Postal Service, U.S. For most of its history, the postal service was the nation's largest civilian institution and the federal government's most visible manifestation in Americans’ everyday lives. Empowered by the
Constitution to “establish Post Offices and post Roads,” Congress created a communication network to unite the fragile young nation. Some of the first postal connections, for instance, linked county seats to state capitals and ultimately to
Washington, D.C. The Post Office Department itself did not build many
roads or operate many long‐distance transports. But contracts with private carriers—stagecoach and steamship lines,
railroads, trucking firms, and airlines—helped create a nationwide transportation system.
Politics pervaded the Post Office through most of its history. From Andrew
Jackson's administration until 1971, the postmaster general customarily served as the president's chief political lieutenant, some having previously headed the party's national committee. Postmasters general dispensed patronage—tens of thousands of local postmasterships and thousands of contracts—throughout the nation. Congress itself set postage rates, often arguing for years over a fraction of a cent for one category or another. Residents of rural areas, and their representatives in Congress, lobbied assiduously for special postal services to reduce their isolation. Rural free delivery (1896) was the most direct response, but postal savings banks (1911–1966) and parcel post (1913) also helped.
Although the postal service facilitated personal correspondence, most material sent by mail related to the press, business, or commerce. The volume of mail grew from 7 billion pieces in 1900 to 85 billion in 1970. The number of post offices peaked at 76,688 in 1900, dropping to 32,002 in 1970. Between 1926 and 1970, by contrast, the number of postal employees more than doubled to 741,000.
The postal service long maintained a dual relationship with the press. Newspapers and
magazines enjoyed free or below‐cost postage rates from the 1790s to the 1970s, and vestiges of the subsidies continued even longer. But the very centrality of the postal service also made it the federal government's principal censor of printed material. From the passage of a federal postal censorship act in 1873 through the mid–twentieth century, the Post Office Department, often in tandem with the U.S. Customs Service, barred from circulation printed matter or other materials considered indecent and obscene. The Post Office also suppressed material deemed treasonable or subversive, notably during the abolitionist controversy, the
Civil War,
World War I, and the
Cold War.
The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 transformed the Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service, a quasi‐corporate agency. Seeking to rectify the shortcomings of legislative rate‐making by elevating economic considerations over politics, the act removed rate‐making control from Congress and vested it in an independent regulatory body, the Postal Rate Commission.
While a late‐twentieth‐century surge in direct‐mail marketing increased the volume of parcels and catalogs in the mail stream, new private carriers such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service (UPS), promising faster, more efficient service, aggressively competed with the U.S. Postal Service for this business. At the same time, e‐mail messages via the
Internet increasingly supplanted the U.S. mails as a favored mode of communication. The future of the postal service in the new era of privatization and electronic information‐exchange remained unclear as the twenty‐first century dawned.
See also
Censorship;
Journalism.
Bibliography
Wayne E. Fuller , The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life, 1972.
Richard R. John Jr. , Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, 1995.
Richard B. Kielbowicz
