Ridiculous as the competition sometimes becomes, the general process is not a trivial one, for if a nation keeps its issuing of stamps in reasonably good order, it will garner through the years an immense profit from merely selling those stamps to hungry collectors. This profit, for which no extra work need be done or services provided, can run into millions of dollars a year and can be lost if too many stamps or ones that are too ugly are issued, or if scandal touches their production. History is replete with sad tales of nations that destroyed their credibility and thus their lucrative sales by allowing or even supervising questionable practices. Today no serious collector would pay a penny for the stamps of such countries, while the wonderfully designed and chaste stamps of the British Empire, for example, grow each year in popularity and value.
Because the United States issued some really horrible stamps prior to the operations of our committee, our stamps internationally rank only in the second tier, but very high in that, and in the past three or four decades the improvement has been such that our reputation has soared. To be recognized as having philatelic merit a stamp must be issued for a legitimate postal use by a nation with a respectable reputation. It must be handsome in design and must depict some worthy or extremely interesting subject matter. While I hold my nose when looking at some of the junk that was forced upon our committee by political pressure, I glow with pride when I recall some of the best that I helped sponsor.
Two ironclad rules saved us from embarrassment: (1) We will issue no stamp honoring a specific religion; (2) We will authorize no stamp honoring an individual until he or she has been dead ten years, former presidents of the United States excepted. With that preamble, let me relate a handful of typical problems.
On the day in 1977 when Elvis Presley died prematurely, fat and dissolute at the age of forty-two, a frenzied movement was launched to have the event memorialized as a national holiday, with intense pressure applied on the stamp committee to honor him immediately. The movement spread, and not even our citation of the rule requiring the ten-year wait satisfied his grief-crazed fans: ‘Elvis is not an ordinary man. He’s bigger than presidents. He deserves his own rules.’ When one group learned that I was on the committee, and this was some time after his death, they descended upon me with anguished pleas: ‘Mr. Michener, Elvis must be honored. He’s the most important American of this century.’ When I asked, ‘What about Franklin Roosevelt or General Eisenhower?’ they said scornfully: ‘Politicians, generals, who gives a damn about them? Elvis is something like a saint, bigger than life, bigger than anything.’ I shocked the group by saying: ‘I’ve never heard a Presley song. I’ve never seen a Presley movie.’ Drawing back in horror, they asked: ‘Where in hell have you been? The biggest thing of the century and you missed it?’ I tried to explain that to the general public Elvis might be somewhat less important than they thought, and the reply of the leader was full of obscenities. The pressure never let up; there had never been anything like it in philatelic history. On the tenth anniversary of Presley’s death it was reported that a stamp might be issued honoring the man whom his fans still believe to have been the greatest American of this century.
The second most intense campaign that I remember, and I used to receive a flood of mail promoting this cause or that well-known person, began when the huge family of the American woman who pioneered time-and-motion industrial studies in the early years of this century decided that she must be honored. Lillian Gilbreth had twelve children; they married and had their own numerous children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, each of whom had at least twelve friends. Mrs. Gilbreth also belonged to several learned societies, and all their members had friends, so now the total number of people interested became astronomical, and it seemed as if each of them wrote to me and all the other members of the committee—profit to the government from the sale of ordinary stamps to the Gilbreths alone must have been sizable—and in the end we had to capitulate, or half the United States would have been alienated.
A campaign almost as volatile was launched by a large engineering society whose members demanded a stamp honoring their profession, and they went about their lobbying with a professionalism that was awesome. Since I had been inundated with mail, I assumed that we would again have to surrender, but to my surprise our feisty chairman withstood the onslaught with the most adroit letter of negative decision written during my tenure: ‘I have received hundreds of letters imploring us to grant you a postage stamp honoring your society, but I don’t think engineers respect stamps much or really need them, because every piece of mail I received had metered postage with not a stamp in the lot.’
This chairman, Belmont Faries, was an ideal man for his job, a tough bird who for many years had been stamp editor of the Washington Star, and who knew all aspects of philately, from both the producers’ and the collectors’ point of view. He knew all the scams, all the ingenious strategies by which enthusiasts tried to slip their favorite activity or person past our committee. Three examples of his leadership will illustrate how he operated.
Because I am often a coward, I shall call this European nation Splendovia, famous among other things for a large number of senators and representatives of Splendovian ancestry in the U.S. Congress. These legislators had formed a committee that hammered at us month after month to honor Splendovian accomplishments. By these tactics they were making our stamps look as if only Splendovians had ever been adventurous or run big businesses or been elected to office or written books. I thought we had pretty well exhausted the field when the congressional group insisted upon yet one more Splendovian memorial, but we simply could not think of anyone we had missed. Our committee included several excellent historians, men and women of the widest knowledge, but when a Splendovian name was finally proposed by the enthusiastic congressmen, our historians had to admit that they had never heard of the man. When they asked: ‘Suppose we do issue the stamp. How do we justify it to collectors?’ I suggested, in an attempt to be witty: ‘Let’s announce that he was the first man in history to breed Plymouth Rock chickens west of the 87th Meridian.’ This occasioned some robust laughter, but not from Faries, who reminded us: ‘This matter is terribly important to the Splendovians. It’s one of their legitimate ways to force themselves into the history of the nation. We’ll publish some rationalization for the stamp, but I doubt if anyone will ever read it or buy the stamp.’
At our June meeting one year he was obviously grim as he rapped for order: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I shall make an announcement and for the first time in all our meetings I will entertain no comment or motions when I am through. El Supremo insists that a stamp be issued honoring a Hispanic, any Hispanic, and it is to be on sale by August fifteenth. The national election will be held, as you know, in November.’
He was seen at his ecumenical best, I think, when a group of homosexual organizations petitioned for a stamp on the understandable grounds that they represented a considerable segment of the population. He presented their demand without any show of emotion and then sat back as the expected storm broke. Because this petition arrived in the years when there could be free discussion of such matters, when, as one might say, ‘the issue had come out of the closet,’ there was no cry of moral outrage and no snide bashing of unconventional life-styles. There was, however, careful analysis of the request, with some members pointing out that we had rejected groups much larger than this one and others asking whether we really wanted to honor a group so far removed from the historical norm. I gave the little speech the others probably expected, pointing out that homosexuals were a part of the national fabric, and that justice required equal treatment, etc., etc., but after having listened to me with the greatest patience, Faries said quietly: ‘I believe this debate is meaningless, because we’ve already covered the problem. We’ve honored a famous homosexual. Look at our issue Number 2010.’ When we rapidly shuffled our index of all U.S. stamps ever issued, we found 2010, which was a benign scene from a novel by Horatio Alger, whom we had hono
red with a delightful stamp in 1982.
‘Yes,’ Belmont said in his usual quiet voice, ‘Alger was the son of a respected Unitarian minister in New England. He attended Harvard Divinity School and became a clergyman himself, gaining appointment to an important church in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, he had such an ungovernable fondness for choirboys that he was dismissed from his church in disgrace and fled to New York, where, under a new name, he gained fame by writing about older men who became attached to homeless waifs, helping them gain fame and fortune. We printed 107,605,000 copies of his stamp. I think this shows we have solved this delicate subject rather nicely, and I shall so inform the applicants.’ We closed our catalogs and moved to other business.
One continued battle confronted our committee. We did our best to obey the rule ‘No religious stamps,’ but the counterpressures were never-ending. The Catholics, who were both numerous and led by gifted persuaders, tried every imaginable trick to outsmart us, proposing stamps that clearly honored their religion but were disguised in various clever ways so as to slip into one of the acceptable categories. We were just as adroit in nullifying their campaigns, but in 1982 their quarterback swept right around our defensive backs. They proposed and won a stamp honoring Saint Francis of Assisi, not as a religious figure but as a nature lover who talked to birds. It was a beautiful maroon stamp depicting Saint Francis at his lovable best, and it raised a storm of protests from other religions.
In self-defense lest we get our heads broken, we honored Martin Luther as a philosopher and the famous old synagogue in Touro, Rhode Island, dating back to 1763, as a notable bit of architecture. I wanted to join the parade by honoring my old friend John Knox as the man who had disciplined Mary, Queen of Scots, but got nowhere. In the future I’m sure we can expect a score of imaginative suggestions for sneaking frankly religious stamps onto the roster under other categories, and I suspect little damage will be done.
The Catholics, however, carried home one tremendous victory. In 1943 Hungary issued the world’s first Christmas stamp, an Adoration of the Magi, and it proved so popular that Australia copied the idea, and was followed by New Zealand, Canada and Great Britain. In the United States the idea lagged, primarily because our government was afraid to issue a stamp with religious overtones that might offend non-Christians, and when John F. Kennedy assumed the presidency he gave strict orders that no action be taken that might look as if his administration favored Catholics.
In 1962, in the face of a tremendous demand for a Christmas stamp, the problem was solved by issuing one that avoided the religious trap: a holly wreath against a white door, with two tall, slim candles and the designation four cents. As predicted, it proved immensely popular, with constant reruns in the hundreds of millions becoming necessary. As the holiday season ended, 861,970,000 stamps had been sold at a tremendous profit to the government.
The religious barrier still held, however, so we continued with a series of innocuous stamps showing Christmas trees and holly, but in 1966 the government issued a stamp with a frankly religious subject, a glorious Mother and Child by the Flemish painter Hans Memling. I will not detail the hell that broke loose with the appearance of that stamp, but Jews and libertarians protested the religiosity and irate Protestants pointed out that the stamp depicted Mary not as the simple Virgin in a stable but as Mary, Queen of Heaven, with what seemed to them to be a Catholic missal in her left hand. What was worse, the baby Jesus had his left hand on the missal, as if he were approving Catholic theology. More than a billion copies were sold, and in a revised version another billion.
Protesters initiated lawsuits to halt distribution of the offending stamp, claiming that it breached laws separating church and state. A lower court approved the stamp, a higher ordered a retrial, and tempers flared, but finally it was decreed that the postal department was free to issue such stamps as it deemed desirable. But animosity remained, with one Protestant critic telling me in quiet fury: ‘This is shameful propaganda, Michener, and it has to be halted.’
In 1970 the difficult problem was solved: ‘In future there will be a choice: one stamp with a religious subject and the other reflecting the “secular joys” of the winter season.’ That Solomonic decision has produced a series of Virgins, each more ravishingly beautiful than the last, accompanied by companion Christmas stamps that are clearly nonreligious, and a more dreary chain of snow scenes and holly berries and country farmhouses I have rarely seen, but in an attempt to maintain impartiality in the religious wars, this winterscape series continues. The score when I retired was Catholics 2, Committee 0, and I must say from the point of view of the artistic and historic aptness, I was with the Catholics all the way. After all, they had some fifty of the world’s greatest artists to select from; the lay group had to rely on somebody in Brooklyn drawing sleigh bells.
Just as my running for Congress taught me the complexity of American political life, so my work with the stamp committee made me realize the passion with which Americans can defend the important symbols of their lives. It also boggled the mind that when we finally agree to honor someone like my good neighbor Pearl Buck that 185 million copies of her handsome sepia portrait done by the best artist available were going to be in circulation for the next decade and then repose in a million stamp collections throughout the world. As one of our members said one morning as we began our deliberations: ‘Here we go again. Conferring immortality on a few lucky Americans.’
The intensity of partisanship with which spots in this hall of fame are contested accounted for my major disappointment when on the committee. On the first day I served, the postmaster general asked what subjects I might want to propose as I began my duties. I caused rude laughter among my companions when I replied: ‘I’ll want us to issue, in the most dignified outer frames available and with the finest engraved portraiture, a new series of our thirty-nine presidents.’
An old-timer in the stamp business explained why such a series would be impossible: ‘We’ve tried it. Everyone wants it. Trouble is, in any series like that the problem arises: Which presidents get the popular stamps? The stamps that go on the letters and so on. Republicans or Democrats? The party in power insists that they get the popular denominations, maybe three billion copies of each stamp, leaving the party out of power with things like the thirty-nine-cent stamp, seven hundred fifty thousand copies.’
‘I could live with that. As Senator Marcy warned: “To the victor belong the spoils.” ’
‘But it’s not so simple! It takes us a long time, several years at least, to crank up a full set of presidents, and if we’re in a period in which party control might change, the party that’s in will want to rush things and get their boys secure in the good spots, while the party that’s out wants to delay so that the good ones will still be available when they take over.’
One day when I was wearied by the logrolling within the committee and the incessant pressures from without, I asked somewhat petulantly: ‘Are we wasting our time on this nonsense?’ and a high official of the postal service replied: ‘No. Because your group has done its job so well in the past, our government picks up about a hundred and fifty million free dollars a year, so keep at it.’
The only time I campaigned strongly for a stamp, although I frequently tried to kill unworthy ones and often succeeded, was when decisions were being made for the popular 1984 issue depicting dogs that were typically or exclusively American. Our subcommittee on nature and wildlife included representative breeds like the malamute of Alaska and the black-and-tan coonhound of our Southern states but ignored my favorite, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, and also the American collie, the favorite of Dr. John C. Weaver, president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin system and professor of geography at the University of Southern California.
I was powerless to convince the committee that my dog, which few had seen, could stand with the best, and Dr. Weaver made no headway in championing his collie, so in fraternal outrage we formed an ad hoc committee, informing the oth
ers that we would vote for no dogs whatever unless we were assured that our two would be included. When I look at that handsome number 2099, showing my powerful Chesapeake Bay retriever in his dark red coat, I feel that my time on the committee was well spent, and I am sure Dr. Weaver feels the same way about his gold-white collie. Thus do grown men play boys’ games.
My commitment to the total earth, and my love for it in all its manifestations, presented me with recurring dilemmas: where to live, and to what segment of the earth did I owe my allegiance?
The first problem was not academic, because American law at that time not only permitted American citizens to live abroad but also gave them a financial advantage for doing so. I knew nothing of this until one day when my accountant was making out my income tax: ‘Jim! Haven’t you been out of the country working in Asia for more than five hundred one consecutive days?’ When I nodded, he exclaimed: ‘Then you get all your income taxes for last year excused! You pay nothing!’ I could not believe it, but it was true, and when I asked around I found that many men were finding it profitable to take up residence in Ireland, which offered additional inducements, or Switzerland, where life was exciting and abundant. I was often approached with interesting proposals: ‘You can take a cottage here, do your writing and save a bundle.’ Although I was tempted, I never succumbed, and I had two good reasons for my refusal, one rather high-minded and the other largely pragmatic.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 30