In 1891, Wanamaker tested rural free delivery in 46 small towns across the country from Dexter, Maine; to Roseville, California. RFD proved to be so popular in these villages that locals worried what would happen when the experiment ended and their customers had to return to their old ways. “The free delivery is a success in the broadest sense of the word,” wrote the postmaster of Emporium, Pennsylvania. “We could not do without it, as the signature of every citizen here would attest if required.” Wanamaker boasted that the Post Office Department made a profit of $4,000 on the trial because it inspired citizens to send more letters. “It is evident, then—indeed, we have proved it—that you can spend money for free delivery in these small communities and get it back and more too,” he crowed.
Local chapters of the National Grange of the Order of Patrons and Husbandry, the influential farmers’ advocacy group, sent petitions by the thousands to Congress clamoring for Brother Wanamaker’s experiment to be extended. Small-town residents like J. B. Brown of Vernon Center, Connecticut, sent letters to the editor calling for RFD in their communities. “Bring the post office to the farmers’ doors and you will take more hayseed out of their hair, put more comfort in their homes and money in their pockets than any one thing purchased at the same expense,” Brown wrote. In Salisbury, Massachusetts, P. A. True sent a similar letter to his newspaper. “The United States mail is a great civilizer,” True wrote, “and I do not know why the farmers of the rural town can not have it [delivered] free as well as the city mechanic.” Naturally, newspaper publishers in rural areas called for RFD too, knowing it would increase their subscribers.
Once again, special interests rallied against Wanamaker. Merchants in small towns opposed rural free delivery, saying customers wouldn’t come into town to shop as much. Saloon keepers argued that farmers would have less excuse to stop in for a drink after visiting the post office and the country store. The private expresses insisted that rural free delivery was just the first step in Wanamaker’s scheme to destroy rural businesses. After all, they warned, once farmers got mail delivered to their homes, they would insist on ordering everything from Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company.
Some people said there should be no further RFD testing because letter carriers wouldn’t be able to ride their bicycles on bumpy dirt roads. “I am glad to know this,” Wanamaker responded indignantly. “R.F.D., like bicycling, will make for better roads, and that is the crying need. A nation’s strength and progress are bound up with the improvements of communications, and it is the duty of the whole community, for social and patriotic reasons, to work hard on the roads. . . . If there are millions, as you say, to whom it will be difficult for rural carriers to get mail, how do the children of those towns get to school?”
In January 1892, James O’Donnell, a congressman from Michigan, introduced a bill to appropriate $6 million for broader testing. But the House of Representatives refused to approve the funds, and even killed an amendment that would have appropriated $100,000 for more limited tests. Once again, Wanamaker, who had become a millionaire by creating one of the world’s greatest department stores, had been thwarted by politics. Rural free delivery was dead, and its chief evangelist couldn’t have been more disappointed.
This is not to say that Wanamaker didn’t have some more modest successes during his four years as postmaster general. He placed clerks on streetcars and ocean liners, turning them into traveling post offices as the department had done with trains. He introduced home mailboxes in cities. This meant a letter carrier no longer had to hang around outside people’s houses waiting for them to return so he could give them their mail without fear of its being lost or stolen. Wanamaker introduced the postal service’s first pneumatic tube system, sending a Bible wrapped in an American flag underground from one Philadelphia post office to another. Within a few years, the department had similar networks humming beneath the streets of New York, Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago. Wanamaker introduced the first commemorative stamps. And he created the country’s first national postal museum in Washington with artifacts from mail systems around the world. “The footprint of the mail carrier is the signpost of civilization,” Wanamaker declared at the opening ceremony.
Still, Wanamaker sounded melancholy in his final annual report to Congress in December 1892. He had failed to get funds that year for any new projects. “There was nothing to be done this past year except to trudge along the old roads, for Congress at its last session passed no bill affecting the postal service in any substantial way,” he sighed.
Wanamaker scolded Congress for not supporting rural free delivery. “The old system is really colonial,” Wanamaker said. “It takes pay for delivery of letters without delivering them. It obliges people to go or send for mail and that means in the winter or stormy seasons and for families of aged people, the deprivation of going without letters and periodicals (hardly less valuable) that lie in post offices for long periods not called for. We shall look back with astonishment before many years that the present system had to be suffered so long.” Wanamaker called for the resurrection and adoption of his postal telegraph plan. “I am fully convinced that the Government will never properly do the postal work committed to it until it uses electricity in some form,” he insisted.
Then it was time for Wanamaker to say good-bye. A month earlier, Grover Cleveland had run again and defeated Harrison in the 1892 presidential election. That meant Wanamaker and the other members of Harrison’s cabinet would soon be out of work. For Wanamaker, it would be a relief to return to the private sector, where he no longer had to submit to the will of Congress. But he would miss the people at the Post Office Department, many of whom he had gotten to know and admired. Before he went home to Philadelphia, Wanamaker personally signed more than 65,000 letters of appreciation to every postmaster in the country.
Wanamaker would construct a larger and even more iconic department store in Philadelphia and create another in New York. But he continued to pay attention to the Post Office Department, where something remarkable was happening. The second Cleveland administration opposed RFD, saying it would be too expensive. But farmers’ organizations, small-town residents, and their allies continued to press for it, and in 1896, Congress approved $40,000 for a larger test. William Wilson, Cleveland’s postmaster general, reluctantly created 44 RFD routes in 29 states.
Rural letter carriers delivered mail in the backwoods of Maine, the sugar belt of Louisiana, the fruit-growing districts of Arizona, the ranch lands of Colorado, the farms of upstate New York, and an island in Lake Champlain in Vermont. They made their rounds on bicycles, horses, buckboards, buggies, and two-wheeled carts, crossing over farms and fields to make their deliveries. People never complained when they saw a letter carrier traversing their property. Rural residents were delighted to get their mail at home.
Farmers fashioned makeshift mailboxes out of stovepipes, tomato cans, and feed boxes and hung them outside their gates. “One man has a lard pail hung out on a fence post; three or four have nailed up empty coal oil cans, and a few have utilized syrup cans,” the Post Office reported. “These make very secure receptacles when placed on the side with the upper half of one end cut out.”
Now that farmers received a daily newspaper in their mailboxes, they knew the weather forecast. “That saves us time and anxiety,” wrote O. N. Caldwell, a farmer in Carpinteria, California. “The weather report is dropped in our box, and that is the first thing I look at, to see what it says about the weather tomorrow.” They could keep track of the price of crop futures and get better prices for their livestock and vegetables. “I saw a big jump in the potato market,” wrote J. S. Hollingsworth, a farmer in Snacks, Indiana. “Next day I left a postal card in a United States box at the crossroads for a farmer three miles distant to ‘hold your big potato crop; a jump is on the market; don’t sell too soon.’ In two weeks from that date he sold 1,000 bushels at 20 cents above the October market.” Rural free delivery raised pro
perty values too. “It’s already had an influence on the price of land, which has increased $5 an acre,” wrote S. C. McDowell of Fox Lake, Michigan.
RFD also made farmers feel more like full-fledged citizens. In Tempe, Arizona, one grateful farmer wrote: “I live three and a half miles from the Tempe post office, and have been sick for a week past, yet my mail is brought to my door every morning, except Sunday. I hope the Government is satisfied that the experiment is a grand success; for I assure you that we ‘hayseeds’ (as we are sometimes dubbed) are more than pleased with the system. It looks as if ‘Uncle Sam’ had at last turned his eye in our direction, and had determined to help the farmer.” RFD was hardly profitable, as Wanamaker had promised that it would be. In sparsely populated areas, rural carriers traveled for miles to deliver a handful of letters, which meant that the postal service spent as much as six cents to deliver some two-cent messages. The cost was surely higher in Alaska, where the post office delivered mail by dogsled and operated what was described as the world’s only reindeer route. “Here on a sledge made of whalebone, drawn by a team of domesticated reindeer, Uncle Sam’s postman hurried over the trackless snow covered tundras—freezing and starving at times, and at other times forced to kill and eat his ‘horse,’ bent upon the same mission as the R.F.D. carrier in the happy, populated U.S.A.,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. But regardless of the cost, the time had come for rural free delivery.
The political climate in the United States was changing. The efforts of farmers to turn the Populist Party into a viable third party had failed, but many of its ideas were picked up and improved upon by progressives like Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, Wanamaker’s old adversary, who had become his ideological kinsman on postal matters. In 1902, Roosevelt made RFD a permanent service. “It brings the men who live on the soil into close relations with the active business world,” Roosevelt said in annual report to Congress that year. “It keeps the farmer in daily touch with the markets; it is a potential educational force; it enhances the value of farm property, makes farm life far pleasanter and less isolated, and will do much to check the undesirable current from country to city.” The cries of protest against free rural delivery now came from small-town postmasters who realized what RFD meant for them. Now that the Post Office Department had carriers going door-to-door everywhere, it didn’t need as many outposts. In the first decade of the twentieth century, it closed 17,108 post offices, reducing the total number from 76,688 to 59,580. It was a sharp reduction and one that would never be duplicated at the U.S. Post Office in such a short span of time.
Wanamaker was elated by his vindication, and a few years later, he savored another. In 1910, Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, defied the banking industry and signed a postal savings bill allowing Americans to deposit up to $500 at their local post office. As Wanamaker had predicted, people were eager to entrust their money to the federal government for safekeeping. Half a century later, the Post Office Department would become America’s largest bank, with four million customers and $3.4 billion in deposits.
Shortly after that victory, Wanamaker celebrated another belated triumph. His foes in the private express industry had been prescient: now that rural people had free letter delivery, they wanted parcels bought to their homes too. Wells Fargo, American Express, and the United States Express Company wouldn’t do that; it wasn’t profitable enough. The best they could offer was to drop off packages at the nearest train station, which might be miles away from a farmer’s home. That wasn’t good enough in the era of RFD. A new breed of muckraking journalists discovered that the private expresses were connected to the big railroads through a web of joint stock ownership. The railroads charged the Post Office Department four cents a pound to carry the mail. However, the expresses paid less than one cent per pound to carry their parcels on trains. Both the railroads and their private express partners made vast sums of money from this arrangement. Rather than conducting themselves like paragons of private enterprise as they claimed to be, the railroads and private carriers were operating a cartel.
Two decades earlier, GOP bosses like Thomas Platt and Joseph Cannon stood in the way of Wanamaker’s parcel post plan. But Republicans were swept out of office in the 1910 midterm election, when voters replaced them with progressive Democrats who had no love for the private express companies. The new Congress held hearings on the creation of a parcel post service, frequently lauding Wanamaker, who was now hailed as a hero rather than scorned.
In 1912, Taft signed the Parcel Post Act, and his administration asked Wanamaker to be one of the first to send a package when the new service began on January 1, 1913. On New Year’s Eve, the 74-year-old former postmaster general arrived at the Philadelphia General Post Office in a dark, three-piece suit and a bow tie, looking rounder than when he had presided over the mail system. “I have been on the Parcel Post turnpike since 1889, when I made an earnest and urgent argument for it and other postal service in my first annual report to President Harrison,” Wanamaker reminded everyone. “The cost of living and the prices of many things would not have been as high the last twenty years if Parcel Post, postal savings and cheapened telegraph service had been granted to the people when other nations had proved them and were successfully operating them.” He had a gift for President Taft, a set of gold-plated spoons. At midnight, Thomas Smith, the postmaster of Philadelphia, handed Wanamaker’s package to a mustached postman who rushed it to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s West Philadelphia Station so it could be delivered to the White House.
Later that morning, people around the country lined up at post offices that had opened for the historic occasion and sent three million packages. In Gary, Indiana, a brick dealer named William Parry arrived at the post office with a thousand of his products, individually wrapped to get around the 11-pound limit. It was the kind of self-promotional stunt that Wanamaker might have attempted in his early days, before he had achieved respectability.
The parcel post was a boon to mail-order companies like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. Previously, they had relied on the private expresses to transport their orders. But now they had an army of federal letter carriers who could transport their goods to every doorstep in the country, including those in rural areas where people were starved for the items in their catalogs. Thanks to parcel post, the mail-order industry’s profits climbed from $40 million in 1908 to $250 million in 1920. Wanamaker contributed to this by shipping parcels at no extra charge for customers who spent more than one dollar at his stores. He called it “Wanamaker Free Delivery.”
Postal customers sent all sorts of oddities through the parcel post just to see if they could get away with it. They mailed pitchforks, brooms, and bees. They mailed eggs, some of which arrived intact. In February 1914, the Pierstorffs of Grangeville, Idaho, sent their five-year-old daughter to visit her grandmother 75 miles away in Lewiston via parcel post, because it was cheaper than buying her a train ticket. Little May Pierstorff weighed 48 pounds, which meant that she was just under the Post Office Department’s 50-pound limit for parcels. The Grangeville postmaster charged her parents 53 cents, attaching the appropriate stamps to the front of her coat. May traveled all the way to Lewiston in a railway baggage car under the watchful eye of a railway mail clerk. When she arrived, a mail clerk on duty drove her to her grandmother’s house rather than leaving her at the post office for morning delivery. Soon there were more incidents of “child mailing,” and finally the Post Office Department outlawed the practice.
It’s unclear what John Wanamaker made of that, but he was fascinated by the department’s next innovation. He wished that the technology had arrived sooner so he could have been the postmaster general who could have taken credit for it. “Why weren’t the Wrights a little earlier with their flying machine?” Wanamaker wrote. “Then I would have had the credit for this innovation, provided always that Congress would have listened to me. It generally didn’t.”
5
I
nto the Sky
Otto Praeger waited anxiously on a polo field beside the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., clutching a cigar in his right hand. Short and balding, the 47-year-old Praeger had a pale, doughy face. He wore a hat and a three-piece suit that needed pressing. He looked as though he hadn’t slept, and he had every reason to be nervous. Praeger was the second assistant postmaster general in charge of transportation, and his biggest project was the U.S. Post Office’s new Air Mail Service, which was about to make its first official rounds on the balmy, cloudless morning of May 15, 1918.
The new service would make its debut before nearly 5,000 people who crowded onto the polo field. Schoolchildren had been given the day off so they could see the flying mailmen. Praeger circulated among 500 dignitaries in a roped-off area. They included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone and an aviation enthusiast himself; artic explorer Robert Peary; Japanese postmaster M. K. Kambara; a young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was then assistant U.S. Navy secretary; and Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a dour 54-year-old Texan referred to by his fellow cabinet members as “the cardinal,” because even on days like this, he dressed in a dark suit and a round hat and carried a black umbrella to hide his gout-infected foot.
The U.S. Air Mail Service would be a joint undertaking of the Post Office and the U.S. Army. The Army would supply the pilots, mechanics, and planes. The Post Office would do the rest—mapping out routes, securing airfields, building hangars, and hiring an administrative staff. The public would receive speedier mail delivery, and military pilots would learn to fly long distances before journeying to France to battle German airmen in World War I, which the United States had entered little more than a year before. At least, that was the idea.
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