How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  Roosevelt’s interest in the post as a political tool wasn’t confined to its architecture. He was a passionate philatelist, and he used stamps, including some of his own design, as visual versions of the “fireside chats” that popularized his often controversial policies. A series of commemoratives that glorified his new Civilian Conservation Corps and the national parks highlighted the administration’s focus on providing jobs to the unemployed and reminded Americans that even during the Depression, theirs was a spectacularly beautiful country. FDR’s response to the criticism that he used stamps to promote his politics was to order new issues that honored George Washington and the White House, both icons of presidential power. His most famous philatelic contribution, however, was distinctly bipartisan: his sketch for a stamp based on James McNeill Whistler’s painting titled Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, but better known as “Whistler’s Mother,” which appeared in 1934 in honor of all American matriarchs.

  FDR was more interested in stamps and post offices than in the Post Office Department per se. He had a surprisingly cool personal relationship with James Farley, the dynamic chairman of the Democratic Party and his own postmaster general. Six-foot, four-inch “Big Jim” was the consummate wheeler-dealer and a Svengali of the spoils system. He had engineered Roosevelt’s two elections as New York’s governor and two victorious presidential campaigns, as well as the near-decimation of the Republican Party’s clout in 1936, but the touchy president was annoyed that the talented, charismatic Farley was referred to as the Kingmaker. (Despite his many achievements, he’s often remembered for unwittingly generating an unlikely corruption scandal known as “Farley’s Follies.” As postmaster general, he sometimes bought sheets of “preprints,” or imperforate, un-gummed stamps, to give as souvenirs to the president and others, but philatelists loudly objected to this privileged access to the collectors’ objects. In response, Farley had the sheets reprinted without gum or perforations for sale to the general public.) The capable postmaster general left public office before Roosevelt’s third term and went on to manage a large private distribution system: Coca-Cola’s international division.

  Roosevelt’s philatelic interests must have been a welcome distraction from the disastrous results of his response to the “Air Mail Scandal” of 1934. This imbroglio over the post’s transportation contracts was rooted in events during the previous Republican administration. Walter Brown, President Herbert Hoover’s postmaster general, had helped to write the Air Mail Act of 1930, also known as the McNary-Watres Act, which had greatly increased his power over postal policy. To curb the contractors’ profitable practice of flying junk mail, he changed the basis of their compensation to the size of a plane’s cargo space rather than the mail’s weight. Partly to sweeten this bitter medicine, he also offered the carriers ten-year rather than four-year contracts. In exchange for this added security, the airlines greatly expanded their routes at no cost to the government. The act also empowered Brown to extend or consolidate airmail routes as he saw fit. When the new postal contracts were awarded to just the three large airlines, later United, American, and TWA, that had been personally invited to attend what was dubbed the postmaster general’s “Spoils Conference,” the charge that the post was bankrolling cronyism and discriminating against the smaller carriers led to the sensational scandal of 1934.

  In the end, the case against Brown was flawed. He certainly wanted the contracts to go to the largest, best equipped airlines that could most readily expand the nation’s airways. However, announcements of meetings for all interested carriers had been published in the newspapers; smaller companies that later complained of unfairness did not attend. Partisan politics also played a role. Brown was a Republican, and Democrats eager to distract the public’s attention from the Depression had sponsored the 1934 congressional investigation into the airmail contracts on the grounds that they had gone to the previous Hoover administration’s friends. Years later, Brown was cleared of charges of fraud or collusion.

  That same year, Roosevelt made things worse for himself and the post by voiding all of the aviation companies’ domestic government contracts and calling in the U.S. Army Air Corps to deliver the mail. The private carriers by then controlled a fleet of much-improved planes that flew day and night on numerous routes, but the military and its pilots didn’t have nearly the same equipment or experience. The resulting chaos included sixty-six accidents and the deaths of twelve crew members, which the legendary World War I fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker called “legalized murder.” Roosevelt was forced to reverse his order a mere month later. If the Army’s terrible performance had a silver lining, it was that the bloody debacle rallied support for the development of what became the U.S. Air Force.

  The Air Mail Act of 1934 restored the postal contracts to the private airlines, but it also made the bidding process more competitive, spread the federal wealth more evenly, and lowered the companies’ compensation, all of which further encouraged the industry’s investment in passenger service. Several small boutique aviation firms, such as Aeromarine and Chaplin, had catered to the needs of a few wealthy vacationers, but now the airlines had to figure out how to transport very large numbers of passengers—still a far-fetched idea. Americans enjoyed watching barnstormers go through their paces at air shows, but crashes such as the one that killed Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and six others in 1931 discouraged them from taking to the air themselves. Moreover, planes had been built for transporting cargo, not people, and until 1930, the few willing to take the risk had to wear a parachute, jounce about on a mailbag, and tolerate a maddening din. To gain the public’s confidence and the necessary bank loans to convert to a new business model, the airlines developed new commercial passenger planes, such as the Boeing 247 and the Douglas DC-2, that were larger, faster, and more comfortable—and also, thanks to better navigational aids, much safer. By 1933, the Boeing 247 traveled at 155 miles per hour, and its ten passengers sat on upholstered seats in a special compartment equipped with hot water. In 1936, the Douglas DC-3, which had a quieter cabin and seats buffered by rubber, became the first popular, and profitable, passenger plane.

  The mail continued to fly on the major commercial routes between big cities, but many small towns still lacked airports. By 1939, All American Aviation operated a service in a handful of eastern states that resembled an airborne version of the RMS, in that its planes both dropped off and picked up mailbags without landing. The outgoing sack was suspended on a rope between two poles, and when the pilot swooped down, a clerk caught it with a grappling hook. “Flying the pickup” was an extraordinarily demanding, risky, and expensive proposition, however, and in 1949, All American stopped the service and became a passenger carrier. In 1951, the company became Allegheny Airlines, then USAir, which is now part of American Airlines.

  Air Mail continued to be a separate postal service until 1975, when planes began to carry almost all domestic intercity first-class letters for the price of a regular stamp. In 2006, the post expressed its pride in its long involvement with aviation by trademarking the term “Air Mail”—not coincidentally, if less deservedly, along with “Pony Express.”

  • • •

  NO SOONER HAD AMERICA survived the Great Depression than it was thrust into World War II. The hard-pressed post, which had just returned to its previously high levels of mail volume and employment despite its austerity budget, was thrown back into crisis mode. The complexity of its wartime operations was like nothing seen in a military conflict before or since. The combination of the 11.5 million personnel at home and abroad and the vast constellation of their devoted correspondents produced a staggering number of letters to process and transport. Previously, the overseas mail had traveled on great ships such as the British Titanic, which sank in 1912, losing some seventeen million pieces of mail. (About a dozen letters postmarked aboard have survived, because the Titanic didn’t head right to New York City from Southampton but stopped first at Cherbourg, in Fr
ance, then at Queenstown, in Ireland; letters written early in the voyage were sent from those ports.) The huge oceangoing vessels were slow, however, and they also made tempting targets during war.

  Aviation had been in its infancy during World War I, but planes could now fly overseas both faster and more securely than the big ships could sail. (The Yankee Clipper had carried transatlantic mail by 1939.) The problem was that the aircraft lacked adequate cargo space for bags upon bags of heavy, bulky mail. Back in 1937, the Hindenburg, a huge German dirigible equipped with its own post office and plenty of room for cargo as well as passengers, had represented one possibility. Mail sent from America to Europe took five to seven days to arrive by sea but just two and a half on the great airship. However, on May 6, 1937, it had caught fire and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing thirty-six people, and of the approximately seventeen thousand letters it carried, just two hundred survived. (The National Postal Museum has exhibited an envelope, postmarked on the Hindenburg, that a passenger had addressed to himself so that one of his sons, a budding philatelist, could save the stamps. He and one of his four children died in the crash, but the young collector received his father’s final gift in the mail.)

  The debut of “Victory Mail” eliminated the problem of sending tons of bulky mailbags across the Atlantic by borrowing a technique that had been developed by Eastman Kodak for copying bank records. Soldiers and their correspondents wrote to one another on sheets of specially designed, lightweight V-Mail stationery that folded into self-contained envelopes. Next, letters from the States were opened and microfilmed, then sent on rolls holding about eighteen thousand messages apiece to military stations near the designated recipients. The film was then developed on-site to produce copies of the originals, which were delivered within a week or two to soldiers in the field. The same process operated in reverse to send V-Mail from the front back home. This communications breakthrough enabled 150,000 messages to fit into one forty-five-pound mailbag rather than the twenty-two bags previously required. As an added bonus, V-Mail that wasn’t destined for overseas was light enough to travel as regular airmail.

  The hundreds of millions of V-Mails that were posted during the war were subject to certain constraints. The medium couldn’t accommodate regular photographs, which inspired the Chicago Tribune to take pictures of newborns that were then microfilmed by a special separate process and sent to their fathers overseas. Even the classic epistolary sign of affection was forbidden, because the “scarlet scourge” of lipstick kisses could gum up V-Mail’s machinery. The military continued its practice of censoring all of its personnel’s correspondence to obliterate any references to the location and activity of troops, as well as to monitor their morale. This unhappy task usually fell to a unit’s officer, but soldiers who objected to the personal scrutiny could place their letters in a special “honor cover” that went to a larger base for a more anonymous inspection.

  As in the past, war compelled the post to hire more women to replace the men at the front. In 1917, the combination of World War I and the era’s labor strife had forced an urban experiment with female letter carriers, despite “a grave doubt in the minds of those familiar with the every-day work of letter carriers in the city delivery service whether women could stand the strain for any length of time without seriously impairing their health.” If women were only grudgingly permitted to carry the mail on the ground, Helen Richey, the first female commercial airline pilot and the first woman to fly the mail on a regular basis, faced even more opposition during World War II. In 1935, despite her stellar record, the Air Line Pilots Association refused to admit her to its ranks, and the post cut back her flights. She quit in frustration, but during the war, she volunteered to ferry military planes around England and the United States. (Like many women, Richey found herself unemployed after peace was declared in 1945 and the men returned home, and she died at thirty-seven, an apparent suicide.) The African American women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion technically worked for the military, not the post, but they were stationed in Europe during the war to process mail for U.S. personnel overseas and served with distinction. Their efforts were the more notable considering that, as Major Charity Adams Earley, their supervisor, put it, they “were segregated two ways, because we were black and because we were women.”

  The post’s wartime efforts were not confined to expediting military mail. The department assumed many additional burdens, including selling “war bonds,” as the savings bonds sold in post offices since 1935 were then called, registering aliens, dispensing draft materials, and even helping with a livestock census; some small-town postmasters also served as military recruiters. Most of these postal efforts were predictable enough, but one made by FDR was highly imaginative. By now a master of using philatelic imagery to rouse the nation’s esprit de corps, he ordered a commemorative stamp in 1942 that portrayed the seemingly odd couple of Abraham Lincoln and Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the canny president used the Chinese leader’s admiration for the Great Emancipator to highlight his country’s resistance to Japanese aggression.

  15

  MID-MODERN MELTDOWN

  THE POST THAT EMERGED after World War II, like America itself, appeared to be booming as never before. The department’s status was such that when the jeweler Harry Winston donated the fabled $350 million Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958, he sent it by registered first-class mail from New York City to Washington, D.C., for $2.44 postage, plus a very low $142.05 for insurance. The simplest of the more objective if less colorful testimonies to the institution’s standing was the most eloquent: America’s already-robust mail volume actually more than doubled between 1945 and 1970, from almost thirty-eight billion to nearly eighty-five billion pieces—more than the rest of the world’s combined.

  This huge midcentury increase in mail seems surprising at first. After all, Americans now had a number of other ways to communicate and receive information. As much as they loved their radios, telephones, and televisions, however, they were still big readers and writers. They devoured morning and evening newspapers, the Saturday Evening Post and Woman’s Day, and were long accustomed to communicating with letters and cards for mere pennies. Then, too, the mail had major practical advantages over the telephone for both individuals, who restricted expensive long-distance calls to emergencies and special occasions, and businesses, which needed written records of transactions. Finally, the vigorous “greatest generation” was busily creating the postwar economic and baby booms, and their new start-ups and suburbs produced much, much more mail than before, especially the bills that generated 80 percent of the first-class volume.

  The glittering statistics on the sheer amount of America’s mail helped to obscure a darker reality whose shadows were both existential and practical. The post that was being force-fed ever more tons of letters, parcels, and publications had been gravely depleted by a decades-long diet imposed by two global wars and the Great Depression. Its facilities were run-down, and to call its by-hand technology outdated is a dramatic understatement. The biggest problem was sorting the era’s oceans of mail, and the cure was automation. The fewer times a letter or parcel has to be handled, the greater the efficiency. However, even clerks in major post offices still used the “peek and poke” sorting method familiar to Benjamin Franklin: examining a letter’s address, then sticking it into the appropriate box or slot for delivery. Some insiders foresaw the catastrophic result of continuing to try to do more with less and understood that without a commitment to a massive modernization—estimated costs ranged upward from $5 billion—the issue wasn’t if the post would be plunged into a crisis but when.

  The urban postal palaces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the Farley, that had once symbolized the institution at its peak now embodied its decline. The huge buildings, which were also major mail distribution centers, had been designed for another age
. Chicago’s sixty-acre Old Main Post Office, then the world’s largest, served a city that was a vital rail, air, and mail hub and second only to New York as a national financial center, but its clerks struggled to do their work with only the most rudimentary tools. They raked the constant stream of incoming bags down slides into big vats, then heaved the contents onto conveyor belts that dumped the mail onto large tables for manual sorting. When letters fell off the belts, they used shovels to scoop them up and put them back. If such a system had been able to handle the prewar mail, it was completely swamped by its postwar boom.

  The problem of the post’s antiquated facilities was paradoxically compounded by advances in transportation. The automotive and aviation revolutions had sent the once-mighty railroad on which the department had depended for nearly a century into precipitous decline. In 1920, 80 percent of intercity travelers went by train; by 1949, that figure had dropped to 8 percent, and by 1957, to 4 percent. By 1969, America’s 208,517 miles of railroad track had dwindled to some 54,000. The post office was forced to adjust, and it shifted from trains to motorized vehicles, just as it had replaced post riders with stagecoaches and stagecoaches with trains. To avoid the overcharging endemic to transportation contracts, the department even invested in its own fleet of trucks.

  The decision to return to moving the mail on America’s highways and byways might have been necessary, but it complicated mail processing, which could no longer easily be done simultaneously with transportation. The new Highway Post Offices that were installed inside some trucks and buses were slower, prey to traffic jams, and less efficient than the smooth-sailing Railway Post Offices had been; they swayed more, which made sorting more difficult and induced more motion sickness. The mail had to be processed somewhere, however, and the post was forced to return to its old hub-and-spokes circulation system centered on large regional distributing post offices.