“Is what he did any worse than when you ordered the maintenance man in this post office to go down in this cellar and burn all the A&P ads at Christmas?” Rademacher asked.
The supervisor thought it over. “I don’t think that man deserves a suspension,” he said.
In 1949, Rademacher ran for branch secretary and won. The next year, the Post Office fired Nonen for his alleged ties to the Communist Party, and the branch’s 1,500 members chose Rademacher to replace him. Rademacher was 29 years old, which made him the youngest president in the history of the Detroit branch. He would go on to lead the NALC through a period of unprecedented turmoil and transformation. Years later, one of the union’s press officers would describe Rademacher as “a modern-day Moses” who led postal workers out of an industrial dark age. This was certainly how Rademacher saw himself. But other letter carriers called him a sellout and burned him in effigy in Times Square.
Letter carriers think of themselves as a special breed. They are the organization’s more visible employees, and they tend to be extroverted. They spend the day visiting people, and they always have something to give them. It might be a flyer from a local car dealer, and it might be the phone bill, but they also bring birthday cards, magazines, and packages. Is it any wonder that people are happy to see their letter carriers and sometimes even offer them a cool drink in the summertime or a warm beverage in the winter?
These outgoing postal workers have historically enjoyed each other’s company too. As soon as Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster general, started hiring carriers to provide free city delivery in 1863, they formed benevolent societies and brass bands. Unlike clerks, who historically had a closer relationship with management because they worked in postal facilities and were more likely to be promoted to supervisors, letter carriers were free spirits who worked outdoors and were on their own most of the day. Their allegiance was to each other.
Early on, carriers were political appointees who could get fired anytime their party lost control of the White House. That changed after a frustrated federal job seeker shot and killed President James Garfield in 1881. Two years later, Congress passed the Pendleton Act creating civil service protection, which covered a growing number of federal workers, including letter carriers and postal clerks, so that these jobs would be awarded on the basis of merit rather than political affiliation. Even then, however, letter carriers had 12-hour days and no paid holidays or pensions. They all had to watch out for postal inspectors who followed them as they made their deliveries and sometimes had letter carriers fired.
Given their mutual regard, it’s no surprise that letter carriers were the first group of postal employees to form a union. In 1889, in a meeting room above Schaefer’s Saloon on Milwaukee’s Water Street, sixty carriers from around the country formed the National Association of Letter Carriers and elected William Wood, a thin-faced Detroit mailman with dark eyes and a bushy white mustache, to be their first president. That is why the Detroit chapter became the NALC’s Branch No. 1. Two years later, there were 231 branches around the nation, and the number rose to 333 the following year. The NALC now represented over 5,000 carriers, and it was a political force. President Grover Cleveland had signed a law mandating an eight-hour workday for full-time letter carriers, but the Post Office disregarded it so the NALC sued. In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the department to pay $3.5 million in unpaid overtime to letter carriers. The NALC wasn’t just bringing them together; it was delivering results.
Predictably, other kinds of postal workers formed their own unions, hoping to emulate the NALC’s success. After President Theodore Roosevelt declared rural free delivery a permanent service in 1902, the men and women who delivered the mail to farmers formed their own lobbying organization, called the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. “It has been suggested by the city carriers that we cast our lot with them,” said one of their leaders. “The city boys are a splendid lot of fellows and have troubles of their own, but their troubles are as dissimilar as the work of the two branches and it has been the generally expressed judgment of our best men that each delivery will be better served by its own organization.” Like their city counterparts, the rural carriers wanted higher wages, but they also wanted smoother roads and a stipend to cover the cost of their wagons and horse-drawn buggies, which they used to haul the mail.
Postal clerks tried to organize too, but they were a fractious bunch. In 1899, a group of clerks who called themselves the United National Association of Post Office Clerks (UNAPOC) met in New York and adopted a constitution. Seven years later, another faction convened in Chicago and created the competing National Federation of Post Office Clerks (NFPOC). The two organizations talked about merging but spent much of their time bickering instead. The New York–based clerks called the ones in Chicago radicals. The clerks headquartered in the Midwest dismissed their East Coast adversaries as management stooges. Meanwhile, railway mail clerks, who considered themselves a cut above the average post office clerk, formed their own association, but it was for whites only. So black workers had to start their own advocacy group, which was called the National Alliance of Postal Employees.
None of these organizations had much power at first. The Post Office wasn’t legally required to discuss anything with them and generally ignored them altogether. Albert Burleson, Woodrow Wilson’s postmaster general, fired union presidents for criticizing his policies. When 25 workers at the Fairmont, West Virginia, post office quit to protest the local postmaster’s firing of an elderly carrier, Burleson accused them of conducting an unlawful strike and pressed charges against them. One alleged striker, a letter carrier named W. H. Fisher, was so traumatized that he hung himself in his jail cell on the eve of his trial.
Burleson roiled the Post Office further when he introduced industrial efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor’s system of scientific management. With stopwatches in their hands, managers observed postal workers as they went about their daily routines, calculated the average amount of time they took, and tried to hold everybody to the same standard. The clerks didn’t seem to care, but letter carriers hated the system that became known pejoratively as Taylorism. The NALC accused Burleson of trying to turn its members into robots and tried to have Taylorism banished from the Post Office, but Burleson was too powerful.
So the NALC focused instead on Congress, whose members tended to be more susceptible to pressure from postal employees, especially letter carriers who visited the homes of their constituents every day. To keep these gregarious postal workers happy, Congress periodically passed pay raise bills. But presidents often vetoed them, as Calvin Coolidge did in 1926. When President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, he trimmed the salaries of federal workers by 15 percent and made postal workers take nine furlough days. As far as the NALC was concerned, FDR was no friend of the workingman. The union fared better in the postwar years. President Harry Truman dutifully signed a bill in 1945 increasing the top pay for letter carriers to $2,500—the equivalent of $33,047 today—and subsequently signed another bill raising it by an additional $400 ($5,288 today).
Newsweek took notice of the NALC’s growing clout on Capitol Hill. “Congress suffers from a strange occupational ailment,” the magazine wrote. “Postmanitis is marked by a high fever and a fluttery stomach; although not fatal, it nevertheless is terrifying. It recurs whenever the legislators start thinking about what might conceivably happen if they ever did anything to make the nation’s mail carriers angry. The only cure for it, as far as Congress knows, is simply to vote for everything the postal employees’ lobby wants.”
In 1947, Truman appointed Jesse Donaldson, a former letter carrier from Shelbyville, Illinois, to be his postmaster general. It was the first time a president had promoted a career postal worker to be the country’s top mailman, and the NALC celebrated the decision. But letter carriers came to despise Donaldson as much as they did Albert Burleson. When Congress shaved $24 billi
on from the Post Office’s budget in April 1950, Donaldson responded by reducing home delivery to once a day. This was quite a change for densely populated places like New York where people were accustomed to getting mail four times a day at home. In the New York suburbs, the carriers visited three times a day.
Polls showed that most people didn’t care about getting mail once a day but letter carriers were furious about it. Previously, they had delivered mail in the morning, returned to the post office for a leisurely lunch, and then departed for the afternoon tour. Now they spent most of their day on the street. NALC’s president William Doherty, a white-haired former carrier from Cincinnati who weighed more than 300 pounds, called Donaldson’s decision “the rape of the Post Office” and mounted a campaign to restore two deliveries a day. Some members of the U.S. Congress sympathized. “Fifty million tired taxpayers have been hit in the mailbox with this ruling,” protested Senator Alexander Wiley, a Republican from Wisconsin. “I, for one, think it is disgusting because there is need for more mail service rather than less.”
Much to the NALC’s disappointment, Congress decided not to overturn Donaldson’s decision. From then on, the union became more combative. “When we are angry (and we have had many occasions to be angry in recent years), we say so in no uncertain terms,” Doherty wrote in his memoir Mailman U.S.A. “We do not pull punches.” Not that it did much good. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower vetoed four pay raise bills. Toward the end of Eisenhower’s second term, however, Doherty organized what he called the “Crusade for Economic Equality” and persuaded Congress to override the popular Republican president’s last veto in 1960.
For all Doherty’s tough talk, he was also conspicuously weak on race relations. In southern cities, the NALC typically had two branches, one for its white members and another for the black ones. Doherty wearily argued that the union needed to maintain a policy of segregation if it wanted to increase its membership and its lobbying strength. “I suppose [segregation] has been debated endlessly in all democratic forms of government since long before the War Between the States or the Civil War,” he said. “It is just one of those things.”
In Detroit, James Rademacher became one of the young, rising stars of the new assertive, NALC. He enjoyed challenging the Post Office’s management, and he did so often. Not long after he became president of Branch No. 1, he referred to a supervisor as a “sadist” in the local newspaper for refusing to let a carrier out of work to be with his hospitalized wife. The postmaster of Detroit saw the article and tried to have Rademacher fired for using such language. Rademacher didn’t want to lose his job so he went to see the branch’s attorney. While he was waiting in the lawyer’s office, Rademacher spotted a dictionary on the shelf. He looked up the word “sadist” and saw that it meant “slave-driving boss.” Rademacher wrote the postmaster a gleeful letter: “Dear Mr. Baker, this is where I got the information to call him a sadist. I quoted Funk & Wagnall’s. Yours very truly.” The postmaster backed off.
Soon, Rademacher found a larger stage to perform on. At the 1954 NALC convention, he and some of his Detroit men paraded down one of Cleveland’s main streets with a coffin to protest Eisenhower’s recent veto of a salary increase bill. Three years later, he became nationally known within the union for filing a federal lawsuit against the Post Office when the Eisenhower administration briefly halted Saturday mail delivery because of a budget shortfall. “They just hated me,” Rademacher laughs.
The Post Office could have lived without Rademacher, but the NALC wanted more of him. In 1960, Rademacher was elected national assistant secretary-treasurer and moved to Washington. He got to know Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who wanted to improve the federal government’s labor-management relations. Two years later, President Kennedy signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to negotiate with officially recognized employee unions. But the NALC would never be on that list as long as it had dual chapters for blacks and whites. Rademacher was given the job of combining them.
Rademacher traveled to Atlanta first and was stunned when he got off the plane. Having grown up in Detroit, he had never seen separate water fountains and washrooms for blacks and whites. Carriers of both races toiled side by side in the southern city’s post office, but they couldn’t gather together after work. The only place Rademacher could meet safely with all of them was a federal courthouse. The whites took seats on the left side of the room and the black letter carriers clustered on the right. “Now close the doors, and keep them closed,” Rademacher commanded. He motioned to some of the whites to move to the right and some of the blacks to take seats on the left. “That’s it,” he said. “You don’t want a union? Go . . . now . . . get out! We fought hard to get this executive order. We don’t want to lose it.” The carriers started talking and, by midnight, they agreed to form a single unit.
In a Louisiana city that he refuses to name, Rademacher had a harrowing experience when he talked to black and white carriers in the basement of a local branch president’s home. Someone interrupted and told him to look out the window. There was a flaming cross on the front lawn. The branch president told Rademacher he needed to leave right away and drove him to the airport, avoiding the main roads where he feared that the Ku Klux Klan might be waiting for them.
In the end, the NALC did away with the dual chapters and won recognition as an official bargaining unit along with six other unions representing clerks, rural letter carriers, mail handers, maintenance workers, truck drivers, and special delivery messengers. The clerks should have had the biggest union of them all. After all, clerks made up nearly half of the department’s 716,000 employees in 1968. A decade earlier, the two main clerks’ organizations had stopped fighting with each other and merged their two lobbying groups into the National Federation of Postal Clerks. Yet the federation had only 143,000 members. (One of the reasons was an unrecognized organization known as the National Postal Union, which represented a large number of clerks in New York City.) Meanwhile, all but a handful of the Post Office’s city carriers were dues-paying NALC members, making it the biggest postal workers’ union. The same year, James Rademacher was elected national president of the NALC, which made him the most powerful of the seven union presidents.
All of them opposed the Nixon administration’s effort to turn the Post Office into a corporation, but Rademacher was the most vehement critic, calling it “unnecessary and dangerous.” He compared Winton Blount’s public relations campaign to Joseph Goebbels’s big lie. He claimed that AT&T was pushing the plan because it secretly wanted to destroy the Post Office and take it over: “Why then, there will be little old AT&T ready and willing, oh so willing, to pick up the pieces and inherit the entire communications complex of the United States of America.”
If this wasn’t provocative enough, Rademacher warned that there would be a letter carriers’ strike if his members didn’t get substantial raises soon. Postal service employees were legally forbidden to walk off the job, but Rademacher testified before the House post office committee in June 1969 that his restless members were likely to disregard the law and there was nothing he could do about it. “The time has come,” Rademacher predicted, “when responsible union leaders can no longer control the troops.”
For all of his calculated bombast, Rademacher was being truthful about the mood of his members. They were growing more militant, especially in New York, where the cost of living was higher than in the rest of the country. The starting salary of a letter carrier was $6,000—or the equivalent in today’s dollars of $38,000 a year—compared with the $10,000 that a New York trash collector made. Why were the garbage men doing so well? The trash men had gone on strike in 1968. Postal workers in New York, many of whom worked two jobs, talked about striking too. Sure, it was against the law, but what did they have to lose? It was the sixties; everybody was protesting—blacks and Hispanics, students, women, gays and lesbians. It was time for postal workers to stand u
p for themselves too.
Rademacher was treading a fine line. He was indulging his members with his strike talk, but he didn’t know what the Nixon administration would do if his people walked off the job. They might all end up in jail. So he sent carriers out after work in 400 cities to retrace their routes and deliver stamped postcards with the message: “SOS: Save our Service! Notify President Nixon right now to sign a pay bill.” The White House received three million of these cards, a number the administration couldn’t ignore.
Blount refused to have anything to do with Rademacher, but political operatives in the White House thought it was worth reaching out to him. The task was assigned to Nixon aide Charles Colson, who lived near Rademacher in a Maryland suburb and knew him causally. Colson telephoned Rademacher and invited him to the White House. “We got your message,” Colson said. “We’d like to discuss this with you. When can you come over?” The two men met secretly over lunch at the White House on December 5, 1969, in the basement cafeteria beneath the Oval Office. At one point, Colson tried to impress his guest. “Do you hear those footsteps?” he asked. “That’s the president of the United States.” Rademacher informed Colson that he had been to the Oval Office for dinner the previous year with former President Johnson. “Okay, let’s start fresh,” Colson said.
The two went over Blount’s proposal. “What’s the problem with it?” Colson asked. Rademacher and Colson discovered they actually shared a lot of common ground. They agreed that the unions needed the right to collectively bargain with the Post Office rather than appealing to Congress for raises. Rademacher wanted to make sure his members kept their civil service status and the pensions they had built up over the years. “That’s easy,” Colson assured him.
Rademacher had also been keeping track of the votes for an administration-backed postal reform bill in the House post office committee. At first, it looked as if the bill didn’t stand a chance because of union opposition, but the votes were getting closer and closer. Blount was doing more than feeding committee members grits: he was offering to build new post offices in their districts, as Jim Farley might have done to secure votes in the Roosevelt era. If Rademacher couldn’t stop the bill, he wanted to shape its outcome. He figured that he could trade his endorsement for an immediate salary increase for his members.
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