POSTAL SERVICE, U.S

POSTAL SERVICE, U.S. In many ways the U.S. Postal Service is the federal government agency most intimately involved on a daily basis with its citizens. It was and is a truly nationalizing service, connecting Americans to one another irrespective of state lines and geographic distance. However, in its earliest years its ineffectuality undermined the new nation's ability to fight the American Revolution and hampered efforts at creating a national polity in the years immediately following independence.

Benjamin Franklin was deputy postmaster of Philadelphia from 1737 until 1753, when he was appointed deputy postmaster of the colonies. At the Second Continental Congress, Franklin headed the committee that established an American national postal service and in 1775 became the first postmaster general.

The postal service languished during the Revolution. Afterward, as delegate to the Confederation Congress in the 1780s, Franklin continued to press the weak federal government to pay more attention to developing a postal service worthy of the name. He died in 1790, living just long enough to see his pleas and early efforts attended to by the strong federal government created under the Constitution of 1783. Under President George Washington, a strong Post Office department became a national priority in 1789. In September of that year Samuel Osgood was named postmaster-general; at the time there were fewer than eighty post offices in the United States. The Post Office was initially placed in the department of the Treasury. Under the nationalizing influence of the new Constitution, the number of local post offices with full-time or part-time postmasters increased dramatically. By 1800 there were well over eight hundred post offices in the United States.

As was true of so much of the federal government's operations in the Federalist decade, the Post Office department was quickly politicized, and remained so through the Age of Jackson. The Federalist Party built its organization in the 1790s around federal government employees in the states. The party also introduced politically oriented partisan newspapers everywhere in America, as did the opposition, the Jeffersonian Republicans. But the Federalists were in control, and they conjoined both sources of party support by naming many among its host of new printer-publishers as local postmasters. It was a natural marriage: Postmasters in villages, towns, and cities across America were the earliest recipients of national and international news; they not only were able to use the new postal routes being established to expedite delivery of their own newspapers, they could impede the opposition as well. They were able to frank (send without postal fee) their weekly papers to subscribers in many instances. At the same time it was very much in the political interests of the national government to designate local roads as post roads, thus providing subsidies for the building, extension, or improvement of key routes connecting the nations' states and localities. It was under these conditions that the more-than-eightfold growth in the size of the U.S. postal service took place.

Isaiah Thomas is a prime example of a printer-postmaster. After Benjamin Franklin, he was the most eminent representative of this eighteenth-century type. Appointed postmaster of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1775, Thomas was the publisher and editor of The Massachusetts Spy. The Spy was a staunchly Federalist weekly sheet reaching readers throughout the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. The printer combined his operation with running the local post office, his stationer's shop, and his book publishing business. The Berkshires was an area crucial to the Federalist Party interests, for it was the locale of Shays's Rebellion, an uprising against national economic policies perceived to be unfair to farmers that roiled American society to its core from 1786 through 1787.

As postmaster, Thomas's value to the Federalist Party increased immeasurably. Not only was the printer assured of early receipt of foreign and domestic news via incoming exchanged newspapers, he knew that as postmaster he could frank at least part of the heavy mail generated by his newspaper as well as the paper's delivery through the Berkshires along newly upgraded post roads that he had designated. For Thomas and the Spy it was a marriage of business, politics, and government made in heaven and writ large, a grass roots part of national postal operations that extended through the Age of Jackson and beyond.

The Jeffersonian Republicans who took power in 1801 continued this path of postal politicization; as the nation grew in the early nineteenth century, so did the number of postal routes and postmasters who counted themselves partisan printers of newspapers. Among the earliest postmasters-general were prominent national political figures like Timothy Pickering (served 1791–1795), a Federalist, and Gideon Granger (1801–1814), a Jeffersonian Republican.

In the Age of Jackson (1824–1850), the U.S. population greatly increased along the eastern seaboard with the arrival of vast numbers of immigrants from Europe, and in the West as Americans moved into the Ohio Valley and beyond and into the Southwest as far as Texas. The Post Office kept pace. John McLean served as the postmaster general from 1823 to 1829, and he maintained the department's partisan character even as he effectively presided over its rapid expansion. Beginning in 1829 with William T. Barry, the postmaster-general was added to the president's cabinet, although the Post Office did not become officially established as an executive department until 1872 (it was removed from the cabinet in 1971 and renamed the U.S. Postal Service). By the time Andrew Jackson was elected president (with McLean's support) in 1828, there were more than three thousand post offices across America. McLean was rewarded with an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, a position he held until the Civil War. Jackson's "spoils system" of course included the Post Office department. One of Jackson's closest advisors, Amos Kendall, served as postmaster general from 1835 to 1840. A former newspaper printer and local postmaster, Kendall was not only a member of Jackson's cabinet, he also ranked high among the handful of political advisor's that made up Old Hickory's "kitchen cabinet." The political eminence of the postmaster-general reflected the importance of the U.S. Post Office department to the administration's political operations.

Among other political meddling, Kendall introduced a dangerous precedent when he banned Abolitionist tracts from the mail. It was the first of many instances when the U.S. Post Office involved itself in efforts to draw its own line in the sand between the national interest as the postmaster-general saw it and Constitutional protections of freedom of speech and the press. Other instances followed: supposedly "obscene" literature was banned periodically between 1868 and 1959, subject to postal enforcement. It included material that was generally agreed to be obscenity as well as material that was or came to be acknowledged as significant literature, such as works by Henry Miller, Leo Tolstoy, and many others. In 1918 the Post Office seized and burned issues of the Little Review containing chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses. During World War I several newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail under the terms of the Espionage Act of 1917. Birth control information also fell victim to Post Office censorship.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the U.S. Post Office had become a great unifier for the nation, maybe its most important in a rapidly expanding and diversifying republic. The mail got through efficiently and cheaply, helped by large infusions of federal money. In an age of slow travel, the Post Office linked most Americans to each other across the spreading population. Technology mingled with age-old means of transportation to get the mail through. By 1845, for example, the newly developed steamship was employed to deliver the mails both along the American coast and on inland rivers that could accommodate deep-draft vessels. In 1845 the Postal Act provided subsidies to American steamship companies that carried the mail to Europe, and lowered postage rates domestically to five cents for distances up to three hundred miles. In a nation rapidly expanding westward, the stimulus to commerce was incalculable, and connections were made possible among increasingly separated families as young sons and daughters and arriving immigrants alike moved west.

When even the new technology would not suffice, the Post Office turned to the saddle horse, the simplest and oldest means of rapid transit. Scheduled overland service was introduced in 1858 to carry the mail west. In April 1860 the Pony Express was introduced as a private enterprise, opening a route from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, more than 1900 miles. The trip was made in just over ten days, with horses being changed at 157 stations along the way, every seven to twenty miles, depending on the terrain. One of Buffalo Bill Cody's first jobs was as a Pony Express rider on the Mormon Trail route in the early 1860s. He rode from his native Iowa on a route that ended in Salt Lake City, Utah. In July 1861 the Pony Express was contracted by the Post Office to deliver the mail, but it soon passed into history with the introduction of the transcontinental telegraph in October 1861.

Following the Civil War, the transcontinental railroads did a better, cheaper, and faster job of delivering the mail. Postal cars were a fixture on the cross-country railways from the late nineteenth century on. The service expanded, and the cars came to carry all sorts of insured or bonded valuables as well as stamped mail. Like the Pony Express, the rolling post offices of the railway systems made their way into mainstream American culture, usually as the targets of daring train robbers.

The Post Office adopted the use of stamps in 1847 and made prepayment of mail via stamps mandatory in 1855. Money orders were added as a service in 1864 and free daily urban delivery to the home was introduced at the same time. Rural free delivery was added on an experimental basis in 1896 and became permanent in 1902. Postal savings banks were introduced in 1911. The Post Office played an increasing part in American daily life as the twentieth century opened. Technology made this expansion possible. Railway post offices made the sorting of mail in transit an art form; machines to post mark and cancel stamps were in every post office, no matter how small; and conveyor belts and pneumatic tubes moved the mails in all of the large cities of America by World War I. Registered letters and parcel post deliveries were in place by the same time, no matter how rural the locale.

Another aspect of postal operations had some interesting by-products. A few people became rich off of U.S. Post Office errors. A handful of upside-down airmail stamps of the 1920s became collector's items. Stamp collectors swamped post offices in 1962 to buy the commemorative stamp issued to honor Dag Hammarskjöld, late secretary-general of the United Nations, when it was found to have been printed with its yellow background inverted; however, the postmaster-general ordered a new printing of the stamp with the "error" intentionally repeated, destroying the collector value of the original misprinting. Dozens of other stamp-plating errors, large and small, drew would-be collectors. Tens of thousands of children were encouraged to pore over stamp albums looking for gold.

The introduction of airmail was part of Post Office lore. Even before Charles A. Lindbergh popularized single-engine long-distance travel in 1927, the U.S. Post Office had introduced airmail. As a direct outgrowth of the mystique of the single-engine fighter planes of World War I, the postal service began delivering small amounts of mail by air in 1918. The first airmail service carried letters costing six cents between New York City and Washington, D.C. By 1920, again with New York as the hub, airmail service to San Francisco got underway, almost Pony Express-like in its relay system. Technology played its part, as airplanes improved dramatically and radio guidance beacons aided navigation. Government largesse also had a role, as it had with the post roads, the Pony Express, and railroad subventions. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 introduced government support of private airlines with contracts for carrying the mail and subsidies for building new airports. The Post Office was in the air all over the map before Lindbergh made his landing outside Paris.

James A. Farley, a long-time associate of Franklin Roosevelt, and the chief architect of Roosevelt's victory in the 1932 presidential election, was rewarded with the office of postmaster-general in the New Deal administration. He gave new visibility to the department and renewed its association with American politics, an association that had weakened in the wake of two generations of civil service reform beginning in the late nineteenth century.

Farley's political clout was in evidence in another crucial way. A long-time proponent of putting people back to work in the wake of the Great Depression, as postmaster-general with access to the president he was able to tap into the deep funding available for the Public Works Administration. Under Farley's aegis, hundreds of new post offices were built in villages, towns, and cities across America. Many of these are architectural gems. They grace the town squares of towns and the civic centers of large cities alike. Many are Art Deco in design, others are Greek Revival. Designed by otherwise unemployed architects and built by dedicated craftsmen, stonemasons, masons, and plumbers as well as tens of thousands of unskilled laborers, these buildings stand as prized examples of what public funding can do when both the will and the need are present.

Many of these local post offices were built with disproportionately large rotundas. These were meant to symbolize Post Office service, but they were also backdrops for life-size murals painted by out-of-work artists. Here Farley utilized his authority to tap into the funding of the Works Projects Administration (WPA). Many of the frescoes that were painted in the 1930s and 1940s are now considered significant works of art. Ben Shahn, for example, worked for the WPA from 1933 to 1943. Perhaps his best Post Office mural is the thirteen-panel one in the central post office in the Bronx, New York, depicting urban and rural working class life in America.

By the end of the twentieth century the ritual of the familiar daily mail delivery had deepened America's attachment to its Post Office. It was a daily connection of virtually all Americans to their federal government. Many aspects of American culture symbolized that attachment. In the "Blondie" comic strip, Blondie and Dagwood's postman, usually arriving a couple of times a week followed by a neighborhood dog, was introduced to Chic Young's seven-day-a-week comic strip in 1932. Similarly, Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers featured more than one kindly postman (or a small post office) from the 1930s through the 1950s. A late-eighteenth-century printer's post office and a nineteenth-century country post office in a West Virginia country store were fully restored as part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The rural mail carrier in a red-white-and-blue jeep and the bagtoting urban postal worker both became welcome sights across the American landscape.

High-technology postal sorting systems in cavernous regional postal centers, with the alienating effects of sophisticated equipment and attendant depersonalization, have taken their toll on the mail delivery system. Competing with the homey images from the past are those beginning in the 1980s of mail workers "going postal," a synonym for violence in the workplace. Although challenged by competition from private delivery companies as well as the advent of instant electronic means of communication, the Post Office remains the most ubiquitous of federal agencies in a federal establishment that often seems very distant from the day-to-day concerns of Americans.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Israel, Fred L., ed. U.S. Postal Service. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.

Marling, Karal Ann. Wall-to-Wall America. A Cultural History of Post Office Murals in the Great Depression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Prince, Carl E. The Federalists and the Origins of the U.S. Civil Service. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

U.S. Postal Service. History of the United States Postal Service, 1775–1993. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.

Carl E.Prince

See alsoCourier Services ; Direct Mail ; Pony Express ; Rural Free Delivery .

The United States Postal Service

Source

Adhesive Stamps and Three-Cent Letters . Mail delivery was not a service taken lightly in the mid nineteenth century. There were few mechanical devices to assist in mail handling, and the postal system was in an early stage of development. Local postmasters did much of the work as they saw fit, including canceling stamps so they could not be reused. Until the early 1850s, this process was done by the postmaster in writing or with a hand stamp he designed himself. A key development in the history of mail delivery was the introduction in 1842 of the adhesive postage stamp and envelopes with printed postage, which allowed people to affix stamps themselves or use postpaid envelopes. When postal workers were freed from some of the fee-collection duties, they could spend more of their time sorting mail for distribution. Even so, until 1855 letters could still be sent with stamps affixed or with postage due on delivery. The Postal Act of 1851 introduced some uniformity into the administration of the U.S. Post Office. It stipulated a uniform postage rate: for letters under one-half ounce going up to three thousand miles, three cents for prepaid postage and five cents for postage due on delivery. For distances over three thousand miles, the rate doubled.

City Service . For people living in cities, correspondence within the city limits was easy to manage. Private carriers competed with the U.S. Postal Service, and rates varied depending on the carrier, distance, and size of the letter or package. To send a letter, a person took it to the post office, and a carrier took the letter to the post office closest to the recipient. There was no guaranteed free delivery of mail in cities until 1863. Before then, recipients paid a premium to a private messenger service for delivery or, more commonly, picked up their mail at their local post office. Sometimes the mail was delivered by the sender to the post office for pickup by the recipient; in

some cases the local postmaster had to advertise in the local newspaper that mail was being held for specified recipients.

Rural Service. Mail service between cities or to rural areas was a more complicated matter because travel was difficult: roads were primitive, and the only motorized transportation was by train or steamship. By 1850 mail was being carried by rail when the routes allowed and by steamboat and stagecoach to places not served by trains. But service was slow and unpredictable, especially in the West; the first intercontinental railroad line was not completed until 1869. Railroad tracks were heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, making delivery in the South and West a difficult chore until the end of the century. Overland postal routes were often served on a biweekly basis at best, and that service was to central distribution centers, where mail was sorted and sent out to local stations. Delivery of a letter from the East to a rural western destination could easily take weeks or even months. In rural areas delivery took longer, especially if the recipient was not near a railroad route, and access to a post office was likely to require a time-consuming journey for people living on farms.

War Mail. The Civil War paralyzed the mail service. Some eighty-five hundred post offices in the South separated themselves from the U.S. Post Office, and on 1 June 1861 the federal government forbade delivery of mail to the South, though by mutual agreement between the federal and confederate governments, prisoners of war were able to send letters, which were gathered, exchanged between the sides, and distributed by the prisoners’ postal service. The Confederacy established its own postal service and issued its own stamps, but the newly established government had difficulty finding printing plants to print the new issues, and, as the war progressed, inflation caused the postal rates to quadruple from their initial level, which was the same as in the North. Paper shortages added to the problem, as envelopes became scarce. People used any wrapping materials they could find to cover letters, including wallpaper. In most cases, the system simply failed, and people resorted to personal messengers—acquaintances traveling toward the destination of the letter—or private carriers, such as American Express, to carry their correspondence. By the end of the war more than fifty-five hundred post offices in the South had closed.

The System Flourishes. The Postal Act of 1863 designated classes of mail—first class for letters; second class for periodical publications; third class for the rest—and authorized free delivery of mail in the cities. That year New York City and Philadelphia employed about 120 mail carriers each to meet the new delivery obligation, and by 1864 there was free delivery of mail in sixty-six cities, requiring the services of 685 mailmen. Rural free delivery was still thirty-three years off. With free delivery in the cities, the postal system flourished. Attempts were made to improve efficiency of distance mail at the same time. Postal workers were assigned to railroad mail routes to sort mail while it was in transit to speed up distribution. Postal rates dropped to two cents

for a half-ounce letter. By the end of Reconstruction, the postal system handled some three billion pieces of mail annually.

Source

Peter T. Rohrbach and Lowell S. Newman, American Issue: The U.S. Postage Stamp, 1842–1869 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984).

U.S. POSTAL SERVICE

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) processes and delivers mail to individuals and businesses within the United States. The service seeks to improve its performance through the development of efficient mail-handling systems and operates its own planning and engineering programs. The service is also responsible for protecting the mails from loss or theft and apprehending those who violate postal laws.

The postal service was created as an independent establishment of the executive branch by the Postal Reorganization Act (39 U.S.C.A. § 101 et seq.), which was approved August 12, 1970. The U.S. Postal Service began operations on July 1, 1971, replacing the Post Office Department, which after years of financial neglect and fragmented control had proved unable to process the mail efficiently. Despite the availability of new technology, as well as skyrocketing mail volume, the department handled mail the same way it did in the 1870s.

As of 2002 the postal service had approximately 750,000 employees and handled more than 200 billion pieces of mail annually. The chief executive officer of the postal service, the postmaster general, is appointed by the nine governors of the postal service, who are appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, for overlapping nine-year terms. The governors and the postmaster general appoint the deputy postmaster general, and these 11 people constitute the board of governors.

In addition to its national headquarters, the postal service has area and district offices, which supervise approximately 38,000 post offices, branches, stations, and community post offices throughout the United States.

In order to expand and improve service to the public, the postal service is engaged in customer cooperation activities, including the development of programs for both the general public and major customers. The consumer advocate, a postal ombudsman, represents the interests of the individual mail customer in matters involving the postal service by bringing complaints and suggestions to the attention of top postal management and solving the problems of individual customers. To provide postal services that are responsive to public needs, the postal service operates its own planning, research, engineering, real estate, and procurement programs, which are specially adapted to postal requirements. The service also maintains close ties with international postal organizations.

The postal service is the only federal agency whose employment policies are governed by collective bargaining. Labor contract negotiations affecting all bargaining unit personnel are conducted by the Labor Relations or Human Resources divisions. These divisions also handle personnel matters involving employees not covered by collective bargaining agreements.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is the federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over criminal matters affecting the integrity and security of the mail. It operates as the inspector general for the postal service. Postal inspectors enforce more than 100 federal statutes involving mail fraud, mail bombs, child pornography, illegal drugs, mail theft, and other postal crimes. The inspectors are also responsible for the protection of all postal employees. In addition, inspectors audit postal contracts and financial accounts.

Most postal regulations are contained in postal service manuals covering domestic mail, international mail, postal operations, administrative support, employee and labor relations, financial management, and procurement.

In recent years the U.S. Postal Service has gained national attention on several fronts as it sought to compete with private delivery services such as Federal Express and United Parcel Service. In the middle 1990s, the USPS began sponsoring a professional bicycling team that gained worldwide renown when team member Lance Armstrong won the prestigious Tour de France for five consecutive years beginning in 1999. In 2002 the USPS announced a postal rate increase to 37 cents for first-class mail, citing declining revenues and the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars due to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the fears generated by the mailing of several anthrax-contaminated letters shortly thereafter.

further readings

Cerasale, Jerry. 2003. "Postal Service Reform: Why? And How?" Catalog Age 20 (November 1).

Hudgins, Edward. 2001. Mail at the Millennium: Will the Postal Service Go Private? Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.

U.S. Government Manual Website. Available online at <www.gpoaccess.gov/gmanual> (accessed November 10, 2003).

U.S. Postal Service. Available online at <www.usps.com> (accessed August 16, 2003).

cross-references

Collective Bargaining Agreement; Mail Fraud.

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

Postal Service (USPS), United States

The United States Postal Service (USPS) is an independent government agency that collects and disseminates the mail to millions of homes and businesses across the country.

In the early days of America, colonists had to either ferry their own mail or rely on messengers and merchants to carry their letters and packages. The first official postal service emerged in 1639, when Richard Fairbanks' Boston tavern became the repository of all mail sent from abroad. The postal service was initially run by the British, but in 1775, America's Continental Congress voted to establish its own postal system, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. By the 1780s, the postal system consisted of seventy-five post offices and about twenty-six post riders. The first postage stamps were introduced in 1847.

Over the next two centuries, the postal service expanded and evolved. Americans' westward expansion gave rise to the Pony Express in the 1860s, a team of horse-riding letter carriers who distributed the mail between Missouri and California. Over the years, letter carriers traded in their horses for faster means of transportation: trains, steamboats, and trucks. With the introduction of the airplane in the early 1900s, the Postal Service could for the first time deliver mail quickly and affordably across the oceans.

The next major overhaul to the postal system occurred on August 12, 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act. The Act replaced the old Post Office Department with the U.S. Postal Service. It was designed to make the service run more like a business and less like a government agency. Today, the USPS is directed by an eleven-member Board of Governors, led by a Postmaster General. Postage rates and service fees are decided upon by an independent Postal Rate Commission.

Every day, the USPS handles more than 680 million pieces of mail. The Postal Service relies on the revenue from these deliveries to survive, because it does not receive funding from taxpayer dollars. To protect its customers from mail theft, mail fraud, and other criminal activities involving the mail, the USPS has its own law enforcement agency, called the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. This agency works closely with federal law enforcement officials to ensure that the mail service is safe.

In October 2001, mail security became a matter of national urgency. Following the discovery of anthraxtainted letters, which ultimately infected twenty-two people and killed five in the northeastern United States, the USPS announced that it was adopting tighter security measures. Many postal facilities were outfitted with state-of-the-art irradiation systems, which sanitize the mail using the same radiation technology that protects the food supply from bacterial contaminants. Also installed were vacuum/filtration cleaning systems to remove hazardous particles from sorting machines.

█ FURTHER READING:

BOOKS:

Bolick, Nancy O'Keefe. Mail Call!: The History of the U.S. Mail Service. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts, Incorporated, 1994.

Kule, Elaine A. The U.S. Mail (Transportation and Communication Series). Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2002.

ELECTRONIC:

The United States Postal Service. <http://www.usps.com/> (December 20, 2002).

SEE ALSO

Anthrax, Terrorist Use as a Biological Weapon
Mail Sanitization
Nixon Administration (1969█1974), United States National Security Policy
Postal Security