So Rademacher broke with the other postal union leaders and blessed Blount’s plan. On December 18, he returned to the White House and had his picture taken with Nixon in the Oval Office. Nixon was surprised to learn that Blount had been keeping Rademacher at arm’s length. But once the union president was on his side, Blount invited Rademacher to one of his rich southern breakfasts. Blount’s aides chuckled when the union president, an inveterate bargainer, demanded an extra biscuit, but they made sure he was satisfied. They needed his support if they wanted to get the reform bill passed.
Blount and Rademacher still didn’t like each other but they lobbied Congress in tandem. On March 12, 1970, in a 17-6 vote they nudged through the House post office committee a reform bill with a 5.4 percent pay increase. Rademacher sent a telegraph to his 600 branch leaders, “Cool it,” he told them. “We’re making progress.” Rademacher was especially concerned about New York’s Branch No. 36, the NALC’s biggest branch, which represented 7,200 letter carriers in Manhattan and the Bronx.
Branch No. 36’s president Gustave Johnson, an amateur painter who had recently grown an artist’s mustache and goatee, told Rademacher not to worry; he had everything under control. But that night, when Johnson told his members about the proposed pay raise at a meeting, his agency members started chanting, “Not enough! Not enough!” and then “Strike when? Strike when?” One of the fed-up carriers made a motion for a strike vote, which passed. Johnson reluctantly scheduled the vote for March 17. He appeared on television to discourage letter carriers from voting for a walkout, warning them that an unlawful strike would be a catastrophe.
The vote was held on a Tuesday night at Manhattan Center, a former opera house that now served as a union meeting hall near the New York General Post Office. By 7 pm, the room was packed with 2,600 boisterous letter carriers. They booed Johnson when he arrived at 8:40 pm to get the voting started. Then he headed across the street to a bar called Farley’s Gin Mill to confer with Moe Biller, president of the Manhattan-Bronx Postal Union, a renegade union without official recognition that represented 25,000 clerks and mail handlers.
An old-school labor agitator from the Lower East Side, the tall, balding Biller had been fired from the Post Office in the 1950s for his alleged Communist ties and later reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court. They were joined by Jack Leventhal, president of the NALC’s 6,000-member Branch No. 41 in Brooklyn. The three presidents needed to figure out what to do if Branch No. 36 called for a strike. Gus Johnson assured them that it wouldn’t happen, but the other union heads weren’t so sure. No matter what, the three men agreed not to make any decisions without conferring with each other.
Around 10 pm, they returned to Manhattan Center and took seats onstage. Johnson announced the outcome of the vote. It was 1,555 in favor of a strike and 1,055 opposed. “Well, we voted,” he declared, banging his gavel. “That’s it. This is a democratic union. There will be no mail delivery tomorrow in New York.”
The same men and women who had booed Johnson less than two hours ago roared in approval. Jack Leventhal pledged the support of his members. “Your brothers and sisters across the river in Brooklyn are with you 100 percent,” Leventhal said. “We’re shoulder to shoulder.”
Moe Biller was stunned. Johnson and Leventhal had promised not to do anything without talking to him, but they couldn’t resist the chance to be heroes. When it was his turn to talk, Biller said he couldn’t call a strike on his own and urged the letter carriers to wait until his union voted. The Branch No. 36 carriers hissed at Biller. “This is a letter carriers’ strike,” one yelled. “What I want to know is whether the clerks are going to cross our picket line.”
“It’s illegal for me to direct my members not to cross a picket line,” Biller cannily answered. “But I’m sure as good union members, they will respect any picket line.”
That mollified the letter carriers. After the meeting adjourned, some of them walked across Manhattan, grabbed some wooden barriers lying along the streets after the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and set up a picket line outside the Grand Central post office. At midnight, hundreds of Biller’s union members arrived for the late shift and refused to cross it. Johnson called Rademacher at home that night to give him the news.
“What am I going to do?” Johnson asked.
“Let it blow,” Rademacher replied. The Great Postal Strike of 1970 had begun.
On Wednesday morning, letter carriers and clerks had set up picket lines outside nearly every New York post office. Winton Blount ordered the sealing of street mailboxes in New York and placed an embargo on all mail headed into and out of the city. He summoned Rademacher and the other six union leaders to his office for a 10 am meeting and told them the department would seek a preliminary injunction in federal court declaring the strike illegal and enabling the Post Office to sue anybody participating in the walkout. “The Post Office will use every means in its command to punish, fine, and imprison leaders of the walkout,” Blount warned.
Rademacher was in a bind. He sympathized with the strikers. After all, he had been complaining for months about their woes. But he feared that Blount might destroy his union. Congress was also on the verge of passing a postal reform bill that would take care of his members. The bill would do more than just give them an immediate raise; it would give them collective bargaining. Rademacher worried that it would all fall apart if the strike continued, so he sent a telegram to Johnson ordering Branch No. 36 to go back to work.
It didn’t, and the strike spread over the next two days to Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. In Chicago, 6,000 letter carriers gathered for a vote, waving their fists and chanting “Postal power—strike!” They overwhelmingly decided to strike. “Our members are so militant, so upset they will stay out ’til hell freezes over,” said Henry S. Zych, president of the Chicago NALC branch. A doleful letter carrier marched through the snow in St. Paul, Minnesota, carrying a sign that said: “Money for the moon, but none for the mailman.” A Washington Post columnist summed up the fundamental irony of the postal strike: “President Nixon comes face to face today with his most pressing domestic crisis in a showdown forced not by students, restless blacks, or the new left, but by the most solid and dependable corner of middle America—the mailman.”
At 10:40 am on Friday, Rademacher was putting on his coat and getting ready to leave his office when his secretary told him that Secretary of Labor George Shultz was on the line. “We’d like to meet with you as soon as possible to try to settle whatever the problem is,” Shultz said. Rademacher told him he was headed to a meeting with 300 of his branch presidents and state leaders at the Continental Hotel to discuss the strike. “Well, can you let them know we’re ready to sit down?” Shultz said.
Rademacher replied that he would and headed off to the Continental, where the branch leaders were waiting in a ballroom. The attendees gave Gus Johnson and Jack Leventhal sustained ovations and wanted to know if Rademacher was going to declare a national strike. Rademacher said he didn’t know yet; he had to go to the White House first and talk to Shultz. And off he went.
At 2 pm, Rademacher returned to the ballroom to shouts of “No sellout!” and “Let’s walk!” Rademacher’s supporters yelled, “Let him speak!” and “Shut up and listen!” After quieting everybody down, Rademacher said the White House was ready to negotiate, but not until striking postal workers returned to their jobs. The branch chiefs reluctantly voted to give Rademacher five days to reach a deal with the administration. If he didn’t get what they wanted, Rademacher promised to call a nationwide walkout.
Again, Gus Johnson conveyed the message to his members in New York, but Branch No. 36 was no longer listening. Some of its members waved signs that said, “Dump the Rat” and “Impeach Rat-emacher.” Others held a rally in Times Square and burned the NALC president in effigy. Rademacher started receiving death threats. When his wife, Martha, heard about it, she suffered a nervous brea
kdown. Nixon sent his personal doctor to the hospital to see if he could help.
Frustrated, Rademacher held a press conference on Sunday and blamed the walkout in New York on infiltrators from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical left group. This only further alienated members of Branch No. 36. Many were middle-aged World War II veterans like Vincent Sombrotto. “That’s the greatest compliment they ever paid me,” Sombrotto later recalled. “I was 41 years old and they were calling me a student.”
Postal inspectors investigated and found that nobody in the branch had ties to the SDS. When real student radicals showed up to lend their support outside the General Post Office in New York, the strikers couldn’t have been less welcoming. “We’re from the SDS,” said an emissary for the group with long hair tied behind his head with a string of shells. “We’ve come to help you.”
He was immediately surrounded by unfriendly postal workers. “You’re not part of our cause, and you are just going to mess it up,” one of them growled.
“I’m with you guys,” another SDS member assured them. “You know, if we weren’t spending all that money in Vietnam we could all get good salaries.”
“I got a boy in Vietnam,” a postal worker replied.
“Look, mister, butt out,” another striker said. Police officers had to intervene and escort the radicals to safety.
At the Post Office’s headquarters in Washington, Blount’s aides kept track of the strike’s progress on an electric map of the United States. Red lights glowed in cities where the strike had halted delivery. Yellow lights illuminated the ones where service had been slowed. Green lights sparkled in areas where delivery was still on schedule, and blue lights were supposed to flash in places where strikers had returned to work, but that was rare. At the strike’s peak, 200,000 workers had deserted their jobs in the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and California, bringing the mail to a standstill in 10 of America’s largest cities including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
If ever there was a moment when people were aware of the role that the Post Office played in their daily lives, it was now. On a typical afternoon before the strike, the loading docks of any big city post office bustled with activity. Banks dropped off mountains of mortgage statements and credit card bills. Utilities trucked in stacks of bills. Employees from department store mailrooms showed up with monthly statements for their charge account customers. Magazine companies handed off their glossy periodicals and bills for their subscribers. Mail handlers wheeled it all inside to be sorted by clerks on the evening shift and delivered the next morning by carriers.
But now the inexorable flow of paper stopped. Banks had to get by without interest payments. In New York, Consolidated Edison and New York Telephone and Telegraph lost millions of dollars a day. Department stores feared they wouldn’t make their payrolls. Meanwhile, the IRS couldn’t collect $1 billion a day in taxes. The stock market plunged, and there was talk of closing it down because it, too, depended on paper to function. Traders mailed each other paper stock certificates to consummate their transactions. Without the massive postal bureaucracy, Wall Street was imperiled. “A modern economy is sustained by an endless flow of carefully directed paper,” Newsweek observed. “The U.S. postal system, for all its creaky inefficiencies, simply has no parallel in performing this vital function.”
Then there was all the routine business correspondence that normally circulated through the postal network. With a strike crippling the Post Office in major cities, executives from IBM, Standard Oil, GM, and Ford could be seen in airports carrying mail pouches instead of their usual briefcases. Pressed into service as a temporary carrier, Thomas Purcell, a salesman for Shield & Company, a New York securities firm, took 30 pounds of paychecks, research reports, prospectuses, and other documents on a flight from New York to Buffalo, stopping in Albany on the way. “It was all I could lug,” Purcell said. The Post Office told businessmen they could also entrust letters to the porters on Amtrak trains. “These people are remarkably honest,” said a department official.
Western Union was overwhelmed with telegraph orders. “It’s terrible,” said a manager at the Times Square office. “We can’t handle it.” Hollywood wasn’t immune from the strike’s effects either. Gregory Peck, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, told his members in New York to deliver their ballots for the Academy Awards to the local office of Price Waterhouse. Otherwise, Peck warned, they might miss the deadline for choosing the year’s best picture.
There were countless stories of ordinary post office users who were inconvenienced too. In New York, a woman getting married in Wisconsin feared that her wedding invitations wouldn’t be delivered in time to out-of-town guests so she went to John F. Kennedy International Airport and pressed them on outbound travelers who promised to put them in the mailbox wherever they landed. In Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, a man walked into the post office with several canisters of film that he needed to mail immediately to Madison. The clerk told him there was an embargo on Madison-bound mail because postal workers were on strike there. “You can’t do that!” the man shouted. “This is the U.S. Post Office!” He tossed the metal containers onto the counter and stormed out of the building. A man with a dazed expression stood outside the Minneapolis downtown post office with a box in his hand. Someone told him the building was closed because of the strike. “Yes, but this is different,” the man said. “These are cookies for my boy in Vietnam.” A drunk stood in front of the post office in nearby St. Paul, hollering at the picketers. “Get back to work,” he commanded. “You can’t hold up my mail. It’s illegal. How’m I gonna get my relief check?”
Polls showed that the public sympathized with the striking postal workers, a sign that Americans still had warm feelings for the men and women who brought them their letters and sold them stamps, but how long would this last? In one week, the government needed to send Social Security checks to 20 million retirees. Blount already had a court order declaring the strike illegal. Now he urged Nixon to send the National Guard into New York to break it. On Sunday, March 22, Nixon declared a state of national emergency and said he would send 27,000 soldiers into the country’s largest city to restore order. “Essential services must be maintained,” Nixon said in a televised address from the Oval Office. “As President, I shall meet my constitutional responsibility, to see that those services are maintained.”
Rademacher pleaded with Nixon to change his mind, predicting violent clashes between the strikers and the guardsmen. But union leaders in New York told their members to stay calm and they waved on Tuesday when the National Guard arrived in the city in a convoy of trucks with orders to sort by zip code the 60 million pieces of mail that had piled up in New York’s main post office, setting aside prescription drugs, welfare checks, and personal letters so they could be delivered quickly. Some of the troops had mixed feelings about their mission. “I’m a little embarrassed,” admitted Arthur Solomon, a former New York postal clerk. “A lot of my friends are up here at the Post Office.”
Major General Martin Foery, commander of the Forty-Second Infantry Division of the New York Army National Guard, didn’t think there would be any trouble. “We know that people are hired temporarily at Christmas time to work in the post office and it works then,” he said, gnawing on a cigar. “Besides, 50 percent of my men are college graduates.” But when the troops took up their positions on the floors of the General Post Office in midtown Manhattan, the Church Street post office in the financial district, and the Brooklyn post office, they were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the job.
Usually, these cavernous rooms were filled with clerks who could throw as many as 60 letters a minute into their proper cubbyholes while conversing with each other about politics or sports or the shows they watched on television. “We would exchange verses from Don Quixote and Rime of the Ancient Mariner and other classics,” says William Burrus, a former postal clerk
in Cleveland who would later become the first African American president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). “On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we devoted all of our discussions to racial issues and some of the atrocities that had occurred in our country between the races.”
But the troops didn’t have any training or experience. David Andresen, a 21-year-old guardsman from Suffield, Connecticut, stood in front of hundreds of pigeonholes in the New York General Post Office trying to figure out where to put a letter. “I never expected to be doing this,” he said. Kenneth Hancock, a 19-year-old from Roanoke, Virginia, sounded similarly mystified. “I just don’t know where it goes,” he sighed.
The National Guard didn’t do home delivery, but it carried two million pieces of mail to businesses and nonprofit groups. The troops who made these rounds sometimes had trouble finding office buildings, even the very tall ones. Strike sympathizers called them “scabs” and “fascists pigs.” But when the guardsmen showed up at the right addresses with the mail, they received a hero’s welcome. Secretaries offered them coffee. Bosses dropped what they were doing and came out to shake hands.
The servicemen stayed in New York for two days, but by then Nixon had made his point. Around the country, strikers returned to their jobs and even the Branch No. 36 dissidents finally gave in. Some regretted it and wanted to walk out again, but Nixon kept 10,000 National Guard troops in New York to discourage any recidivists.
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