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Neither Snow Nor Rain

Page 30

by Devin Leonard


  17 “The Western settlers (I speak now from my own observation) stand as it were upon a pivot. . . . The touch of a feather, would turn them any way”: “Letter to Benjamin Harrison,” October 10, 1784, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-benjamin-harrison-3/.

  18 “It is easy to see what hand could be made of the post offices, if ever they are under the direction of an improper person”: Gales and Seaton, eds., Annals of Congress (The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 1834–1856), http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/print_documents/a1_8_7s3.htm.

  18 “Wherever information is freely circulated, there slavery cannot exist”: Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 35.

  19 By the turn of the century, there were 903 post offices and 20,817 miles of post roads in the United States: Miles, Postal Reform, 26.

  19 “I view it as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a boundless abyss of public money”: Thomas Jefferson, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 8, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), http://press-pubs.­uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_7s4.html.

  20 “To write from Portland (Maine) to Savanna and receive an answer back”: Francis C. Huebner, “Our Postal System,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 9 (1906): 141, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40066939?seq= 1#page_scan_tab_contents.

  20 “The most active and intelligent [blacks] are employed as post-riders”: Deanna Boyd and Kendra Chen, “The History and Experience of African Americans in America’s Postal Service,” National Postal Museum, http://postalmuseum.si.edu/AfricanAmericanhistory/p1.html.

  Chapter 2

  23 this was twice as many as Great Britain: John, Spreading the News, 5.

  23 The American Post Office used private contractors to transport mail by horseback, stagecoach, steamboat, and three-wheeled sulky on 116,000 miles of post roads, and often generated a yearly surplus: Miles, Postal Reform, 26.

  23 Theodorus Bailey, the city’s postmaster, padded downstairs every morning in his bathrobe: John, Spreading the News, 162.

  24 the General Post Office, which employed 8,764 postmasters whose ranks outnumbered the country’s 6,332 soldiers: The United States Postal Service: An American History, 11.

  24 “Mr. McLean, will you accept a seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court?”: Ben Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City: Hubbard Brothers, 1886), 98.

  24 “General Jackson, I have come here to talk to you about my office”: Ibid., 111.

  25 “large masses of newspapers, pamphlets, tracts and almanacs, containing exaggerated, and in some instances, false accounts”: Report of the Postmaster General, Post Office Department, December 1, 1835, 397.

  27 One day in 1838, William Harnden, a frail high-strung 26-year-old with dark hair and extravagant sideburns, wandered into the Reading Room: Alvin F. Harlow, Old Waybills: The Romance of the Express Companies (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), 13.

  27 “I immediately advised him to travel between the two cities”: “An American Enterprise,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, August 1875.

  27 “IMPORTANT TO MERCHANTS, BROKERS, BOOK-­SELLERS AND ALL BUSINESS MEN”: Harlow, Old Waybills, 18.

  27 “I can’t make it go”: Ibid., 19.

  28 Everything seemed to be going Harnden’s way until January 13, 1840, when he dispatched his younger brother, Adolphus, to Boston: Ibid., 20.

  29 “Receive nothing mailable,” he warned one of his associates: Ibid., 37.

  29 “making a deep hole in the coffers of Uncle Sam”: Report of the Postmaster General, Post Office Department, 1841.

  29 “Mr. H. deservedly enjoys the highest confidence”: Ibid.

  29 “These private expresses will only be found to operate upon the great and profitable thoroughfares”: Annual Report of the Postmaster General, 1843, 447.

  30 “His hand?” Harnden fumed: Harlow, Old Waybills, 23.

  30 “Because the king’s business required haste”: Ibid., 31.

  31 “If you choose to run an express to the Rocky Mountains”: Henry Wells, Sketch of the Rise, Progress, and Present Conditions of the Express System (Albany, NY: Van Benthuysen’s Steam Printing House, 1861), 10.

  31 “It may amuse you to hear that the oyster was a powerful agent”: Harlow, Old Waybills, 35.

  31 Wells started a letter delivery service in 1844: Richard R. John Jr., “Private Mail Delivery in the United States During the Nineteenth Century: A Sketch,” Business and Economic History, vol. 15 (paper presented at the thirty-second annual meeting of the Business History Conference, 1986), 141.

  33 “Zounds, sir,” Hobbie replied: Ibid., 144.

  33 “Intemperance is filling our alms-houses with paupers”: Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 55.

  34 “So long as the church sanctions and sustains it, slavery is impregnable”: Ibid., 125.

  34 “Horrible!” Leavitt wrote: Ibid., 145.

  34 “Of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard of, this is the most extraordinary”: Chris West, A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps (New York: Picador, 2013), 5.

  35 That year, the Royal Mail handled 169 million letters, more than twice as many as the year before: Miles, Postal Reform, 27.

  35 “It is the complete leveler. . . . The poorest peasant, the factory-girl, the match-vender, the beggar, even, enjoy the benefits of the cheap postage”: Joshua Leavitt, “The Moral and Social Benefits of Cheap Postage,” Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, December 1849, 10.

  35 “Give us the British system of postage, and slavery is dead!”: Davis, Evangelical Abolitionist, 158.

  35 “The mode of managing and conducting the post office in the Kingdom of Great Britain is not only different from, but much less expensive”: Report of the Postmaster General, Post Office Department, 1844.

  36 “The operations of the system, as it exists, have become odious”: The Congressional Globe Containing Sketches of the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Twenty-Eighth Congress, vol. 13, ed. Blair and Rives (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe, 1844), 195.

  36 “Find the proper rate”: Ibid., 196.

  36 “This is a bill for the benefit of cities, to the injury of the country”: Ibid., 340.

  37–38 “No American citizen can hesitate to lend his aid to accomplish a measure which is fraught with so many blessings to every portion of our community”: “An Address of the Directors of the New York Cheap Postage Association to the People of the United States” in The American Postal Network, 1792–1914, vol. 3, ed. Richard R. John (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 325.

  38 “Maybe the letters will come pouring upon you in such multitudes that you’ll wish for the old rate of postage”: David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 34.

  38 “It is a very good plan for you to correspond with your relatives in Wisconsin”: Ibid., 94.

  39 By 1854, the number of American post offices had risen to 23,584: Miles, Postal Reform, 26.

  40 “There were knocks on the doors, taps on the windows, and beseeching calls at all corners of the house”: Bayard Taylor, Eldorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861), 209.

  40 “Those who were near the goal frequently sold out their places to impatient candidates”: Ibid., 212.

  41 “We have to request a more strict observance of stamping letters”: Philip L. Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fa
rgo and the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 25.

  41 “I am called sanguine at home”: Ibid., 15.

  42 “Remember boys . . . nothing on God’s earth must stop the United States Mail”: Mary A. Helmich, “The Butterfield Overland Mail Company,” Interpretation and Education Division, California State Parks, 2008, http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25444.

  42 “Our heavy wagon bounded along crags as if it would be shaken to pieces”: “Overland Mail to California in the 1850s,” USPS, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/overland-mail.htm.

  42 “Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back”: Helmich, “The Butterfield Overland Mail Company.”

  Chapter 3

  46 In February 1861, six southern states—South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana—declared themselves a new nation and seized nearly 9,000 post offices: Report of the Postmaster General, United States Post Office Department, 1863.

  47 “They left him at 2 this morning”: Rita Lloyd Moroney, Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General (Washington, DC: United States Post Office Department, 1963), 15.

  47 “I have troubles enough”: Ibid., 15.

  49 “It is impractical,” Medill said: George A. Armstrong, “The First Railway Postal Car,” The World To-Day: A Monthly Record of Human Progress, vol. 14, from December 1, 1907 to June 1, 1908, 308.

  51 “A mail bag is an epitome of human life”: J. Holbrook, Ten Years Among the Mail Bags or Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post Office Department (Philadelphia: H. Cowperthait & Co., 1855), 15.

  51 “no obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication”: Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 313.

  54 “From Maine to California, we believe the new order of Protestant Jesuits called the YMCA is dubbed with the well-merited title of the American Inquisition”: Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), 126.

  55 “All were very much excited and declared themselves ready to give me any law I might ask for”: Ibid.

  55 “They were brazen”: Ibid., 134.

  55 “The Devil seemed determined to claim me as his servant”: Ibid., 140.

  56 “I do not want any fat office created, whereby the Government is taxed or for some politician to have in a year or two”: Ibid., 137.

  57 “The mail of the United States is the great thoroughfare of communication leading up into all our homes, schools and colleges”: Anthony Comstock, Frauds Exposed; or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted (New York: J. Howard Brown, 1880), 391.

  58 “a religion-monomaniac”: Ezra Heywood, Cupid’s Yokes: Or, the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life (Princeton, MA: Co-Operative Publishing, 1876),12.

  59 “The fresh air was never more refreshing,” Comstock wrote: Anthony Comstock, Traps for the Young (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883), 164.

  59 “I have a warrant for your arrest for sending obscene matter through the mail,” Comstock informed him: Ibid.

  59–60 “In Boston . . . as I had momentarily left the chair in which I was presiding over a public convention”: Martin Henry Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 114.

  61 “Two plainer violations of the Bill of Rights—two meaner outrages upon liberty, decency, and morality—have never been perpetrated among our people!”: T. B. Wakeman, The Unanswered Argument Against the Constitutionality of the So-Called Comstock Postal Laws (New York: The National Defense Association, 1880), 28.

  61 “I found it crowded with long-haired men and short-haired women”: Comstock, Frauds Exposed, 424.

  62 “Heywood is certainly a champion jackass,” the poet wrote: Blatt, Free Love and Anarchism, 143

  62 “The court is robust enough to stand anything in that book”: Ibid., 144.

  63 “Europeans love to hear of such things”: Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, Roundsman of the Lord, 229.

  63 “George Bernard Shaw? . . . Who is he?”: Ibid., 230.

  63 “When the Constitution of the United States authorized Congress to establish post offices and post roads, it was not intended that the authority should go beyond this”: Margaret Sanger, “Should Women Know?” The Spur, February 1915, 58, in The Public Writings and Speeches of Margaret Sanger, https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=305121.xml.

  Chapter 4

  65 “Wanamaker is in no sense a leader of the party”: Richard White, “The Bullmoose and the Bear: Theodore Roosevelt and John Wanamaker Struggle over the Spoils,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 71, no. 1 ( January 9, 2004): http://journals.psu.edu/phj/article/view/25850.

  65 “Would he ever have been thought of for a place in the Cabinet if he had not contributed or raised this money?”: “The Week,” The Nation, 1889.

  66 “Harrison still speaks to me”: Herbert Adams Gibbons, John Wanamaker (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1926), 332.

  68 “The idea clung to my mind that I could accomplish more”: Joseph H. Appel, The Business Biography of John Wanamaker, Founder and Builder (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 39.

  68 “You are making a mistake”: Ibid., 40.

  69 “Any article that does not fit well”: Ibid., 52.

  69 “How about the top of the page?” Wanamaker responded: Gibbons, John Wanamaker, 102.

  71 “We raised so much money the Democrats never knew anything about it”: Ibid., 259.

  71 “My Dear Sir, we did not have the pleasure of meeting during the campaign”: Ibid., 264.

  71 “General Harrison sent for me”: Philadelphia Citizens, John Wanamaker, The Record of a Citizens’ Celebration to Mark His Sixty Years Career as Merchant, April 1861—April 1921 (Philadelphia: Printed for the Committee, 1921), 37.

  72 “The whole range of domestic life finds a full expression here”: Marshall Henry Cushing, The Story of Our Post Office (Boston: A. M. Thayer & Company, 1893), 253.

  73 “One of the most valuable of the acquirements which are Mrs. Collins’ possession is the knowledge of the city locality of almost every street in this and most other countries”: Alice Graham McCollin, “The ‘Blind Reader’ at Washington,” Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1893.

  74 “We feel rather proud if we quicken a mail between New York and Chicago by three hours”: Cushing, The Story of Our Post Office, 999.

  75 “I made no recommendation in my message warranting you to proceed as you have”: “Jay Gould Kicks, He Gets Harrison to Check Wanamaker’s Postal Telegraph Scheme,” New York Times, April 13, 1890.

  78 “The free delivery is a success in the broadest sense of the word”: Report of the Postmaster General of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 123.

  78 “It is evident, then—indeed, we have proved it”: Cushing, The Story of Our Post Office, 1004.

  78 “Bring the post office to the farmers’ doors”: Charles H. Greathouse, “Free Delivery of Rural Mail,” Yearbook of Agriculture—1900, 1901.

  78 “The United States mail is a great civilizer”: Letter from the Postmaster General, in Response to Senate Resolution of January 13, 1892, Relative to the Extension of Free-Delivery System to Rural Districts.

  79 “I am glad to know this,” Wanamaker responded: Gibbons, John Wanamaker, 282.

  80 “The footprint of the mail carrier is the signpost of civilization”: Ibid., 320.

  80 “There was nothing to be done this past year except to trudge along the old roads”: Report of the Postmaster General of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892), 3.

  80 “The old system is really
colonial”: Ibid., 12.

  81 “One man has a lard pail hung out on a fence post”: Annual Reports of the Post-Office Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 20, 1897 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), 123.

  81 “That saves us time and anxiety”: Greathouse, “Free Delivery of Rural Mail,” 524.

  82 “I live three and a half miles from the Tempe post office”: Annual Reports of the Post-Office Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 20, 1897, 112.

  82 the world’s only reindeer route: “Carrying the Mail Within the Arctic Circle,” Chicago Tribune, September 12, 1909.

  83 “It brings the men who live on the soil into close relations with the active business world”: Theodore Roosevelt, “Second Annual Message,” December 2, 1902, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29543.

  84 “The cost of living and the prices of many things would not have been as high the last twenty years if Parcel Post, postal savings and cheapened telegraph service had been granted”: Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores: Jubilee Year, 1861–1911 (Privately printed, 1911).

  86 “Why weren’t the Wrights a little earlier with their flying machine?”: Gibbons, John Wanamaker, 310.

  Chapter 5

  87 Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a dour 54-year-old Texan referred to by his fellow cabinet members as “the cardinal”: Adrian Anderson, “President Wilson’s Politician: Albert Sidney Burleson of Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (January 1974): 247.

  89 “What’s the matter?”: Captain Benjamin B. Lipsner, The Airmail: Jennies to Jets (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1951), 17.

  91 In 1957, however, one of them turned up: Ted Johnson, “The 150th Anniversary of the Balloon Jupiter Airmail Flight,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, 2009, http://postalmuseum.si.edu/collections/object-­spotlight/balloon-jupiter.html.

  91 “The Post Office Department has been up in the air long enough, and now let us get down to terra firma”: Henry Ladd Smith, Airways: The History of Commercial Aviation in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1991), 55.

  92 “I had the bait gourd,” Burleson said: Anderson, “President Wilson’s Politician: Albert Sidney Burleson of Texas,” 352.

 

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