ED: This is BackStory with the American History Guys, I'm Ed Ayers. Today in our show, we're going to talk about NPR's great, great grandfather in public broadcasting, the post office.
SPEAKER 2: We think of that as weird, because we assume that the mail system was always designed to promote correspondence, but it wasn't. The United State Postal System was specifically framed around the importance of broadcasting new.
ED: Throughout the years, the post office has been innovative.
SPEAKER 3: The post office has this tradition of using anything and everything that moved to move the mail. Nothing was moving faster in the 1950s than missiles.
ED: The post office has also been used by those that wanted to be provocative.
SPEAKER 3: I really think that they though that if they sent slave holders this information about why slavery is bad, that the slave holders would recognize common sense and change their mind.
ED: The history of the post office, today on BackStory. First, some history in the making.
TONY FIELD: Hello BackStory podcasters, I'm Tony Field, senior producer of the show. I'm here to remind you that if you like what you hear on today's show, you can help the uninitiated find out about BackStory by leaving a positive review on our page in the iTunes store.
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BackStory radio is where you'll find us on Facebook, and on Twitter. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
SPEAKER 5: Major production support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the University of Virginia.
ED: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American History Guys.
PETER: Hey guys. Do you remember Alexis de Tocqueville?
BRIAN: Yeah. The French guy.
PETER: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
BRIAN: Yeah.
PETER: Wrote a book.
BRIAN: He came here and wrote a great book, Democracy in America, about the United States.
PETER: Yeah, you got it. Tocqueville is a French aristocrat, comes from an aristocratic family. Tocqueville comes to the new world in 1831 because this is kind of a living laboratory for all the crackpot ideas people had had in the enlightenment and subsequent years.
Imagine when there used to be big trees, Brian, just imagine that there's a sea of big trees and it's really a pretty savage looking landscape, or a savage landscape, still Indians hanging around. It's dangerous, it's gloomy, it's dark. People don't think that big trees are beautiful in the 19th century.
BRIAN: Just in the way.
PETER: Yeah, they're in the way. It's like being in outer space.
And so you come to America, "How's it working out?" And how do people over those great horizons stay together? So, Tocqueville wants to figure this out, and he says, "If America works, it works in Michigan."
No, Michigan is now a new frontier, because the city of Detroit hardly exists, it's all wilderness.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: We start out again at 7:00am. We enter a forest of huge oaks. The road turns into a path hard to follow. Night comes on. Our anxiety at not being able to reach Flint river. The wind subsides, deep darkness.
PETER: You're afraid you're going to get scalped, and you're afraid that who knows what's going to happen to you.
But even in this vast wilderness with these barbaric frontier people, Tocqueville notices something that's amazing.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: In the Michigan forest, there is not cabin so isolated, not a valley so wild, that it does not receive newspapers at least once a week. We saw it ourselves.
PETER: He's shocked! Look at these conditions these people live in, but somehow, and this is what really blows his mind, they're on top of the news and they have this hunger, this appetite for the news. How does this happen?
Because, poor people in France, they can't read. Poor peasants are ignorant. They don't vote. They don't do anything. It's being connected that's really important. And that's I think what's really novel about this, is that connecting the far periphery to the center.
BRIAN: So Peter you've got this situation in which people are highly literate, but live in the middle of freaking nowhere. But they've not always been in the middle of nowhere, and they want to connect with where they've come from, and all the other places that are merging all around them. You have an America that's disconnected, but longing to be connected.
Okay. So we have this huge network delivering newspapers into the most barbaric regions of the continent and we call that what, Peter?
PETER: Get ready for the Brian.
BRIAN: I'm ready.
PETER: Okay. The Post Office. The Post Office.
SPEAKER 9: A guaranteed morning delivery.
BRIAN: Peter, you know the crazy thing here is that when I think of the post office today, I think of a place that mails out post cards, birthday cards, Hallmark greeting cards if they have those any more, and tons of junk mail.
PETER: Yeah. Well they didn't have junk mail in this period. [inaudible 00:05:43] the post office had a different mission all together. What would come in great quantities, were newspapers from all over the country. They were subsidized by the post office.
And the important challenge was to try to somehow keep this country together. Even those barbarians in Detroit. At the edge of nowhere. They had to be somehow kept in the loop.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE: From time to time we stop before what they call the Post. It was almost always an isolated house in the depth of the woods. There we dropped a large packet from which doubtless each inhabitant of the neighborhood came to take his share.
I don't believe that in the most enlightened rural district in France, there's [inaudible 00:06:30], an intellectual exchange as rapid or as large as in these wildernesses.
BRIAN: I get it. It's reading the news that connects Americans to each other that makes us a country. So in that regard, you know it sounds a lot like this is the CNN of its day. Although it's a publicly subsidized CNN. Now there's an idea, Peter, public subsidy for information. Publicly subsidized radio.
Today on BackStory, "You've got mail." You've got mail. A history of the post office.
We're your hosts. The American History Guys, I'm Brian Balogh, 20th Century guy.
ED: I'm Ed Ayers, 19th Century guy.
PETER: And I'm Peter Onuf, 18th Century guy.
BRIAN: So Peter, now that I've got the mail, I kind of want to know where the system that delivers it came from.
PETER: Well, you got no mail, you got no country, okay. Mail is absolutely important for stitching these distant settlements together into a more perfect union. And that's why its right there in the Constitution! Article one, section eight provides for post offices and post roads.
And without that system of information exchange, there's going to be no United States of America. Because what does united mean? United means the post office!
So de Tocqueville surprised to see this in the wilds of Michigan, but people moving there would have been expecting to find that.
BRIAN: Yeah. And by the time they get there in the 1830s, things are starting to change. They're counting on this system of postal services and roads so much, that they want to start sending letters. But there's one thing standing in their way Peter, different rates of postage for different kinds of mail.
DAVID HINKIN: A newspaper could travel for once cent to a subscriber, and a newspaper could be exchanged for free between one newspaper publisher and another.
BRIAN: This is David Hinkin, he's a professor of history at UC Berkeley.
DAVID HINKIN: Now in order to pay for the system, the government had two options. One is simply to raise revenue and consider it an expense of government.
BRIAN: I'm opposed to that right off the bat. So can't do that, what else do they got?
DAVID HINKIN: The alternative was to charge other users, so, the thing was to charge people who sent letters.
BRIAN: What was the rationale of tapping letter writers?
DAVID HINKIN: The rationale was that they were using it for a private purpose.
BRIAN: Gotcha.
DAVID HINKIN: Whereas newspapers were using it for what was regarded as a more public purpose.
BRIAN: How much did it cost to send a letter then?
DAVID HINKIN: It was extraordinarily expensive to send letters. I'll give you an example. You send a single sheet letter between Albany, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So that's about 400 miles. That would be 25 cents. So that's between one quarter and one third of the average daily wage of a non farm laborer in the United States at that time.
Let me put it differently. You want to send a letter from New York City up to the Capital, say to Albany. Postage would be more than 50% higher than shipping a barrel of flour over the same route.
But, you could send a newspaper for one cent and you could send a newspaper for free if you sent it to someone else that published a newspaper.
BRIAN: Oh, see, and I'm already thinking, "Couldn't you cheat that system in some way?"
DAVID HINKIN: Right. There were ways around it.
The main thing that people did, was that they didn't write letters. I think that's the first thing I want to stress. It would be an extraordinarily important occasion that would warrant such a thing. But some people had a way around it. And here is where folks began to get a little more clever. You took a newspaper and you put it in and if you wrote on it, as people sometimes did, "Hi Mom. I'm fine." That wouldn't work, because the postmaster would see that and then when the recipient went to pick up the newspaper, the recipient would be charged a letter rate.
So what you had to do was somehow disguise it. So in 1840, a story appeared in the New Orleans Picayune describing one of the tricks. Someone sent a newspaper from New York to Boston, and he addressed the newspaper to John Garigo Smith. And the newspaper explained it, that middle name, that bizarre middle name, G, A, R, I, G, O, was actually an acronym, and it meant, goods all received in good order.
In other words, instead of an ordinary business correspondence confirming the receipt of goods from Boston to New York, this milliner was able to that by simply addressing a newspaper with that name and sending it for the newspaper rate of one cent.
BRIAN: Very clever.
DAVID HINKIN: Here's something more elaborate. So there's a man who wanted to communicate with his father without paying the postage, so he penciled into the margins of the newspaper a drawing of an awl, it's something you can make a hole with and a leather strap. The awl, was pointing to a well, like a water well, so this is a rebus which where the son tells the father all is well.
People did their best to send letters through paper rates and the post office was concerned about it. A memo from the postmaster general in the 1840s said that any writing that conveyed an idea to the person to whom the paper was sent, or informed him of any distinct fact, was subject to letter post.
And, this actually created problems with actually addresses. You could get in trouble for writing an address, because as the postmaster general himself said, if A writes his name on the margin of the paper, sends it to a friend by mail, he conveys to him several distinct ideas and facts. First of all, that he's alive. Secondly, he's well enough to write. Three, that he remembers him. And fourth, that he has sent him by mail this very newspaper, and that tells him where he is, right?
So this was in some ways a logically untenable position that the post office was taking by 1842.
BRIAN: Why then, why the 1840s? Newspapers had been around a long time. Why did it take this long to occur to people?
DAVID HINKIN: In part because people were moving at faster rates and at much further distances. And in part because the postal system itself encouraged people to imagine that they had some connection.
So if you grew up in Vermont and you moved to Michigan, the fact that there is a postal route, and you can send a small town newspaper from Vermont to a small town Michigan, does create a sense of proximity that probably encouraged and cultivated more desire for people to stay in touch.
The flip side of it of course is if you know you can stay in touch, you may be more likely to move, to take longer trips.
BRIAN: Well, I'm sure that the government and the post office were eager to supply this longing, this expectation now, to communicate across space. So did they adapt and provide Americans what they needed?
DAVID HINKIN: In the end, in 1845 and then again in 1851, Congress radically both slashed the price of postage and sort of redesigned the fee scale. They made it based on weight, rather than number of pages, or distance. Congress then said, "Well if we lower the postage, more people will use it and it won't cost us any more money."
But that argument was only plausible because Congress then thought there was a demand to use it. Incidentally that demand was in part illustrated by things like the tricks that I was talking about.
BRIAN: David Hinkin is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. His book is, The Postal Age. The Emergence of Modern Communications in 19th Century America.
It's time for a short break. When we come back, the post office plays host to the nation's most contentious debate. Later, we'll see what the postmaster general does when he gets his hands on a guided missile.
PETER: You're listening to BackStory, we'll be back in a minute.
Welcome back to BackStory, I'm Peter Onuf, 18th century guy here with Ed Ayers.
ED: 19th century guy.
PETER: And Brian Balogh.
BRIAN: Your 20th century guy.
We're talking today about the US post office. What it's given us through the years, besides the mail.
PETER: These days it can be hard not to feel a little sorry for the post office. Congress sets up rules for how it has to spend money, but it's the post office that takes the heat when your letter takes two weeks to arrive. The poor post office.
But two centuries ago the post office seemed very powerful indeed. Before email, before phones, before telegraphs, the post office seemed to be everywhere.
And in the 1830s something happened that made the post office seem way too powerful to some people. It all began with the abolitionists in the north.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: Abolitionism isn't a big deal in the 1830s, at least when the 1830s start.
PETER: This is Jennifer Mercieca, she's a professor of communications at Texas A&M University.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: In other words, if you're someone who's against slavery, you're kind of lukewarm, you're not really acting on the fact that you're against slavery.
PETER: Mercieca says that around 1835, northern abolitionists really stepped up their game.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: The American Anti Slavery Society decides that really what they want to do is get their message into the south. And so, they draw up a list of 200,000 slave holders, and they send their newspapers into the south.
I really think that they thought that if they sent slave holders this information about slavery is bad, that the slave holders would recognize common sense and change their mind.
PETER: As you might imagine, that's not what happened. Slave holders did not change their minds about slavery, but they did start to question the role of the post office in their communities.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: This is right around the time that the steam press is invented. And so, if you can imagine being a kind of gentleman, where the pace of life is really slow, and all of a sudden, this technology that had seemed benign, right, the post office and newspapers, becomes a weapon.
They thought that they were trying to ferment slave revolt. And nothing made southern slave holders more fearful than having a slave revolt.
PETER: The situation reached a crisis point in South Carolina. Over the last five years Charleston had been a cockpit of controversy over the role of the federal government and the future of slavery.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: And so, when the newspapers arrived in Charleston, that was the place where they had the most dramatic impact.
RICHARD JOHN: The Charleston postmaster, Alfred Huger, he says to himself, "Oh my Gosh."
PETER: This is Richard John, a historian at Columbia University and an expert on everything postal.
RICHARD JOHN: If I permit these tracks to be distributed, this might encourage a mob to assail the mail en route. So the Charleston postmaster marks the abolitionist tracks suspicious, and puts them in the corner of the post office, a rather large and impressive building still standing today.
PETER: Richard John talks about the abolitionist mail crisis of 1835 in his book called, "Spreading the News". We asked Richard to read a portion from his description of what happened next.
RICHARD JOHN: On Wednesday, July 29, 1835, at some point between 10 and 11 in the evening, a small group of men identified as the lynch men, broke into the post office in Charleston, South Carolina, by forcing open a window with a crow bar. These men extracted from the post office sacks marked suspicious containing abolitionist tracks.
The following night, the lynch men burned these tracks along with effigies of three of the leading abolitionists in a spectacular bonfire watched by a loud and enthusiastic crowd of 2,000, which was around 1/7 of the entire white population of the city.
PETER: News of this mob traveled fast from one post office to the next. That's when the Federal Government stepped in through the US Postmaster General Amos Kendall. Kendall was loyal to Andrew Jackson, and Andrew Jackson is loyal to the southerners.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: Amos Kendall as the postmaster gets involved. He writes a letter that's circulated through all the newspapers that essentially says, "Look, I have no legal authority to say that you can't circulate these newspapers through the post office, but I believe that local law is more important than National law." And if National law is being perverted and he believed that it was being perverted, then local law should be more important. And he calls that patriotism.
PETER: Amos Kendall essentially directs local postmasters to do as they see fit. So most of them, stop circulation of the abolitionist tracks. This marks a real set back for the abolitionist movement. But the lasting damage was to the post office.
JENNIFER MERCIECA: People were using this communication technology to bring up a topic of conversation that no one in the south wanted anyone to ever discuss. It made them suspicious of the post office and of the Federal Government.
PETER: That's Jennifer Mercieca. We also heard a minute ago from Richard John. You can read more about the great mail crisis of 1835 at BackStoryradio.org.
BRIAN: Ed, I want you to explain something to me. The story we just heard takes place in 1835. Up to this point it seemed to me that the post office is more or less a pretty uncontested Federal service. And, I would kind of like to know how it became so suddenly, controversial.
ED: Yeah Brian, great questions, especially for a 20th century guy, here's what happens is that some things have happened along the way.
Well, first of all, abolitionism has really been around for only a few years now. We think of it in its most incendiary form, only from 1831 on. So this is something that's new in current events. That's one thing.
Another thing is that they have these newspapers, The Liberator, and the tracks that they're producing are also brand new. So suddenly slaver holders are finding a new technology that's [inaudible 00:21:26] against their ancient institution.
Another thing that happens, is that these things can be produced very rapidly by steam presses. And so suddenly slave holders can feel overwhelmed by a massive amount of this new kind of mail.
Something else happens. Big businessmen who are in favor of abolitionism underwrite this campaign. And so you can have a scale of dissemination that would have been unimaginable if it's just individual writing letters to another individual.
BRIAN: And so the big issue then is going to be, who controls the Federal Government? Because the future of slavery, as all slave holders know, depends on an active government. They know that government has got to be on their side and what they see all of a sudden is that the post office, which was supposed to be this neutral institution that served all Americans across the vast continent is now being deployed by their sectional enemies against them, in other words, it's the Federal Government's neutrality which is at issue.
ED: Yeah, because the stakes could hardly be higher. A slave holder would say, "What's more immediately threatening to me, than a piece of mail appearing in my home, where a literate slave can read that he or she has allies elsewhere, that are calling for the end of slavery."
But, it's not just the white south that is upset by this dynamic. In the northern cities they open this up and they go, "What is this? Some rich people in the north are disseminating this volatile material all across the country, speaking in my name, and you may not speak in my name. I'm all for slavery. I'm all for holding the country together."
And so, this seems to me that even as a northerner that this is using the mail to undermine the compact of the country, allowing rich people to put out any messages they want, no matter how ill considered.
And Brian, and Peter, it's not long after this that crowds in Illinois actually take a printing press and dump it into the Mississippi River and they actually kill the printer.
So all across the country, people are responding to the threat that the materials brought by the post office. Originally envisioned as one of the most benign and beneficent institutions of the American nation seems suddenly now to be one of the greatest threats to the American nation.
BRIAN: Today, the post office seems pretty old fashioned, antiquated, it's not exactly a service that you ever associate with innovation. But for much of its history, the post office has really been on the leading edge of new technologies.
I talked with Nancy Pope, an historian and curator for the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in DC. Nancy told me about three different technologies that the post office used to deliver the mail. Some, admittedly, were more successful than others. The first, at the turn of the 20th century was a series of underground pneumatic tubes, giant versions of the kinds of tubes that you see at the drive through windows and banks today. You know that deliver your deposit receipt along with a snack for your dog? These tubes were constructed below the street of America's busies cities. Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and New York.
NANCY POPE: They had a series of canisters and each canister would carry about 600 letters and then they fired these canisters off through the tubes and they really went to almost about 27 miles per hour. They were pretty swift little things.
The Chicago post office had the most intriguing test of a pneumatic tube, most of the test they would bring in the Mayor and the postmaster and a few celebrities and they had a reporter and they would show how this works. Well in Chicago they wanted to prove that the mail would not be harmed by these tubes, so for the test, instead of putting in mail, they put in a live kitten.
BRIAN: How did that go, Nancy?
NANCY POPE: For the kitty, actually, probably pretty terrifying, but the good news is that he came out the other side alive, kicking and actually screaming and clawing when they opened up the canister.
BRIAN: Okay, so what's the longest that one of these canisters traveled through one of these pneumatic tubes?
NANCY POPE: They really went up to about two, three miles, 10 miles at the most, but they were so entwined in all the cities. New York City for instance had 15 miles of tubes all over the city, and 27 miles by the turn of the century. All of the cities combined had almost 60 miles of tubes running underground. It was very popular for people to use, because in those days, businesses and residences had several deliveries of mail a day.
Now we're used to the one a day delivery. But at that point businesses could have seven, some cities had five for residences, so say a wife wants to send a letter to her husband at work. "Dearest Charles. Dinner at six?" And he could respond about bringing somebody home for dinner. "Absolutely. Micky will join." And then she could write back. "What do you want?" And him back what the menu should be. "Green bean casserole sweetie." All in one day.
BRIAN: Amazing. How long did the post office use this system in large cities
NANCY POPE: Well it really was from 1893 in Philadelphia to 1914, 1915. I do know that New York City actually brought theirs back into use after the end of World War I, and they used a few lines until 1953.
BRIAN: Wow.
NANCY POPE: And then they just retired it for good.
BRIAN: Let's move on to another innovation that caught my eye. Something called vmail.
SPEAKER 14: The US Post Office inaugurates a fast new mail service for soldiers and sailors overseas.
NANCY POPE: V for victory signifies means we've moved into World War II. vmail was used during World War II, and the concept was that because letters are so heavy, when you're sending all these letters to the troops, that's a lot of mail that's taking up a lot of space on ships and planes. And wouldn't it be better served for the war effort, if you could reduce that somehow?
SPEAKER 14: Letters written on special forms, four by five inches when folded, are stamped and posted like regular mail.
NANCY POPE: So the idea was, we'll reduce it by taking pictures and shrinking them down.
SPEAKER 14: Each letter passed by the sensor, is photographed on small rolls of 16mm microfilm.
NANCY POPE: Then the film was transferred overseas and the film was then sent to a special location and the film would be then developed.
SPEAKER 14: Automatic machines enlarge each overseas letter from 16mm negative to a four by five inch print.
NANCY POPE: And these little letters that are about a quarter size of the original were produced, and then sent on to whoever the mail was intended for.
BRIAN: So the letters that the soldiers actually received were a quarter of the size for a regular letter?
NANCY POPE: Exactly. Soldiers or the people at home. What women often did was seal the letter literally with a kiss, so that's lipstick on the letter, which is great, fine for the letter, but what happened with the vmail is these special, the envelopes that you wrote on, went through machines that opened them up, so they could be photographed. But because of all the lipstick that would get stuck in the machine as the letters went through, it built up and built up and built up and it would clog the machines. So yes the called that the red scorge.
BRIAN: I understand that the post office tried to employ missile technology? Did I make that up?
NANCY POPE: Not at all. The post office has this tradition of using anything and everything that moved, to move the mail. Nothing was moving faster in the 1950s than missiles. So Arthur Summerfield, who is the Postmaster General at the time, a great lover of everything modern and futuristic, said, "Why don't we take these missiles and use them to carry mail? They've got these areas where you're putting the nuclear warhead, we'll just empty out that space and put in letters."
So, in June of 1959, he had convinced the NAVY and Defense Department to go along with him, and they took 3,000 letters that they put into the space where the nuclear warhead would have fit, and they put those into the Regulus missile that was on the USS Barbero. The Barbero sailed out about 100 miles. It was at Norfolk. It sailed out about 100 miles into the ocean, and turned around and fired its missiles.
BRIAN: And what was the recovery operation like?
NANCY POPE: Fortunately for this, the regulus missile had two colors and two uses. The red missile was a test missile and it was fitted with wheels and landing gear. And the blue one was the one that was not going to come back. So fortunately for the test they used the red bird and with the landing gear it was guided to a landing in Mayport, Florida at the Naval Station. And when it landed, perfect landing, everything great, they carted it over to a receiving committee, which was the Postmaster General and some Navy officials, an admiral and such, and they opened it up and there was the mail that had been flown from the Barbero to the airfield.
BRIAN: Was it addressed correctly? I mean did it arrive at the right place
NANCY POPE: Well see, that's the tricky part, because it delivered the mail fine from the sub to the Naval Base, but all these letters were addressed to people like President Eisenhower, members of the Senate and so they took them to Jacksonville, Florida, and just put them in the mail stream.
BRIAN: I'm just going to guess, that missile technology did not catch on
NANCY POPE: Well, the missile worked fabulous, and really the Defense Department loved the idea because they liked any sort of public showing of how well the missiles worked. This was of course the Cold War era. And anytime we can say to the Russians, "Our missiles are so good, that we can use them to carry mail. We can use them to land wherever we want them to. They're guided well."
So the Defense Department loved that aspect of it. But that was really all they cared about. Summerfield on the other hand, had in his press release said, "This is a great day for the future of mail and soon we'll be using missiles to carry it to Europe and everywhere." Of course they didn't. This was the one and only shot.
BRIAN: Nancy Pope is an historian and curator at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in DC. Guys, I've got to tell you about the best story that Nancy told me. The post office experimented with using camels out west to transport the mail.
PETER: Very cool.
BRIAN: We're going to take a short break. Coming up, we'll expose the true nature of one of the most miserable moral, and financial failures in postal history, the Pony Express.
PETER: You're listening to BackStory, we'll be back in a minute.
BRIAN: This is BackStory with the American History guys. I'm Brian Balogh, 20th century guy.
ED: I'm Ed Ayers, 19th century guy.
PETER: And I'm Peter Onuf, 18th century guy.
BRIAN: Today on our show, the US Mail. With the post office struggling to chart its future course, we're exploring today what the post office has meant in the American past.
PETER: Every week, we invite listeners to ask us their questions about our topic online via Facebook, Twitter and our website. And we've invited a few of you to join us on the phones.
All right guys, our first call is from our hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, it's Nancy, welcome to BackStory.
NANCY ON PHONE: Thank you.
PETER: What have you got for us?
NANCY ON PHONE: I have a story about my father.
PETER: Okay.
NANCY ON PHONE: At the beginning of World War II he had trained to be a professional photographer and he was about to open his own studio, but he was afraid he would be drafted, and he would leave my mother with a lot of debt and a business she couldn't run.
So he started to work as a postal clerk in the post office in Durham, North Carolina. He was drafted, and when he came back, he went back to the post office. Many times, he applied to be postmaster, and was quite qualified, but because it was a political appointment and he belonged to a minority party, he was passed over, and the Congressman told him repeatedly, "Well you are our best candidate, but I can't got back to Washington and tell them that I can't find one single person of my party to make postmaster."
PETER: Wow.
NANCY ON PHONE: Yeah.
BRIAN: And Nancy, I think it's important to let you know that the post office was the heart of Federal political patronage, going all the way back to Peter's period.
PETER: Yes, absolutely.
BRIAN: This was a long, your dad was following the footsteps of many, many, many qualified people who were turned down, because, literally, of the political party they belonged to.
NANCY ON PHONE: Right. And obviously, most of the post office did not run that way. It was a meritocracy except for those plum positions at the top.
PETER: Yeah, in a way it's like civil service today. The highest levels are political. But that patronage is really important, because it's not just communications that holds the country together, and that is what we celebrate with the post office, but its also those appointments, their personal connections. It's the reach of the National party into every village in the country, and yep, they're winners and losers, but it's a big incentive for people to get active, to participate. So patronage just sounds like a dirty word to us now, it's against clean government and meritocracy and everything, but it also performs a very important function in cementing connections and creating attachments that make the Union work.
BRIAN: You know, Nancy, had your father become postmaster, he would have been in charge not only of the mail, but perhaps more important, although informal job, would have been approving the hiring of all kinds of Federal employees in his city. And the postmaster was just a small version, a little version, of the Postmaster General.
The Postmaster General served in the President's cabinet in a formal capacity until the early 1970s, but it was his informal capacity ad the man, and he was always the man, who signed off on all the major political appointments to office. Not just in the post office, but key political appointments to the Federal government, around the whole country. It was truly one of the most powerful political jobs in the nation.
PETER: Absolutely.
NANCY ON PHONE: Right.
BRIAN: So I think that it should make you feel a lot better, that he was a part of history. You know that he's woven into the fabric of discrimination.
NANCY ON PHONE: Well, Mr. Zip saved him, because he became, when the instituted the zip code in the 60s, he was appointed Mr. Zip for Durham, working with businesses, and eventually he rose over all the postmasters and was sent to the regional office, he was so good at it.
PETER: Well this is a happy story then.
NANCY ON PHONE: It is a happy ending story, yes it is.
PETER: Yeah. So I want to know about Mr. Zip. We didn't have them in the 18th century, he's a 20th century character, were there Mr. or Mrs. Zips all over the country or was your entrepreneurial father just so good at this that he became like nationwide Mr. Zip?
NANCY ON PHONE: No. No. They appointed people in all sorts of communities that were large enough to have businesses that needed to be trained to get on board using it. And he had all this photography background, so he could go out to businesses and make presentations and stuff like that, explaining what zip code was and how it would benefit their businesses.
BRIAN: It's never going to work. It's too complex. You can't put numbers on letters ... all those numbers.
NANCY ON PHONE: Exactly.
PETER: Thanks for your great call.
BRIAN: Thank you very much.
NANCY ON PHONE: Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.
BRIAN: If you're just tuning in, this is BackStory, and we're talking about one of America's oldest, most expansive organizations, that's right, the post office.
PETER: We've got a caller on the line from Boston, Massachusetts, it's Annette. Annette, welcome to the show.
ANNETTE: Good to be here. I was just thinking the post office is a place where African Americans were actually able to enter something called the middle class or even the working class in places in the south and actually all over the country.
Where I grew up, jobs in the post office were the jobs that people who didn't go to college could get. But they were conscientious people because you have to take a test and so forth and all those things, but it was a good job. And there was a lot of resentment among some in the white community. Particularly if they worked in the post office, because that was sort of a ... it's not like they had a regular office, but it was a job that conferred status.
Bringing mail was different, because, I suppose even in slavery, blacks ran errands and took letters and things to people, that's one thing. But anything that conferred dignity. A lot of people felt hostile towards.
BRIAN: Could I ask where you grew up, Annette?
ANNETTE: I grew up in Garner, Texas.
PETER: So Brian, I'm thinking of other Federal institutions like the military that were very important in the emergence of a black middle class.
BRIAN: Yeah. Well, one thing that the US Army or Navy and the US Post Office have in common is that they are national, they're Federal operations, and so as the Federal Government began to employ African Americans the post office, which employed more people than anybody, well into the 20th century among Federal agencies, did begin to employ African Americans, and it was a special place I think for African Americans for a number of reasons.
Number one, and you might not have seen this coming, there weren't unions. And one of the problems that African Americans faced in middle class type jobs, was discrimination within the unions themselves. So the post office really did become a tremendous engine of opportunity for lots of African Americans, in part because the Federal Government really did take a lead in non discrimination, but in part it wasn't until, I think, the 60s or the 70s, that there was a union and I should say, in fairness to unions, by then unions were much more progressive on the issue of race.
But this is so 20th century, there's got to be a history of this in the 19th century, Ed?
ED: It's a surprising place. You referred in the middle of your response, Brian, to the federal nature of all this. And ironically, the American south would have created places where African Americans could have these jobs because of political patronage. You know when you had Republican Presidents coming in, they were looking for Republicans in the south, and there weren't very many who were not African American.
And so ironically, the post office would be a place, especially in neighborhoods that were heavily African American, that these jobs could come to literate black people. And this is a phenomenon that you would find in lots of places, even unexpected ones.
PETER: Thanks very much Annette.
ANNETTE: You're very welcome.
PETER: Great talking with you.
BRIAN: Thank you.
ANNETTE: Bye bye.
BRIAN: Bye bye.
ED: We've got one more story for you today, and it's about one of history's most famous attempts to deliver the mail. The Pony Express. Now just to be clear, the Pony Express was not a service of the United States Post Office itself. It was a private venture, like FedEx or UPS. And at the time, it was seen as a huge achievement, moving the mail across the country on horseback in just 10 days. People were fascinated by the pony and the legend lives on today.
But as you might have guessed, the Pony Express was not as glamorous as the myth suggests. BackStory producer Eric Mennel tells the story.
ERIC MENNEL: I grew up hearing the same story you did about the Pony Express. But as it's not exactly a topic of everyday conversation, I called up my childhood expert source for a refresher.
ERIC'S MOM: Hello?
ERIC MENNEL: Hey Mom.
ERIC'S MOM: Hey.
ERIC MENNEL: Hey.
In the interest of full disclosure, my mom has no formal training in American history. Most of what she knows about the Pony Express comes from stories. Stories she heard from someone who heard them from someone who heard them from someone. I asked her what exactly she remembers.
ERIC'S MOM: That was the mail system in the wild west. I mean I can't give you by dates or anything, I'm thinking early 1800s-ish. And a lot of times they would have younger men do it, crossing the mountain ranges and riding through the desert on a horse with no name. That's how the delivered the mail. If that's not the real Pony Express? Is there more to the story than that?
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: Well, with no disrespect to your mother.
ERIC MENNEL: This is Christopher Corbett, he's a journalist and an author who's written a book on the Pony Express. I told him how my mom and I thought that the Pony Express was the main method of mail delivery for years and years.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: No one ever gets that right.
ERIC MENNEL: Really?
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: People guess 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, it more or less operated for 78 weeks.
ERIC MENNEL: A year and a half. EAnd Corbett says, not only was the Pony Express short lived, but the kind of mail they delivered, was pretty bland too.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: They were carrying government documents, they were carrying bank transfers, they were carrying important business matters, they were not carrying love letters, Christmas cards, junk mail, and they weren't carrying packages. But other than that, mom was right.
ERIC MENNEL: So other than everything, mom was right.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: Yes.
ERIC MENNEL: Yeah.
The basic details of the Pony Express don't necessarily make it seem like such a bad idea. It's official name was the Central Over Land California and Pikes Peak Express, catchy, I know. It was a private venture sort of like the FedEx of 1860. And it stretched from Saint Joseph, Missouri in the east to Sacramento in the west, about 2,000 miles. Each rider, a young man, would cover 10 or so miles before switching horses. He's switch horses maybe eight or nine times, before a new rider would take over. The trip would take less than 10 days. A remarkable improvement on the six months the post office would take by steam ship.
Logistically however, the business was a disaster. Each rider only carried about 20 pounds of mail at a time, that's like two and a half gallons of milk per trip. Each piece of mail cost $5 to send across the country, a full week's pay at the time.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: You could almost teach this at Wharton or Amos Tuck or Harvard as how not to run a business.
ERIC MENNEL: Again, Chris Corbett. He says the term, "hemorrhaged money." And often times they didn't even pay their riders.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: That's one of the things they used to complain about, was not getting paid. They didn't talk about having to shoot their way through a horde of Indians or they didn't have any of those kinds of romantic kind of western dying novel, Hollywood stories. They said they didn't get paid.
ERIC MENNEL: The conditions were terrible. The food was inedible. A few riders died from the weather. One guy's horse fell on him. Sounds miserable. So you've got to wonder how people came to remember the Pony Express as so great. Corbett says there are two guys to blame. The first, Mark Twain.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: Mark Twain was a 26 year old Confederate Army deserter who was going west on the top of a stagecoach in western Nebraska, and he was hoping to see the Pony Express. And the driver of the coach told him, if you sit up on the top here, you might see the rider of the Pony Express come through.
And along after a while, near Mud Springs, Nebraska, Twain saw a Pony Express rider. And writing entirely from memory, 10 years later, in Hartford, Connecticut, having not taken a single note, he got a whole chapter of Roughing It our of this.
"No matter what time of day or night his watch came on. And no matter whether it was winter or summer, raining, snowing, hailing or sleeting, or whether his beat was a level straight road or a crazy trail of a mountain track and precipices. Or whether it lead through peaceful regions or regions that swarmed with hostile Indians, he must be always ready to leap into the saddle and be off like the wind."
And he completely enshrined the memory of the pony, and his description is not inaccurate, it's just wildly enthusiastic, and it's very romantic. I mean, okay, he's Mark Twain.
ERIC: Ten years later, the second guy came around, Buffalo Bill Cody. He added a reenactment of the Pony Express to his traveling show.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: And from the day that show opened in Omaha, Nebraska in 1881 until the day it closed, wherever Cody took that show, in rain or in shine, drunk or broke, he took the Pony Express. It was a permanent fixture in the show. Literally hundreds of thousands of people saw the pony express. Queen Victoria came out of mourning to see the Pony Express.
The Pope allowed the Pony Express to come into Vatican City. When Buffalo Bill got done, Eric, no one was going to forget the Pony Express, and they weren't going to let the facts get in the way.
ERIC MENNEL: The Pony Express shut down literally within hours of the first telegraph message reaching the west. Technology wiping out the need for in person delivery. Sound familiar?
I asked Corbett why he felt the memory of the Pony Express is so strong, even today.
CHRISTOPHER CORBETT: I think it is a thrilling and powerful memory of the old west. I think it's a benign memory of the west, and we don't have a lot of benign memories of the west. We have memories of the west that make us understandably plainly uncomfortable. The slaughter of the buffalo, what was done to the American Indian, the exploitation of the land, whatever, there's a lot of things about the 19th century west that a lot of people are uncomfortable with.
But then along comes the pony, no pun intended, he carries no baggage. Americans love that memory.
ERIC MENNEL: It's a memory that's not going away. It's hard to imagine door to door mail carriers 150 from now. We'll probably have robots or something. Or automated cars that shoot your mail directly to your doorstop, I don't know. But I'm willing to bet, when it comes time to brand those robots, to stamp a logo on their sides, somebody in the room's going to make the suggestion, "What about a man on horseback? You know, the Pony Express."
BRIAN: Eric Mennel is one of our producers.
That's going to do it for us today. But we'd love to hear what you think about the future of the US Post Office. How do you imagine the mail being delivered 50 or even 100 years from now? Tell us at our website, BackStory.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. BackStory radio is the handle.
Now if you're feeling really gung ho about the post office after hearing this show, you could mail us a physical letter, with paper and a stamp and everything. Our address, 145 Ednom Drive, Charlottesville, Virginia, 22903. Seriously we love hard copy.
Today's episode of BackStory was produced by Neal [inaudible 00:51:34], Jess [inaudible 00:51:34], Eric Mennel and Alison Quance. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Our senior producer is Tony Field.
PETER: Frank Cirillo is our intern. We had help from Alan Chen. BackStory's executive producer is Andrew Wyndham.
Special thanks today to WVTF here in Virginia and to our Mark Twain gatherer. Christopher Corbett's book about the Pony Express is called, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express.
Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, an anonymous donor and the History Channel, history made every day.
SPEAKER 3: Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh are professors in the University of Virginia's Corchran Department of History. Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
BRIAN: On the next BackStory with the American History guys. America the Beautiful is a song about American exceptionalism, about how America is the greatest, most beautiful country in the world.
SPEAKER 2: The third verse ends with the words, "America, America, God shed his grace on thee. Til selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free."
BRIAN: Really? Selfish gain? American exceptionalism on the next BackStory.