How The Post Office Created America

Winifred Gallagher, “How The Post Office Created America,” Penguin Press, 2016, 287 pp.

Most histories of the US focus on military, political, and socioeconomic matters; however, this book tells the nation’s story from the perspective of its communications network (P. 5).

The United States mail, the author tells us, was republican at birth. For example, the Post Office Act of 1792 in effect subsidized newspaper circulation, spreading national and international news to far-flung states and making for an informed citizenry. the post office forged a communications revolution just as far-reaching as the later telegraph and internet revolutions.

My Notes:

Pg. 1:  The history of America’s Post Office is nothing less than the story of America.  Of the nation’s founding institutions, it is the least appreciated or studied, and yet for a very long time it was the US government’s major endeavor.  Indeed, it was the government in the experience of most citizens.

Pg. 4:  By 1970, America increasingly looked to business rather than government for problem-solving strategies, and Congress transformed the tax-subsidized Post Office Department into the self-supporting United States Postal Service.  In 2007 the USPS began to report huge deficits and entered an ongoing period of crisis.

Pg. 12:  After Rome’s fall, communications links in the West were largely limited to kings, monks, and scholars until the thirteenth century, when European businessmen began to sponsor services that were commercial rather than governmental.  By the sixteenth century, the German Thurn and Taxis dynasty had begun to expand on the Holy Roman Empire’s imperial system to create the first public post, which transported correspondence for paying customers as well as officials throughout much of Europe.

Pg. 34f:  Congress passed the Post Office Act of 1792 which laid down important policies that would affect the country’s political, social, and physical development for generations to come.  This act helped turn the abstract idea of democracy into a concrete reality by authorizing mail service for the entire population rather than just the privileged few or the conveniently located.  The Post Office Act precipitated a communications revolution that was as profound in its consequences for American public life as the subsequent revolutions that have come to be associated with the telegraph, the telephone, and the computer.  The Act had set off the greatest explosion of newspapers in history.  The post quickly became the federal government’s biggest, most important department and primed the US to become the world’s most literate, best-informed country within two generations—surely one of the most significant, least appreciated developments in American history.

Pg. 68:  President Jefferson may have technically invented the spoils system when he replaced 10 percent of federal workers with his supporters, but Jackson took it to a new level by institutionalizing postal patronage and making it the financial engine of America’s two-party system.  The spoils system’s political impact was amplified by the fact that many of the postmasters appointed were the editors of their local newspapers, who were thus rewarded for their partisan electioneering in print. 

Pg. 79:  The telegraph was an extraordinary advance but one that primarily affected the stock market, big newspapers, and some other time-sensitive businesses.

Pg. 86:  After the Post Office Act of 1851, deficits of the Post would be accepted as a matter of course.  To shore up its monopoly position, laws were passed that made it a crime for other carriers to transport mail in places served by the post, which put the independent competitors out of business.

Pg. 104:  Between 1790 and 1860, America’s population had soared from 3.9 million to 31.4 million.  Its post offices had increased from 75 to 28,498, and its post roads from 1,875 miles to 240,594. 

Pg. 113:  Manifest Destiny:  This theory of American exceptionalism proposed that the US was a unique, divinely favored country that had a moral duty to spread its enlightened values and government from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  The concept cleverly blended the era’s ‘postmillennial’ Protestant belief that Christ was already building his new kingdom right here in America and the hard-edged Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared that North and South American were now off-limits to new European colonization.  President Polk used the Manifest Destiny idea to rationalize taking half the Oregon Territory from Britain and seizing a big chunk of the Southwest from Mexico.

Pg. 151: In 1863, despite some dithering about the propriety of mailmen approaching homes where women might be alone, Congress authorized home mail delivery.  The post’s new letter carriers walked an average of twenty miles per day, six days per week fifty-two weeks per year until the 1880s, when they finally received two weeks of vacation, an eight-hour workday, and overtime pay.  They were obliged to hand letters directly to their customers, which entailed endless waiting and rapping, and often hauling the same letters back on their next round if no one answered.  (Homeowners were not required to install mail slots or boxes until 1923).  In 1902 Rural Free Delivery (RFD) became a permanent postal service. (pg. 190).

Pg. 159:  The completion of the five transcontinental railroads, starting with the Union Pacific and Central Pacific in 1869 and ending with the Great Northern in Seattle in 1893, was one of the nineteenth-century America’s signature achievements. 

Pg. 192:  In 1883 Congress passed the Pendleton Act, which created a bipartisan Civil Service Commission to ensure that federal jobs would be awarded on the basis of merit.  The law had some conspicuous holes, particularly regarding the post.  Its provisions applied to clerks and letter carriers but not to the rest of the Department’s employees, including tens of thousands of postmasters and rural carriers.

Pg. 219:  The Espionage Act of 1917, passed during WWI, made it a crime to ‘willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the US.’ 

Pg. 225:  By 1924, the post had achieved the goals of routine night flight and regularly scheduled transcontinental service.  Letters sped from west to east in about thirty hours with just seven relay stops, each stop lasting a mere five minutes.  The government subsidies to the airline industry through their postal deliveries was instrumental in the development of the airlines.  The early airmail contractors evolved into major corporations—including Boeing, Pan Am, and the ‘Big Four’ of United, Eastern, TWA, and American airlines—that were the major beneficiaries of an expensive infrastructure of airfields, illuminated runways, and communications all provided by the post. (Pg. 228).

Pg. 239:  America’s already-robust mail volume actually more than doubled between 1945 and 1970, from almost thirty-eight billion to nearly eighty-five billion pieces—more than the rest of the world’s volume combined.

Pg. 247:  The ZIP (zone improvement plan) code system of five digits speeded up mail delivery.  The first three numbers identified a particular area’s central mail processing facility, and the second two either a certain post office or a particular postal zone.  These numbers could be read by machines.

Pg. 252:  In March 1970, postal employees staged the first major strike by federal workers in American history and stopped much of the nation’s mail.  The average letter carrier started at barely $6,000 per year while the national median income was about $7,500, and after twenty-one years made only $8,000.  The strike’s devastating consequences, particularly on the business sector, shocked Americans into realizing how much the post that they took for granted actually mattered.

Pg. 275:  Today, the post is in trouble again.  But the $68.9 billion-per-year enterprise is the world’s most productive postal system, handles 40 percent of its mail, and charges its lowest rates.  Its physical delivery system built over more than two centuries, the nearly thirty-two thousand post offices, and the nation’s second-largest civilian workforce (after Walmart).