By the early 1930s, there were two million stamp collectors in the United States. Most major newspapers had stamp columnists. Gimbels opened stamp sales departments and started children’s stamp clubs in 45 of its stores around the country. And in 1932, NBC began broadcasting Ivory Stamp Club of the Air, a children’s radio show featuring “Captain Tim,” former Australian Army captain Tim Healy, whom it described as “the famous war veteran, soldier of fortune and stamp expert.” Healy, who was in fact Australian but had recently worked as a street sweeper after losing his job at an oil company in the Depression, entertained his audience three evenings a week. “Do you know you can learn history and geography and the strange customs of strange places just by studying stamps?” he asked his listeners. Healy encouraged them to join his club by mailing in an Ivory soap wrapper for which they would receive a membership badge in return, along with an album and a package of stamps for starting their collections. Two and a half million children heeded his call. “Keep healthy and strong with Ivory Soap so you won’t miss any of our programs,” Healy urged them. “Whether I’m in America, Australia or the jungles of Africa, I take my daily bath with Ivory Soap.”
It was great to have a champion like Captain Tim, but many Americans still thought of stamp collecting as an adolescent pastime. The most famous adult collectors seemed like cases of arrested development. Colonel Ned Green, a one-legged sybaritic millionaire, traveled to stamp dealers in a chauffeured limousine and stored his purchases in a New York apartment where they were guarded by his staff of nubile young women. Among Green’s treasures were a number of coveted Inverted Jennies, stamps issued by the Post Office in 1918 on the day of the new service’s debut. As it turned out, the famous biplane on the stamp was upside down on a number of sheets. Before the department discovered the error, a collector had bought a sheet of 100 at the Washington post office and sold it for $15,000 to a dealer who turned around and sold it to Green for $20,000. Green broke up the sheet and sold some of the stamps individually to his fellow collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. Some disappeared, despite the efforts of Green’s alluring guards. There were rumors that he burned a few to show off for his friends. It has also been speculated that he lost 20 of the precious stamps when his yacht sank in Half Moon Bay. Either way, Green was no role model. American collectors longed for someone who would legitimize their hobby as King George V, crowned in 1910, had done in England. They finally got their wish in 1932 when the Democratic Party nominated Franklin Roosevelt as its presidential candidate.
Born in 1882 in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt collected stuffed birds, model ships, and miniature books. He inherited his affection for stamps from his mother, Sara Delano, and it would outlast his other hobbies. He spent hours filling albums with stamps from faraway countries and making notes about their places of origin, which is how he gained his extensive knowledge of geography. He was especially intrigued with stamps from Hong Kong, where his aunt Dora resided. “Tell Uncle Will to save me foreign stamps as I have begun to make a collection,” Franklin wrote to her.
His interest waned when he went off to Harvard College and later he married his fifth cousin once removed Eleanor Roosevelt. He entered politics in 1910, serving first as a New York state senator and later as assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. He ran unsuccessfully for vice president in 1920 on a ticket led by Ohio governor James Cox. They were defeated by Republican Warren Harding and his running mate Calvin Coolidge, but Roosevelt was clearly a Democrat to watch, a charming young man with a radiant smile and a fine name even if some members of his party thought he lacked substance.
In 1921, Roosevelt was stricken with polio at his family’s vacation home on Campobello Island, losing the use of both his legs. Stamps provided him with an escape as he spent weeks in bed coming to terms with his disability, and his attachment to them would never again weaken. Every night before he fell asleep, he spent half an hour organizing and annotating his stamps much as he had when he was a boy. When he seemed overwhelmed, his secretary Missy LeHand produced one of his albums and put him at ease.
When Roosevelt returned to politics, he made no secret of his passion. After he was elected governor of New York in 1928, he was photographed at his desk examining his collection, magnifying glass in hand. In 1931, he joined the American Philatelic Society, which was thrilled the following year when he entered the presidential race. “From the view point of the collector per se, the victory of Governor Roosevelt at the polls this November would be the most desirable ever in philatelic history,” the American Philatelist wrote. “The resultant gain in prestige with the concomitant publicity that would necessarily follow would surely develop a world-wide boom in stamps. . . . The progress and spread of Philately in these United States would be of momentous proportions. And so, not as a Wet or Dry, not as a Democrat or a Republican, not as a liberal or a conservative, but simply as an enthusiast in Philately, we bespeak of favorable consideration by all the members of the A.P.S. of the candidacy of our fellow member, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, A.P.S. #11590 for the office of President of the United States!”
Roosevelt’s opponent Herbert Hoover noticed the rapturous endorsement. Soon after, someone from the Hoover campaign wrote to the society to tell it that the incumbent had “a high opinion of philately” and that his sons were longtime collectors. This was news to the editors of the American Philatelist. They subsequently wrote that no matter who won the election, it was important for the society to sign up at least one of the Hoover boys. It was always good to have well-placed friends in Washington.
After winning the presidential race in November 1932, Roosevelt selected James Farley, his campaign manager, to be the nation’s postmaster general—or, as the genial Farley liked to say, its chief “postage stamp salesman.” Farley was six feet two inches tall, weighed 215 pounds, and was the picture of a machine politician with his double chin and bald head. The son of Irish immigrants, he was born in 1888 in the small town of Grassy Point, New York. As a teenager, he worked in his mother’s tavern, tapping kegs, pouring drinks, and doing whatever he could to keep patrons happy. It was good training for his future career. Farley became known as a man who never forgot a face and had thousands of friends. “Some people have memories for figures, some for books,” he said. “I happen to have a memory for people, not only their faces but their names. I have no doubt that this has helped me in making friends. People don’t like to be forgotten. They want to be remembered.”
Farley became a top salesman for the General Builders Supply Corporation, but he longed for influence more than commissions. In 1925, Governor Al Smith of New York appointed him to the New York State Athletics Commission, which regulated boxing. Farley knew little about pugilism, but he won many new friends by dispensing free tickets to prizefights. “Jim Farley passes fall like snowflakes on the deserving and the grateful,” the New Yorker wrote in an early profile. Farley was also a prolific joiner, becoming a member of the Knights of Columbus, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Improved Order of Red Men, and the Fraternal Order of Eagles.
The popular Farley held on to his athletic commission post and his club memberships when he managed Roosevelt’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 1928. After the victory, Farley resuscitated the party in traditionally Republican upstate New York, writing letters to dozens of long-neglected Democrats in these areas and providing his assistance. Two years later, Roosevelt was reelected by a 750,000-vote margin and Farley floated his name as a presidential candidate. “I do not see how Mr. Roosevelt can escape becoming the next presidential nominee of his party even if no one should raise a finger to bring it about,” Farley told the press.
Two years later, Farley masterminded Roosevelt’s presidential campaign, traveling across the country to a national Elks convention in Seattle and stopping along the way to woo local Democratic leaders. On the night of his victory in 1932, Roosevelt celebrated with supporters including Farley and
his wife, Elizabeth, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York. He whispered to Mrs. Farley: “Get ready to move to Washington.” Elizabeth Farley said she didn’t want to leave New York. “Well, get ready anyway,” Roosevelt replied. “Because Jim is coming down there after the Fourth of July.” Roosevelt appointed Farley as both postmaster general and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the line between the two jobs tended to blur.
Democrats hadn’t held the White House in 12 years, so party members descended on Washington seeking an audience with Farley. They took up residence in the waiting room at the Democratic National Committee’s office, and they camped out on the green sofas in the reception area of the Post Office Department, where Farley had an office big enough to hold a basketball court, decorated with portraits of his mother and Benjamin Franklin. Job hunters stalked him in the hallways of the Mayflower Hotel, where he stayed in Washington. “I virtually had to slip back and forth to the office like a man dodging a sheriff’s writ,” Farley later wrote. There were requests from higher authorities too. Eleanor Roosevelt sent Farley a note on behalf of a relative: “Dear Jim, have we a Democratic postmaster appointed at Newberry, South Carolina? If not, I may have a candidate. A distant cousin has turned up. Very sincerely yours, ER.” Farley told the first lady there would be no vacancy at the Newberry post office until the sitting postmaster’s term expired in 1936.
Republicans condemned Farley as a political hack who filled the Post Office Department with more of the same, but he turned out to be an able administrator. The Depression had caused the Post Office’s volume to fall between 1929 and 1933 from 27 billion to 19 billion items and its revenues to decline from $696 million to $588 million. The department lost $113 million in Farley’s first year as postmaster general, but he trimmed the deficit by raising the price of mailing a half-ounce letter from two cents to three cents, the first increase since 1870, and by making his 242,971 employees take 11 payless furlough days. Department stores, utility companies, and some local governments started using private messengers to deliver bills and advertisements to people’s mailboxes. Farley put a stop to this, persuading Congress to pass a law, still in effect, forbidding anyone but a government letter carrier to deposit anything in a home mailbox.
Farley was fascinated by the exploits of the post inspectors and how they caught members of the fearsome Touhy gang who were robbing mail trucks around the country. In 1933, four of its members—Basil “The Owl” Banghart, Ludwig “Dutch” Schmidt, Isaac “Ike” Costner, and Charles “Ice Wagon” Connors, all of whom wore handkerchiefs over their faces—stole more than $325,000 in cash and bonds from a truck parked by the loading dock of the main post office in Sacramento, California. With very little to go on, just the laundry mark on an abandoned glove, postal inspectors tracked the gang members down and recovered 85 percent of the stolen goods.
The following year, Farley was even more amazed when postal inspectors shepherded $2.3 billion worth of gold weighing more than 2,375 tons from the U.S. Mint in San Francisco to the Denver Mint on special trains that secretly moved across the country on different days. For Farley, it was “like a fantastic tale from the Arabian Nights or some other highly romantic piece of literature.” He was less interested in censorship, abandoning the department’s efforts to keep books like Joyce’s Ulysses out of the mail.
While Farley acclimated himself at the Post Office, Roosevelt embarked on an unprecedented expansion of the federal government. He put unemployed people to work with jobs programs like the Works Progress Administration. He pushed through legislation to establish new regulatory agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which protected people’s savings; and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which policed Wall Street. Roosevelt also had to read a lot of mail. Hoover had need of only a single person on his staff to deal with his mail, but Roosevelt received more than 8,000 letters a day and needed a staff of 50 people to sift through it all.
Even with all that to keep him busy, Roosevelt wanted to see the designs for any new stamps that were being considered. So in September 1933, Farley visited Roosevelt at the White House to discuss a new stamp honoring Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, the famous explorer who had led expeditions to Antarctica. Much to Farley’s astonishment, Roosevelt spent an hour sketching a crude prototype with the routes that Byrd had taken to the south pole.
Farley couldn’t help noticing how much Roosevelt relaxed as he worked on the drawing. Until then, Farley had assumed stamps were just a diversion for the president, but now he saw how they rejuvenated him. The president wanted stamps that might do the same for the Depression-weary public. He wanted to celebrate aspects of American culture that had rarely, if ever, been depicted on stamps. Working closely with Farley, Roosevelt helped design a series honoring America’s national parks and another commemorating its poets, painters, composers, and inventors. When a women’s group visited Farley and urged him to issue a stamp honoring suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony, Roosevelt told him to grant their wish. “By all means, authorize the stamp immediately before those ardent ladies reach the White House,” Roosevelt joked. He was quick to pick up a pencil and sketch another prototype. Farley kept all the drawings, boasting that he had a complete collection of “original Roosevelts.”
He may not have collected stamps himself, but Farley knew how to sell them, turning the appearance of each new stamp into a media event. He invited cameramen to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to capture him tearing a proof sheet from the presses and autographing it for Roosevelt. “As you know, the president is an enthusiastic stamp collector,” Farley told reporters early on. He also signed sheets for Roosevelt’s chief of staff Louis Howe and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, both ardent collectors like their boss, and set some aside for his own three children.
Inevitably, the flamboyant postmaster general became a political target. Airlines that had lost out on airmail contracts under the Hoover administration accused former postmaster general Walter Folger Brown of favoritism. In 1934, the Senate held hearings, excoriating Brown for approving the deals without competitive bids. The White House ordered Farley to cancel the contracts and arrange for the Army Air Corps to carry the mail, which he dutifully did.
It was an unmitigated disaster. Unlike those flying for private airlines, the Army pilots weren’t prepared to fly in bad weather, and that’s what they encountered as they took to the skies in February. There were blizzards in the West and gales in the central and eastern states. In the first week, five pilots died, three of them while still in training. The aviation industry seized the opportunity to assail the White House. The World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, now a vice president of Eastern Air Lines, called Farley’s decision “legalized murder.” Republicans joined the attack. “The summary, autocratic and dictatorial manner of canceling the air mail contracts without a hearing is worthy of fascism, Hitlerism or Sovietism at their best,” said Hamilton Fish, a Republican congressman from New York. As the death count rose to 12, newspaper cartoonists depicted Farley leading a parade of dead pilots.
Meanwhile, former postmaster general Brown insisted on testifying before the committee and clearing his name. He explained what he had done to rescue the imperiled aviation industry and he said that even Farley had told him that he thought the hearings were bunk. (Farley denied this.) As public opinion turned against the White House, Roosevelt grounded the military airmail operation. “The continuation of deaths in the Army Air Corps must stop,” he said.
The Post Office rebid the contracts and the same big airlines won them. Farley pointed out that the Post Office got a better deal; its yearly airmail costs fell from $20 million in 1933 to less than $13 million in 1934. The crisis focused attention on the need to overhaul the Army Air Corp in the years leading up to World War II. But Farley was privately furious with Roosevelt for not defending him against the attacks.
Farley also ran into trouble with the philatelic community over his s
tamp sheet giveaways. Prominent dealers complained that unlike ordinary stamps, the sheets lacked gum and perforations and were therefore quite rare. Indeed, no true maniac’s collection would be complete without them. Columnists noted if the sheets ever turned up on the market, collectors would pay huge sums for them; therefore it wasn’t fair for Farley to dole them out to White House insiders.
Farley insisted the collectors were fussing over nothing, but the complaints continued, and in January 1935, Roosevelt told Farley to stop giving the sheets away. “I do not think that this should be continued, even if such sheets are regarded merely as samples and not available for postage in the regular way,” the president wrote to Farley in a memo. “Will you, therefore, be good enough to take steps to discontinue the issuance of any stamp or stamps except in the precise condition in which the issue is placed on sale at the Post Offices?”
Unfortunately, Farley had already given a sheet of Mother’s Day stamps to William Wallace Atterbury, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Atterbury passed the sheet on to a relative in Norfolk, Virginia, who hung it in her living room where a dealer spied it and offered to buy it for $15,000. When she turned him down, he raised his offer to $20,000 and then $22,5000. The dealer got the stamps and took them to New York to turn a profit. The news spread quickly among collectors, and they condemned Farley for ignoring their warnings.
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