How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

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  ONE INESCAPABLE ASPECT OF the post’s history casts a dark shadow on its long golden age. The department had hired women and ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans, well before most other institutions, but the groups’ jagged progress toward equal employment opportunity continued to reflect the larger culture’s norms.

  Women had made modest advances in securing postal jobs by the later nineteenth century, particularly in rural areas. Flora Hawes, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, a city of fifteen thousand, was one of the few allowed to run larger post offices, at least in less populous areas. Cushing describes her as an iron butterfly: “Though modest in manner, she is as determined as a queen. With her, to determine is to execute, and to plan is to accomplish.” Of the country’s some 67,000 postmasters around 1892, more than 6,000 were women, most of whom served in small country post offices. Cushing observes that some were “the most important persons in their towns” and commends their characteristic way of combining efficiency with “trying to please their patrons and the Department alike, and pleasing both because they try.” Hattie Connors, postmaster of Sorrento, Maine, made that extra effort by sharing her musical talents, especially whistling with her fingers “unlike any other feminine artist.” In the early 1890s, sixty-one female postmasters participated in conducting a massive survey of post offices ordered by Postmaster General Wanamaker. They included an Idahoan who did her three-hundred-mile inspection tour on horseback and a Mississippian who traveled mostly by sailboat.

  By the early twentieth century, Postmaster General George Cortelyou could celebrate the pioneer “lady postmaster” who featured in the lore of the Wild West: “And yet while there are no monuments to her and while she has not been eulogized in Congress, she is very close to popular affections. The writers of romance weave their spells around her, and she figures in many American novels that have to do with real life.” He took pains to point out that women were well suited for postal jobs, because “no part of the Government’s work comes more in contact with the home and family than the postal service,” and stressed that the department was exceeded only by the public schools as women’s largest and best employer.

  By that time, the ranks of postal employees also included 105 redoubtable female RFD carriers. Determined to help her parents raise a large family of girls, Viola Bennett, of Suwanee, Georgia, made headlines when she beat seven better-educated male applicants for the job in 1904; she was in the news again in 1906, when she narrowly escaped death on the job after her frightened horse overturned her buggy. Etta E. Bolton, an RFD carrier from Mobile, Alabama, won special praise for repeatedly wading to the rescue of her mailbags after a bridge collapsed, causing her carriage to fall into a river. On one occasion, a certain Miss Westman, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the local stagecoach proprietor, encountered three bears on the trail while carrying the mail in the vicinity of Eugene, Oregon. She was thrown by her startled horse but remounted and completed her route without recourse to her revolver.

  Despite their gains, particularly as rural postmasters, women still faced plenty of discrimination in the post. Federal law specifically authorized the heads of government departments to appoint female clerks in 1870, but only about a sixth as many women as men were called for interviews from the Civil Service Commission’s list of candidates. Those who were chosen had limited opportunities for advancement and were routinely paid less. As Cushing put it, they “fill places where skill, diligence and tact are required . . . but they have not been put in places of command much yet, and many appointing officers who want clerks and especially stenographers and typewriters prefer men.” Pittsburgh’s fine new distributing post office, which handled sixty-five million pieces of mail in 1891 alone, appears to have been an exception in this regard. Its departments of registered letters and money orders were among its most efficient and were run and staffed by women, yet Cushing fails to name even their chief clerks. The omission is the more notable when contrasted with the detail lavished on Postmaster James McKean by an unnamed journalist, whom Cushing quotes at length: “a Scotchman, a bachelor, fat, pleasant, rosy-cheeked, and . . . ‘as sweet as a woman.’”

  Married women confronted particular obstacles. In 1902, the New York Times reported many civil service employers, including the post, requested only male names from the registers of qualified applicants. By way of explanation, one official said, “Every time a woman is appointed to a clerkship in one of the departments she lessens the chances of marriage for herself and deprives some worthy man of the chance to take unto himself and raise a family.” Postmaster General Henry Payne, who served in President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration between 1902 and 1904, ordered that women employees who change their names by marriage would not be reappointed, adding that wives should “stay at home and attend to their household duties.” This official bias against married women extended to 1921, when it was lifted by Postmaster General Will Hays, and was especially strong in cities, where large male workforces made women’s services less essential.

  The exigencies of frontier life that created opportunities for women, if only by default, also admitted some ethnic minorities into postal service. Francisco Perea, who served as the postmaster of Jemez Springs, New Mexico, between 1893 and 1904, belonged to a wealthy Hispanic family who had sent him to be educated by Jesuits in St. Louis. As a young man, he had been the bilingual interpreter in negotiations between local leaders and General Stephen Kearny, who led the Army into Santa Fe and seized New Mexico for the United States in 1846. Perea later became a successful merchant, served as a lieutenant colonel in the Union forces, and in 1863 became one of the first Latinos to be elected to Congress, where he fought for improvements to New Mexico’s transportation and postal systems.

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  CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS IT that racism slowly but steadily declined after the end of slavery. In reality, following some progress during the Reconstruction era, prejudice surged again, peaking around 1900. The Republicans who dominated the White House after the Civil War had tried to use the spoils system to advance social justice as well as their own clout by giving postal jobs to their party’s new African American members. In 1876, however, a very close, contentious election led Rutherford B. Hayes, the new Republican president, to placate the South’s angry white Democrats by withdrawing the federal troops who had kept order after the war. This retreat ended the progress made during Reconstruction and emboldened racists to threaten and even assault African Americans who held enviable federal postal positions.

  The sad coda to the exemplary career of Minnie Cox, the postmaster of Indianola, Mississippi, illustrates this dismal political and racial dynamic. The black graduate of Fisk University and fervent Republican was first appointed by Postmaster General Wanamaker in 1891. She and her husband, Wayne, a school principal and later an RMS clerk, were respected figures in the community, and the new postmaster was accepted at first. She was known to be kind as well as competent, even to the point of spending her own money to pay late post office box rental fees to install a phone for her three thousand customers’ convenience.

  Despite her ability and standing, white aspirants to her good federal job threatened Cox’s life. The danger was real. In 1898, a mob had murdered Frazier Baker, the postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, and his baby daughter. (Postal inspectors closed that town’s post office and investigated the crime, but the accused killers were released after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.) President Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to use the post to combat racism, first refused to let Cox resign, but fearing for her safety, she left Indianola in 1903. Her story made national headlines along the lines of the Cleveland Gazette’s: “Mrs. Minnie Cox, Postmistress of Indianola—A Faithful and Efficient Official Driven from Office by Southern White Brutes.”

  African Americans’ plight grew still worse during President Woodrow Wilson’s administration (1913−1921). The Democratic champion of Progressivi
sm was also the first southern president since the Civil War. He feared jeopardizing the support of his party’s regional base, but he also personally supported the Jim Crow laws that limited African Americans’ rights as citizens, just as he opposed women’s suffrage, Native American assimilation, and Asian immigration. In a shocking reversal of justice, his postmaster general Albert Burleson—a pompous, overdressed Texas politician known as “the Cardinal”—set about resegregating the federal government. Beginning in 1914, applicants for civil service exams had to supply a photograph, supposedly for identification purposes, that made discrimination easier. Burleson not only tried to prevent the post from hiring African Americans in the first place but also fired and demoted many of those already employed. Black workers in the department’s headquarters in Washington were hidden behind screens and forced to use separate dining rooms and bathrooms.

  Because they shared the cars’ close quarters with white coworkers, the black clerks in the Railway Mail Service were Burleson’s particular obsession. Their situation had already worsened after the service switched to safer steel cars in 1913, which increased competition for the well-paid jobs. They were subjected to indignities and physical assault, and one man was even pulled off his train and killed. (Nevertheless, James Julian, whose parents had been born into slavery, held his hard-won RMS job for twenty-five difficult, dangerous years, and he and his wife, a teacher, were able to send their six children to college. Percy Julian, their firstborn, became a world-famous scientist who held some 130 chemical patents, and with a certain poetic justice, he was honored with his own stamp in 1993.)

  In the end, the racist treatment of African American postal workers backfired. They continued to be highly respected within the black community; indeed, in 1895, ten of Frederick Douglass’s pallbearers in Washington, D.C., were mail carriers. Moreover, the gross injustices they faced led black RMS clerks to form the powerful National Alliance of Postal Employees, a labor union that would vigorously protest discrimination for decades. The Republican administrations that followed Wilson’s ended the disgraceful effort to resegregate the government, and the post went on to add significant numbers of black employees.

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  BY THE HEADY YEAR OF 1913, the triumphant post and its civic mandate had reached their fullest expressions. Some of its greatest achievements during its zenith were particular boons for the long-underserved agrarian population, but other important advances benefited rural and urban Americans alike.

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  REDEFINING “POSTAL”

  JUST AS THE POST in its golden age did much to develop rural America’s physical and social landscape, it also contributed to the progressive City Beautiful movement, which flourished between 1890 and 1920. Its sponsors attempted to counter urban ugliness and squalor with grand architecture that glorified the public commons and fostered civic pride. The palatial new post offices designed for big cities combined beauty, utility, and grandeur to celebrate both the government’s commitment to the people’s good and the Post Office Department’s importance to civic life. No less than Egyptian pyramids or French cathedrals, these heroic American buildings illustrate an institution’s peak and a culture’s moment in time.

  Like the new national parks, the buildings of the City Beautiful movement were aesthetic antidotes to the Industrial Revolution’s environmental toxins. Rapid, unplanned urban growth had produced densely populated slums crammed with smoky factories and pestilent tenements, which cast a pall on the quality of life for rich and poor alike. With a largeness of spirit and purpose now almost unimaginable, an idealistic group of civic leaders, philanthropists, and architects, including Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, decided to combat this blight with an “American Renaissance.” No less than Boston’s Copley Square library, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum, and San Francisco’s Civic Center, the magnificent new post offices that became the vibrant cores of many cities and towns were among the movement’s most impressive achievements.

  The precedent for grand post offices had been set much earlier by the department’s own stately headquarters in the General Post Office building in Washington, D.C., which Andrew Jackson had commissioned from architect Robert Mills. The elegant Palladian structure, which was expanded between 1855 and 1866, had become a major attraction for proud American tourists. As Harper’s New Monthly Magazine put it, “We doubt if there is a building in the world more chaste and architecturally perfect than the General Post-Office as now completed.” Nevertheless, by 1890, the department had outgrown Mills’s masterpiece and overflowed into five rented buildings. In 1899, it moved to much larger quarters in what’s now called the Old Post Office building. The huge pile designed in the Romanesque Revival style was no match for its predecessor in aesthetic terms, but its size and soaring clock tower, second in height only to the Washington Monument, proudly proclaimed the post’s status.

  After the war, Americans were more comfortable with heroic federal structures outside of Washington. The Treasury’s Office of Construction, esteemed for its custom houses, began a major building binge. By the later nineteenth century, the post had established major regional headquarters throughout the nation that were housed in grand buildings of their own. Large “first class” postal palaces sprang up in Albany, Little Rock, St. Louis, and other regional centers to serve as vital communications and information hubs in America’s booming, business-oriented economy. Politicians in both parties supported the splurge on these opulent buildings, which enabled them to brag about the fancy facilities they had secured for their constituents.

  As the department increased the number and range of its services, postal architecture became a form unto itself. These huge, lavishly embellished, government-owned buildings resembled chateaus or citadels and were located in the best part of town. They had to be easily identifiable, as were Ammi Young’s similar designs for Galveston, Richmond, and Cleveland, but they also had to have the distinguishing characteristics that local pride demanded. The dormers, rounded arches, heavy masonry, and square tower of architect Mifflin Bell’s vast General Post Office and Federal Building in Brooklyn, New York—then a prosperous independent city—say “castle.” The interior of this gem of the Richardsonian Romanesque Revival style, built between 1885 and 1892, is embellished with luxurious details, including carved fireplaces, marble floors, and wainscoting; the beautiful atrium is surrounded by a three-level loggia whose cast-iron columns are decorated with classical acanthus leaves and anthemion palmettes. Around the same time, Bell also designed a Romanesque Revival post office for remote Carson City, Nevada. Then the state’s second federal building, this frontier post office is more modest than its regal Brooklyn relative, yet it was à la mode, took up an entire city block, and featured the town’s first clock tower, which soared 106 feet above the ground.

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  THE PROGRESSIVE ERA’S postal architecture also had to accommodate new functions that stretched the traditional meaning of “postal” itself. Since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, many Americans had been suspicious of banks, and at the turn of the twentieth century, millions of rural people and urban immigrants alike still stowed their money under a mattress or a loose brick. The big banks were just as uninterested in these humble depositors, and many smaller ones were either uninsured or unreliable to the point of failure. Philadelphia and a few other cities had philanthropic “savings banks,” and ever since Postmaster General Creswell’s efforts in 1873, Congress had received periodic proposals to expand such services. Postmaster General Wanamaker had more recently used the financial precedent of the widely trusted postal money order service to argue for providing average folk with safe, government-backed postal banking. However, legislators had continued to respond to pressure from a banking lobby wary of any government competition by consigning the idea to death by committee.

  As happened with RFD, public pressure fueled by Progressive ideology finally forced the government to authoriz
e postal savings banking. Both political parties supported the policy at their conventions in 1908, and a year later, President William Howard Taft advanced a good Republican argument: the service would not just encourage thrift and otherwise benefit the people but also get more cash into circulation—particularly the many millions of dollars that immigrants sent back to their banks in “the old country” each year. The big banks still huffed that the very idea was unconstitutional, but in 1910, Congress authorized certain post offices outside the big cities to serve as savings depositories.

  Partly to appease the banking industry, the Postal Savings System was designed for Americans of modest means, particularly those in areas that were underserved by banks. Customers could start an account with $1 but could not invest more than $500, later raised to $2,500. They received 2 percent interest, which not coincidentally pressured private banks to raise their own rate to 3 percent. (Even children could have accounts, and married women could open accounts under their own names that were not subject to their husbands’ control.) The program also benefited the government, which invested the deposits in local banks at 2.5 percent and used the profit to cover related costs. The service was slow to catch on at first, but by the early days of the Great Depression, more than $300 million had been deposited in postal savings, which, unlike deposits in private banks, was backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. The program service had an educational benefit as well, because it helped to familiarize average Americans with finance and ultimately made them savvier consumers of commercial banking services.

  In 1913, the government authorized another radical extension of “postal” to include binding the nation with things as well as information. RFD had established the precedent for providing rural folk—still the majority of the population—with better connections to main-stream society, and they soon wanted more. First on their list of demands was better access to the national market and the consumer goods churned out by the nation’s new mass manufacturers, which their small general stores either didn’t carry or overcharged for. England had inaugurated its Parcel Post service in 1883, and the U.S. post had begun to transport large packages across international borders in 1887. Much to Americans’ dismay, however, domestic parcels that weighed more than four pounds still had to be carried by private express companies, such as Wells Fargo and American Express. They established regional monopolies able to command steep fees and opposed competition from a postal parcel service. (Like the post riders before them, many RFD carriers earned extra income by unofficially toting packages to the homes on their routes.)