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 .