Neither Snow Nor Rain
Page 1
NEITHER
SNOW
NOR RAIN
NEITHER
SNOW
NOR RAIN
A History of the
United States Postal Service
DEVIN LEONARD
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Devin Leonard
Jacket design by Daniel Rembert
Jacket photograph © FPG /Staff / Getty Images
Author photograph by Daniella Zalcman
All insert photos courtesy of the Library of Congress, with the following exceptions: Photos 2.1 (Crowds in San Francisco), 2.3 (Adam’s Express), 9.1 (Downtown Manhattan), 9.2 (Chicago), 9.4 (Midtown Manhattan), 9.5 (Philadelphia): New York Public Library. Photo 9.3 (Washington, D.C.), 12.2 (James Farley): Wikimedia Commons. Photos 3.3 (Letter Carrier), 4.5 (Sorting by Hand), 6.2 (“Child Mailing”), 8.4 (Clerks), 11.3 (Air Mail): National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Photos 14.4 (Zip Codes), 14.5 (Mr. Zip), 16.1–3: United States Postal Service. Photo 15.1 (Postal Strike): Neal Boenzi/The New York Times/Redux.
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2458-6
eISBN 978-0-8021-8997-4
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
To Eileen, Colin, and Faith
“The postal establishment of the United States is the greatest business concern in the world. It handles more pieces, employs more men, spends more money, brings more revenue, uses more agencies, reaches more homes, involves more details and touches more interests than any other human organization, public or private, governmental or corporate . . . There are other nations that number more people. But there is none whose intercommunications, in area of sweep and magnitude of proportions, approaches the United States.”
—Charles Emory Smith, U.S. Postmaster General, 1899
“No one really runs the Post Office.”
—Winton Blount, U.S. Postmaster General, 1968
Contents
Prologue
1 The Founding Father
2 Interlopers I
3 Comstockery
4 A Businessman at the Post Office
5 Into the Sky
6 A Stamp Collector in the White House
7 Mount Semrow
8 The Day the Mail Stopped
9 Interlopers II
10 Going Postal
11 You’ve Got Mail!
12 “Thank God for Amazon”
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Prologue
Growing up in Queens, Evan Kalish didn’t go to the post office very often. When he needed to send somebody something, he used his computer and later his iPhone. But everything changed after Kalish graduated from Brown University in 2008. He wanted to see the whole country and set off on a three-month road trip to Minnesota in his Toyota Camry. He took pictures of himself in front of post offices in every town he visited so he had proof that he had actually been to these out-of-the-way places, and he started sending letters to his friends while he was on the road. “I really got into it,” he says.
The more post offices he visited, the more fascinated Kalish became. They were everywhere, and each one was different. When he returned to New York, Kalish was so inspired that he decided to visit every post office in America. It would take years, of course. There were 36,723 post offices in the United States. So what? Kalish would see the whole nation by the time he was through.
Kalish created a blog cheerfully entitled “Going Postal” and began to chronicle his travels on the Internet. He visited every post office in New York City and Long Island and most of the ones in northern New Jersey. He traveled I-95, snapping pictures of himself in front of post offices from Baltimore to Boston. Kalish swooned over the one in Nashville, the walls of which were decorated with hundreds of autographed photos of country music stars. He was charmed by a purple post office in Phillipsville, California, near the Oregon border. He cultivated a palate for the stylish post offices constructed during the New Deal era, which often had splendid murals, some of them painted by famous American artists like Ben Shahn and Milton Avery. The murals turned Kalish’s journey into a treasure hunt. “It’s almost like the institution is a giant museum,” Kalish says. “It’s fun to try to see if you can find all the galleries.”
Sometimes postmasters tried to chase Kalish away, saying that he had no right to take pictures of their buildings. What if he was a terrorist? Kalish responded that they couldn’t hassle him as long as he was outside on public property. Others recognized Kalish from his blog and gave him tours, pulling old photographs from their filing cabinets to show him. Kalish made a lot of friends this way, which was nice for someone who could be rather shy.
By the end of 2010, Kalish had visited 1,561 post offices and had made an unexpected discovery: he wasn’t alone. He met a man who had been to 20,000 post offices over the course of 40 years. He befriended two others who had each been to more than 10,000. Kalish went on a summer excursion with his fellow enthusiasts to visit post offices on islands off the coast of Maine. They chartered a boat and went to MacMahan Island. There are no roads on MacMahan Island, just unmarked trails. But there was a post office waiting for them. They took a ferry to Bustins Island to visit another one in a small yellow building along with the public library. “The ferry we happened to take was also the mail ferry!” Kalish wrote on his blog.
Kalish announced on “Going Postal” that he had been to another 1,253 post offices in 2011. But the more Kalish immersed himself in the infrastructure of the U.S. Postal Service, the more there was to see. He now understood that behind all of those post offices, there was a network of 461 processing plants, some with floors big enough to hold several football fields, through which millions of letters and packages flowed. He couldn’t just walk into these places; they weren’t public buildings. But with the help of his postal connections, he found people who let him in. Everywhere Kalish looked, he saw mail trucks and mailboxes. To think that he had spent most of his life oblivious of them all.
But Kalish needed to move quickly. The U.S. Postal Service was awash in red ink. In 2011, it revealed that it had lost $8.5 billion the year before. As people abandoned the mail, it wanted to close post offices, shutter processing plants, and shed employees. Kalish was working on a graduate degree in geospatial analysis at the University of Pennsylvania. He hung a map on the wall of his apartment showing Pennsylvania’s endangered post offices in concentric circles. He didn’t have classes from Friday until Monday evening. “I would take my car every weekend and visit cluster
s of them,” Kalish says. “It was a race against the clock.”
The U.S. Postal Service is a wondrous American creation. Six days a week, its 300,000 letter carriers deliver 513 million pieces of mail, more than 40 percent of the world’s total volume. In parts of America that it can’t reach by truck, the USPS finds other means to get people their letters and packages. It transports them by mule train to the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Bush pilots fly letters to the edges of Alaska. In thinly populated parts of Montana and North Dakota, the postal service has what it refers to as “shirt pocket” routes, which means that postal workers literally carry all their letters for the day in their shirt pockets. At a time when the USPS is losing several billion letters a year to the Internet, it still has to do this six days a week because it is legally required to provide universal service to every American home and business. Is it any wonder the USPS struggles to make money, even now that it also delivers packages on Sundays for Amazon?
People often talk about how the postal service is lumbering and inefficient compared with private sector competitors such as UPS and FedEx. But the USPS delivers more items in nine days than UPS does in a year. It transports more in seven days than FedEx brings to its customers in a year. In 2011, Oxford Strategic Consulting, an English firm, studied the postal services in developed countries and found that the USPS was by far the most efficient at handling letters, delivering 268,894 per employee—twice as many as the UK’s Royal Mail and five times that of Germany’s Deutsche Post. The USPS refers to the study proudly, though being the world’s most efficient letter handler doesn’t have the same cachet that it did a generation ago.
The USPS seems archaic in the age of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. But for much of its history, the American postal service has been at technology’s sharpest edge. It developed a system of sorting mail on trains in the nineteenth century that was considered a wonder of the age. The U.S. Post Office Department, as it was once known, pioneered commercial aviation in the early twentieth century. In the 1950s, it created high-speed letter sorting machines with electric eyes that read zip codes and handwritten addresses. Postal services around the world use this technology now, but its slow deployment in America is a story that one long-serving deputy postmaster once confessed made him want to cry.
The USPS seems from the outside like a listless bureaucracy, full of people who have gravitated there for security, not because they are consumed with ambition. “Nobody aims to be a postal worker,” says Orlando Gonzalez, a letter carrier and union organizer in New York. “That’s not someone’s goal. But I know countless people that have come here and stayed.” It can be an insular place, suspicious of people and ideas from outside.
But fascinating people have passed through its ranks. Benjamin Franklin, America’s first postmaster general, was only one of them. Long before Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States, he was the postmaster of New Salem, Illinois. Harry Truman held the title of postmaster of Grandview, Missouri. Walt Disney was a substitute carrier in Chicago. Bing Crosby was a clerk in Spokane, Washington. Rock Hudson delivered mail in Winnetka, Illinois. The mercurial jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus toiled anonymously in post offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco before becoming famous in the 1950s. Four decades later, the USPS honored Mingus with his own stamp, but neglected to mention that he was a former employee.
Some famous postal workers didn’t care for the job. The novelist William Faulkner, author of classics like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, spent three years as postmaster at the University of Mississippi until he was forced to resign in 1924 for his obvious disinterest. A postal inspector furnished him with a long list of his transgressions, which included treating patrons rudely, failing to forward mail, and writing the greater part of one of his books while he was on duty. “I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.” Faulkner wrote in his letter of resignation. The scabrous author Charles Bukowski worked for the postal service as a substitute carrier. In his 1971 novel Post Office, Bukowski depicted the job in nightmarish terms. “Every route had its traps and only the regular carriers knew of them,” he wrote. “Each day it was another god damned thing, and you were always ready for a rape, murder, dogs, or insanity of some sort. The regulars wouldn’t tell you their secrets.”
Like most large institutions, the USPS has a darker side. It has been plagued by racism and scandal. It has a shameful legacy of censorship, including banning material about birth control and novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the 1980s and 1990s, postal workers went berserk on the job, murdering their coworkers. For much of its history, postmasters and rural letter carriers were hired primarily because of their political connections, not for their qualifications. It was a system that made many uncomfortable, but it persisted until 1970.
At the same time, however, the postal service has been a beacon for generations of working-class Americans, a place where they could earn a paycheck and rise into the middle class. It was not uncommon for brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters to spend their entire careers at the USPS. This was especially true for African Americans and Hispanics. They couldn’t always find jobs in the private sector. But they knew there was always work for them at the post office. And Bukowski aside, a lot of people like working there. True, clerks who wait on us at the post office can seem perennially disaffected. “Why are they the way they are?” Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory asked in 1988. “Why are they so angry at us? Post offices have ropes to keep us in line. The clerks’ faces tell us they wish we hadn’t come. I wish they could realize that we have not come to cause them harm. All we want to do is send packages and buy commemoratives, which I enjoy—apparently more than I am supposed to.”
Letter carriers, on the other hand, talk about how nice it is to leave the post office in the morning and be on their own for most of the day. Who hasn’t secretly wanted to trade jobs on a warm spring day when we are stuck inside at our desks? Their mailbags may be much lighter these days, but they still have their junk mail or “job security,” as letter carriers call it.
Perhaps more than anything else, the USPS reflects the changing way that Americans see their government. The country’s founding fathers, among them Franklin and Washington, envisioned the postal service as a force that would bind Americans together, bringing them not only letters from friends and family members, but newspapers and magazines that would foster a common culture. “We are so diverse that only extraordinary means could have held us together when so many forces seemed designed to tear us apart,” Lawrence O’Brien, Lyndon Johnson’s postmaster general, said in an eloquent 1966 speech. “There are a number of reasons why the United States did not become the dis-United States and why we did not evolve into the North American Balkans. There are many factors that combined and unified America. The process was carried on silently, almost in secret, underneath the temporary upheavals in our history. It moved by a chain of paper that transported the elements of Americanism through thousands of miles, across mountains and desert, from city to frontier, a chain stretching into every clearing and valley. This link consisted of the postal service and the publications—magazines and newspapers—that provided a common store of images, of heroes, of folklore, of truth, and of inspiration and ideals.”
In the late 1970s, American attitudes toward government and toward the USPS began to change. Even before the election of Ronald Reagan and the triumph of a new conservatism, lawmakers and their cheerleaders in the business community began speaking of the postal service as a threat. If left unchecked, they argued, the USPS would extend its tentacles into new forms of communication better handled by the private sector. Therefore, the USPS had to be reined in; but the more the USPS’s foes restricted its operations, the more they laid the groundwork for the postal service’s current crisis.
&n
bsp; Now the USPS is slowly vanishing. It has sold off its historic post offices. It has closed processing plants. A decade and a half ago, the USPS employed 905,766 people; in 2014, it had a workforce of 617,877. But even as the USPS shrinks, its losses continue to swell. By its own calculations, it owed nearly $71 billion in mid-2015. The possibility of that money being repaid seems unlikely.
In other moments of crisis in the postal service’s history, Congress has intervened to rescue it. Americans, after all, have depended on the postal service to bring them love letters, messages from family members in distant parts of the country, and newspapers that keep them connected to the rest of the world. Businesses have relied on the postal service to take bills to their customers and return with checks. Strange as this may sound, for most of its history, America could not have functioned without the USPS. “It is one of the biggest businesses in the country,” President Harry Truman said in 1951. “And without it, the rest of the country would not be able to do business at all. Without the postal service all our activities would come to a standstill—business, national defense, family life, everything.”
Today, nobody in Washington seems to possess the politician’s will to save the U.S. Postal Service. Or perhaps the politicians simply don’t care because the issue is no longer as relevant to their constituents. Republicans want the USPS to cut mail service and close more postal facilities. Otherwise, they argue, the postal service will require a taxpayer bailout. Democrats and their allies in the postal workers’ unions accuse Republicans of exaggerating the agency’s financial troubles because they want to destroy the government mail system. People in the technology industry say that the Internet is killing the USPS and that this is how it was meant to be, but the Internet may be the postal service’s best hope.