Farley didn’t do himself any favors by dissembling. First he said he had no idea how the stamps had gotten into private hands. “When that Mother’s Day stamp came out, I think Mrs. Roosevelt got one of the sheets and another got loose,” he said. “That’s probably the one that is down in Norfolk.” Next, he insisted that the stamps were worthless “specimens” because the Post Office never sold them.
Republicans saw an opportunity to embarrass the man they called Roosevelt’s “jobs-master.” Charles Millard, a thick-necked, bespectacled Republican congressman from Westchester County, New York, called for Farley to appear before Congress to explain the stamp gifts. “The real question at issue is not whether certain philatelists or stamp dealers have been injured, but whether Mr. Farley or any official of the United States has used his official position to show favors and bestow valuable gifts upon a special group of people,” Millard said on the House floor. Another Republican asked if the rugs were still on the floor in the postmaster general’s office. The Democratic-controlled House overwhelmingly rejected Millard’s request to interrogate the postmaster general and chairman of their party’s national committee. “It was the biggest turnout since the opening day of Congress,” the Chicago Tribune observed. But allegations of favoritism hung over the stamps that collectors now referred to as “Farley’s Follies.”
The politically shrewd Farley came up with a face-saving scheme. If collectors wanted proof sheets, he would furnish them. The Post Office announced that it would sell the same kind with neither gum nor holes to the public beginning on March 15, 1935. Thousands of happy collectors lined up at the Philatelic Agency’s window and the Benjamin Franklin Post Office in Washington to purchase the stamps. One buyer hitchhiked all the way from Kansas the day before so he could sleep on the post office floor and be first in line for the sale. Postal workers told him he couldn’t spend the night in the building, but he was outside when the sun came up, and he was soon at the front of a long line of men, women, children, and soldiers in uniform. The Post Office stationed inspectors to keep the peace, but the collectors didn’t cause trouble; they just wanted their proof sheets. On the first day, the Post Office reaped $529,838. The Washington Post called it “the greatest stamp rush in history.”
It was almost as if Farley had orchestrated the entire thing as a publicity stunt. Later that year the American Philatelist published a poem entitled “To Hon. James A. Farley, Master Salesman of the World.”
A master salesman—Here’s to Jim,
We never saw the likes o’ him.
He doesn’t need to advertise,
This politician, smooth and wise.
He changes the critic’s stinging lash
To a half a million dollars—cash!
This Master Salesman shrewd and arch,
Who sold us stamps the ides of March.
Those sheets ungummed with center lines
And perforated gutter lines—
He gave us what we hollered for
And took our shekels by the score.
He saved the labor costs and gum—
So speed the presses, let ’em hum
A chance to sell—He would not muff it,
More than half a million profit.
The Devotees of Philatelum
Buy all the stamps that Jim will sell ’em.
(A half a million of the line
In half a day is doing fine.)
And Texas, Maine, and Delaware
And Foreign buyers, too, were there.
They had the cash—God bless their souls—
Jim sold ’em stamps—without the holes!
Farley also poked through departmental records and discovered that under Republican administrations, the Post Office had given entire albums of stamps to party leaders like President Theodore Roosevelt and bosses like House speaker Joseph Cannon and New York’s U.S. senator Chauncey Depew. Farley found that Republican loyalist Anthony Comstock had also received free stamps from the department. “As long as the critics felt that I should be purer than the pure Anthony Comstock in regard to souvenir stamps, I had no wish to disappoint them,” Farley would later write.
Throughout it all, Roosevelt remained in the good graces of collectors. In the summer of 1935, the American Philatelic Society held its fiftieth annual convention in Washington, D.C. Roosevelt allowed some of his stamps to be exhibited on the convention floor. The president invited Max Ohlman, his personal stamp dealer, to the White House for tea. The two men laughed at the news that Herbert Hoover had belatedly joined the society that day. Roosevelt promised to have his picture taken the next morning with conventioneers on the White House lawn. The following day, there was pandemonium outside the White House as hundreds of collectors tried to get past the guards to have their pictures taken with the president. The White House panicked and called it off. But the society’s members forgave Roosevelt. Thanks to him, their hobby had never been more popular; Farley estimated that the number of American collectors was approaching 10 million. “The United States has become the stamp-collecting wonder of the world,” wrote the New York Times.
Roosevelt’s interest in the Post Office went beyond stamps. He wanted people to purchase them in nicer buildings. As part of his effort to create jobs and get the American economy moving, his administration built 1,731 new post offices, more than any previous administration. But Roosevelt wanted to do more than just put people to work. He wanted to create post offices that inspired stamp buyers and made them proud to be Americans. With his blessing, the Treasury Department funded and designed post offices that were more attractive than most of the ones built before. It constructed mission-style post offices in California, art deco ones in Florida, and colonial revival–style post offices in the older Northeast.
Many of these buildings are now historical landmarks and not just because of their lovely facades. Roosevelt wanted the lobbies of these buildings to be breathtaking too. So the Treasury Department created the Section of Painting and Sculpture (later called the Section of Fine Arts), which commissioned 1,200 murals and 300 sculptures for the new post offices by emerging American artists like Ben Shahn, Rockwell Kent, Philip Guston, and Milton Avery. Like the stamps of the Roosevelt era, these murals were meant to lift the spirits of Americans as they waited in line at the post office to buy stamps or mail a package.
Predictably, some of these murals were controversial. In 1937, Rockwell Kent completed a set of murals in the department’s headquarters in Washington depicting an airmail pilot arriving in Puerto Rico with a letter from Alaska written in an Eskimo dialect. Kent tipped off a reporter that the letter in the pilot’s hand contained a provocative message. The reporter had the letter translated and discovered it was a call for Puerto Ricans to rebel against their American rulers: “To the people of Puerto Rico, our friends! Go ahead. Let us change chiefs. That alone can make us equal and free.”
Farley asked Kent to replace the message with something less controversial, preferably in English, and threatened to withhold the final $1,300 of the artist’s payment. Kent refused and promised a suit of his own if Farley proceeded. The Treasury Department finally paid Kent in full because it said this would enable the federal government to take possession of the mural and sanitize it. The Washington Post warned the Roosevelt administration against this. “Hitler to the contrary notwithstanding, art can know no dictation—even when it impinges on propaganda,” the Post wrote. “Mr. Kent’s mural does just this, but a laughing and tolerant public will want it to stand. It happens to be good art, a verdict not always possible to hand down on most essays at mixing paint and politics.” Though he was no art aficionado, Farley listened. The mural still hangs in the building, unaltered.
There were more disputes over murals. In Safford, Arizona, the chamber of commerce objected to artist Seymour Fogel’s proposal to paint one showing Apache Indians performing a ceremonial dance. What w
as the problem? The chamber members said Geronimo had killed several of their Mormon parents. Puzzled Treasury Department officials explained that Geronimo was nowhere to be seen in the mural, which only upset local business owners more. Fogel ended up painting a mural showing the arrival of white settlers in Safford instead.
In Kennebunkport, Maine, locals protested Elizabeth Tracy’s fine mural of bathers at nearby Old Orchard Beach, saying the women in the painting weren’t sufficiently svelte. Senate Minority Leader Wallace White, a Republican from Maine, took up their cause. “The mural is a picture which, to speak frankly, depicts a group of fat women, scantily clad, disporting themselves on a beach,” White said. He waved off the suggestion that his constituents were prudes. “Oh, I don’t think those gentlemen of Kennebunkport have any objection to nudity,” he said. “It was the bulges, fore and aft, they objected to.” Sadly, Tracy’s mural was painted over.
More often, postal customers welcomed the murals. In small towns, people who had never been to a museum lingered at the post office, watching as muralists brought scenes from their community to life on the wall. Parents asked where their children could get art lessons because the local schools didn’t offer them. “The only trouble with the pictures is that they are so good they call for more of the same,” lamented the Pocahontas Times in Marlinton, West Virginia. “It is pitiful to arouse taste and desire for the artistic and shut off the supply: in the nature of cruel and unusual punishment. Those stark cold walls were never forbidding until two corners of our post office lobby were warmed into life by the fine paintings.”
An amateur architect, Roosevelt was deeply involved in the architectural design of post offices in six upstate New York towns including Hyde Park, where Springwood, his family’s ancestral home, is located. Roosevelt wanted architects to replicate the region’s vanishing Dutch Colonial buildings. “I never knew anyone to take as much interest in the public buildings of the neighborhood as my husband,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in “My Day,” her newspaper column. “He has watched every step of the Poughkeepsie Post Office building and now that they are starting a post office building in Rhinebeck, he is off this morning to discuss that.”
Roosevelt got the same kind of pleasure from conceiving post offices as he did designing stamps. Roosevelt befriended the architect Rudolph Stanley-Brown, with whom he worked on four of the buildings. The president drove the architect and his wife out to visit a historic house in Rhinebeck with a distinctive curved roof that he had selected to serve as the model for the village’s new post office. The Stanley-Browns rode in the back with two Secret Service agents. On the way, Stanley-Brown said he was sure the metal rods separating the panes of glass in the windows would be three-quarters of an inch wide. Roosevelt didn’t think so. “I think you’ll find, my boy, they are exactly one inch across,” he replied. When they arrived, Stanley-Brown found that the president was right. “That’s the kind of thing I remember,” Roosevelt said. “Not particularly useful in politics, but absorbing to me.”
Roosevelt dedicated the Rhinebeck post office on May 1, 1939. He stood on the front porch of the building on the cool, overcast day in his overcoat with Eleanor, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Farley, and the crown prince and princess of Denmark, who were touring the United States. Roosevelt told the crowd that filled the streets that his great-great-grandfather had lived in Rhinebeck and served in the Revolutionary War militia. He also talked about how the Post Office exemplified his administration’s ideals. “We are seeking to follow the type of architecture which is good in the sense that it does not of necessity follow the whims of the moment,” Roosevelt said, “but seeks an artistry that ought to be good, as far as we can tell, for all time to come.”
When Roosevelt was done, he handed a trowel to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark so he could lay the cornerstone. Farley joked that the post office might not stand for long because the prince wasn’t a member of the builders’ union. Roosevelt was ready with a quip of his own. “I now announce this very historic cornerstone has been well and truly laid and also that His Royal Highness is an honorary member of the Union, in good standing,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine a contemporary president caring so much about a post office, but Roosevelt understood that a local post office was more than just a place where people bought stamps. Throughout the country, post offices anchored downtowns and instilled a sense of patriotism by flying the American flag. They were civic spaces where people of all races and income levels mingled and felt the touch of the federal government. The clerks at the counters could be doting or brusque, but everybody got the same treatment. What could be more democratic?
For 12 years, Roosevelt and Farley were a political team. They collaborated on so many new stamps that Republicans accused them of pandering to collectors to get votes. They strengthened the Democratic Party by dispensing postmaster positions and rural letter carrier jobs. But Farley wasn’t a liberal ideologue like other members of Roosevelt’s brain trust, including Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins, director of the Works Progress Administration. He wanted to make friends, not enemies. He disagreed strongly with Roosevelt’s divisive attempt to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges who would support the New Deal and with his efforts to unseat Democratic senators who thwarted his legislative agenda. As the end of Roosevelt’s second term approached, Farley thought he had the perfect candidate to run for president in 1940 and unite the party: himself. After all, he had so many potential supporters. “Someone once asked me if I thought I had 50,000 friends,” Farley said. “Without wanting to brag, I think that 100,000 comes closer to the number. I can pick up this telephone on the desk and call up a friend in every city in the country from Maine to California and I know them all well enough to call them by their first names.”
Farley wasn’t taking any of them for granted either. On May 10, 1939, he departed to celebrate Postal Day at the San Francisco Fair. Along the way, he visited 13 states and delivered 20 speeches. Previously Farley had traveled the country as Roosevelt’s advance man, but now he did so on his own behalf. “Jim Farley has done more favors and made more friends than any politician in American history, and his power is proportionately vast,” Life magazine wrote. Farley refused to declare himself a candidate. The last thing he wanted was to be seen as disloyal to Roosevelt. But he encouraged speculation about his worthiness. “I’ve got as good a chance to be president as anybody in the world,” he said privately. At the end of the year, Farley sent more than 200,000 Christmas cards, signing each one in his distinctive green ink. “This is going to be a huge job, but I feel sure it will be worth it,” he wrote.
There was at least one obstacle to Farley’s presidential candidacy. As the Democratic convention approached in July 1940, Roosevelt refused to say whether he might run again, putting Farley in a difficult position. He spent a sweltering afternoon at Hyde Park, pressing the president to reveal his plans, but Roosevelt would not be pinned down. “Jim, I don’t want to run and I’m going to tell the convention so,” Roosevelt said. Both men understood that this left open the possibility that the party might ignore his public demurrals and nominate him anyway, in which case the president might argue that he had no choice but to grant its wish.
That was obviously what Roosevelt hoped for. At the convention in Chicago, party leaders indulged him by choreographing what was supposed to look like a spontaneous outpouring of support for Roosevelt, complete with a 45-minute parade on the floor by his enraptured supporters. As a matter of pride, Farley submitted his name for the nomination. The delegates gave him a standing ovation, and the band played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” but it was no use. There was a roll call vote. Roosevelt received 946 votes compared with Farley’s 72. Farley’s friends, so many of whom were in the hall, had deserted him. He resigned from the Post Office Department and the Democratic National Committee and took a job as the head of the international division of Coca-Cola. He became one
of Roosevelt’s harshest public critics, calling him a despot and an untrustworthy friend, the worst kind in Farley’s book.
Farley would never be president, but he would be the most famous postmaster general after Benjamin Franklin. In his farewell address, he told his employees not to be strangers and invited them to visit when he had settled in at Cola-Cola. “I should like to see any of you any time,” Farley said. “Only don’t crowd in at the same time.”
Roosevelt replaced Farley at the Post Office with Frank Walker, another Irish Catholic. Walker had grown up in a mining camp in Montana and became a wealthy movie theater owner and one of Roosevelt’s chief fund-raisers. Unlike Farley, Walker didn’t court the press, which explains why he remained a stranger to many of his new employees “Let’s get this straight,” Walker said in a speech to several hundred of them in New York after several years on the job. “I am the postmaster general, despite the fact that a lot of people think Jim Farley still has the job.” Walker later complained that Roosevelt had forced him into taking the job by publicly announcing his appointment at a campaign rally without giving him a chance to say no.
Like Farley, Walker soon found himself working with Roosevelt on stamp designs. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Walker was inundated with requests for jingoistic stamps celebrating America’s military might. A group of artists led by Paul Beranger, creative director of J. Walter Thompson, the New York advertising agency, drew up designs for stamps with tanks, bombers, and aircraft carriers and sent them to the White House for consideration. But Roosevelt didn’t like them. “They’re mighty fine designs,” he told Ernest A. Kehr, the New York Herald Tribune’s stamp columnist. “But would such pictures reflect what we’re trying to do? Wouldn’t they convey to the minds of the people for whom we’re fighting this war . . . that we are a militaristic and imperialistic nation?”
Instead, Roosevelt wanted individual stamps that celebrated America’s freedoms and China’s resistance to the Japanese. He called for a series of stamps with the flags of nations conquered by the Axis powers, including France, Poland, and Korea, and the image of a phoenix, the mythical bird that was reborn after its death. “It might tell those suffering victims in Europe that we are struggling for their own regeneration,” Roosevelt said. The president purchased the first sheets of these stamps at the White House with the ambassadors of the occupied countries at his side. Walker was there beside him smiling awkwardly, unlike Farley who was been a natural showman.
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