Few things feel as secure as tucking a letter into an envelope, affixing a stamp, and dropping it into a post box. Go ahead and laugh, but remember: Harry Winston put $2.44 in postage on a box that contained the Hope Diamond and sent it to the Smithsonian through the mail. Club-wielding vandals may feel the drive-by slaughter of your mailbox is great fun, until they learn it is a federal offense; that'll be $250,000 and three years in the jug — for each mailbox. Take heart, you felons: in 1792 and for many years after, you got the death penalty for messing with the mail.
The U.S. mail may now be the butt of a thousand jokes — thanks to a fiscally suicidal Congress and its own myopic mismanagement, as Winifred Gallagher will get to in How the Post Office Created America, her learned, stirring story of the institution — though the jokes are of recent vintage. The post, as it came to be known in the United States, became the central nervous system of the body politic — and a wonderfully subversive force, in its way. It was radically, directly democratic; it encouraged the exchange of ideas. It did what it could to create an informed electorate, bind the states, spur a juddering economy. It was the national commons long before a central bank, a transportation network, and a civil service — and it helped to birth all three of them. If Gallagher is right, the grassroots of that commons lies dormant under the woes of today's post.
Postal systems go back 4,000 years to China — China is always first with the good stuff, like the compass, fireworks, and special delivery — and the Middle East. Gallagher, via Herodotus, tells us that Darius I sent couriers with clay tablets along a 1,600-mile network some 2,500 years ago. Herodotus also tells us that these couriers "are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed." (We have the translation of a Harvard professor to thank for the poetic "gloom of night.") Though the Holy Roman Empire accepted paying customers, and seventeenth-century England and France opened the royal mail to the public, few could afford the service. The same held true for the British colonies. The swells would wait at the docks for the mail packet to deliver "the latest consumer goods, and especially news from the distant center of the universe." They would retire to the merchant's exchange, read their letters to one another, and the tidings would gradually filter to the unnumbered and unwashed.
There is where Gallagher finds the great departure of the American postal system from all others. In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which levied taxes on the American colonies for their upkeep. We know the result of that misstep, but what Gallagher teases out are the implications the act had on the colonial postal service. It went underground, bypassing the Crown's mail and its prying eyes. Voilà: the Committees of Correspondence, a crucial aspect of which would morph into the Constitutional Post, which the Continental Congress of 1775 would transform into the Post Office Department of the United States. Benjamin Franklin's association with the Postal Service is well earned, but it is George Washington who really nailed the institution's promise: "The importance of the post office and post roads on a plan sufficiently liberal and comprehensive . . . is increased by their instrumentality in diffusion knowledge of the laws and proceedings of the government."
Gallagher makes this case; it easy to nod in agreement with her opinion that the spirited crux of the American post is that "if a people's republic were to work, the people had to know what was going on," especially in a "sprawling, diverse, and thinly populated United States." This is not patriotic pap, she argues. It is fundamental to participatory democracy and a sense of trust in government. Accordingly, it had to be financially accessible to all. And the post's task would be Herculean, building a system of offices and roads, while at every turn having to assuage parochial paranoia as its nation building rubbed raw against states' rights. Here is a government office, through the encouragement of journalism and the agency of communication, whose purpose is the dissemination of information to be churned into knowledge to chart – and to check — the course of that government.
Every garden, including those sown for sociability and illumination, has its cold-blooded reptiles. It wasn't long before Andrew Jackson turned the post, which employed three-quarters of the government's civilian workforce, into an "exercise in bald- faced political patronage," trumping the service's tradition of protecting competent employees. With the spoils system, the post office lost a lot of its chrome; still, the office's history is high with color. Gallagher doesn't break out the Crayolas, but she knows a good story when it bites her. There is the forward-thinking quality of rural free delivery ("Some of the most poignant tributes to the service concerned its impact on long-isolated rural people's mental health"); the postal savings system, a.k.a. the poor man's bank; parcel post to light a fire under the Depression; the nurturing of the aviation industry. There is the hiring of women and African Americans on a significant scale. There is the dead-letter office, possibly our nation's most poetic archive. There is grand architecture (New Orleans), medium grand (Carson City, Nevada), and just fine (small-town clapboard and flower boxes), as well as the WPA post office murals. The Post Office delivered both the morning and evening newspapers (once upon a time), mail to lonely soldiers, and brown-paper parcels ("a notable Victorian enthusiasm. Anthony Comstock, a governessy former dry-goods clerk . . . and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, convinced Congress that the post was being used to promote degeneracy").
And there is the backward and/or narrow thinking, both in-house and outhouse. In-house, Gallagher will count, in particular, a lack of visionary thinking, and an utter dropping of the electronic ball, from faxes to email. But what would torpedo the post's potential loftiness was when legislators turned away from "the broad historical understanding of the post as an almost open-ended public service and began to recast it as a business." The post was not going to make a profit, or even break even, if it was going to service the underserviced. Although the institution's approach- avoidance conflict — "a push-pull reaction to something that poses both risks and rewards" — at the dawn of the digital age was a monumental failure, a pro-business, profit-expectant reorientation promises to be death by a thousand cuts (by rate capping, for instance, and requiring the prefunding of retirement income) or just a return to letter carrying being a mark of privilege.
Despite self-destructive and congressional efforts, the post office isn't about to die. "The $68.9-billion-per-year enterprise is the world's most productive postal system, handles 40 percent of its mail, and charges the lowest rates," Gallaher shouts out, and it comprises "the nation's second-largest civilian workforce (after Walmart)." Letter carriers visit more than 154 million addresses daily — and if that doesn't warm your heart, contemplate getting one — and post offices remain a social hub, if a somewhat tarnished one. Gallagher's history is vital, disputatious, and cheering at once — like the early Republic's newspapers that served to justify so insurgent an operation — tackling public service, private enterprise, federal power, states' rights, the value of a national infrastructure, the fruits of bipartisanship, and the constipation of regional and political polarization. Those are big themes indeed: ones that have, for better and worse, created America.
Peter Lewis is the director of the American Geographical Society in New York City. A selection of his work can be found at writesformoney.com.
Reviewer: Peter Lewis
