Walker also oversaw a campaign to airlift hundreds of millions of letters to American troops fighting overseas in World War II. Collaborating with the Army and Navy, the Post Office created V-Mail, a process enabling people to write short letters, which were converted to microfilm, flown overseas, and finally transferred back onto paper and delivered to soldiers. “An air-mail sack weighs about 70 pounds,” Walker said. “By the use of V-Mail forms . . . the same 70 pounds can be reduced to two pounds.” Within a year, the Army Post Office alone had delivered 25 million V-Mail messages.
The Post Office encouraged people to send V-Mail to boost the morale of American fighting men, but some correspondents answered the call with too much enthusiasm as far as the department was concerned. Shortly after the service started, the Post Office told women to refrain from kissing V-mail letters, saying their lipstick might cover the addresses. Some newspaper columnists saw Walker’s influence in this edict. He was turning out to be quite a prude.
American soldiers loved Esquire magazine and hung its busty pinups in their barracks. In December 1943, however, Walker revoked the magazine’s second-class periodical discount because he found the alluring images obscene. Fearing that its mailing costs would become unaffordable, Esquire sued the Post Office. Its editor Arnold Gingrich testified that he had been making monthly trips to Washington to show the magazine to postal officials before it went to press, a process he found burdensome and unfair. “It seemed like it was the only way to stay out of trouble,” he said. “I would make all the required revisions on the spot, and some of the things I had to ‘tone down’ seemed to me to be a case of bending over backward to avoid offending even the most sensitive of sensibilities to a degree that was nearly ludicrous.”
The case was covered extensively by the country’s newspapers, which generally found Walker’s objections laughable. The Roosevelt administration’s enemies tried to turn the conflict between the postmaster and the men’s magazine into a presidential campaign issue. Congressman Ranulf Compton, a Republican from Connecticut, accused Walker of setting himself up as “sole dictator over the nation’s reading matter. The postmaster general has indicated that he had taken this outrageous action in order to force Congress to clarify the law,” Compton fulminated. “That is comparable to a bank robber committing a murder in order to force the courts to determine whether murder committed in the commission of a felony is first or second degree. If every crackpot appointed by the New Deal decided to issue arbitrary and ridiculous interpretations of precedent law in order to force the hand of Congress, the nation will be in a sorry stats.” The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and the eight judges issued a unanimous ruling in Esquire’s favor.
Roosevelt wisely stayed out of this fight. He was overseeing the U.S. invasion of Europe and meeting with America’s allies to discuss how the continent would be reconfigured after Hitler’s defeat, but he was never too busy to think about stamps. He called Walker late one night and told him he wanted an unadorned five-cent stamp with the words “Toward United Nations” to honor the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. “The design has to be as simple as possible,” Roosevelt said.
Roosevelt planned to attend the historic gathering and buy one of the first sheets himself in the city’s main post office, but his health was deteriorating. He spent much of that month at his home in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he was secretly joined by his former girlfriend, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, with whom he had had an affair in the early years of his marriage. Rutherfurd invited her friend, the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, so she could paint Roosevelt’s portrait. On the morning of April 12, Shoumatoff had the president sit in the living room and wrapped a navy blue cape on his shoulders. She could see that Roosevelt wasn’t feeling well and thought she knew something that might lift his spirits. She had recently seen a new three-cent Florida centennial stamp and asked Roosevelt if he had anything to do with it. “Yes,” Roosevelt said, brightening. “I certainly did.” After about an hour, he raised his hand to his temple and said, “I have a terrific headache.” He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and he died several hours later. Three months later, the Post Office Department released a memorial stamp in his honor at the post office in Hyde Park that he had helped design.
The Post Office arguably reached its zenith around this time. In 1947, it delivered 36 billion items, including 713 million postcards. The department’s annual income had surpassed $1 billion and it employed more 300,000 workers. Postal savings bank deposits peaked at almost $3.4 billion. The department had never been bigger or more prominent.
The public’s sentiment for the Post Office had never been stronger either. Miracle on 34th Street, one of the year’s most popular movies, highlighted the Post Office’s Letters to Santa program, which allows people to buy gifts for needy children who mail their Christmas wishes to Santa Claus at the North Pole. In the film, New York postal workers deliver 50,000 of the children’s letters to the judge who is ruling on the sanity of Kris Kringle, a kindly old man who claims to be the real Santa Claus. Previously, the judge has been skeptical, but once the uniformed carriers dump bags of letters on his desk, he changes his mind. “Since the United States government declares this man to be Santa Claus, this court will not dispute it,” the judge says. “Case dismissed!”
“Thank you so much, your honor,” Kringle says, “and a very merry Christmas to you.”
Yet as the Post Office’s deficits swelled, Jesse Donaldson, Harry Truman’s postmaster general, reduced the number of daily residential deliveries from two to one to save money, ending what now seems like a wondrous time in American history. Telephones were becoming ubiquitous. In 1950, AT&T handled 51 billion calls compared with the Post Office’s delivery of 45 billion pieces of mail. People no longer needed to be able to send a letter in the morning and get a reply in the afternoon. They could just pick up the phone and instantly talk to their families and friends. A Gallup Poll showed that 47 percent of the public disapproved of Donaldson’s service cut while 53 percent thought it was a good idea or just didn’t care.
The spread of telephones, however, didn’t do anything to diminish the amount of mail flowing into people’s homes. Businesses still relied on the Post Office to deliver their bills. Magazine publishers needed it to carry their thick, glossy product, and mail-order companies needed it to transport their catalogs. In 1940, the average American received 211 pieces of mail a year; a decade later, that number rose to 292.
In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Arthur Summerfield, a Flint, Michigan, car dealer who had been his campaign manager, to be postmaster general and deal with this flood. In some ways, Summerfield was a buffoonish character. He made headlines with his short-lived effort to send mail by guided missile. “Before man reaches the moon,” Summerfield said, “mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India or to Australia by guided missile.” In fact, the postal service did this only once, firing a missile with 300 letters from a naval submarine to an air station on the Florida coast.
Summerfield was also obsessed with pornography. He kept a collection of obscene magazines and films confiscated from the mail in a special room and showed it to visitors. Channeling the spirit of Anthony Comstock, Summerfield ruled in 1959 that D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was too offensive to be mailed and confiscated copies. “Any literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by the pornographic and smutty passages and words so that the book, taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work,” Summerfield said.
Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, which had published the book in the United States, sued the Post Office in a federal court in New York. His attorney called upon famous literary critics like Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin to testify about the importance of Lawrence’s book. Federal District Court Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan ruled against the Post Office. “The Postmaster General has
no special competence or technical knowledge on this subject which qualifies him to render an informed judgment entitled to special weight in the courts,” Bryan wrote. The New York Times would later say that this was the day that obscenity became art in the United States. The Post Office would try again in the coming years to ban other books from the mail, but after Bryan’s ruling, this became a futile effort.
In other ways, however, Summerfield was prescient. He could see that the system was breaking down. The decline of the railroads was forcing the Post Office to abandon the Railway Mail Service, which meant that it had to fly the mail between cities and then move it in trucks in downtown post offices through crowded urban streets. The change inevitably slowed down delivery and led to widespread customer dissatisfaction. During the Depression, the Roosevelt administration had poured money into the Post Office’s infrastructure, but there hadn’t been much investment since then. Summerfield saw the effect as he traveled around the country. “Almost everywhere work was being done with shopworn equipment in run-down, overcrowded, poorly lighted postal buildings constructed years before,” Summerfield wrote in his memoir U.S. Mail. “Most tasks were being done by hand, too slowly and too expensively, in the same way they had been done in the days of the first postmaster general—Benjamin Franklin.” Summerfield pleaded with Congress to raise stamp prices so he could modernize the Post Office. In 1958, Congress raised the price of sending a one-ounce letter to four cents, its first increase since 1932. For Summerfield, it was too little and too late. He left the Post Office in 1961 much as he had found it.
7
Mount Semrow
In the summer of 1963, when people went to their local post office to purchase stamps, many encountered a wide-eyed, orange-faced figurine clad in a letter carrier’s blue uniform. His name was Mr. Zip. When they pressed a button on his side, they heard the brassy-voiced Broadway star Ethel Merman deliver a special version of “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah.” “Welcome the Zip Code,” Merman half sang and half shouted in her inimitable style. “Learn it today. Send your mail out the five-digit way!”
Mr. Zip symbolized the five-digit zip code, the most radical address change since a century before, when Abraham Lincoln’s postmaster general Montgomery Blair required people to put street addresses on their envelopes. Not that a street address was always necessary. The acerbic Washington columnist Drew Pearson once received a letter addressed to “S.O.B., Washington” from a reader upset about his criticism of Harry Truman. But between 1940 and 1960, the amount of mail delivered by the Post Office more than doubled, from 28 billion to 64 billion pieces a year. Clerks could no longer sort it all fast enough under the old system.
The zip code was supposed to be the solution. The first number represented one of 10 delivery zones around the county, starting with zero in the Northeast and ending with the number nine on the West Coast. The second number often indicated a state, and the third usually represented a big-city post office where mail was sorted. The fourth and fifth typically indicated the closest post office to a letter recipient’s home. In other words, a clerk could look at a zip code and pinpoint almost exactly where a given piece of mail was going without squinting to read a sender’s scrawled handwriting.
The Post Office wanted Mr. Zip to become as familiar as Smokey the Bear. Small-town postmasters arranged for him to ride on floats in parades and appear at country fairs. The Post Office held beauty contests around the country, crowning the winners Miss Zip Code. Dick Tracy, the popular square-jawed comic strip detective, appeared in an advertisement telling postal customers, “Protect your mail. Use Zip Codes!” The Post Office also recruited Hugh O’Brian, star of ABC’s The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, to promote the code. Mr. Zip also appeared in a board game (“Zip Code: The Last Word in Games!”) and on lunch boxes, on coffee mugs, and as a bobble-head doll.
Hoping to take advantage of the folk music craze which had spawned the ABC show Hootenanny, the Post Office ran public-service ads featuring an ensemble called the Swinging Six whose members wore turtlenecks, strummed acoustic guitars, and urged the public to use the zip code or else. “There’s been a mail explosion!” the Swinging Six sang. “They’ve got a terrible load! You’ve got to help them right away before the U.S. Post Office explodes!” But the Swinging Six had good news: the Post Office had developed a computerized machine that could instantaneously read and separate letters based on the five-number code. They called it “the fantastic zip code scanner!”
The zip code would eventually become a fixture in American life, something everybody used to send letters and packages. Initially, however, people thought the zip code seemed like another step toward an Orwellian future when the federal government and large corporations would reduce everything in people’s lives to numbers. AT&T had recently angered the public by requiring people to use entirely numerical telephone numbers rather than the old ones with distinctive two-letter prefixes, like BUtterfield or MUrray Hill, that stood for their neighborhoods. With the zip code’s introduction, people wondered if small towns like Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Wounded Knee, South Dakota; and Boring, Oregon, would forfeit their quirky names and become 87901, 57794, and 97009.
Postal workers didn’t care for the zip code at first either. Clerks who had previously had to memorize complicated numerical “schemes” representing towns, neighborhoods, and streets worried that the zip code would dumb down their profession. Letter carriers felt insulted by the cartoonish Mr. Zip. “I’m tired of the image of the American Letter Carrier being held up for public ridicule,” complained a carrier from Fort Worth, Texas. “No Letter Carrier I have ever seen looks as absurd as Mr. Zip.” Yet before the end of 1963, the Washington Post declared the Post Office’s campaign to create public awareness of the zip code an overwhelming success. “Even if they’re not using it,” the Post wrote, “they’re talking about it.”
The Post Office really did have a fantastic zip code scanner. In the 1950s, the department’s research division created a device called an optical character reader, which sorted mail using an electric eye that could separate 36,000 letters an hour by zip code. The machine couldn’t decipher handwriting yet. But business mail now accounted for 80 percent of America’s postal volume. Companies spewed it out using computerized address lists and mailing labels. And the scanner could read a computer-generated zip code.
The Post Office was counting on the optical character reader to help it cope with the surging volume of mail. It knew that half of this mail came from 25,000 companies. The department would give them a three-year deadline to adopt the zip code. If it could install optical character readers in 200 large post offices, which handled 60 percent of America’s mail, the Post Office wouldn’t be swamped with letters. There was one problem. The Post Office had only one optical character reader, and it was a prototype still being tested at the Detroit post office. At the rest of the department’s 34,000 post offices, clerks still sorted mail by hand as they had done in Benjamin Franklin’s time. The Swinging Six weren’t exaggerating. The Post Office really was about to explode.
Harry Semrow, the postmaster of Chicago, was known in the city as “the world’s happiest postmaster.” Some even called him “the swingingest postmaster we’ve ever had.” A handsome, six-foot-four conservatory-trained pianist with a quick wit and a toothy grin, he could sing and play the accordion with almost professional ease. He was also a talented politician who had made himself indispensable to Mayor Richard Daley, Chicago’s political boss. Thanks to Daley, the 48-year-old Semrow had already served five years as a state legislator. His current position at the Post Office was just another in a string of political jobs, which, coupled with his outside business interests, would make Semrow quite wealthy. Of course, he was happy.
On the evening of December 28, 1963, Semrow was onstage at the Chicago Stadium in front of an audience of 13,000 postal workers hosting their annual holiday party. It was a very special occasion. Semrow introduced the gospel
singer Mahalia Jackson, one of the evening’s featured performers. He clowned around with movie star Jimmy Durante and even sang a song himself about the perils of postal work, accompanied by a letter carrier in a dog costume. The Chicago post office marching band performed in new red-white-and-blue uniforms paid for out of something called the Chicago Post Office Welfare Fund, as did the Chicago post office chorus, whose 70 members wore shiny new robes. Before Semrow joined the stars to sing “Auld Lang Syne,” he thanked his audience for another fine year. But perhaps he spoke prematurely.
Semrow’s Chicago post office was the largest mail processing facility in the world. It was known as “the hub of the American postal universe.” Most of the mail traveling across the country passed through the massive building that spanned two city blocks and contained three million square feet. Inside, 14,900 clerks sorted 21 million pieces of mail a day, but it was a constant struggle. The amount cascading through the Chicago post office was twice as much as the monumental building was designed to handle when it opened in 1934.
On the night of the holiday gala, the Chicago post office was bursting with Christmas packages. Trucks were backed up for blocks outside the building, unable to drop off their loads because there was a backlog of parcels inside that couldn’t be sorted quickly enough. Employees called it “Mount Semrow.” Tons of packages wouldn’t arrive at people’s homes until after Valentine’s Day. “We were really in a bind,” said Clairborne Bolton, Semrow’s assistant director of operations. “We had nearly 100,000 sacks of Christmas packages unprocessed. Some of it was stored in a garage. We had mail piled up all over the place.” Semrow joked that businessmen must have been mailing presents when they should have been attending their holiday office parties.
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