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  Chapter openers:

  National Postal Museum: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Wikimedia Commons: here; Rural Free Delivery © 1996. United States Postal Service. All rights reserved. Used with permission: here; Forever Stamp © 2007. United States Postal Service. All rights reserved. Used with permission: here.

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  Office of War Information, Wikimedia Commons: here; Wikimedia Commons: here, here; Library of Congress: here, here, here; The U.S. Democratic Review, 1838: here; Thomas Nast, Wikimedia Commons: here; Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library: here; National Postal Museum, Curatorial Photographic Collection: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; National Postal Museum: here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Harry T. Peters “America on Stone” Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution: here; National Archives: here; Minneapolis Newspaper Photograph Collection: here; African American Employees’ Photo © 1963. United States Postal Service. All rights reserved. Used with permission: here; CSBCS Machine © 1996. United States Postal Service. All rights reserved. Used with permission: here.

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  IN MEMORY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND BENJAMIN RUSH,

  MY FELLOW PHILADELPHIANS

  CONTENTS

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION: Why the Post Office Matters

  1 Inventing the Government: B. Free Franklin

  2 Building the Postal Commons

  3 Moving the Mail

  4 The Politicized Post

  5 Crisis and Opportunity

  6 The Personal Post

  7 Growing the Communications Culture

  8 Linking East and West

  9 The Mail Must Go Through

  10 War Clouds, Silver Linings

  11 Full Steam Ahead

  12 The Golden Age

  13 Redefining “Postal”

  14 Starving the Post

  15 Mid-Modern Meltdown

  16 The U.S. Postal Service

  AFTERWORD: Whither the Post?

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  SUGGESTED READINGS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  WHY THE POST OFFICE MATTERS

  THE HISTORY OF ITS POST OFFICE is nothing less than the story of America. Of the nation’s founding institutions, it is the least appreciated or studied, and yet for a very long time it was the U.S. government’s major endeavor. Indeed, it was that government in the experience of most citizens. As radical an experiment as America itself, the post was the incubator of our uniquely lively, disputatious culture of innovative ideas and uncensored opinions. With astonishing speed, it established the United States as the world’s information and communications superpower.

  After the Revolution, America needed a central nervous system to circulate news throughout the new body politic. Like mail service, knowledge of public affairs had always been limited to an elite, but George Washington, James Madison, and especially Dr. Benjamin Rush (a terrible physician but a wonderful political philosopher) were determined to provide the people of their democratic republic with both. Their novel, uniquely American post didn’t just carry letters for the few. It also subsidized the delivery of newspapers to the entire population, which created an informed electorate, spurred the fledgling market economy, and bound thirteen fractious erstwhile colonies into the United States. For more than two centuries, the founders’ grandly envisaged postal commons has endured as one of the few American institutions, public or private, in which we, the people, are treated as equals.

  The America of the Early Republic desperately needed physical as well as political and economic development. The government quickly mapped this terra incognita with post routes that connected towns centered on post offices; it also subsidized the nascent transportation industry, then dominated by the stagecoach, by paying its owners to carry the mail. By 1831, French political philosopher and mail coach passenger Alexis de Tocqueville wondered over America’s unparalleled communications system, which brought the latest national and foreign news even to the Michigan outback.

  By the time of Tocqueville’s visit, the founders’ ideal of nonpartisan politics had faded, and the post they created to unite opinionated Americans could divide them as well. President Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, fumed when abolitionists used the network to send their unsolicited publications to Charleston, South Carolina, where irate locals committed a federal crime by burning the mail—a conflagration that illuminated slavery as a national rather than merely regional issue. Yet Jackson himself scandalously politicized the post with his “spoils system,” which allowed the party that won the White House to hire its supporters for postal jobs wrested from the defeated rival’s ranks—a gold mine of patronage that cemented and sustained the country’s two-party system for the next 140 years.

  In the 1840s, the post faced the worst crisis in its history. Antebellum Americans, including the migrants moving from farms to cities, and increasingly to the western frontier, protested its high letter postage by turning to cheaper private competitors that contested its exclusive right to carry mail. The post responded by turning personal correspondence, historically a costly luxury, into a cheap daily staple, which both aided its recovery and transformed Americans’ personal lives. The combination of postage for pennies and the Railway Mail Service—a now forgotten wonder that efficiently processed mail aboard moving trains—later enabled many people to write to a friend in the morning and receive a reply that afternoon.

  The post played a crucial role in one of the nineteenth century’s crowning achievements: turning the Atlantic-oriented United States into a Pacific nation as well. The transcontinental telegraph and railroad of the 1860s usually get the credit, but they followed in the tracks of a post that was already responding to the needs of history’s greatest overland migration. (Most settlers got their mail at post offices in general stores, much like the one served by the young postmaster Abraham Lincoln on the Illinois frontier.) The post subsidized the Overland Mail Company’s western stagecoaches but only paid the Pony Express to carry mail at th
e end of its short life, when the private service helped to keep distant California slavery-free and connected to the rest of the Union.

  Like America itself, the post was transformed by the Civil War. When the Confederacy stole its entire southern network, Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s brilliant postmaster general, used the savings from the discontinued operations to pay for expensive new services, including Free City Delivery, which brought mail to urban doorsteps, and the postal money order system, which initially enabled Union soldiers to send their salaries back home safely. The post had been the first, and was for a very long time the only, institution to give jobs to disenfranchised women that offered them rare entrée into public life. Most had been small-town postmasters, but Blair went further, hiring women for prestigious positions as clerks even at the department’s august headquarters in Washington, D.C. The post had long been prohibited from using enslaved workers, lest they learn from publications circulated in the mail that all men were created equal. After the war, the victorious Republicans underscored their politics by employing significant numbers of African Americans. As a black woman, sharpshooting, cigar-smoking “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, a former slave who transported the mail by wagon in the wilds of Montana, broke both barriers.

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, the post became a progressive champion for Americans who looked to the government to protect them from the Industrial Revolution’s dark side, notably the powerful new monopolies that deprived them of affordable, competitively priced services. Their fearless if improbable spokesman was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, the Republican merchant prince. Critics accused him of running his department like his legendary namesake department store in Philadelphia, but he used his business genius on behalf of average Americans to fight for Rural Free Delivery and broaden the meaning of “postal” to include parcel delivery and even savings banking.

  Despite the austerity imposed by two global wars and the Great Depression, the undernourished post nevertheless supported, for many years single-handedly, the infant aviation industry required for its Air Mail Service (an unknown Charles Lindbergh was among its pilots). It also linked citizens at home with their loved ones fighting abroad—in World War II with microfilmed Victory Mail letters (no lipstick kisses allowed). Deprived of funds and stuck with long-obsolete equipment and facilities, the post even managed to cope with the booming middle class’s quadrupling mail volume until 1966, when, amid riots, protests, and burning cities, the institution faced its second crisis, famously illustrated by the weeks-long shutdown of Chicago’s post office.

  By 1970, America increasingly looked to business rather than government for problem-solving strategies, and Congress, now accustomed to focusing on the post’s bottom line, transformed the tax-subsidized Post Office Department into the self-supporting United States Postal Service. This odd government-business hybrid was finally allowed to modernize its facilities for handling traditional mail. Within a decade, however, the post—ruled by a fiscally conservative Congress and hampered by its own mismanagement—failed to join, much less lead, the revolution from paper mail to email that was its next logical development. In 2007, reeling from onerous new regulations as well, the USPS began to report huge deficits and entered its third and ongoing period of crisis.

  Since 1775 until recently, the post has responded to the nation’s changing needs—indeed, the institution’s advances had often helped precipitate them—but crises and budget-driven policy decisions have gradually, almost imperceptibly, erased America’s collective memory of what this dynamic institution has been and vision of what it could be. The people and their elected representatives, who must soon decide the post’s future, now know very little about the post, past or present. Indeed, the most widely read academic history was published in 1972, and the best popular one in 1893. Most of the scholarly literature focuses on the nineteenth century, and there has been very little study of the period after the 1930s. It is time for Americans to learn more, particularly about the post’s modern history, which this book bases on extensive primary research, including interviews with scholars and postal professionals as well as explorations of libraries, museums, and archives.

  Most histories of the United States focus on military, political, and socioeconomic matters, but How the Post Office Created America tells the nation’s story from the perspective of its communications network. Restoring the record of how the post made us the people we are is important, both for this misunderstood, underappreciated institution and for the insights into the country’s past and current affairs that it provides. After all, recurrent themes in the post’s story—including the respective merits of public service and private enterprise, the limits of federal power and states’ rights, the complex relationships between government and business, the fruits of bipartisanship, the value of national infrastructure, and the country’s regional and political polarization—echo through the history of the United States to this day. The post deserves the effort to remember, because just as the founders had envisioned, it created America.

  1

  INVENTING THE GOVERNMENT: B. FREE FRANKLIN

  THE POST BEGAN TO CREATE the United States long before the Declaration of Independence. In the summer of 1754, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Crown’s two postmasters general for North America, traveled to Albany, New York, to represent Pennsylvania at a highly unusual political assembly. Great Britain’s thirteen scattered colonies were not yet a unified bloc but instead quarrelsome competitors for their mother country’s favor. The prospect of the bloody Seven Years War—the first round in the struggle between England and France and their respective Native American allies over control of North America—had forced officials from the seven northernmost fiefdoms to gather for the first time in search of a common defensive strategy. Franklin took advantage of the rare opportunity posed by this “Albany Congress” to present a larger, bolder vision of familial unity, which reflected his nearly unique experience of running the rudimentary postal network that strung the otherwise fractious siblings together.

  Franklin could be sure of his fellow delegates’ close attention. At forty-eight, he was a bright star in the Crown’s colonial constellation and a celebrated personification of what would become the American up-by-the-bootstraps success story. The fifteenth child of a pious Puritan candlemaker had had barely two years of schooling, yet he had gone on to become a postmaster and the editor-publisher of the Pennsylvania Gazette, the colonies’ best newspaper, and the popular periodical Poor Richard’s Almanack. His fortune secured, he pursued his passions for science, technology, and music; mastered chess; read in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin; and became an influential political philosopher and government official.

  Franklin’s provocative essays on relations between the Crown and its colonies ranged from “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.,” which offered an American perspective on British trade policy, to the droll “Rattlesnakes for Felons,” which suggested exchanging reptiles for English convicts transported to the colonies. His ideas excited intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, including a young Harvard student named John Adams. Eminence notwithstanding, Franklin thoroughly identified with the eponymous Coopers, Chandlers, Smiths, Wrights, and other average countrymen and their down-to-earth view of the world and its ways. One of his saucy satires of official hypocrisy, published in 1747, was entitled “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker, before a Court of Judicature, at Connecticut near Boston in New-England; where she was prosecuted the Fifth Time, for having a Bastard Child: Which influenced the Court to dispense with her Punishment, and induced one of her Judges to marry her the next Day.”

  Franklin’s wide-ranging accomplishments bespeak a wonderful convergence of a dazzling intellect and the extroverted, pragmatic, industrious temperament later associated with America’s “national character.” A great believer in self-improvement and the active pursuit of personal virtue, he cultivated
thirteen qualities meant to counter his own peccant inclinations, including overeating and unseemly jesting. Despite his lapses, he observed that he “was by the Endeavour made a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been.” Moreover, he was equally devoted to the development of civic virtue, upholding Aristotle’s view that “though it is worth while to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike to attain it for a nation.” His tireless efforts to promote the commonweal in his adopted Philadelphia included helping to found lofty institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society, but also practical ones, such as the city’s fire department, public library, and premier hospital. Indeed, one of his first public services, in 1727, had been organizing the Junto, a club devoted to the uplift of men from all social classes. Franklin is best remembered for the clever aphorisms that made him a household name: “If man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles,” and “To-morrow, every fault is to be amended; but that to-morrow never comes.” Many others, however, are earnestly altruistic: “The noblest question in the world is, what good may I do in it?” and “Well done is better than well said.”

  Much has been made of Franklin as the quintessential postmaster general, and he was certainly a very good one. At a time when overland travel was a grueling ordeal, he personally surveyed and strengthened the sketchy system that connected, albeit erratically, the widely scattered, culturally diverse provinces from Falmouth, Maine, to Charleston, South Carolina. He made many improvements, from plotting more efficient routes marked with milestones to speeding up delivery; round-trip service between Boston and Philadelphia was cut from six weeks to three, and one-way service between Philadelphia and New York City to a mere thirty-three hours. His colonial post was more efficient—and, for the first time, profitable—but it remained a conventional mail service, based on Britain’s, that was primarily designed to advance an imperialistic power’s interests, serve a narrow elite, and produce some revenue for the Crown.