In the early twentieth century, the RMS switched from the hazardous wooden RPO cars to much safer steel ones, which increased the competition for the clerks’ well-paid positions. These modern cars came in three standardized sizes: the sixty-footer, which could carry between nine and twelve clerks; the thirty-footer, which could hold five; and the fifteen-footer, just one or two. A train moving between major cities might pull two or more of the largest RPO cars, as well as other cars filled with presorted mail and packages.
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THE VAST POST-RAIL NETWORK quickly became a cornerstone of America’s thriving industrial economy, which depended on a fast, secure means of transporting money and valuables as well as communications and information. Indeed, one major reason why the RMS has remained so little remarked upon is that its managers deliberately shrouded its details in secrecy in order to thwart robbery at a time when millions of dollars, including huge payrolls locked in safes as registered mail, routinely traveled around the country by rail. In his wonderful postal history, published in 1892, Marshall Cushing, who also served as Postmaster General John Wanamaker’s private secretary, mentions one train that carried $20 million in gold as registered mail packed in five hundred boxes; it traveled from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the subtreasury in New York City for a cost of $3,500—a bargain compared to the cheapest private express carrier’s estimate of $60,000. (Even more impressively, starting in 1934, postal inspectors supervised the safe transfer of America’s $15.5 billion in gold reserves from New York to Fort Knox as registered mail in five hundred railcars.)
Not all RMS trains that transported treasure were so fortunate. That Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and other crime sagas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often feature exciting railroad holdups is no accident. The post’s policy of vigorously pursuing thieves and offering big rewards for their capture inspired the saying that if you stole ten cents from the post, it would spend a million dollars hunting you down. Many train robbers wouldn’t touch the mail car out of fear of reprisal. Those who were bold enough to do so often robbed the independent express carriers’ railcars, too, which gave postal inspectors the additional help of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, the private security force that famously pursued Butch and Sundance.
Robberies of post offices and mail trains peaked in the 1920s, when the department even armed some of its clerks and carriers. The most notorious of the crooks were the D’Autremont brothers, who made the serious mistake of killing an RMS clerk and three other men when blowing up an RPO car at Tunnel 13 in Oregon in 1923. The postal inspectors’ only clue was a charred logger’s coat that the culprits had left behind, which led to the identification of three men who had recently worked in the area’s timber industry. The worldwide manhunt took three and a half years and included sending the brothers’ medical records to every dentist and optician in the United States. One man was finally found in Manila, in the Philippines, and the others in Ohio, and all were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The mobile nature of the RMS helped to curb postal crime of a tamer, bureaucratic sort. Previously, managers at the big distributing offices had received a commission on the postage for any mail handled in their facilities, and some were said to run up those numbers by routing mail through several offices, which delayed service. Their resistance to any change that would cut into their own compensation, along with Congress’s initial reluctance to pay for its expansion, helps explain why the RMS developed slowly at first.
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JUST AS THE POST had always been about much more than the mail, the railroad was about much more than transportation, and their collaboration in the RMS accelerated the nation’s development to a degree sometimes hard to believe. In the summer of 1867, the Union Pacific Railroad’s chief engineer established Cheyenne, in what’s now Wyoming, as a supply depot for the company’s workforce and “Hell on Wheels” camp followers, and a tent served as the tiny settlement’s first post office. By year’s end, daily mail and train service had turned Cheyenne into a boomtown of some four thousand citizens.
When the railroad finally reached a miners’ camp known as Creede, Colorado, its mail volume jumped from a small bundle of letters per week to many thousands, to say nothing of newspapers. Hundreds of fuming customers lined up all day long outside the twelve-by-fourteen-foot shanty that was the post office. Postmaster C. C. Meister had originally agreed to serve his colleagues purely out of good nature, and he was overwhelmed. He finally got some help in the form of a female clerk, who boldly posted a sign saying that all mail not retrieved within thirty days would be burned. (Miners tired of waiting in line bribed her small son to sneak in and get their letters.) Meister was greatly relieved when the post finally accepted his resignation.
Although an important regional distributing point for mail and goods delivered by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad, the first post office at Oklahoma City was also a makeshift affair, established in 1888 in a stockade that was one of the raw settlement’s nine buildings. Mail volume was initially light, consisting of about one hundred letters and one hundred newspapers per day, yet its first two postmasters were apparently not up to the task and were fired. G. A. Beidler, their successor, was already apprehensive when he arrived at the desolate outpost late at night, accompanied by his young son, and instead of being welcomed, he was sharply questioned by the military, then told to sleep on some mailbags. Nevertheless, the diligent postmaster soon established a regular, orderly operation, dignified by the Stars and Stripes floating proudly above, just in time for the great land rush of “Boomers” and “Sooners” eager to settle the territory and their floods of mail. By 1890, the erstwhile wilderness outpost was a town of nearly ten thousand people that boasted a gasworks, municipal water, and a post office situated in its own building, albeit a former chicken coop.
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THE POST AND THE RAILROAD were the nineteenth century’s two great monopolies—one public, one private—and their partnership was tetchy. As in many marriages of convenience, money played an important role. The tone was already set in the 1840s, when the combination of the railroads’ heavy charges and competition from the private mail carriers had helped to plunge the post into its worst crisis. Some social critics had urged the government to force the railroads to reduce their exorbitant fees. In 1845, Congress settled for a new merit-based classification system that paid more money to companies that transported important mail faster. Those assigned to the first class received up to $300 per mile per year; those in the second class, $100; and those in the third class, $50. Nevertheless, American railroads continued to receive much higher compensation than those of other nations. Between 1870 and 1912, Congress conducted five major investigations of suspiciously high costs, which revealed some bureaucratic corruption on one side and some seamy pork-barrel politics concerning rail expansion on the other. The government kept on complaining about the railroads’ poor, overpriced service, and the latter about the former’s inconvenient schedules and underpayment.
One typical contretemps began in 1873, when Congress authorized a new weight-based sliding scale that appeased the railroads at great cost to the post. By 1876, the national slump following the financial crash of 1873 forced the government to cut this inflated compensation by 10 percent, to be followed by a further 5 percent reduction in 1878; payments to railroads that had received land grants for carrying mail were also reduced to 80 percent of what the others got. The four major eastern companies retaliated by slashing their employees’ salaries by 10 percent, which set off a major rail strike in 1877. The public was infuriated by the disruption, and the post once again tried to mollify the railroads with more money.
The post may have overpaid the railroads, but its transportation costs, compared to its soaring administrative expenses, remained relatively stable as the Post Office Department and its network continued to expand. Moreover, by the later nineteenth century, Americans generally a
greed with Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner that “of all existing departments, the post office is most entitled to consideration for it is the most universal in its beneficence. . . . There is nothing which is not helped by the post office.” On the other hand, the railroads had earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first industry to be put under federal regulation and the monopoly that the people loved to hate. A famous vignette from 1883 that featured William Vanderbilt, owner of the New York Central Railroad, suggests that the feeling was mutual. While traveling west in his private railroad car, the tycoon was questioned by a Chicago journalist about his company’s cancellation of an express mail train that the public had valued but that Congress had refused to pay extra for. Vanderbilt replied, “The public be damned.”
Theirs was a complicated relationship, but it’s no accident that, driven by the same political, social, and economic forces, the long golden ages of the great postal and railroad monopolies overlapped. The Interstate Commerce Commission, which was established in 1887, regularly reviewed the post’s transportation compensation, and its records show that into the 1950s, both partners felt they were mistreated and misunderstood—one measure of a kind of fairness.
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BY THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, steam power dramatically improved America’s international as well as domestic communications. Just as it had been quick to subsidize the railroads to carry domestic mail, the post gave early, crucial support to the young oceangoing steamship industry that sped up service to the West Coast and Europe. In the process, the post amplified its role in spurring the nation’s industrial development and promoting its economic and political interests abroad.
Well into the nineteenth century, the world’s posts operated independently, each with its own elaborate rate structures, accounting procedures, and regulations. Americans who wanted to send letters abroad faced an ordeal that included getting them to a domestic port, across the ocean, and to their addressees in foreign countries. The process took anywhere from one to three months and involved at least three separate costs; the complicated postage was hard to calculate in advance, so the recipient was stuck with paying it. For a long time, British packets had dominated transatlantic mail, but in 1818, the American Black Ball Line’s fast, regularly scheduled ships began to sail from New York to Liverpool in a mere twenty-three days. By the 1830s, many other U.S. shipping firms carried foreign correspondence as well.
By the 1840s, it was clear that the government had to do something about the maddening state of international mail. Floods of European immigrants had swelled the volume of transatlantic letters, and merchants eager to increase foreign trade clamored for better communications. Moreover, the military was greatly concerned by the advent of new oceangoing steamships and America’s lack of them. Britain had already built up its industry by subsidizing Cunard and other shipping firms, which gave it the edge in dominating both international mail service and trade; should the need arise, the government could even commandeer the steamships for its Navy. America had plenty of fine sailing ships but no private steamship industry. Worse, the U.S. Navy had only 77 vessels, just 3 of which were steamers; for England, those numbers were 636 and 199. This imbalance, at a time when many Americans were enamored with Manifest Destiny and competing with the former mother country over trade and the ownership of the Oregon Territory, finally pushed the government to take action.
In 1845, a Congress determined to improve international communications, trump Britain, and develop America’s merchant marine authorized the postmaster general to contract with ship owners to carry the mail abroad. By the next year, new oceangoing routes connected New York to Southampton, England, and Bremen, Germany. To help jump-start what was a brand-new, very costly industry, priority was given to firms that built steamships for the purpose; these vessels also had to be suitable for military duty. As was the case with the railroads, the government ensured that America would get the steamers it sorely needed not by incurring the huge expense of building them but only by assuring payment for carrying the mail—another vital postal-private collaboration that improved transportation and communications alike.
In 1847, Congress authorized the secretary of the Navy to contract for additional steamship mail service. One route ran from New York to Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Havana; another from Havana to the Isthmus of Panama, then up the Pacific coast to California and Oregon; and still another—the most important—between New York and Liverpool. By 1853, Congress tried to soothe a South disgruntled by the stimulus to the North’s shipping industry and trade with a steamship line from New Orleans to Tampico and Veracruz in Mexico.
The effort to produce the great steamships drove the development of more sophisticated industry, technology, and engineering in an America poised to become a world power. The new ships were soon big and fast enough to compete with Cunard over passengers and light freight as well as mail. The Pacific, one of the ambitious, enormously expensive vessels built by the entrepreneurial E. K. Collins, crossed the Atlantic in a mere ten days, about five days faster than the British record. This progress, however, came at a high cost that transcended mere money. Two of his experimental ships sank at sea: the Arctic, lost in 1854 with his wife and two of his three children aboard, followed by the Pacific in 1856. That same year, much like his fellow transportation moguls John Butterfield of the Overland Mail and William Russell of the Pony Express, Collins went bankrupt and later died with his once golden reputation tarnished.
By the 1850s, American opinion had become more divided over using the postal subsidization of the steamship industry as an economic as well as military weapon. As tensions eased with Britain, some politicians argued that investing in a big fleet of potential warships was an unnecessary extravagance and that the money would be better spent on improving mail service at home. The huge subsidies also invited the usual complaints about favoritism and corruption in the department’s transportation contracts—particularly in the Democratic South, which still lacked the much-desired steamship line from New Orleans to Europe and the economic boost from the shipping industry that the North enjoyed.
These dissenters aside, the post’s steamship policy resonated with Americans who still favored expansion and competition with Britain, as well as immigrants, shipbuilders, publishers and merchants eager to flood Europe with their products, and the military. By the time the initial subsidies were halted, in 1859, America’s international mail service was much faster, and its foreign trade had also greatly increased. This growth resumed just after the Civil War, when Congress authorized the postmaster general to contract with steamship owners to transport the mail from the East Coast through various ports to Brazil, and from San Francisco to Japan, China, and Hawaii.
By the 1870s, the political parties had divided over the post’s support of the international shipping industry. Among Democrats, expansionist sentiment focused on improving transportation in America’s own West rather than foreign parts; they also argued that low tariffs alone would stimulate trade without the costly subsidies. Republicans advanced the viewpoint of the nation’s increasingly powerful and productive manufacturers, which were eager to reach new foreign markets; they wanted expansion overseas, high tariffs, and postal subsidization of a robust merchant marine. In 1891, the Republicans assumed control of the government just as nationalism and expansionism surged again, and Postmaster General John Wanamaker was authorized to contract with ship owners to improve both international mail service and commerce still more. (That entrepreneurial official went further, even installing post offices on some vessels.) By the turn of the century, America had expanded its global influence with floods of newspapers, books, and consumer products as well as correspondence circulated by the ocean-going post.
International mail’s transportation had advanced in tandem with its processing, which had greatly benefited from the establishment of the General Postal Union in 1874. By 1875, an American could send a letter to E
urope for five cents that arrived in a week; postcards and newspapers cost just two cents.
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STEAM POWER HAD IMPROVED postal service for most Americans by the late nineteenth century, but others, particularly in the western outback, remained beyond the pale. Letters that arrived at the nearest regional postal hub or train station in these remote places still had to be transported, usually on a weekly basis, to small rural post offices to await retrieval by recipients on foot or horseback. The need for Star Route carriers who could get this tough job done as cheaply as possible by whatever means necessary had increased with the nation’s rapid western expansion following the Civil War.
Star Route contractors usually took on the difficult work to help cover the costs of their main businesses. They were obliged to function regardless of conditions that often ranged from inclement to hazardous. A carrier recorded only as “Stringer” set out on horseback one spring day to carry the mail from Buffalo, Wyoming, to the hamlet of Ten Sleep. When the snow became too deep, he switched to snowshoes and a toboggan. After one of his snowshoes broke, he staggered and fell for twelve miles back to his ranch, made a new snowshoe, and finally got the mail delivered in a week. Something of what even much later Star Route contractors experienced comes across in recollections from the 1930s by Harry Elfers, who transported the mail by boat from Sandusky, Ohio, to Kelleys Island in Lake Erie, some ten miles away. He wrote that just sailing one four-mile leg of the trip could take twenty minutes or eight hours, depending on the weather, particularly in winter:
How the Post Office Created America Page 18