How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  “most majestic system of public education”: Edward Everett Hale, “A Public Telegraph,” Cosmopolitan, December 1891, pp. 249, 251.

  postal service had become “a great university”: Congressional Record, 59th Congress, 1st sess., 5081, April 11, 1906. Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly,” October 2008, https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/universal-service-and-postal-monopoly-history.text.

  Theft continued to be the most common crime: In one notorious case of postal fraud, Roy DeWelles was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1965 after using mail solicitations to make more than $500,000 from bogus health services and his $2,500 Detoxacolon machine, which he sold to chiropractors and alternative healers. he was finally apprehended for mailing false advertising to ten thousand people. In 1988, postal inspectors arrested televangelist Jim Bakker for mail fraud amounting to $158 million in charitable donations used for personal gain, for which he was sentenced to forty-five years in prison.

  “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke”: George Bernard Shaw, Letter to the Editor, New York Times, September 26, 1905, p. 1.

  an “Irish smut dealer”: “Who’s Bernard Shaw? Asks Mr. Comstock,” New York Times, September 28, 1905, p. 9.

  “Shall the right to mail service”: Louis Post, “Our Despotic Postal Censorship,” in John, American Postal Network, vol. 1, p. 407.

  “Good men must not obey the laws”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Politics,” Essays: Second Series (Boston: James Munroe, 1844). Quoted in https://emersoncentral.com/politics.htm.

  If there’s a physical symbol of what the combination of the post at its peak: The Farley Post Office continues to play an important role in the preservation of New York City’s historic buildings. The demolition of Pennsylvania Station, its glorious companion building across the street, in 1963 was the impetus for the establishment of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965. In 2007, New York State bought the Farley building from the post and plans a massive renovation that will create a multi-use, public-private facility meant to rejuvenate Midtown West. The Farley post office’s lobby and public service area will be meticulously restored to its original grandeur circa 1912.

  Mail formerly processed at the Farley is now handled by the Morgan Annex between 28th and 30th Streets on 9th Avenue. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, the Farley took over some operations from the damaged Church Street post office located across the street from the World Trade Center.

  The quotation, paraphrased from Herodotus: Herodotus, The Histories, ed. and trans. A. D. Godley, pp. 96–97.

  “Congress was building on the policy”: Kelly, United States Postal Policy, p. 88.

  14: STARVING THE POST

  make the world “safe for democracy”: Woodrow Wilson, speech to the 65th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate Document No. 5. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=61.

  “You are not here to make a living”: Woodrow Wilson, speech at Swarthmore College on October 25, 1913, in Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Albert Bushnell Hart (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), p. 15.

  “willfully utter, print, write”: “The Espionage Act of 1917,” University of Houston Digital History. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=3904.

  a return to “normalcy”: Warren G. Harding, “Back to Normal: Address Before Home Market Club,” Boston, Massachusetts, May 14, 1920, in Warren Harding and Frederick Schortemeier, Rededicating America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920).

  “The great postal highway”: Kelly, United States Postal Policy, p. 255.

  “the Post Office has been used”: Ibid., pp. 168−69.

  “The greatest single difference”: Ibid., p. 120.

  “a very safe airplane”: Quoted in “The Early Years of Air Transportation,” https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/amercia-by-air/online/early_years03.cfm.

  “just something to clutter up the cockpit”: Quoted in Donald Dale Jackson, Flying the Mail (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1982), p. 92.

  “Only place to land on cow”: Quoted in ibid., p. 6.

  “Alone in an empty cockpit”: Quoted in ibid.

  “The Pilot was only slightly injured”: D. B. Colyer, News Letter. Week Ending September 26, 1925, Air Mail Service, Omaha, Nebraska, Record Group 28, National Archives and Records Administration.

  “I am an airmail pilot”: Quoted in Jackson, Flying the Mail, p. 148.

  “to be a pilot of the night mail”: Ibid.

  citing the “four seeds”: Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Airmail,” https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100/pub100_026.htm.

  “native, human, eager and alive”: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The Freedom of the Human Spirit Shall Go On,” Address at the Dedication of National Gallery of Art, Section of Fine Arts, March 17, 1941, Special Bulletin, National Archives, Record Group 121, Entry 122.

  Rickenbacker called “legalized murder”: Edward Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker: An Autobiography (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 186.

  “a grave doubt in the minds”: “Capital City Tries Women as Letter Carriers,” The Postal Record: A Monthly Journal of the National Association of Letter Carriers 30, no. 12 (December 1917), p. 399. Cited in Teller and Park, “Women in the U.S. Postal System,” http://postalmuseum.si.edu/womenhistory/women_history/history_streets.html.

  “were segregated two ways”: Quoted in Jennifer Lenhart, “Six Military Women and Six U.S. Wars; Charity Adams Earley; World War II,” Washington Post, October 18, 1997.

  15: MID-MODERN MELTDOWN

  “In the councils of government”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, January 17, 1961, Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, 1953−61, Eisenhower Library; National Archives and Records Administration.

  “monuments in stone to political patronage”: Arthur E. Summerfield, U.S. Mail: The Story of the United States Postal Service (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), p. 205.

  “Who was the other?”: Ibid., p. 230.

  “We stand on the threshold”: Quoted in United States Postal Service, “Missile Mails,” July 2008. http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/missile-mail.pdf.

  “clearly is not a business enterprise”: Postal Policy Act of 1958, U.S. Statutes at Large, 72, pp. 134, 135.

  O’Brien had not been a wily political operator: Not a flower born to blush unseen, Larry O’Brien later became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the burglary of his office by political opponents in 1972 set off the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. He went on to serve as the commissioner of the National Basketball Association.

  The group took its responsibility: Towards Postal Excellence: The Report of the President’s Commission on Postal Reorganization (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).

  “elevating our people in the scale of civilization”: Quoted in Melville Clyde Kelly, The Community Capitol: A Program for American Unity (Pittsburgh: Mayflower Press, 1921), p. 207.

  16: THE U.S. POSTAL SERVICE

  In August 1970, an enthusiastic President Richard Nixon: Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, U.S. Statutes at Large, 84 (1970).

  “independent establishment”: http://www.21cpw.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Postal-Reorganization-Act-1970.pdf.

  “No longer was the Post Office”: Fuller, American Mail, p. 331.

  However, Nixon and his Postmaster General: Winton Blount’s admirable efforts included the policy of recruiting able African Americans executives, such as John Strachan, who managed the huge New York Metropolitan Postal Center that ran operations in both Manhattan and the Bronx.

  The dynamic Blount was followed by Postmaster General Elmer Klassen, a former president of the American Can Company, who was initially
touted as a labor relations expert. Before long, however, he was criticized by influential political columnist Jack Anderson and others for giving away enormous benefits to the postal unions during a period of high inflation.

  Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, who served between 1992 and 1998, had a unique view of postal employment issues. The no-nonsense Texan had been a Ford assembly-line worker before becoming an auto executive and head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. “Carvin’” Marvin got his nickname after downsizing the post’s workforce by firing 23,000 bureaucrats in order to hire more mail handlers.

  “must be regarded as the devourer”: Kelly, United States Postal Policies, p. 190.

  The very notion of letting the hitherto sacrosanct: For more information, see Coleman Hoyt and Robert Cohen, Postal Worksharing: An Irreverent History (Woodstock, VT: private publisher, 2011).

  substituting a “money corporation”: Quoted in Fuller, American Mail, p. 338.

  The number of African Americans in its ranks: The ranks of the post’s most interesting African American employees must include Kermit Oliver, who began working nights as a clerk in the Waco, Texas, post office in 1978. The reclusive artist, who is the son of a black cowboy, is renowned for paintings that depict Native Americans and regional flora and fauna, such as prickly pear cacti, wild turkeys, and mustangs, surrounded by elaborate decorative borders. His pictures sell in the five figures, and he also designs highly sought-after $400 scarves for Hermès, the French luxury goods firm. However, Oliver kept his nocturnal version of the artist’s day job. (See Jason Sheeler, “Portrait of the Artist as a Postman: The Strange and Secret World of Kermit Oliver,” Texas Monthly, October 2012.)

  “With our near 16,000 women Postmasters”: Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, Post Office Department press release, February 3, 1958, quoted in United States Postal Service, “Women Postmasters,” July 2008.https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/women-postmasters.pdf.

  “How can we break”: Summerfield, U.S. Mail, p. 205.

  “Unless the postal service really makes”: “Postal Study Proposes Five-Day Mail Delivery Increased Federal Subsidies to Mail Service,” CQ Quarterly Almanac 1977, pp. 547–50.

  “All three Postmasters General”: Ibid.

  “compete with portions of the traditional market”: Office of Technology Assessment Reports Collection. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ota/Ota_4/DATA/1982/8214.PDF.

  had been “largely disappointing”: President’s Commission on the United States Postal Service, Embracing the Future: Making the Tough Choices to Preserve Universal Mail Service, August 2003. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/usps/offices/domestic-finance/usps/pdf/freport.pdf.

  was soon reified: Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, U.S. Statutes at Large, 120 (2006). https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/STATUTE=120/STATUTE=120=Pg3198/content-detail.html.

  “the delivery of letters”: Title 39 U.S. Code §102. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/102.

  “If the nation’s best executives”: Murray Comarow, “The Future of the Postal Service,” in Thomas H. Stanton and Benjamin Ginsberg, Making Government Manageable: Executive Organization and Management in the Twenty-First Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 95.

  “Throughout all past history”: Kelly, United States Postal Policy, pp.168–69.

  AFTERWORD: WHITHER THE POST?

  “We live by communications”: Summerfield, U.S. Mail, p. 165.

  It delivers mail in the canyons of Wall Street: In 1999, Michael Schragg, the founder and director of the U.S. Postal Museum, in Marshall, Michigan, fulfilled a lifelong dream: delivering mail by boat to the great freighters traveling along the Detroit River to the Great Lakes. The post’s transportation contractor for the nation’s only floating zip code—48222—is the Westcott Company, which also delivers supplies such as light bulbs and toilet paper to the big ships. The freighters don’t stop to get their mail, which would be a costly delay. Instead, the small mail boat pushes itself into the ship’s side, which rises eight to ten stories above, then the freighter’s crew lowers down a bucket for the mail.

  it has not won over the great majority: Office of Inspector General, USPS, “What Postal Services Do People Value the Most? A Quantitative Survey of the Postal Universal Service Obligation,” Report No. RARC-WP-15-007, February 23, 2015. https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2015/rarc-wp-15-007_0.pdf.

  This large survey published in collaboration with Gallup, shows that most respondents—both households and businesses—still strongly value traditional mail, particularly door and curb delivery, access to post offices, and universal service at a uniform first-class rate.

  state-of-the-art technology: The process for a single first-class letter works something like this: When the letter arrives at a local post office, it’s sent to a large regional processing plant, where it’s placed with others on a conveyor belt. Mechanical wands smooth out and level the mail stream, so that each piece is unobstructed. Conventional letters are separated from thick or odd-sized ones, then are screened for biohazards. Next, an advanced face-canceler system zeroes in on the letter’s front side, so that a digital camera can snap its address. An optical character reader then scans that bit of information so that a computer can compare it to the post’s database of 154 million addresses.

  The letter gets sprayed with a bar code that gives a city, state, street, house number, and the now-expanded ZIP code plus 6, which sequences the carrier’s route properly. Then the bar-coded envelope is fed into a “delivery input/output subsystem” machine, which directs it toward a processing center near its final destination within or outside the state. The letter is dispatched via the most efficient, cost-effective route, whether on a plane leaving Miami for Atlanta or a truck going from New York City to Newark, New Jersey. When it reaches a sorting facility near its destination, another machine reads its bar code and directs the envelope to the proper receptacle for its trip to the recipient’s local post office, properly sequenced for delivery. (For more information, http://postalmuseum.si.edu/research/pdfs/ZIP_Code_rarc-wp-13-006.pdf.)

  As in many nations, they could become community information hubs: In 2012, during the chaos following Superstorm Sandy in New York City, some technologists demonstrated the advantages of an intranet by setting up a web of aerials in Brooklyn’s hard-hit waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook. Residents deprived of electricity and cell service were thus able to keep informed about flooding, transportation, and other vital issues.

  called “first-rate intelligence”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Pasting It Together,” Esquire, March 1936.

  SUGGESTED READINGS

  BOWYER, MATHEW J. They Carried the Mail: A Survey of Postal History and Hobbies. New York: Robert B. Luce, 1972.

  BRUNS, JAMES H. Great American Post Offices. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.

  CHAPMAN, ARTHUR. The Pony Express. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932.

  CULLINAN, GERALD. The United States Postal Service. New York: Praeger, 1973.

  CUSHING, MARSHALL. The Story of Our Post Office: The Greatest Government Department in All Its Phases. Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co., 1893.

  DAY, J. EDWARD. My Appointed Round: 929 Days as Postmaster General. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965.

  FINLAY, HUGH. Journal Kept by Hugh Finlay, Surveyor of the Post Roads on the Continent of North America, during His Survey of the Post Offices between Falmouth and Casco Bay in the Province of Massachusetts, and Savannah, in Georgia: Begun the 13th Septr. 1773 & Ended 26th June 1774, ed. Frank H. Norton. Brooklyn, NY: Norton, 1867.

  FOWLER, DOROTHY GANFIELD. The Cabinet Politician: The Postmasters General, 1829−1909. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.

  ———. Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977.

  FULLER, WAYNE E. The American Mail: Enlarge
r of the Common Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

  ———. RFD: The Changing Face of Rural America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.

  ———. Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

  GANZ, CHERYL R. Every Stamp Tells a Story: The National Philatelic Collection. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2014.

  HENKIN, DAVID. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

  HOLMES, DONALD B. Air Mail: An Illustrated History, 1793−1981. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981.

  HOLMES, OLIVER W., AND PETER T. ROHRBACH. Stagecoach East: Stagecoach Days in the East from the Colonial Period to the Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.

  HOWE, DANIEL WALKER. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  JACKSON, DONALD DALE. Flying the Mail. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1982.

  JOHN, RICHARD R. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

  ———. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

  ———, ed. The American Postal Network, 1792−1914. 4 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012.

  KELLY, CLYDE. United States Postal Policy. New York: D. Appleton, 1931.

  KIELBOWICZ, RICHARD B. News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700−1860s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989.

  KNIGHT, SARAH KEMBLE. The Journal of Madam Knight. Boston: David R. Godine, 1972.

  LONG, BRYANT ALDEN, AND WILLIAM JEFFERSON DENNIS. Mail by Rail: The Story of the Postal Transportation Service. New York: Simmons-Boardman, 1951.

  MIKUSKO, M. BRADY, AND F. JOHN MILLER. Carriers in a Common Cause: A History of Letter Carriers and the NALC. Washington, D.C.: National Association of Letter Carriers, 1989.