Rural Free Delivery

RURAL FREE DELIVERY

RURAL FREE DELIVERY (RFD), a service designed to bring mail directly to people living in rural areas, was initiated on an experimental basis in 1896. Cities had enjoyed mail service for decades, but the cost of building a delivery network in remote areas, along with opposition from local merchants and postmasters, had delayed service to rural towns. Subscription magazines and mail-order stores had become staples for a growing middle class, and their emergence put new pressures on the federal government to expand its mail services. In addition, farmers' advocacy groups, well organized in the 1890s, amplified the call for reform.

Rep. Thomas E. Watson of Georgia, a friend of the Farmers' Alliance and vice presidential candidate for the Populists in 1896, was the author of the first free rural delivery legislation, enacted in 1893 and providing $10,000 for an experiment. (An earlier bill, based on the proposal of Postmaster Gen. John Wanamaker, would have provided $6 million, but the House Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads deemed it too expensive and killed it.) Opposition to RFD remained fierce. Service was delayed three years because of the intransigence of the new postmaster general, Wilson S. Bissell.

Congress had added $20,000 in 1894 and directed the postmaster general to make a report. The search for a postmaster general willing to start the experiment caused further delays. In the meantime, petitions poured in to Congress from local and state organizations of the National Grange and from other organizations of farmers. In 1896, Congress added another $10,000 appropriation, and Postmaster Gen. William L. Wilson, Bissell's successor, decided to test five rural routes in his home state of West Virginia. Between the autumn of 1896 and the spring of 1897, mail flowed along eighty-two pioneer routes, scattered through twenty-eight states and the territory of Arizona. Wilson laid the first routes in both sparse and populous areas, to better gauge the cost of the project. He estimated that extending the service nationally would cost between $40 million and $50 million.

After Wilson left office, Perry S. Heath, the first assistant postmaster general, and August W. Machen, superintendent of free delivery, adroit politicians who favored extension of the system, began active promotion of RFD. Securing an appropriation of $150,000 in 1898, they announced that any group of farmers wanting a mail route need only petition their congressman for it, sending a description of their communities and their roads. Congressmen were overwhelmed with petitions. In 1902, there were not more than eight thousand routes in the nation; three years later there were thirty-two thousand.

By 1915, the number of rural mail carriers was 43,718, as against 33,062 city mail carriers. Routes continued to be organized until the mid-1920s, and in 1925 the number of rural mail carriers reached 45,315. Afterward, consolidation of routes based on the use of automobiles brought sharp declines. In 1970, there were 31,346 rural routes extending 2,044,335 miles, or an average of about 65 miles per route.

Rural free delivery—by bringing daily delivery of newspapers with coverage of national and world events, changing fashions, and market quotations and by delivering mail-order catalogs—was of major importance in breaking down rural isolation. The rural free delivery system also contributed to the development of a parcel post system and played an important part in the good roads movement. True to some of the dire predictions of its early opponents, however, RFD cut into the profits of main street retailers; brought an exotic and sometimes threatening urban culture into rural living rooms; and added to the growing sense that residents of small towns lived at the margins of a consumer economy dominated by America's biggest cities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barron, Hal S. Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Fuller, Wayne E. RFD: The Changing Face of Rural America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.

Gladys L. Baker / a. r.

See also Advertising ; Mail-Order Houses ; Post Roads ; Postal Service, United States ; Rural Life .