a material comfort that’s available at any time.
One big change in military mail is that most of it is now packages. Historically, the constraints imposed by transportation by sea had limited the number of parcels sent abroad. Soldiers who fought in World War II had to specify to loved ones exactly what gifts they wanted for the holidays, and then get the letters signed by their officers; back in the States, donors had to bring these letters to the post office to prove that they were sending only the requested items. During the Vietnam War, however, huge, well-publicized backlogs in San Francisco during the holiday season of 1968 changed military policy, and fleets of 747s now fly packages to troops abroad.
The whole process of delivering the military mail was streamlined in 1980, when the Department of Defense created the Military Postal Service Agency, which relieved each branch of the service from coordinating separately with the USPS. That’s not to say that transporting mail to the troops is without its challenges. The military post has to negotiate with all the countries the mail will pass through, which means, for example, no alcohol or pork products in Muslim countries and no cigarettes in Italy.
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THE USPS HAD MADE considerable progress in resolving some of its long-term problems in handling traditional mail, but the focus on correcting problems of the past distracted it and its congressional overseers from its historic role in creating America and planning for the future. Such postmasters general as McLean, Blair, and Wanamaker would have anticipated the imminent digital revolution, just as Summerfield had more recently. They would have regarded email as the obvious evolutionary next step for paper mail and an online postal service as the logical extension of universal service. They would have insisted that the mandate to bind the nation was as readily adaptable to passwords and PINs as it had been to physical addresses, and that the post must take the lead in connecting Americans with electronic media, just as it had done with the delivery of newspapers, market data, affordable personal correspondence, and consumer goods. They would have marshaled the arguments once made for a postal telegraph on behalf of a postal Internet, maintaining that the obligation to unite the people with information and communications required making the new resource a public service rather than ceding it to private companies for their own profit.
The postal visionaries of the past would have tried to provide Americans with cheap, secure broadband access and email accounts that protect them from hackers and hucksters. They would have moved to capitalize on the post’s great brand for security and privacy by offering safe ways to transact business online, including a legally binding digital signature service, secure cards for paying bills and authenticating identity, and safe digital storage. They would have insisted that every post office in America become a neighborhood media hub equipped with a bank of computers that enabled citizens to go online for little or no expense—a service now provided by more than sixty nations around the world, to say nothing of America’s own public libraries, where people queue up or take a number for online access.
That the USPS and a Congress beset with lobbyists from special interest groups either didn’t foresee or didn’t respond to the digital revolution’s impact on the post’s traditional operations and seize upon its positive potential was a monumental failure. After all, the Internet itself was created by the federal government’s own Advanced Research Projects Agency (later, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and nurtured by its National Science Foundation, which funded the Computer Science Network. This convergence of federal institutions should have put the federal government’s official communications-and-information system on the inside track in the race to exploit the new technology for the public good.
That certain people involved in postal affairs did grasp the digital revolution’s implications only highlights the missed opportunity. Back in 1965, Summerfield had written, “How can we break the economic and time barriers of a system requiring that privately recorded messages—small pieces of paper in essence containing writing and pictures—must be passed from hand to hand in every phase of delivery from the sender to the receiver?” His visionary experiment with Speed Mail leapfrogged over traditional mail processing to the high-speed transmission of information that would climax in email. In 1977, Gaylord Freeman, the chairman of the Commission on Postal Service, had said, “Unless the Postal Service really makes a commitment, which it has not made, to electronic message transfer, they face a really bleak future.” Underscoring the point with the example of the post’s failure to act on a proposal from Xerox to co-launch a “daygram” service that would send faxes from one post office to another for delivery within four hours, he emphasized the commission’s conclusion: “We feel quite strongly that the Postal Service doesn’t recognize the seriousness of the loss of the first class mail.” House Post Office and Civil Service Committee chairman James M. Hanley, a New York Democrat, agreed, observing that congressional efforts to nudge the USPS toward electronic communications had been unsuccessful: “All three Postmasters General (since the 1971 reorganization) have been reluctant to do that.”
In 1982, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), which between 1972 and 1995 advised Congress on scientific and technological matters, published “Implications of Electronic Mail and Message Systems for the U.S. Postal Service.” The report underscored that such commercial services “will increasingly compete with portions of the traditional market of the U.S. Postal Service. . . . It seems clear that two-thirds or more of the current mainstream could be handled electronically, and that the volume of USPS-delivered mail is likely to peak in the next 10 years.” (First-class mail volume actually peaked in 2001, total mail volume in 2006.) Like the earlier Commission on Postal Service, the OTA urged Congress and the USPS to join the digital age before it was too late.
These warnings thrust postal management into what psychologists call an approach-avoidance conflict: a push-pull reaction to something that poses both risks and rewards. Like individuals, businesses struggle with how to balance the need to keep doing the things that produce revenue with the desire to try something new that could be either a lucrative success or a costly failure. The Postal Reorganization Act’s demand that the post become a self-supporting, businesslike organization understandably weighed heavily on managers, most of whom rose through the ranks thinking more about how to move the mail and balance the books than about innovation and political maneuvering. Moreover, as an organization of insiders, the USPS had little expertise in the new world of electronic communications.
Despite the obstacles, a few top postal executives did manage to experiment with digital pilot programs. In 1982, well before the general use of email, Postmaster General Bolger launched E-COM (electronic computer-originated mail). This service enabled a computer in one post office to transmit a message to a computer in another, where it could be printed out and delivered to as many as two hundred recipients within two days—a plus in terms of both increasing speed and reducing mail handling and costs. The post struggled for several years to offer E-COM over the loud protests of such companies as International Telephone & Telegraph, Graphnet, and Telenet, which were all too aware of the logic and seeming near-inevitability of postal email. Their fears were realistic enough, considering that an enormous government enterprise like the post is better able than most businesses to lose money on launching new projects. Moreover, some eighty eclectic businesses and groups, including the Moral Majori
ty, Merrill Lynch, and Eastern Airlines, had already signed up for E-COM, in hopes of using it for everything from bills to timely notices for just twenty-six cents per two pages.
E-COM’s supporters faced the same kinds of opposition as the proponents of the postal telegraph, RFD, Parcel Post, and the Postal Savings System had experienced before them. Indeed, as recently as 1975, the USPS had bowed to pressure from Kinko’s and other photocopying businesses and ordered that photocopiers be removed from post office lobbies. Allowing such a simple amenity that complemented traditional mail services had been a great convenience, especially for suburban and rural Americans, and outraged postal customers bombarded the USPS and Congress with thousands of protest letters (an effort reinforced by Xerox’s media campaign to keep its own machines in place). Two years later, in a rare concession, the post reversed itself and declared that existing copiers would not be removed; however, before new ones could be installed, local postmasters had to ensure that there were no commercial alternatives nearby.