Now it was up to Knight to get the mail to Omaha, and he would have to do it in the dark. The Post Office had asked residents of towns along the way to light bonfires. Knight followed the blazing path. “I felt as if I had a thousand friends on the ground—Lexington, Grand Island, Columbus, Fremont slipped by, warm glows of well-wishers beneath the plane’s wings,” he recalled later. “Then I saw the lights of Omaha.”
Thousands greeted Knight when he touched down at 1:10 am. He was spent, but the pilot who knew the route from Omaha to Chicago hadn’t shown up, so Knight volunteered to take the mail to Chicago. “We can’t let it bust up here,” he said. “I’m going to take it through, so get out the maps and I’ll be on my way after that coffee and two cigarettes.” He studied the maps for a few minutes and took off at 1:50 am.
Knight’s account of his journey to Chicago is haunting. “By this time I was flying over territory that was absolutely strange,” he said. “I knew nothing of the land markings, even if they had been visible. I had to fly by compass and by feel. The throbbing rhythm of the motor didn’t help matters. It was almost a lullaby. I gripped the control stick with my knees and began slapping my face to keep awake. I stuck my face over the side of the cowl and let the rushing zero wind bite my cheeks almost raw. . . . I got pretty lonesome. At times, the moon was totally obscured by a layer of clouds. It looked as if the whole blooming world was sleeping hard. There’s a sense of isolation that’s hard to describe. But my faithful old Liberty [engine] roared out, fighting the wind and dragging my ship along at about a hundred miles an hour.”
He found Iowa City deserted except for the night watchmen. Everybody else had gone home, thinking the Post Office had canceled the remaining flights. Knight ate a ham sandwich and smoked a few more cigarettes before departing for Chicago. “I didn’t dare eat any more for fear it would put me to sleep,” he recalled. “It was 6:30 a.m., Wednesday. The rest of the way I flew by instinct. I just pointed the plane’s nose for Chicago and kept going. Snow whirled around the ship for a while and the wind blew stiff from the east. It was hellishly cold. But as the day grew brighter, I saw the gray smoke of Chicago, mixing with the clouds, and it was the finest sight I have ever beheld.”
Knight arrived in Chicago in exuberant spirits. “I feel fine,” he told a reporter. “I just need some eats and some sleep.” He gave his mail to pilot John Webster, who flew it to Cleveland. Ernest Allison transported it the rest of the way, arriving in New York at 4:50 pm. Previously, it had taken the Post Office nearly four days to transport mail across the country on a special train. But now the New York Times proclaimed on its front page, “Continent Spanned by Airplane Mail in 33 hours.” Praeger sent Knight a grateful telegram: “Accept my hearty congratulations for your splendid performance last night under most difficult weather conditions.”
The Republican majority in Congress had slashed the Air Mail Service’s proposed $1.25 million budget for 1921 and planned to eliminate the service entirely under Harding, but now they hurriedly reinstated the funds. Days later, Praeger left the Post Office. He worked for a while as a consultant to mail-order companies that wanted to better understand the mysteries of the Post Office. Eventually, the king of Siam recruited Praeger to set up an airmail service in his country. So Praeger boarded a steamship and set off for the Far East.
The 1920s were another transformative time for mail. Americans sent hundreds of thousands of picture postcards every year. J. C. and Rollie Hall, two brothers from Nebraska, started producing Hallmark greeting cards, which would become America’s biggest-selling brand of cards for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and birthdays, too. Pitney Bowes unveiled its postage meter, soon to be ubiquitous in company mailrooms, freeing their employees from the burden of visiting the post office to purchase stamps. Eventually, sales of Pitney Bowes labels would surpass those of traditional stamps, though the labels would never replace stamps as some feared.
It was also a busy time for the postal inspection service. In 1920, inspectors put an end to Charles Ponzi, architect of the modern day pyramid scheme, when they arrested him for using the mail to bilk his victims. Mail train robberies became so common that the Post Office issued surplus military weapons to railway mail clerks, but that didn’t frighten off the De Autremont brothers, who boarded a San Francisco–bound train in Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains in 1923 with sawed-off shotguns, thinking that it was carrying $500,000 in gold. A railway post office clerk locked himself in the mail car, but the De Autremonts had come prepared with dynamite and they used it to blow open the door. As it turned out, there was no gold on the train. After killing the clerk and three others, the brothers escaped with only $1,000. Postal inspectors pursued them for three and a half years, looking for clues in Alaska, Mexico, and South America. After the De Autremonts were apprehended, they confessed and were sentenced to life in prison.
The decade was also the golden age of airmail. In 1923, the Post Office created the world’s first night airway between Cheyenne and Chicago, placing flashing gas beacons every 300 miles and installing powerful searchlights atop 50-foot towers at airports to guide pilots. In 1923, it started night flight training in North Platte, Nebraska. Air Mail Service pilot Dean Smith recalled those days with wonder. “I wish everyone could have the pleasure and excitement of those first hesitant probes across the dark plains,” Smith wrote. “We were like children venturing from home, each time daring a bit farther, then running back filled with awe at what we had done. It felt empty and lonesome out there, even with the beacons flashing, four or five visible ahead; we felt the fear of the unknown, the excitement of pioneering, and the satisfaction of accomplishment.”
Regular transcontinental service began in July 1924, and a month later, the Air Mail Service broke its own record, transporting the mail from New York to San Francisco in 24 hours. “The U.S. Post Office runs what is far and away the most efficiently organized and efficiently managed Civil Aviation undertaking in the world,” wrote C. G. Grey, editor of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. “That 3,000 mile trip, with its 1,400 miles in the dark, day in and out all the year around, is a wonderful affair.”
National Geographic praised the Post Office Department more effusively. “There is a revolutionary fact abroad in the land: aircraft have gone to work,” the magazine wrote. “And the nation is waking to find itself fast wedded to a new handmaid of progress—the United States Transcontinental Airmail. The story of this great overhead skyline trail linking East and West, along which, through storm or calm, in darkness or in light, a score of winged couriers relay the public mails across three thousand miles of continent in less than a day and a half, is a modern romance of transportation as fascinating as any that comes to us out of the colorful past.” The New York Times was no less impressed. “One of the most wonderful things in the world is the United States Air Mail Service,” it observed. “It has its equal nowhere for the distance flown and service rendered.”
But the end of the U.S. Air Mail Service was rapidly approaching. In 1925, Republican president Calvin Coolidge signed a law permitting the Post Office to award airmail contracts to private airlines with the hope of spurring the passenger transportation business. The Post Office was inundated with bids from companies newly formed specifically to win such contracts, and began parceling out routes to the low bidders. On August 30, 1927, Post Office pilot Stephen Kaufman made the U.S. Air Mail Service’s final flight, carrying a shipment of mail from New York to Cleveland. His arrival in Cleveland must have been a surreal experience for him. When Kaufman landed at 12:58 am, ten thousand people were waiting, including a former Miss America with a champagne bottle in her hand. But they weren’t there to greet Kaufman; they had come out on this summer night to cheer for National Air Transport, a private airline that had won the contract for the route and would take Kaufman’s sacks the rest of the way to Chicago.
Once Kaufman had handed off his mail, the U.S. Mail officials disbanded. The P
ost Office Department gave its lighted airways to the Department of Commerce, which regulated the aviation industry. It donated its airports to the cities and towns in which they were located. It sold its planes to the new airlines that had contracts to carry mail. These same companies hired many of the post office’s longtime pilots.
In 1927, Charles Lindbergh, himself a former airmail pilot who worked for a private contractor, made his famous flight from New York to Paris, inspiring an aviation craze. Thousands of young men took flying lessons in the hope of emulating Lindbergh, cities that didn’t already have airports built them now, and the public sent airmail letters as it never had before. Parker Brothers even created a board game called “Aviation: The Air Mail Game” to take advantage of the fad. Many private airlines choose this moment to issue stock, which speculators devoured, causing it to soar to unsustainable levels.
When the stock market crashed in October 1929, airline shares plummeted, putting the nascent industry in jeopardy. Its unlikely savior turned out to be Walter Folger Brown, Herbert Hoover’s postmaster general. A politically connected Republican attorney from Toledo, Ohio, Brown was an owlish-looking man who parted his dark hair in the middle and wore round glasses. He had helped elect Harding and Hoover and he wasn’t about to let anybody push him around in Washington. As postmaster general, he ordered a high-ceilinged sedan that he could get into and out of without removing his stovepipe hat. His political foes started calling him “High Hat Brown,” but he made no apology. Initially, Brown said, the Post Office had ordered him “a small Lincoln car,” but it simply wouldn’t do. “When I looked at the car,” he said “I found that a man of my height, and I am below the average, could not wear a top hat and sit in this car,” he said. “The occupant would have to keep his hat in his hand, because there was not clearance enough. We were greatly disturbed about that.” So Brown sent the Lincoln back and ordered a more suitable vehicle.
Brown was just as unyielding when it came to awarding airmail contracts. At his urging, Congress passed the Air Mail Act of 1930, enabling the department to award contracts without competitive bidding. With his new powers, Brown set out to reorder the imperiled aviation sector, which still carried more mail than people. “Someone has got to try to solve this problem, or we are going to have a collapse of the passenger-carrying industry in this country,” Brown insisted.
As far as Brown was concerned, the airline industry was too fragmented, and many companies formed to win airmail contracts were too weak to survive. In secret meetings at the department’s headquarters that would later become know as “the spoils conference,” Brown awarded contracts to the strongest airlines, forcing some of them to merge with a competitor, creating four large companies that would dominate the industry for decades to come: Transcontinental & Western Air (later known as TWA), American Airways, United Airlines, and Eastern Air Lines. Otto Praeger had proved the viability of commercial aviation; now Brown used airmail contracts to restructure the industry and ensure its survival in the Depression. But did Brown save the industry or did he abuse his power as postmaster general? Inevitably, there was a scandal, but it unfurled after the election of another president who doted on the Post Office unlike any other.
6
A Stamp Collector in
the White House
On March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his legs rendered useless by polio, made his way to the podium in Washington, D.C., on the arm of his son James to deliver his inaugural address with the now famous words, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The audience didn’t applaud. The country was in the throes of the worst economic depression in its history. One out of every four Americans was unemployed. In the previous two months, 4,000 banks had collapsed, and depositors were hurrying to withdraw their money from the surviving ones, all but guaranteeing that more would fail. Crop prices had tumbled, and farmers were defaulting on their mortgages and losing their land. There were plenty of reasons for Americans to be frightened.
The following day was a Sunday, but Roosevelt sequestered himself in the White House working out a plan for a four-day bank holiday, which he hoped would calm bankers and their jittery depositors. A technical question arose: should Roosevelt declare the holiday with an executive order or by proclamation? Roosevelt summoned Wilbur Carr, a State Department official known for coming up with solutions in gnarly situations. Carr told Roosevelt that he favored a proclamation, which settled the matter. He got up to leave, but the president stopped him. “Don’t go, Wilbur,” he said. “Wait until the others have gone.”
When the two men were alone, Roosevelt changed the subject. “Wilbur,” he asked eagerly, “don’t you get a good many interesting foreign stamps?”
“Yes, many,” Carr replied.
“I would appreciate it greatly if you would sometimes bundle up a few and send them over to me,” Roosevelt said.
This story has been recounted by at least one of Roosevelt’s biographers as evidence of his ability to maintain his sense of humor in a crisis, a personality trait that helped him restore the confidence of the American people during the Depression and lead them to victory in World War II. But historians often gloss over his passion for stamps. Roosevelt was a devoted collector, and once he occupied the White House, he involved himself in the Post Office’s stamp issuing process more than any other president before or after. Republicans accused Roosevelt of politicizing the process, and to some degree, they were right. But for stamp collectors, Roosevelt’s election was a glorious moment. They were accustomed to being called nuts and maniacs. Finally, they had a president who shared their obsession.
In 1886, 24 men posed for a picture at the top of the stairway in an ornately decorated building in Manhattan. Many of them appeared to be in their twenties and looked rather boyish even with their facial hair. The badges pinned to the labels of their suit jackets indicated that they were members of the newly formed American Philatelic Society, which would become the country’s largest stamp collectors’ club. Their newly elected leader, John K. Tiffany, a handsome, mustached 44-year-old, sat in the front row. Born in Massachusetts and educated in France, Tiffany had amassed one of the world’s best stamp collections and would shortly write the first book cataloging American stamps. But in St. Louis, where he spent his adult life, he was known for his legal practice. When the St. Louis Times mentioned Tiffany in an article about the growing popularity of stamp collecting and wrote of his collection of 13,000 stamps, it withheld his name as if trying to shield him from embarrassment.
The truth was that stamp collecting occupied a strange place in American culture. Within a decade after the Post Office issued its first stamps in 1847, people in the United States began hoarding them, and within two decades, more than sixty dealers advertised their services in publications like Tiny Collector and Philatelic Squeal. There were songs about the hobby, including “The American Stamp Polka,” “The Philatelic Waltz,” and “Stamp Galop,” and even a romantic novel entitled The Story of My Stamp Collection. But in the mainstream press, stamp lovers were often described as a little crazy and perhaps not without reason.
The American stamps craved by the philatelists were dull by today’s standards, featuring pictures of deceased presidents, vice presidents, senators, generals, admirals, and an occasional Indian or buffalo, and collectors were quick to assail the Post Office when it broke up the monotony. In 1869, the department issued more imaginative stamps that included a circular one bearing Franklin’s image and others with pictures of a postal rider, a mail train, a steamship, and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Rather than applauding, collectors scorned the new stamps, particularly a patriotic 30-cent one showing an eagle perched on a shield surrounded by American flags. The American Journal of Philately called it “the meanest looking stamp we have ever seen” and wrote that it “reminds us more of a bunch of rags hung out of a junk store than anything else.”
The collecting community also had a tense relationship with post office clerks. Collectors sought stamps in good condition, and it could take time to find the right ones. But clerks had long lines of customers and sometime became exasperated, like the postmaster of Newport, Rhode Island, who refused to fill a dealer’s order for stamped envelopes. “If you want them for business purposes, I’ll get them for you,” the postmaster said. “But if it’s for collectors, I can’t bother with them.”
By the 1920s, the number of collectors had swelled to 500,000 in the United States, and the Post Office realized it needed to treat them more deferentially. At the urging of Third Assistant Postmaster General Irving Glover, whose wife was a collector, the department created the Philatelic Agency in 1921, enabling collectors to order stamps through the mail in mint condition. It turned out to be a nice business for the Post Office. Collectors bought stamps and never used them, meaning the department kept nearly all the income from these purchases rather than incurring delivery costs. In its first year, the Philatelic Agency had sales of $20,906. Two years later, it made more than 10 times that amount as collectors overwhelmed its four clerks with orders. The Philatelic Agency was so successful that other countries emulated it, enabling collectors to fill their albums with stamps from around the world simply by sending a check and a stamped return envelope.
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