by John Freeman
With female typists in the closest proximity to those giving them dictation, the workplace became newly sexually charged. It took some getting used to—for both employees and their families. In Atlantic City in 1892, two high-profile court cases revolved around men who had married their “typewriters”— there was no distinction, apparently, between the women and the machines they worked upon. Relatives of two different men who had married their typewriters attempted to annul the marriages, stating that the men had not been of sound mind when the marriage had been entered into.
The Great Postcard Craze
Oddly, the change in writing practices that had a greater impact on what people wrote to one another in private was a small, square piece of card—the carte de visite or, as it soon began to be called, the postcard. Rumor had it that the thing had been invented on the Left Bank in Paris, where a man spilled his coffee on a square piece of writing stock. The stain made an interesting shape, so he affixed a stamp and an address to it and mailed the card to a friend. In America, another story revolved around “an economical young woman in San Diego who had to pay postage to write her sweetheart, but who would not buy writing paper. She wrote her epistles in minute penmanship on the reverse side of a stamp and mailed only the stamp itself.”
In any event, the first postcard was sent in England in 1871, and by 1873 more than 72 million of them per year were dropped into the British post. That same year, 26 million were sent in Germany, which later became the nation that printed most of the world’s postcards. The postcard craze had arrived. It’s easy to see why people took to it. A postcard was a cheap, relatively quick way to say, “Yes, I received your letter” to send and receive, accept and decline invitations. Doodles, jokes, and romantic asides traveled this way at a fraction of the cost of a telegram.
In the era before cameras were portable and cheap to own, postcards allowed tourists to bring back some sort of visual rendering of where they had been. As Susan Sontag has noted, this newly created act of recording what had been seen led to an intellectual idea that all the world’s visible things—be they a painting or a pizza—could be captured on film and, later, that the purpose of the travel was the obtaining of that image. Before this development, the way people recorded was that they remembered, or they sketched, if they had the inclination, or kept a private diary. What is unique about all of these activities is that each has a singular aura. Postcards, however, were mass-produced.
That didn’t bother most travelers. By the early 1900s, the postcard had become a full-fledged obsession in America as well. In 1906, it was estimated that one in eight Americans bought a postcard every day. The country spent more than $1 million on the little pieces of stationery each week, and in the course of just a few years they became available at more than eighty thousand merchants nationwide. Many of these stores began selling albums for collectors, which ranged from less than a dollar up to $15. Postcard clubs, which allowed people to trade postcards from faraway places, sprang up.
Postcards also became a way to teach geography. One New York state schoolteacher in a small rural town with no public library started a pen pal course between her pupils and foreign students in Africa, Australia, Ceylon, Cuba, Iceland, New Zealand, most of the countries of South America, and all of Europe. “The postcards brought children into touch with the whole world in a way no other means at their command would have done,” wrote a newspaper reporter covering the story of the children’s correspondence. Some places they received return cards from didn’t even appear in their textbooks.
But the little invention was not without its abuses. A New York Times article in 1871 reported on behavior that resembles a print version of flaming (the practice on the Internet of harassing and criticizing someone publicly):
The handy little post-card has already been made the instrument of insult, ridicule or revenge. The anonymous letter has always held to be one of the most cowardly weapons of assault ever used among civilized beings; but with such letters the sting was limited in its application. The receiver might suffer, but he had the option of suffering alone…. The postcard, however, enables concealed scoundrels to deprive their victims even of this discretion. Gross insolence or contemptuous epithets can now by this means be leveled…. We regret to observe that many such instances have lately occurred in London, so many as to constitute a grave objection to the post-card system altogether…. The temptation to call people liars and scoundrels in so safe a way, to accuse them of robbing hen-roosts or murdering their grandmothers, seems quite irresistible to many ingenuous souls, and impunity has apparently brought about something of an epidemic.
Swindlers, Snake Oil Men, and Peepers
Postcards and typewritten letters highlighted a growing problem with written communication: Can you trust the person on the other end of the line? Handwritten letters had their own signature of authenticity, but typewritten letters instantly created a different impression, one of professionalism and business-mindedness—a fact exploited by some aspiring men, as revealed in this newspaper story:
The other day a lawyer had just finished a letter on his typewriter with the word “dictated” at the bottom of it. “Why did you add that to it when you wrote it yourself?” asked a friend. A look of pity filled the lawyer’s face at the stupidity of his visitor. “My guileless, far-away correspondents,” he said, “will believe that I am overrun with business and utterly unable to answer my own letters. If they regard it as a luxury for me to have a private secretary, why should I undeceive them?”
The growing lack of face-to-face communication also presented an ideal situation for all kinds of criminal or miscreant schemes. The earliest adopters of new modes of communication are often those engaged in illegal or unethical activity, who benefit greatly by being ahead of the curve. The newspapers of the 1880s were full of stories about swindles and heists perpetuated by the mail.
In 1884, an advertisement was placed in several Brooklyn papers: “ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS will be paid for information identifying the author of certain anonymous letters mailed to residents of the Nineteenth Ward during the last two weeks.” The advertising copywriter should have been more specific. In fact, a batch of Valentines, some “written in a woman’s angular hand,” some composed by typewriter, had been sent to women around Brooklyn containing messages so lewd that The New York Times couldn’t print them. Chaos had ensued. “In two families the marriage engagements of daughters have been broken off through the instrumentality of these letters.”
In most cases, financial gain was the goal. A New York man procured a list of lumber dealers and opened correspondence with them. Letters to his bankers in Philadelphia to verify his creditworthiness would “bring the reply that Mr. Rowe was a fair, honorable business man.” No sooner had the lumber been delivered, though, than he vanished. In the course of an investigation, an expert on the typewriter was called in to testify that the notes and the bank correspondence were the work of one man.
One of the most successful schemes of the day will ring bells for anyone who has received e-mails from a Nigerian attorney promising hidden millions. In 1887, two British men set up a business called the British-American Claim Agency in New York City, writing to people around the country and encouraging them to look up claims to estates of long-lost relatives in England. The London Times was made to appear an endorser of the scheme, and to light a fire under their “heirs,” the amount the paymaster in Chancery had ready to deliver to them was, according to The Times, £77,693,769.
All the targets had to do to start claiming their rightful fortunes was to write to the office and pay a $2 fee. Five dollars secured an advertisement in London and $13.25 a guaranteed search. Police in the United States were tipped off to the heist by a judge, who shared the same downtown office building as the men behind the scheme; the two men, he said, had been receiving an unusual volume of mail. At the miscreants’ office, law enforcement discovered that the two men had employed fourteen young women to type up the advertising circul
ars on which the British-American Claim Agency sent out its entreaties. In reality, no searches had ever been performed, complaints were ignored, and the two hauled in as much as $500 per day.
Finally, as more and more people communicated by letter, a larger question loomed: Could governments be trusted—as they could not in the early days of mail—to preserve the privacy of the post? Writing in 1960, Summerfield was adamant about the sacredness of first-class mail: “Its privacy is zealously guarded from the moment it is mailed until it is delivered. Not even the President may order it to be censored, or delay its delivery, except in time of war.” This was a convenient caveat for a country regularly at war, as the United States was from late in 1939 through the 1960s and is again today.
In April 1976, a U.S. Senate panel discovered that the FBI, CIA, and several other government agencies had illegally monitored millions of telegrams and opened more than a quarter million letters. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy were implicated. And it was not just a simple scan of letters. As Seymour Hersh reported, James Angleton, the longtime head of the CIA’s counterintelligence division, was personally involved in a “series of (illegal) domestic mail intercepts that enabled the agency to learn how the American Federation of Labor was planning to use the millions of dollars in clandestine funds funneled to it by the C.I.A.” According to one account, “Angleton would personally deliver copies of the letters to Allen Dulles—and thereby ‘made real hay with Allen’ since ‘it impressed Allen enormously to know in general’ what the AFL was planning to do.”
The Plague of Words
Swindles and con men—and the occasional government peeper—were not the only problems with the post as the world tipped into the twentieth century. There was also the sheer amount of it. Not everyone was pleased by the large numbers of letters and postcards flying across the plains. At the turn of the twentieth century, worries over the decadence of the age of letter writing popped up in opinion articles and among men and women who saw themselves as protectors of civil society. “There is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing,” said one woman, “as there used to be in our time. It is a sort of go as you please development, and the result is atrocious. Epistolary accomplishment is considered altogether too puerile a study for the strenuous work of higher education, while rapid note taking at lectures, etc., finishes the ruination of handwriting and style, the result being as you have just observed—that our daughters write like housemaids and express themselves like schoolboys.”
The postcard was often blamed for this drop-off. “It has frequently been remarked during recent years that the art and practice of letter writing has passed away, and the picture postal has helped on this tendency,” wrote one correspondent in The New York Times. “People write less than they ever did, and yet they keep their friends at home posted as to their itinerary during a long trip better than ever before. The picture postal tells a story. That is why it is so popular.” As a result, people heard from one another a lot more, especially when they traveled on vacation. “People will send tourist postcards when they would not write letters.”
Letter-writing mavens in newspapers turned their attention away from simple epistolary etiquette and toward the more pressing problem of the letters one absolutely had to send. “Certain letters, however, must be written,” opined Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, writing under the pen name Julien Gordon; “there is no escape from their claims. These inevitables may be classed as follows: The Family letter; the friendly letter; the business letter; the letter of condolence or felicitation; the love-letter; the miscellaneous note.”
Even President Theodore Roosevelt got into the act of scolding people for their prolixity. “A resolute effort should be made to secure brevity in correspondence and the elimination of useless letter writing,” he argued in November 1905. “There is a type of bureaucrat who believes that his entire work and the entire work of the government should be the collection of papers in reference to a case, commenting with eager minuteness on each, and corresponding with other officials in reference thereto. These people really care nothing for the case, but only for the documents in the case. In all branches of the government there is a tendency greatly to increase unnecessary and largely perfunctory letter writing.”
An unsigned commentary appeared soon after Roosevelt’s scolding comments, applauding his appeal to people’s sense of restraint. It’s worth quoting at length for the way it captures the sense of fatigue, fatality, even, Americans felt when facing the future of words:
We hope the President will be a restraining influence on the flood of words both in correspondence and in books, but we fear the times are against him. They offer fatal facilities for verbal exuberance. Books today are published in vast numbers, less because authors have anything to say than because printing is easy and cheap and the presses have to be kept at work. So, too, the typewriters click out folio after folio in public offices, not because there is any real reason for that amount of writing, but because the machinery for producing it is at hand….
The stenographer, the typewriter and the printing press are invaluable agents of civilization, but they have their drawbacks. They have inundated us with a plague of words, and we wish that curtailment in the government service could be but the beginning of reform.
In some cases, though, it wasn’t just bureaucrats adding to the blizzard of words. By the end of the nineteenth century, commentators began to complain about being badgered at home by news about political candidates. “Even the Republicans favor me with a tableful of campaign documents, possibly to keep me strong in faith,” wrote William Drysdale in a piece entitled “Does Anybody Read Them?” in The New York Times on November 6, 1887. “It occurs to me that maybe these soul-stirring papers are sent to all the good Republicans, in hope that they may feel flattered by the little attention; but I am never flattered by the receipt of anything short of a Patent Office Report, or a bound volume from the Department of Agriculture. As I sweep all these documents into the waste basket with one grand swoop, they inspire me with only one thought. It is—‘How the printers must smile, when they see an election coming on.’”
The Eighty-Letter Day, the Power, and the Glory
The basic postal rate—at least in the United States—didn’t go up for another fifty years once it was first lowered, and even then it rose by just a cent. The era of postal overload was here to stay. Aside from businesses and governments, people who had come into a peculiar kind of modern existence—being famous—weathered this overload in exaggerated fashion. The prolific journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken felt duty-bound to respond within the same day out of “decent politeness.” He also followed the do-unto-others rule: “If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.” Therefore, every day, whether the mail brought ten or eighty letters, he read and responded to all of them. “My mail is so large,” he said, “that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”
Others had someone close by to do the answering. Thomas Edison received thousands of unsolicited letters per year and employed a fleet of male secretaries to craft his responses and sift the nuts from the fans. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1930, the American novelist Sinclair Lewis began to receive hundreds, including several appeals for help or employment. “I’ll do everything for you,” one woman wrote, “and when I say everything I mean everything.” “My dear Miss,” replied Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, to her husband’s admirer. “My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for ‘everything’ I take care of that myself—and when I say everything I mean everything.”
But an even bigger problem had yet to be confronted: junk mail.
The Business of Moving Mail
When Henry Raymond unleashed The New-York Daily Times upon the city, he appealed to New Yorkers by letter:
The carrier of “The New-York Daily Times” proposes to leave [the newspaper] at t
his house every morning for a week, for the perusal of the family, and to enable them to receive it regularly. The Times is a very cheap paper, costing the subscriber only SIXPENCE a week, and contains an immense amount of reading matter for that price…. It will contain regularly all the news of the day, full telegraphic reports from all quarters of the country, full city news, correspondence, editorials. At the end of the week the carrier will call for his pay; and a continuance of subscription is very respectfully solicited.
As people used the world’s emerging postal services more often, business began to use it, too, in order to target customers. The rise of direct-mail solicitations was fast and had been part of life in the colonies from the beginning. The U.S. Postal Service has always operated second-class mail, through which magazines, newspapers, and advertisements travel at a loss, the reason being “that a postal system should help disseminate information as a public service and do so,” Arthur Summerfield observed, “partly at least, at public expense.” The Federalist Papers, essays on articles of the Constitution written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others, traveled this way, in the pages of the New York newspapers The Independent Journal, The New York Packet, and The Daily Advertiser, which in those days arrived by post.