How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  Americans’ voluble demand for modern merchandise delivered for fair prices was amplified by an explosive business phenomenon. The mail-order catalog per se wasn’t entirely new—Benjamin Franklin printed one to sell academic books back in 1744—but Aaron Montgomery Ward took the concept to hitherto unimaginable heights. The midwestern blue-collar boy and former traveling salesman understood firsthand how the monopolies enjoyed by the private carriers and the general stores affected rural people. In 1872, he offered them the convenience of both ordering and receiving goods at home and the lower prices made possible by eliminating the middlemen between him and his customers. By the 1890s, his revolutionary “Monkey Ward” catalogs ran to more than five hundred pages and offered some twenty thousand items, from mirrors to dolls, sewing machines to kit houses. In 1893, his competitors Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Roebuck, who shared a similarly down-to-earth, midwestern perspective, put out their own ambitious catalog, soon known as “the consumer’s bible.”

  Industrial America’s new material culture lacked only one element to become nationwide: the cheap delivery of goods. The debate over Parcel Post, like many during the Progressive Era, cast into high relief the dual and often dueling ethics of business and government, of doing well and doing good. As Harper’s Weekly pointed out, “Express companies extend their business wherever it promises to pay. The Post-office extends its operations wherever there are settlers.” The express carriers, railroads, and country shopkeepers vehemently disagreed with this Progressive attitude and sicced their lobbyists on Congress to fight against Parcel Post. C. A. Hutsinpillar, an Ohio merchant, spoke for those interests: “The effect of such a law is beyond the calculation of man, and almost beyond his contemplation. It would certainly revolutionize the whole system of business, and would be the death knell of retail houses generally, and in a measure the depopulating of towns and villages, the natural effect of destroying the retail business.” Many Americans, however, especially in rural regions, agreed with James L. Cowles, a social reformer and founder of the Postal Progress League, who declared the post to be the sine qua non of American liberty and “our great cooperative express company, our only possible agency for the cheapest, most prompt, and most efficient collection, transportation, and delivery of the products of industry.”

  Just as it had with RFD and postal savings banking, Congress stalled on authorizing Parcel Post—and antagonizing the corporate donors that lobbied against it—by conducting endless debates. Finally, the public’s ire over reports of the huge dividends reaped by the express companies’ stockholders—as much as 300 percent from Wells Fargo—seemingly at the public’s expense forced the government to authorize the service. In 1913, Parcel Post began delivering packages weighing up to eleven pounds for low rates nationwide. More than two decades after John Wanamaker had advanced the cause, he was given the honor of mailing one of the first packages.

  Parcel Post was a phenomenal success and remains a powerful counter to the argument that private industry always serves Americans better than the government. Almost overnight, the high-priced express companies were consigned to carrying heavy freight and providing financial services. Parcel Post delivered more than 300 million packages in its first six months, causing some post offices to rent extra space, and Sears’s orders quintupled during the first year. Suddenly, rural Americans who needed a new bed or table, dress or shirt, didn’t have to overpay or make it themselves; moreover, they could have the same model as residents of Boston or Chicago. Participants in the Farm-to-Table program, which lasted from 1914 until the end of World War I, “mailed” their fresh vegetables, eggs, cheeses, and other products to urban customers by rail. (Cartoons showed post offices equipped with holding pens for pigs and sheep.) College students used specially designed cases to mail their dirty shirts back home to Mother for laundering. A bank in Vernal, Utah, even constructed the façade of its new two-story building from pressed bricks sent via Parcel Post in batches from Salt Lake City, some 150 miles away. As Clyde Kelly later put it, the post had become the greatest distributing organization on earth.

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  THE POWERFUL POST INAUGURATED innovative services, such as RFD, Parcel Post, and the Postal Savings System, but it also continued to update and enlarge upon its original mission of circulating news and information for a now better educated, more sophisticated people. This amplification had begun back in 1851 and ’52, when daily as well as weekly papers could circulate within their counties of origin for free, postage for periodicals was lowered to the same rate as newspapers, and hardcover books were finally admitted to the mail. Then, in 1863, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair had simplified the pricing system by categorizing the mail into first-class letters, second-class publications such as newspapers and magazines, and third-class advertisements, hardcover books, and other miscellaneous printed matter. By 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson could laud the post for its “educating energy augmented by cheapness, and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind, so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea, over land, and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”

  As the nineteenth century progressed, Americans especially wanted more magazines, whose format was better able to satisfy their thirst for different kinds of knowledge. Members of the prosperous new bourgeoisie were curious about the great world beyond provincial borders. Rural people were eager to stay abreast of the latest trends. The swelling ranks of immigrants wanted to master the rudiments of their adopted culture. These groups still needed newspapers, but they also wanted more comprehensive coverage of subjects from the distant realms explored by the new National Geographic to the new science of home economics to the proper observance of national holidays.

  An indulgent Congress responded by subsidizing what amounted to an informal nationwide educational system based on second-class mail. A series of laws passed between 1874 and 1885 made the already inexpensive delivery of newspapers and magazines even cheaper by calculating postage on weight rather than on a per-piece basis; the very low initial charge of two cents per pound was soon dropped to one cent. The circulation of second-class materials quadrupled, from almost 70 million pounds in 1881 to some 312 million pounds in 1895. In exchange for this bonanza, publishers had to prepay postage at the post office where their materials were mailed, rather than shifting the burden to customers at the receiving end—an obligation often previously ignored.

  The post’s subsidization of second-class publications fueled the growth of magazine publishing, which surged from six hundred titles in 1850 to more than five thousand in 1900, which in turn helped support the new advertising industry. The manufacturers of popular new brands, such as Campbell’s Soup and Lipton Tea, were no longer satisfied with amateurish promotions placed in local newspapers. By the 1870s, they were paying for truly professional, nationwide ad campaigns in magazines.

  Americans were captivated by advertising’s catchy slogans, such as “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” for Kodak’s camera and “99 and 44/100% Pure” for Ivory soap. Women made 80 percent of household purchases, and the male editors of the new Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, as well as the venerable Godey’s Lady’s Book, eagerly sold ad space to manufacturers that wanted to target these major consumers. By the 1890s, aided by the post, the publishing and advertising industries were vigorously stimulating each other’s growth, and by 1910, magazines were almost as likely to be found in middle-class homes as newspapers.

  To qualify for the favorable second-class postage rate, publications had to meet certain criteria. They had to balance commercial content with worthy information and maintain a list of legitimate subscribers, a headquarters, and a regular publishing schedule; material in cloth or board bindings was unacceptable. Previously, determining what was or was not a legitimate type of mail had mostly been left to the discretion of individual postmas
ters. Now, however, these new rules obliged the department to undertake the task of inspection, which was complicated by the efforts of wily publishers. Hardcover books were consigned to the more expensive third class, so some companies churned out soft-backed pulp thrillers and weepers that could qualify for the cheaper rate. Others produced “magazines” that were little more than advertorials.

  Some Americans questioned whether the government should be subsidizing what amounted to sleazy advertising supplements and serialized sagas, such as The Wolves of New York and Wild West Weekly, which had flooded the mail as an unanticipated result of the second-class-postage reforms. James Britt, an assistant postmaster general and lawyer, even argued that periodicals should pay higher rather than lower postage, maintaining that the rate of 1 cent per pound introduced in 1885 led to a flood of materials “so trashy and wishy-washy . . . that they scarcely deserve to be mentioned in connection with respectable literature.”

  Publishers feared that Congress would raise their second-class rate and vigorously defended their right to low postage by maintaining that their publications contributed to the market’s growth and, in some cases, to the Progressive Era’s reform-minded culture. The windfall of ad revenue helped to pay for more elaborate articles, including the new in-depth, investigative reporting that appeared in McClure’s and other journals that specialized in what President Theodore Roosevelt called muckraking: exposés of political and corporate corruption, from the dismal conditions in urban ghettoes to the abuses of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Wilmer Atkinson, the founder of the Farm Journal, cast the industry’s self-interested concerns in high-minded terms: “As long as the people get the benefit of the low rate, as they are doing now . . . it matters not much what the rate is except that it should be kept at the very bottom notch.”

  By 1891, the popular essayist Edward Everett Hale felt justified in declaring that the post was the “most majestic system of public education which was ever set on foot anywhere.” All Americans benefited from the increased access to information, but once again, particularly those in rural regions. As Congressman A. F. Lever of South Carolina put it, postal service had become “a great university in which 36 million of our people receive their daily lessons from the newspapers and magazines of the country. It is the schoolhouse of the American farmers, and is without a doubt one of the most potent educational factors of the time.”

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  THE POST’S INFORMAL educational system was a great public service, but the huge increase in second-class mail also had a dark side. The department staggered under the torrent of printed matter that Congress had obliged it to deliver regardless of cost and ran big deficits. Moreover, the same laws that protected the security and privacy of America’s mail also shielded criminals who used second-class material to perpetrate fraud and extortion. (The expression “sold me the goods” refers to “green goods,” or counterfeit money, which con artists often sent via the post.) Theft continued to be the most common crime, but with the passage of the Mail Fraud Act in 1872, postal inspectors also increasingly pursued vendors of quack remedies and perpetrators of lonely-hearts schemes, real estate scams, and other dubious solicitations for payment, including chain letters, which count as lotteries and are thus illegal to mail.

  It took more than offers of shares in phantom gold mines or tonics for bad nerves, however, to ignite the nation’s second major controversy over postal content and censorship. Congress passed a law in 1842 that prohibited importing obscene materials from abroad and another, in 1865, that banned the mailing of such things. Following the Civil War and the popularization of photography, the second-class mail included an increasing amount of pornography—a notable Victorian enthusiasm. Anthony Comstock, a governessy former dry-goods clerk who became a postal special agent and founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, convinced Congress that the post was being used to promote degeneracy. The evidence ranged from racy books and pictures delivered to boarding schools to surprisingly available “feminine hygiene aids,” such as condoms, pessaries, and abortifacients, that had been mail-ordered even by seemingly respectable women.

  The Postal Obscenity Statute that Congress passed in 1873 made it a crime to use the post to transport “Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” This so-called Comstock Law had the support of evangelicals, the YMCA, and Americans who clung to the old-fashioned, agrarian values that they perceived to be endangered by industrialization and urbanization. Antagonists included the members of the Free Love Movement and advocates of birth control. (The law ultimately helped to cast the hush-hush subject of contraception as a legitimate medical and social issue.) Comstock’s personal critics included George Bernard Shaw, whose play Mrs. Warren’s Profession had been deemed obscene. The author responded by declaring that “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. . . . It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.” Comstock’s riposte was to call the distinguished playwright and cofounder of the London School of Economics an “Irish smut dealer.”

  The Comstock Law notwithstanding, Congress had always been wary of interfering with freedom of speech and the mail, and it mostly resisted further efforts to strengthen anti-obscenity laws. In 1892, the Supreme Court ruled that banning certain printed matter, such as lottery materials, from the post did not prevent its publication and thus was not censorship. Yet Congress remained sympathetic to the sentiments expressed in an essay called “Our Despotic Postal Censorship” by social reformer Louis Post: “Shall the right to mail service in the United States, now become a necessity of the common life, depend upon the caprice, the bigotry or the corruptibility of one man at the head of a Washington department or his subordinate at the head of a bureau? . . . What has Congress to say?” Their relative silence suggests that the legislators agreed with Emerson: “Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

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  AS WITH ANY ENTERPRISE, the post’s status reflects its customers’ satisfaction, and in bustling late-nineteenth-century America, the department strove to please with new products. Correspondents who hadn’t mastered the formal letter as well as businessmen who wanted a quick, cheap way to communicate with customers had welcomed the prefranked penny postcards that the forward-looking Creswell had introduced in 1873, twenty years after prefranked envelopes. Some thirty-one million of the cards—the stationery equivalent of the new shorthand writing—were sold in the first seven weeks. Then, around the turn of the century, independently produced picture postcards took the simple form to another level and generated a new mainstream hobby as well as postal revenue from stamps.

  If their plain predecessors were about efficiency, the colorful new postcards were about the pleasures of preserving a memory and sharing it with others. Iconic scenes of Old Faithful and Niagara Falls celebrated the wonders of long-distance travel, which, though not easy, was easier than it had been before the transcontinental railroad. Humbler cards documented small-town Americans’ pride in their new hotels, fairgrounds, and paved, electric-lit main streets. Still others, such as drawings of Victorian ladies careering about in hot-air balloons, were meant to amuse, as were those that stooped to crude ethnic caricature. That the postcard craze peaked in the first decade of the twentieth century helped the department recover from the deficits produced by RFD and other new services.

  American stamps had previously been “regular” or “definitive,” meaning that they were intended for ongoing use, and they accordingly depicted timeless subjects, notably portraits of presidents and other great national figures. The innovative Postmaster General Wanamaker dramatically changed this staid tradition in 1893 with the debut of “commemorative” stamps, which were meant for short-term use and designed to tell patriotic stories or mark important recent events. (A year later, the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing took over the production of s
tamps from private contractors.) The first commemorative celebrated the “World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition,” which was held in Chicago in 1893 to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World.

  The handsome commemoratives were an immediate sensation in an America just coming into its own as a global power. Politicians liked the idea of using postage to communicate the country’s history and values, especially to new immigrants who couldn’t read English. Postal executives were pleased that some of the appealing stamps were kept rather than used, which generated revenue at little or no cost. Philatelists were especially delighted with the affordable little works of art, which attracted new enthusiasts and made narrative a compelling principle for organizing a collection.

  Many experts consider “Western Cattle in Storm,” the crown jewel of the early commemoratives, to be the most beautiful engraved stamp ever made. The image of a great black bull leading his herd through a snowstorm’s near-whiteout, dramatically framed by intricate filigree, was issued in 1898 to honor the Midwest’s ascendancy in general and the Trans-Mississippi & International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, in particular. The ranchers of the Great Plains surely related to the depiction of livestock coping with ferocious weather, but they would have been surprised to learn that the seemingly local scene was based on a similarly rugged part of Scotland.