Oak Hall didn’t attract many customers early on, at least not the purchasing kind. Wanamaker needed to lure more people into his store and get them to spend money, so he abandoned the sales methods he had learned at his previous jobs. He offered clothing at a fixed price. This wasn’t entirely new. A. T. Stewart, a shrewd Irish immigrant, was already doing it at his New York department store. But Wanamaker added his own twist: a money-back guarantee. “Any article that does not fit well, is not the proper color or quality, does not please the folks at home, or for any reason is not perfectly satisfactory, should be brought back at once, and if it is returned as purchased within ten days, we will refund the money,” Wanamaker promised. His competitors thought he had lost his mind.
Wanamaker also spent heavily on advertising at a time when other merchants felt it was a tawdry practice. He hired men to walk around with sandwich boards and ride around in coaches with bugle blowers promoting Oak Hall. One day, a representative of the Philadelphia City Directory visited Wanamaker and asked if he would buy an advertisement at the bottom of the page with the listing for Oak Hall.
“How about the top of the page?” Wanamaker responded.
The sales representative was taken aback. “We have never done that, sir,” he said.
“Well, what if I took the top of every page in the book?” Wanamaker continued.
Wanamaker brusquely commanded the speechless salesman to get him a price. “If I put in an order like this,” he added, “I shall expect also to have the cover page of the directory for a picture of our building.”
In 1868, Nathan Brown died, and Wanamaker bought his share of the business. The following year he opened a fancier store called John Wanamaker & Company on Chestnut Street. The Civil War was over, the economy was booming, and once again people were spending freely. Wanamaker installed a skylight, laid plush carpets on the floors, and decorated the walls of the new store with paintings and mirrors, attracting fashionable Philadelphians who would have otherwise shopped in New York. Three years later, Wanamaker did $2 million worth of annual business at his two establishments.
Naturally, Wanamaker dreamed of doing something bigger. He visited Paris and toured its sprawling department stores like Le Bon Marché. He thought he could construct something commensurately grand in Philadelphia. In 1875, he purchased an entire city block from the Pennsylvania Railroad at Thirteenth and Market streets. Wanamaker tore down the old train shed on the site and built an enormous hall that had pagoda-like towers. He named it the Grand Depot and opened the doors in the summer of 1876 when visitors surged into Philadelphia for the country’s centennial celebration.
In the beginning, the Grand Depot was a cavernous men’s store. Wanamaker added women’s clothing, linens, furniture, books, refrigerators, and washing machines. He promoted his money-back guarantee in full-page newspaper advertisements, but he understood that shoppers hungered for something more. They wanted an experience when they entered his door. So he gave them one after another. With the help of Thomas Edison, he illuminated the Grand Depot with electric lights, another Wanamaker first that dazzled customers. He installed the first in-store air-conditioning system, pumping a million cubic feet of cool air into his store during Philadelphia’s humid summers.
The Sunday-school-teaching retailer wanted to enlighten his customers too. So he opened an in-store art galley with paintings from his personal collection and treated shoppers to free orchestral concerts. These innovations become part of his establishment’s allure. Along with Chicago’s Marshall Field, Wanamaker was part of a vanguard of retailers who ushered in a new era of American consumer culture that melded shopping with show business.
It was inevitable that Wanamaker, a loyal Republican and an admirer of Lincoln, would be drawn into politics. In 1884, Grover Cleveland was the first Democratic president to be elected in 24 years. Republican Party leaders wanted the White House back. Four years later, Matthew Quay, the powerful U.S. senator and Republican Party chairman, telephoned Wanamaker and asked him to help raise money for the Harrison campaign. Wanamaker threw himself into fund-raising with the same competitiveness that he showed in business. “We raised so much money the Democrats never knew anything about it,” he boasted. “They had their spies out, supposing that they were going to do something. But before they knew what was what, they were beaten, not in November, not in October, but long before.” The voters favored Cleveland by a slim margin, but Harrison trounced him in the electoral college with 233 votes to Cleveland’s 168.
After the election, Quay let it be known that Wanamaker deserved to be rewarded for his hard work. In January 1889, the department store owner received a letter from Harrison. “My Dear Sir, we did not have the pleasure of meeting during the campaign, and I have had it in contemplation for some time to ask you to visit me,” Harrison wrote. “Will it not be convenient for you to come at some early day? You are at liberty to name any time that is most convenient to you, as I shall always be at home. Very sincerely, Benj. Harrison.” The president-elect misspelled his financial benefactor’s name, which might otherwise have offended the detail-obsessed storeowner. Even so, Wanamaker made the journey to Harrison’s home in Indianapolis, Indiana. “General Harrison sent for me . . . and offered me a position in his cabinet—one of the ‘easiest’ secretaryships,” Wanamaker remembered. “But I said, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t want a lazy place; if I take anything I will take the hardest place you have got,’ and he put me in the Post Office Department.”
Wanamaker took over at a time when the public’s fascination with the Post Office had never been higher. In cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, letter carriers made as many as seven deliveries a day, which meant they were a constant presence in the lives of urban Americans. Along with books, letters, and newspapers, carriers brought millions of greeting cards to their doors each year. Louis Prang, the lithographer credited with making the first commercially produced American Christmas cards in 1874, was printing five million a year by the 1880s. The Post Office made $1 million a year selling prestamped penny postcards, which had been introduced around the same time. These cards didn’t have pictures on them—the department wouldn’t formally admit that kind for another two decades. But the public embraced the penny postcards because they were a cheap and easy way to send a quick message.
More than 4,000 railway mail clerks sorted mail on trains, and they had a mascot now, a shaggy dog named Owney who had wandered into the post office in Albany, New York. Owney started riding on rails with the clerks and ended up traveling around the entire country with tags on his collar showing the many mail routes he had taken. The public became so enamored with Owney that Wanamaker arranged for him to get a small jacket on which his badges could be displayed more stylishly. When Owney died—he was either put to sleep after biting a clerk or mistakenly shot by a Toledo postmaster—the railway mail clerks had him stuffed and sent him to the department’s headquarters, where he was proudly displayed; he can now be seen at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
Tourists flocked to the department’s Dead Letter Office Museum in Washington, D.C., where the Post Office displayed the strangest of the seven million undeliverable items it received every year. Marshall Cushing, Wanamaker’s secretary, described some of the things that the dead-letter clerks found: “The whole range of domestic life finds a full expression here: tiny little socks, delicately colored and ornamented; the juvenile necktie and the message-bearing valentine; the jewel box with its engagement ring; wedding cake in fancy boxes; infant’s apparel again; soothing syrup; cholera mixture; little shrouds; coffin plates inscribed ‘at rest’; flowers from a grave, —all come here when misdirected, unclaimed, with postage unpaid, without address, or not prepared for mailing in accordance with the regulations.” Cushing also mentioned live toads, snakes, beetles, and tarantulas.
People who couldn’t visit the museum could read magazine articles about Patti Lyle Collins, a widow from Missis
sippi who worked in the Dead Letter Office and became famous for being able to decode unreadable addresses. “One of the most valuable of the acquirements which are Mrs. Collins’ possession is the knowledge of the city locality of almost every street in this and most other countries,” the Ladies’ Home Journal wrote. “One has but to mention a street to her, with the exception, of course, of those named Broad, High and Market, to have her, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, tell at once the city in which it is.”
An address had to be almost impossibly difficult to read for the department to send it to Collins. Around this time, Mark Twain needed to send an early version of one of his stories, “Diaries of Adam and Eve,” to a friend, but couldn’t recall his address. So Twain wrote on the envelope, “For Mr. C. M. Underhill, who is in the coal business in one of those streets there, and is very respectably connected, both by marriage & general descent, and is a tall man & old but without any gray hair & used to be handsome. Buffalo N.Y. From Mark Twain. P.S. A little bald on the top of his head.” That was more than enough for the post office to locate Underhill and give him Twain’s manuscript.
Wanamaker still thought there was much that could be improved at the department. He embarked on a European tour to study the postal services of countries like England, France, and Germany. He was thrilled by what he discovered. The European posts carried mail to everybody in their nations, whether they lived in cities or in rural areas. They brought them packages along with letters and newspapers, unlike the U.S. Post Office Department, which wouldn’t carry anything that weighed more than four pounds. England, France, Belgium, Russia, the Netherlands, and Sweden had savings banks in the post offices in which customers could deposit their money, knowing it would be safeguarded by the government. The foreign posts had also moved beyond paper-based communications, operating their nations’ telegraph and telephone systems.
In his first annual report to Congress in 1889, Wanamaker argued that the Post Office Department should do all of these things. He asked Congress for funding to test rural free delivery, or RFD, as he called it. He wanted to put savings banks in 10,000 post offices in small communities where people typically hid their money under their mattresses because there were no financial institutions nearby. He wanted the Post Office Department to begin carrying parcels.
Wanamaker stopped short of proposing a government takeover of his country’s telegraph and telephone systems, but he wanted to put telephones in post offices so people could make cheap calls. He also wanted the Post Office Department to speed delivery of mail by telegraphing letters between post offices. He hoped this would break the virtual monopoly of Western Union, which, he argued, overcharged for its services, denying ordinary people the opportunity to send fast messages. “We feel rather proud if we quicken a mail between New York and Chicago by three hours,” Wanamaker wrote. “We smile with satisfaction if we induce a railroad company to put on a new mail train, which puts the businessmen of New Orleans, say, four hours nearer to the businessmen of Chicago. Here in the postal telegraph plan is a proposition that saves days and nights.”
Before he took over the Post Office Department, Wanamaker could do whatever he pleased as long as he didn’t bankrupt himself. If he wanted to make the Grand Depot sparkle with electric lights, he did so. If he wanted to station buyers in Paris, Berlin, and later Tokyo to keep track of the newest fashion trends, he did that too. But as postmaster general, Wanamaker didn’t have the same unbridled freedom. Private bankers mobilized against his postal savings bank plan, saying it would undermine their industry. That was enough to kill the proposal.
Private express companies like Wells Fargo, American Express, Adams Express, and the United States Express Company mounted a similar campaign against Wanamaker’s parcel post proposal, arguing that he was promoting it because it would help his department store’s mail-order business. They had powerful congressional allies. In the U.S. Senate, Thomas Platt of New York looked out for the interests of these companies. His motives were hardly charitable. He was also president of the United States Express Company and didn’t want the postal service encroaching on its business. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker Joseph Cannon, an assiduous guardian of special interests, made sure that Wanamaker’s parcel post plan quietly died in committee.
Wanamaker also incurred the wrath of Jay Gould, the Gilded Age financier who controlled Western Union. Gould went directly to President Harrison and told him to reign in his brash postmaster general. Gould had contributed as much as $100,000 to the Harrison campaign and warned in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t get his way, he would not be so generous when the president ran for reelection. The New York Times reported that Harrison scolded Wanamaker for upsetting such a powerful ally. “I made no recommendation in my message warranting you to proceed as you have,” Harrison reportedly said. “The effect of your work is to deprive my administration of valuable friends—friends who deserve better treatment and are not to be slighted. The friends you have slapped in the face were most valuable to us in 1888. And we need them in 1892. To attack them is political insanity. There is no need for it. This postal telegraph scheme might just as well be dropped; it never should have been begun.” The Times attributed this information to unnamed Wall Street sources, which suggests that Gould and his allies wanted to publicly humiliate Wanamaker.
Wanamaker was known for his vigor and his optimism, but now he was becoming angry and frustrated. The Democratic press depicted him as a sleazy spoilsman. Wanamaker didn’t help himself by firing 30,000 Democratic postmasters and replacing them with members of his own party, angering a rising Republican Party star named Theodore Roosevelt, who was Harrison’s civil service commissioner and an opponent of the patronage system. Wanamaker subjected himself to further ridicule by declaring Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, a novella about adultery, too obscene to be mailed. He realized his error and reversed himself, but the damage was done.
Like many postmaster generals before him, Wanamaker did nothing to stop Anthony Comstock from harassing freethinking Americans like Ezra Heywood. In 1890, the Boston Daily Globe wrote approvingly that “Anthony Comstock has renewed his fight against Cupid’s Yoke and other radical social literature published by Ezra H. Heywood. He failed in the courts but now though Brother John Wanamaker, he is wielding the post office department against the wicked Mr. Heywood.” Ten days later, Heywood was arrested by a Boston postal inspector for mailing him an issue of The Word with a mother’s account of how she had explained sex to her daughter. Even Heywood’s lawyer had warned him not to print this one.
In the ensuing trial, U.S. District Court Judge George Carpenter all but declared Heywood to be guilty. “It is right for us to hold that no person should think that purity, manliness and virtue could be promoted by sending through the mail a lewd, lascivious and obscene paper,” Carpenter said in his instructions to the jury. “We have before us an example of a person who apparently, with the education of a respectable man, yet believes it.” Heywood was found guilty of violating the Comstock law and was sentenced to two years of hard labor at Charleston State Prison on July 24, 1890. The verdict gave Wanamaker’s critics more evidence that he was a hypocritical moralizer like Comstock himself.
Perhaps Wanamaker was on Comstock’s side when it came to sexual matters, but he had a larger plan for the postal service that he wanted pursue if only Congress would let him. Three months later, Wanamaker won a victory, albeit a small one, when Congress gave him permission to conduct a one-year test of the “practicability” of home delivery in rural areas. He was authorized to spend only $10,000, but at least it was something.
City dwellers enjoyed all the benefits of modern life, such as paved streets, electricity, and frequent home visits by their letter carrier. Congress had lowered the price of sending a half-ounce letter to two cents in 1881. For 10 cents more, the sender could have the letter rushed to its destination by special delivery messengers. Yet for most Americans, this
level of service was only a dream. Nearly two-thirds of the country’s citizens lived in rural areas. These people still had to go to the post office to get their mail, and that often meant a long, bumpy trip over dirt roads, which they could make once a week at most. Most of them were farmers struggling to make a living. Without the regular delivery of a newspaper, they had no idea if it would rain the next day, so they didn’t know when to plant their crops in the spring or harvest them in the fall. Without the newspaper, they didn’t know what the market was paying for livestock or crops, meaning that buyers could easily get the better of them when they loaded their wagons and journeyed into town to sell to them.
This discrepancy in mail delivery contributed to the feeling among farmers that they were second-class citizens in the United States. Radical orators like Mary Elizabeth Lease stoked their resentment by telling them to “raise less corn and more hell.” They threw their support behind the Populist Party, which championed postal reforms strikingly similar to Wanamaker’s. The party’s platform called for postal banks to protect the savings of small-town residents, a parcel post service to bring them goods at a reasonable price from the stores where city folk shopped, and government ownership of the telegraph and telephone systems. Wanamaker’s opponents and even some of his friends in Washington may have called him a socialist for pushing such ideas, but the wealthy department-store owner found common cause with the people who tilled the American soil. They fondly referred to him as “Brother Wanamaker.”
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