So in June 1968, Kappel stood at a press conference in a dark suit with a pointer in his hand gesturing at a flip chart showing how the reconstituted Post Office would work. Newspapers around the country praised the commission’s work, but Lyndon Johnson was reluctant to bless the plan. Johnson had recently announced that he would not run for reelection that year. Democrats disapproved of his handling of the Vietnam War and civil rights issues, dooming his chances of winning his party’s presidential primary. After Johnson announced his decision not to run for reelection, O’Brien left the administration to run Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Marvin Watson, the new postmaster general, told people that the Kappel Commission’s plan was “going nowhere.”
Republican presidential hopeful Richard Nixon disagreed. He praised the commission’s findings on the campaign trail, and after he was elected in 1968, Nixon appointed Winton Blount to be his postmaster general and act on them. A wealthy contractor from Montgomery, Alabama, Blount was a lanky 47-year-old with big ears and no lack of self-esteem. His friends called him “Red.” Unlike Frederick Kappel, Red Blount flaunted his wealth. He and his wife Mary lived in a Georgian-style mansion on 60 acres of land outside the city and owned a second home on nearby Lake Martin where they entertained guests on a real Chinese junk. Red drove a Jaguar. Mary preferred a Lincoln Continental.
Like most postmaster generals, Blount hadn’t given the Post Office much thought until Nixon tracked him down at a University of Alabama football game and offered him the job over the phone. But Blount was intrigued. He had dreams of running for office himself and would undoubtedly enhance his chances as a Republican candidate if he shook up the Post Office Department, long described by his party as a sclerotic, patronage-ridden mess. Blount studied up by reading the Kappel Commission report. At his first meeting in the White House with Nixon to discuss his appointment, Blount gave the president an ultimatum. “Mr. President,” Blount said, “if you want to reform the Post Office, I’d be delighted to do it. If you want a postmaster general like the rest of them, I’m not interested.” That was fine with Nixon. “Who’s going to make the appointments in the Post Office?” Blount challenged him. Nixon pointed his finger at Blount. “You are,” he said.
Nixon had more pressing things to worry about than the Post Office. The Vietnam War was escalating. The U.S. economy was weakening. He had to desegregate southern schools without alienating his supporters in the region. Nixon also didn’t think Blount would get the votes for postal reform as long as Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. He underestimated Blount’s determination. Blount moved into Jim Farley’s cavernous office, bringing along his African American chef Jesse Butcher to cook grits, quail, and other southern specialties for him.
It wasn’t long before Blount upset people on Capitol Hill. With Nixon standing beside him, Blount announced at a press conference that all Post Office hiring would be merit-based from now on. House Republican leader Gerald Ford endorsed the proposal, but individual party members were furious about it. They had just regained the White House after eight years, and they were eager to reward their campaign workers with jobs. “That son of a bitch takes away all the job opportunities Republicans have been crying for a generation,” said H. R. Gross, a Republican congressman from Iowa. Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s congressional liaison, told Nixon that he would be “committing hari-kari” if he supported Blount’s misguided scheme.
Nixon didn’t waver, and neither did Blount. Blount asked Ford to let him address the Republican caucus in a closed session. For two and a half hours, members of Blount’s own party berated him for taking away their patronage appointments. “We called together all of the Republicans in a private off-the-cuff discussion,” says Paul Carlin, Blount’s legislative aide. “They all gathered in one room, and Red spoke to them for two hours. There was no one in there except the congressmen, Red, and me. They were so vividly angry. I mean, they shouted and jumped up and down.”
At the end of the meeting, the Republican lawmakers weren’t satisfied. So 10 days later, Blount returned for another gripe session. This one lasted an hour and a half, but when it was over, Blount’s fellow Republicans understood something about the new postmaster general: they could yell all they wanted to, but it didn’t mean a thing to Red Blount.
Congressional foes of postal reform soon discovered that Blount was determined to go over their heads to the public. He formed the bipartisan Citizens Committee for Postal Reform to spread pro-reform messages in their districts. The commission was chaired by former Kentucky senator and Republican Party chairman Thruston Morton and Larry O’Brien. O’Brien detested Nixon, but he couldn’t let Republicans run away with postal reform. So he swallowed his pride and attended a press conference in support of Blount’s initiative at Nixon’s home in San Clemente, California. “Larry, why don’t you stand here to my right?” Nixon said.
O’Brien replied, “Just as long as it’s not too far to your right.”
The committee took out newspaper advertisements promising that corporatization would speed delivery and improve working conditions for postal employees. Blount also enlisted a public relations team to spread negative press about the agency. One of the results was “The U.S. Mail Mess,” a 1969 Life magazine cover story that explained how the modern Post Office delivered letters more slowly than the Pony Express. “No one really runs the Post Office,” Blount told the magazine.
Like O’Brien and Kappel before him, Blount warned of a catastrophe if Congress didn’t restructure the Post Office soon. “The volume of mail continues to increase,” Blount told a Senate committee. “At some point in time, we are going to reach the point where this system cannot continue to operate as it is presently constituted. It will break down of its own weight. That kind of breakdown could happen, not only in Chicago, but in many of the urban areas of this country; it could happen all at once, and we would have economic chaos.” If senators and representatives didn’t get the message, Blount tried to deliver it to them personally. Nixon kept a yacht called the Sequoia on the Potomac. Blount used it to entertain lawmakers. He invited them in groups of five or six to breakfasts in his office, where Butcher served them his delectable grits and quail. “If we don’t pass postal reform and get Blount out of town, he’s going to kill us with those grits,” complained one of Blount’s guests.
Blount’s doggedness impressed a lot of people, but it wasn’t enough. Frederick Kappel thought Blount was alienating Congress with his aggressiveness. “He wouldn’t budge on anything,” Kappel later said. “He was too rigid.” Blount was up against a group of foes who were equally unyielding: the leaders of seven postal worker unions. The presidents of these unions had become some of the most active lobbyists and biggest contributors on Capitol Hill. They didn’t think their members were getting paid enough, but they preferred to deal with Congress rather than take their chances with a postal corporation. The union presidents didn’t always get along with each other, but they were united in their opposition to Blount’s plan.
The only union leader the White House thought it might be able to convert was James Rademacher, the tall, charismatic leader of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC). Unlike his counterparts, Rademacher had endorsed Nixon in the 1968 race, but Rademacher and Blount had a toxic relationship. They weren’t just diametrically opposed when it came to postal reform; furthermore, they hated each other. Rademacher had attacked Blount’s public relations campaign, calling it “one of the smoothest and most massive attempts at public brainwashing since the German glory days of Joseph Paul Goebbels.”
Blount accused Rademacher of willfully distorting his reform plan and refused to meet with him. “From time to time we have been asked why the postal unions are opposed to the Postal Service Act,” Blount said. “Mr. Rademacher’s reckless misrepresentation suggests a possible answer.” As long as Blount and Rademacher were in a stand-off, the future of the Post Office was in jeopardy. Ultimately, they e
nded up working together and bringing about the most sweeping organizational change in the department’s history, but first there was a postal crisis that dwarfed the one in Chicago.
Benjamin Franklin, architect of the American colonial post, and first postmaster general.
A post office circa 1809, where all sorting was done by hand.
In 1835, a mob in Charleston, South Carolina, broke into the post office and burned abolitionist newspapers. Postmaster General Amos Kendall condemned the American Anti-Slavery Society for mailing “exaggerated” accounts of slavery.
Before railroads, the Post Office sent mail to California via steamship.
Patrons in San Francisco crowded the post office.
The Pony Express, one of the most famous chapters in the history of the Post Office, was unprofitable and short-lived.
By 1867, postal routes stretched far across the country.
The Post Office faced competition from private carriers such as Adams Express, shown here in 1861 with packages for soldiers in the Civil War.
The abuse of franking has a long history.
Railroads increasingly connected the country and sped the mail.
A city letter carrier in 1885. Free home delivery had begun in 1863.
In the early twentieth century, mail was regularly carried by dogsled in Alaska. The last scheduled run ended in 1963.
Wanamaker’s “Cast Iron Palace” in New York, at 10th Street and Broadway.
Department store magnate John Wanamaker raised $200,000 for William Henry Harrison and was named postmaster general in 1889.
Mail was delivered to homes two times a day until 1950. This image from 1904 is captioned “a letter to Papa.”
Rural free delivery, which Wanamaker advocated, was opposed by small-town merchants. It was finally made permanent in 1902 by Theodore Roosevelt.
Mail volume steadily increased, with sorting done as it was a century before: by hand.
Wanamaker pushed for a parcel post, but the Post Office was kept out of the business until 1912, a situation lamented in this cartoon that appeared in an issue of Puck in 1910.
The Post Office adopted new technology, like the automobile, but were still using horse carts in some cities in 1917.
The use of horses on rural routes lasted for decades after the Post Office’s adoption of the automobile, like here in New Mexico in 1940.
Benjamin Franklin created the Dead Letter Office, pictured here circa 1900.
After the creation of the parcel post, there were enough incidents of “child mailing” that the Post Office had to outlaw the practice.
Carriers laden with Christmas mail in 1910.
The Post Office developed a system of sorting mail on trains in the nineteenth century. Special train cars were used, like this one in 1909.
Puck ridiculed Anthony Comstock, the crusading moralizer who used federal postal laws to stamp out “obscenity,” as “St. Anthony Comstock, The Village Nuisance.”
The postal savings bank, proposed by Wanamaker in 1889, was created by William Howard Taft in 1910. This photograph shows some of the first depositors. Half a century later it was the largest bank in America.
Pneumatic tube systems were introduced in the late nineteenth century in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, and New York, pictured here in 1914.
Mail being boxed by hand in New York in 1914.
Clerks in Washington, D.C. test the Gehring Mail Distributing Machine in 1923. With a keystroke, the clerks could sort letters into boxes for 120 cities or states, but the machine was never used and widespread mechanization wouldn’t happen until the 1950s.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the building of lavish post offices.
Otto Praeger, father of the Air Mail.
Lt. George Boyle would go down in history as “Wrong Way Boyle,” after piloting the first Air Mail flight south to Waldorf, Maryland, instead of north to New York.
The original Air Mail pilots were a glamorous, courageous bunch.
Postmaster General Albert Burleson and Woodrow Wilson at the ceremonial inauguration of Air Mail Service in 1918.
Mail being loaded onto the plane for the inauguration.
Early Air Mail flights, like this one from 1918 in a Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny,” were dangerous.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a devoted collector of stamps, and even designed new issues while president.
Roosevelt’s campaign manager James Farley was named postmaster general in 1932. Farley was the consummate machine politician, but ran into trouble with the stamp-collecting community.
During the Roosevelt presidency, the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned 1,200 murals in post offices, including these in the new U.S. post office building, which opened in Washington D.C. in 1934.
From top to bottom: “Country Post,” (1938) by Doris Lee; “Mail Service in the Tropics,” (1937) by Rockwell Kent; “Sorting the Mail,” (1936) by Reginald Marsh.
A Works Products Administration poster. The Depression caused mail volume to drop.
During WWII, V-Mail enabled more mail to be sent in less space. Letters were photographed and transferred to microfilm, then printed overseas.
The post office was the source of many jobs for minorities and women, here sorting mail in 1966.
From 1940 to 1960, mail volume doubled to 64 billion pieces a year. Zip codes were supposed to be the solution.
Mr. Zip helped sell zip codes to a reluctant public.
In 1970, the largest wildcat strike in American history crippled the post office and much of the country.
In the 1980s, the USPS knew the mail would be affected by computers. Electronic Computer Originated Mail, or E-COM for short, was intended as an answer, but it was hamstrung, and was cancelled in 1985.
After much delay, the USPS developed sophisticated, technologically advanced systems for mail, only to see first class volume decline precipitously.
8
The Day the Mail Stopped
In 1941, James Rademacher, a recently married 19-year-old with a pregnant wife, sat in the Redford, Michigan, post office just outside Detroit, waiting for work. There was no guarantee when he arrived each morning that he would get any. He was a temporary substitute, which meant he filled in for the permanent letter carriers when they were sick or took a holiday. Rademacher begged the other employees to take pity on him. “We’re expecting our first child,” he told them. “Could you possibly take a day or two off so I could get some money?”
One day, the carrier who delivered mail in the Dime Bank building in Detroit answered his plea and took a day off. Rademacher got his route. When he arrived at the building, he was astonished to find a pile of mail two feet taller than he was. He was so nervous that he ducked into a stairwell and threw up. When Rademacher emerged, the supervisor had given the route to another substitute.
Five months later, Rademacher became a full-time substitute, which meant he had steady hours. He was drafted in 1944 and served for two years in the U.S. Navy in World War II. When he was discharged, he became a regular carrier just like his father. The pay still wasn’t much, but Rademacher and his fellow carriers took pride in their work. They wore ties and jaunty caps. This was a time when the Post Office delivered mail several times a day, and carriers were expected to get it there on time. There was a street mailbox on every block. Rademacher remembers emptying the mailboxes at 11 pm so that letters could be delivered the following day.
Back then, letter carriers had a close relationship with people on their routes. The community Rademacher served sent flowers to the hospital when he and his wife, Martha, had their two children. At Christmastime, they gave Rademacher presents to take home to his children. “That’s how much they care about you if you treat them right,” he says. “Not every carrier treats them right, of cou
rse, but the majority do.”
But Rademacher didn’t want to deliver mail the rest of his life. He tried to get a management job, but that didn’t work out so he got involved in the union. When a representative from the Detroit branch of the NALC came around to collect dues, Rademacher pressed him about what he was getting for his money. The dues collector answered that if he was so curious, he should come to a meeting and find out. Rademacher showed up at the next one with 15 other young carriers from his post office. William Nonen, president of the Detroit branch, was so impressed that he made Rademacher the union representative at the Redford post office. Rademacher found that he enjoyed taking on the management. In one of his first cases, he defended a carrier who had been suspended for three weeks for putting a letter in the wrong mailbox. Rademacher said that the carrier had delivered mail for 25 years without a complaint. Wasn’t the punishment too harsh? “We’ve got to have good service at this station,” the supervisor told him.
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