Heather Cox Richardson:
From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.
Joanne Freeman:
And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to be talking about a topic that has been in and out and in and out of the news recently, but that for one reason or another is going to stay in the news, and that is the US Postal Service. It’s been in the news clearly a lot because of the Postmaster General Louis DeJoy who has been doing a number of reforms and changes into the postal system that have been controversial, that in one way or another, have been slowing the mails. That in one way or another are also for that very reason, potentially having something to do with the process of voting and particularly absentee ballots. For that reason, among many others, it has a lot to do with more than the male. And that’s part of what we’re going to be talking about today is the many ways in which the US postal system is about a lot more than simply the mail that it really burrows pretty deeply into what the United States is.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And the funny part about preparing for this was just how much fun it was. How many times when we thought about the United States Postal Service as it’s called now that we had great stories or great memories of things we’d found in historical documents, which says a lot about why the United States Postal Service is so important and what role it has played in America?
Joanne Freeman:
As a matter of fact, the postal service has been a pretty central part of what makes the United States the United States going all the way back to the beginning of the Republic. Because if you think about the fact that a Republic unlike a monarchical form of government relies on public opinion and that the public is sovereign. The only way that the public can act in that capacity is if they are informed about events that are going on around them and particularly about what the government is doing. And for that reason, the postal service ends up having an extreme political importance, as well as a national importance that the founding generation was very well aware of.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So first of all, this interest in having postal routes along the colonies starts even before the declaration of independence and the constitution, right?
Joanne Freeman:
Well, right because even before independence is declared, when you’re in that period when the hostilities are building and America is already starting to turn on royal officers of various sorts, you still have to have a postal service in action. So even before independence is officially declared, Americans are wrestling with the postal service and how it’s going to work.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And fittingly, isn’t it Benjamin Franklin who goes ahead and establishes the first US postal route, even before the declaration of independence? He works for the British Crown as I recall. And just so you know, I sound really good. Don’t I? I am dredging this up from the fact I lived in a town as a kid that had one of the markers on what we then knew as the King’s Highway and we knew it as Franklin’s marker. And so I’m really hoping that my second grade teacher was right when she said Benjamin Franklin did this before the United States was the United States.
Joanne Freeman:
Wow. And I am going to point out here that there’s a historical marker that did a thing, a concrete thing for little Heather before historian person and it has stayed with you. Just as a historian, I want to give it a historical marker it’s moment of glory.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well and worse, I dragged my nephew to it not 10 years ago. And somebody has put it inside a wall. It used to be just simply beside a dirt road and now it’s inside a wall. But it was my understanding that that was the origins of Route 1 up and down the coast from Maine to wherever it would have ended in those days.
Joanne Freeman:
That could very well be. I am actually going to trust you and your second grade teacher as a matter of fact on that fact, but that sounds totally logical. And Franklin was in one way or another involved in the postal service for quite a long time before and then during the United States becoming the United States.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So the idea is that if people can communicate along this road through the exchange of printed matter or handwritten matter, they’re going to unify? Is that the plan?
Joanne Freeman:
Perhaps unify is too strong a word, but one of the main challenges that people thought about and wondered about and really wondered if the United States would work for this reason as a country is just distance. Things were so spread out. The population was so spread out over such a large area. The question came up again and again and again. In a republic, a republican form of government, small r republican that really relies on an informed public in one way or another acting together, can you do that in a country that’s spread out over such a long distance? And the postal service becomes one way of addressing that challenge.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So when they go ahead and try to set up a government and you can take your pick of the Articles of Confederation or the constitution, if you’d like, although of course, I’d love to hear about the constitution. What do they say about this need? Because the constitution ends up saying we have to have a post office, right?
Joanne Freeman:
It does. But what I want to quote and this won’t be a surprise at all. I’m going to quote Hamilton. I do want to quote-
Heather Cox Richardson:
Who?
Joanne Freeman:
Haha. That gets a harrumph Heather. That gets a hearty harrumph. Hamilton in Federalist Number 84 talks about this precise issue. And obviously the Federalist essays are pitching promoting the constitution and also explaining it. So this is part of that discussion. He writes, “It ought also to be remembered that the citizens who inhabit the country at and near the seat of government will, in all questions that affect the general liberty and prosperity, have the same interest with those who are at a distance, and that they will stand ready to sound the alarm when necessary, and to point out the actors in any pernicious project. The public papers will be expeditious messengers of intelligence to the most remote inhabitants of the union.” So there he’s even saying to some degree national security, in addition to an informed body politic will rely on information spreading through the mail.
Heather Cox Richardson:
It’s also really interesting because he’s talking about access to the government and making sure that there isn’t a group of people who are excluded from what’s happening in the country and what’s happening in the government. And that principle, the idea that everybody should be included and that the way to make that happen is to make sure that everybody has equal access to information is, first of all, really interesting one, but second of all, it seems to me that they considered it so important they put it in the constitution.
Joanne Freeman:
Right. The constitution does say that Congress will have the power to establish post offices and post roads, which are the connecting networks within the nation for sure. So it’s a matter of politics. It’s a matter of an informed populace. It’s a matter of community and binding the nation together in some way. And I would say that to that generation of people, those things are all part of the same unit of a challenge that they face in creating the new nation.
There’s a really striking quote from a prominent thinker at the time, Benjamin Rush. And he shows, he uses the word, as you’ll hear in a moment, “Commonwealth” in the middle of this quote, which I think is a word that really ties together just what you’re asking about here, Heather, about the nation, the sense of community, and then the idea of liberties tied into one big bundle. He says, “For the purpose of diffusing knowledge as well as extending the living principle of government to every part of the United States, every state, city, county, village, and township in the union should be tied together by means of the post office. This is the true non-electric wire of government,” which is a really interesting phrase.
“It is the only means of conveying heat and light to every individual in the federal Commonwealth. It should be a constant injunction to the postmasters to convey newspapers free of all charge for postage. They are not only the vehicles of knowledge and intelligence, but the sentinels of the liberties of our country.” So both Hamilton and Benjamin Rush, in one way or another, they’re talking about how vital the postal services as a tool of union and nationhood and national security.
Heather Cox Richardson:
This idea that the post office is the central way in which Americans are tied together in this period, really jumps out at me because it just seems like it’s such a different way than people nowadays tend to think of the post office and yet that idea of access to your government and if everybody having equal access to that government and through the information that is being produced about that government, just jumps out at you in the way that these framers are talking about the importance of the circulation, the free circulation of information.
Joanne Freeman:
Well, right. And in essence, what we’re talking about here, although in this period, they wouldn’t use this word, what we’re talking about is the postal service being central to democracy. Democracy is what you get when you add all those pieces together, that’s a charged word with a different meaning in the founding era, but still that’s essentially what we’re talking about here. And it is, I think that when it’s functioning properly, the postal service is something we don’t think about. When we do think about it, I think we think about it in the realm of, is it profitable or not? Is it a business or not? And what we don’t think about are the various sorts of things, Heather, that I think you and I are going to be talking about today, which is, what does it actually do for the nation?
Heather Cox Richardson:
What I love about the beginning of it in the idea of creating a democracy and spreading the ideas of a democracy is that the way it actually develops does precisely that. So with this charge from the constitution that there needs to be a postal service or a post office as they called it then, there is quickly a real growth in the development of post offices across the country.
By 1790, they were 75 post offices. By 1860, there were 28,498 post offices in the country. And that’s going to say all kinds of things that maybe we can talk about a little bit about the development of the country, the Euro-Americans from the East Coast spreading West, how that takes over popular culture. And all of those things are going to be central to how we think about that institution.
But I want to point out here as a political historian that after about 1830 when Andrew Jackson is in charge of things, those post offices are staffed with political appointees. So what you’re essentially doing is, you are creating this huge institution. It’s not a business at all. It’s part of the government, that is huge institution across the country that has tens of thousands of federal employees. And those federal employees actually make up, by 1831, they make up 76% of the federal government, which is more than the federal government had in terms of soldiers. It had postal employees.
Joanne Freeman:
And I will add that that idea that postal officers will be political appointees and that that begins to interact with partisan politics, that actually goes back to the Dawn of the Republic as well. At the very beginning and the very first few years under the constitution, you have, for example, Federalists. There’s one in particular in the 1790s, and this is a quote from him, says, “Only sound Federalists shall be in the different post offices. From the subscription on letters and papers, corrupted channels may be discerned.”
So what he’s saying is, if Federalists are in the post offices, they can see who’s writing to who and they can draw conclusions about who has loyalties to who. And in essence, work that into partisan politics. So it makes perfect sense that that really is perfected under Andrew Jackson who really brings party politics into play. But that idea that in the very way that the postal service is a network and we’re talking about the importance of that network, we’re also talking about people saying, “Ooh, it’s a network. We can use that politically.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
So you have the idea of the network of ideas early on in that very airy framer way of saying, “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s create a machine.” And then the next generation going, “I’ve gotten even better idea. Let’s actually use that machine.” And that new institution of post offices goes, “All across the country.” And you think of every little town, every little hamlet has a postmaster. My great example of this, of course, is that Abraham Lincoln is a postmaster.
People tend to forget about it. They talk about him as an inventor. They talk about him as something small like the president, but he was actually a postmaster. And that’s one of the ways that he got his start in politics was because people used to go into the post offices to pick up their mail, but he would go another step. If you didn’t go to pick up your mail, he would bring the mail out to you, which he was not required to do, but it gave him a really good reputation. And it also meant that he met a lot of people because everybody was desperate to get their mail.
Joanne Freeman:
Thinking like a politician.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Always thinking like a politician when it came to him. So you have this extraordinary growth in the post office in the middle of the 19th century, and then of course, the civil war hits. And with the hitting of the civil war, it’s pretty clear that the government needs to create some standards for postal service and for how you pay for postal service because there’s just so much coming in.
And one of the things that happens during the civil war is there is the idea that you will pay for postage according to weight rather than according to distance, which is the way it was before. And nobody wanted to be measuring how far a letter was coming from Illinois to wherever the battlefield was that day. So they changed it into being just about weight, which historians are going to lament later on because people are going to write in two directions on the same side of the same sort of paper. And so you sit there trying desperately to read less to two direction.
Joanne Freeman:
Oh, it’s horrible. Yes, it’s horrible to read between the lines up and down the sides. Yeah, it’s the curse of historians who have to read handwriting forever.
Heather Cox Richardson:
People are relying on the mail and the mail becomes a symbol of your connection to your family, but also of the federal government that is linking you to your family. And it begins in the middle of the 19th century to take on this romantic quality and to work its way into our popular culture. So for example, the whole idea of stagecoaches, those Western stagecoaches. Well, why are their Western stagecoaches? They’re Western stagecoaches to deliver the mail, especially after Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 and the opening of the Goldfields in California in ’49, how are you going to get mail out to your son in California? You’re going to send it by the United States Postal Service. And then from that, of course, we’re going to get incredibly romantic things like the Pony Express, which only operates for about a year and a half I think it is.
Joanne Freeman:
That was the thing. That was the thing when I was preparing for this episode that stunned me was that the Pony Express, and the very thing you’re talking about here, Heather, that we’re talking about like romance and culture and our sense of the west and men with the leather saddlebags, riding around on the Pony Express, it lasted less than 18 months.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Yeah.
Joanne Freeman:
Think about the cultural impact of that, it really tells you a lot about the image of what’s being, really, I don’t want to say soul here, but the image of the West conquering the West with the postal service.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And again, we remember the images, we don’t remember what caused it. And in many ways it feels almost like the post office was like the tech boom where there were so many movies about it and so many songs about it and so much change in culture. And the day may come when people forget that there was this origin of something like the internet and it’s centered like, “Oh, remember the songs?” But think of all the ways in which the postal service has become central to our sense of Americanism. So there’s all the movies, there’s all the stagecoaches. There’s the Pony Express. There’s the men reading their mail in any war time, but civil war, World War I and World War II and then popular music. Think of that.
Joanne Freeman:
Well, now, this is the thing, Heather, when you and I were talking in anticipation of this episode, one of the first things we started doing was all of the mail delivery, post office music. There’s so much, Heather.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Of course, you have made that sound more boring. Mail delivery, post office music.
Joanne Freeman:
Oh, come on. My baby she wrote me a letter. We’re talking to music.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Yes, but it’s not… Okay. Just so you know, that’s not really about the post office. That’s about his baby. Okay?
Joanne Freeman:
I know, Heather. Well, but we’re talking about community and his baby is his community. And that is in a sense what all of this music is about. It’s all about receiving letters and sending letters and getting letters and your heart’s breaking because you haven’t gotten a letter. And in one way or another, the mail represents your love, the person you’re wanting or longing for. So it is in that sense, a stand in for community, even in these kinds of popular culture songs.
Heather Cox Richardson:
The Marvelettes.
Joanne Freeman:
You’re not singing. I was waiting for you to sing, Heather.
Heather Cox Richardson:
I am not going to take on The Marvelettes. Let me tell you. They had another one based in the postal service as well. They had Twistin’ Postman as well, sitting by the window, feeling sad and blue all because I haven’t heard from you. And then my momma said, “Look, look.”
Joanne Freeman:
Twistin’ Postman. It’s not a surprise that that did not make it big.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Yeah. However, Elvis, the year you and I were born. Return to Sender (Joanne and Heather singing). And then of course, Stevie Wonder, Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours). We could just go on and on and on. But then think about not just the songs, but how the post office shows up in popular culture.
Joanne Freeman:
Yes.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So you got to give me Cliff on Cheers. I mean, Cliff is the postal carrier on Cheers–
Joanne Freeman:
And that’s a huge part of his character, huge part of his character. And even better, this made me laugh out loud reading about this. I remembered it. And then this particular quote made me laugh out loud. What about Newman on Seinfeld? Right? The character Newman who is a postal worker and on Seinfeld, he’s asked by George, character on Seinfeld, why is it the postal workers tend to go crazy and come back with a gun and shoot everyone? And this is Newman’s explanation. “Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a letup. It’s relentless. Every day it piles up more and more and you got to get it out. And the more you get out, the more it keeps coming in. And then the barcode reader breaks. And then it’s Publishers Clearing House day.” I just love that quote.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And that’s a great transition from the culture, the family-oriented. My baby wrote me a letter kind of thing to this idea about the time that Seinfeld is running that somehow there’s something deeply wrong in this hallowed American institution. And one of the things that’s really interesting about that whole term, “going postal” that they’re talking about there, they’re actually comes by the late 90s this sense that there are a number of postal workers who are going bananas and becoming dangerous on the job.
And there’s actually a hearing about that in Congress. And what they discover is in fact that the postal service is actually a much safer place to work than any place else. But that image of somehow the breakdown of our community represented by the postal service works its way into popular culture, including places like Seinfeld. So we still have that old line about… And this is obviously in quotes here, “going postal,” but that’s a reflection of the era, not the reality. It was safer to work in a post office than anywhere else in that period.
It shows this change that shows up after World War II because with World War II, there’s been an incredible increase in volume of mail. So we get, for example, the first zip codes in 1947 just because so many of the postal workers have gone off to war and nobody else knows how to sort the mail. So they start to play around with adding numbers to the cities, for example, so people will know where to send stuff. And then after the war, as people move out to the suburbs and they move around the country to find work, mail more than doubles at the end of World War II in 1963.
And because the United States Post Office is still run by Congress, it’s still this government organization, and it’s still in older buildings that were developed largely during the New Deal, during the 1930s, they can’t handle this volume. And at the same time that they need new buildings, and the need more workers, and they need to speed up what they’re doing, Congress doesn’t actually want to raise prices on the mail because their constituents don’t want that. And they also don’t want to raise taxes to put more money into things. So the mail backs up hideously late 1960s and 1970s in post offices. And it’s ripe to create a crisis.
Joanne Freeman:
What’s interesting as we’re continuing on in this conversation, we’re talking about spreading across the nation and we’re talking about going to war and coming back, in one way or another and talking about the postal service, we really are mapping national history in one way or another. We’re really tracking the growth and expansion of the nation, not just geographically, but really at its core, what the nation is at any moment, the growth of suburbs. It’s really striking the more that we have this conversation, the ways in which in a sense, we’re laying the framework for a survey of American history of course and our conversation.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But this next piece, again, maps on to the late 1960s and the 1970s because when it is clear that there is a crisis in the post office, there’s an attempt to work out better pay for the postal workers and to try and modernize and it doesn’t work. And finally on March 18th of 1970, the letter carriers or New York City walked off the job. They were protesting their pay and their conditions. And it was illegal, of course, for them to do that. But nonetheless employees across the country joined the walkout and the nation’s mail essentially shut down in 1970. And you think, “Oh, well, maybe you’re not going to get a letter from your aunt.” No, in fact, that’s also pension checks, tax refunds, draft notices, welfare checks. Society really shuts down when that happens. And finally on March 23rd, President Richard Nixon goes ahead and declares a state of national emergency and he sends federal troops into New York City to try and sort and distribute the backlog of mail that’s there.
Richard Nixon (archival):
I have just now directed the activation of the men of the various military organizations to begin in New York City the restoration of essential mail services.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Finally, two days later, they start negotiations to address the issues at stake in the crisis in the post office, but there’s this amazing moment in 1970 where you actually have soldiers trying to get the country up and moving again.
Joanne Freeman:
So after that strike, the resulting legislation from that crisis, the Postal Reorganization Act really basically transforms the post office department into an independent, a newly independent establishment of the executive branch. And it is now called the United States Postal Service. And it includes central provisions in it that supposedly are going to cut back on the possibility for future strikes. So there’s adequate financing authority. There’s collective bargaining that’s added in. There’s the setting of rates by the postal service after an opportunity for hearings before an impartial rate panel and postal workers still are barred from striking.
It takes effect on July 1st, 1971. And the first paragraph of the law basically lays out a mission statement of the new United States Postal Service. It says, “The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the government of the United States, authorized by the constitution, created by Act of Congress and supported by the people. The postal service shall have as its basic function, the obligation to provide postal services to,” and here we go is basically what we’ve been saying all along, Heather, “To bind the nation together through the personal educational, literary and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The cost of establishing and maintaining the postal service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.” So the number of times the people appears in that statement is noteworthy.
Heather Cox Richardson:
This is noteworthy because they’re really trying to emphasize that this is not privatization of the postal service. It’s an attempt to make it more efficient by making sure it’s not dependent on Congress for funding. And that’s a really important point when we’re going to talk about where we are today with the United States Postal Service is after the Postal Reorganization Act, it has always been self-funding. You hear again and again and again, “Oh my tax dollars.” Your tax dollars don’t go into the United States Postal Service after the Postal Reorganization Act.
It doesn’t get tax support and it is also required to serve everybody just like that original idea that you were talking about. It can’t simply take the profitable routes. It does in fact, have to go ahead and make sure everybody gets their mail. And it’s much more expensive to deliver mail to me than it is to deliver mail to you considering where we both live.
Joanne Freeman:
True.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But the other interesting thing that happens after the Postal Reorganization Act is that because postal jobs are no longer going to be based on patronage for whom you vote, it becomes a really big employer of military veterans, people of color, Black Americans and women. So right now the USPS employs more than 630,000 workers, and 100,000 of them are military veterans. So it becomes, again, a representation of American government, but it is self-funding, which I think is really important because you often hear people saying, “My tax dollars are going to these letter carriers.” It’s like, no, actually they’re not. The United States Postal Service has a system by which it keeps itself funded. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that.
But the other piece that I think is so important about today’s United States Postal Service on the heels of the Postal Reorganization Act is the fact that the post office has something that is off the charts valuable. And what that is, of course, is it has vans and it has real estate, both of which are very valuable, but way more than that, it has proprietary information that is incredibly valuable. They know how to get a piece of mail to every single person in this country. And that’s something that private companies would like very, very much to get their hands on.
So that Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 goes ahead and tries to put the USPS on a modern framework. But then Congress changes the law in 2006. It overhauls the agency in 2006, and it requires it to do something that virtually no other private company ever has to do. It requires it to prepay the health benefits of all of its retirees, meaning that it needs to start with payments of about #5 billion with a B dollars a year. And the United States Postal Service which until then was making money and which even still would be making a modest profit every year if it didn’t have this requirement on it, immediately begins to lose money.
Joanne Freeman:
Right along lines of what you’re saying, Heather, that today nearly $120 billion as you put it with a B in debt can be attributed directly to that employee benefits program.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, I’m thinking about when it happened because this is 2006, and then in 2008, the recession hits, the big recession hits. And what that means is, there’s going to be a lot less business. And then, of course, lots of people turn away from what we begin to call snail mail and turn to email. So first-class mail slows way down. And the United States Postal Service increasingly begins to deliver packages instead and is not making the kind of money that it was or that it was expected to under the Reorganization Act of 1970.
Joanne Freeman:
It’s interesting because we are at a moment, one of many such moments in American history where changes in technology lead to changes in communication and information, which then lead to dramatic changes of all kinds that aren’t necessarily anticipated. So now here we are where snail mail is precisely that. And increasingly, it would be interesting to try and get a sense out there in listener world as to how many people have or when was the last time most people receive, for example, a personal letter, a private letter, or how many people have never received that kind of a piece of mail, a private letter from a friend or written a letter to a friend.
I was just speaking this morning with someone and she said, “You should write a letter and tell her that.” And I thought, “I should.” And that feels like it comes in from another planet. So fundamental transformation in the way we communicate with each other and that has to have an enormous impact on the postal service, which is complicated by the fact that it has this aspect of it that is more online with a private company than with a public service.
Heather Cox Richardson:
That idea that the United States Postal Service is seen often now as something that should be privatized, again, as a reflection of our particular moment and a lot of people missed it. But when the former President Donald Trump first got into office, his administration produced a paper that outlined what they consider the importance of privatizing the United States Postal Service. And part of that is in fact, an attempt to be able to have the proprietary information that the USPS has because that’s enormously valuable. But there’s a lot of problems with that idea, not least to the fact that it’s exceedingly expensive to mail stuff to rural areas. For example, if you’re going to focus on private companies because they don’t want to go ahead and take on the routes that don’t make any money.
Joanne Freeman:
So here’s the interesting thing. I do think along the lines of what you’re saying, Heather, that there is a tendency, particularly in the recent past to think of the postal service as a business, a private business or a business just generally that isn’t functional, that isn’t doing well, and this needs somehow to be reworked from within to do better. But the fact the matter is, it is a public service. It is something from the very beginning that a couple of times today in our conversation, we’ve used the word “Commonwealth,” it is something that in a variety of different ways really truly does bind the nation together.
And most recently, the ways in which that has become really a part of the conversation has to do with voting and with the fact that there’s so much change going on around the nation on a state level to pull back on, as we discussed actually last week on this program, voting rights and that there’s some voter suppression now coming into play. If you’re talking about affecting the mail and how it’s spread and how it’s used and where it reaches and how quickly it reaches, by definition, you are now also going to affect some aspects of the voting process.
So they’re, in a very direct and obvious way, the postal service is affecting the workings of democracy. I think it’s important to note too what we’re saying here more broadly on this episode in this conversation, it affects the Commonwealth, the nation and the way that it connects and sub-connects and interconnects in a pretty fundamental way, it really, in a sense is a form of union.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Very much a form of union. And the idea now of turning it over to private companies is particularly disturbing in this moment because the Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whom you mentioned at the start, is very clearly a political, an active political person. So generally, postmasters general they’re supposed to come up through the ranks of the post office. He did not. He actually is involved with other package companies.
And Louis DeJoy was well known for having donated significant amounts of money, both to the former president and to the Republican National Committee. Between 2016 and 2020, he donated more than $2 million either to the President Trump or to the Republican National Committee. And when he got into office, he immediately began to institute what he said were cost cutting measures to address the problem of this pre-funding of retirees health benefits.
But one of the things he did was he dismantled the machines that sorted first-class mail. So essentially first-class mail got slowed down significantly. He also changed the ways in which people delivered mail. But what is a piece of first-class mail? Well, that would be somebody’s ballot. So although there weren’t really hideous slowdowns of mail that people were afraid of in the summer of 2020, in fact, there was a real attack on the idea of being able to move first-class mail through the mails. And really as we were saying an attack on the ability of Americans to connect.
Joanne Freeman:
I think it’s very easy to overlook the significance of the postal service on a whole bunch of levels, just in the nation as a whole. And even on that most fundamental of levels, the level of connection, the level of community, the fact that it connects the nation to a degree that you assume or should be able to assume that you can drop a piece of paper in the mail in New York and I can reach my family in Seattle that they’re reachable that way, that it doesn’t have to be a Zoom call or a phone call, but that in one way or another, we reached the people we care about and conduct business with and all the people we love and who were waiting for their letters in the mail, in one way or another, it’s the postal service that creates that kind of a national we, a national union of people.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, and it’s interesting you say that because certainly since last summer, the summer of 2020, I used to rely on the postal service for everything and that slowed down. And the fact that things seem to take a great deal longer to get places is driving me to use other means of communication. And that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy then that if people turn away from the post office, of course, yes, it will cease to make money or cease to have the ability to make money, there’s a lot up in the air right now because of the pandemic and because of this pre-funding mechanism, which by the way, the Democrats have tried very hard to get rid of and the Republicans refuse to do because I don’t trust it to the post office any longer, which struck me when I first thought of that as being a real loss in my life because it was just, if there was one thing we knew it was you could trust the post office.
Joanne Freeman:
Right. Rain or snow or sleet or hail is true. Not only could you trust the post office, but usually if you’ve lived anywhere for any significant length of time, you know who your postal worker is. So you can trust the post office, you understand how it works, you know the people who interconnect with you in that network of people. So yeah, you could trust it. You could take it for granted. And in a sense, you should be able to take it for granted.
As the founders said as we began discussing at the beginning of this conversation, how are you going to bring together and connect people who are dispersed over such a huge distance, such a dispersed country of population? How are you going to do that? The founders were worried about just the Eastern Seaboard. But the fact of the matter is to create and unite a country. The post office becomes a circulatory system for the nation that is really in one way or another required for national life.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So first, we go ahead and we see it as being a way to move ideas. Then we see it as actually, like you say, the circulatory system. Then there is an attack on it. So it really does reflect our health. But I have to say there is one story that you have told me in the past that you did not get to go ahead and say in this episode, which sums this up so absolutely beautifully. I hope that you will leave us with the story of a certain postmaster.
Joanne Freeman:
So when we were discussing this episode and what we wanted to talk about, one of the first things that I popped up and talked about was my favorite postmaster of my time period and his name is Return, Return Meigs, which I just thought predestined, there’s a man who is born, his name’s Return and he thinks all his life, “I want to be a postmaster. My name is Return.” But he was a postmaster under both President James Madison, and President James Monroe.
And apparently Return Meigs was known for doing two things when he was postmaster. On the one hand, he really helped dramatically expand the postal service. That’s a period that’s not that long after the Louisiana Purchase. So you have the country growing in a dramatic kind of a way. And on the other hand, he really didn’t necessarily deal well with the finances of it. And so there were financial troubles during his tenure as postmaster general as well. So in a sense, not only is he the man perfectly named for that job, but during his tenure, he is engaged with and struggling with the two most profound aspects of the postal service pretty much throughout its history, which is the ground level working of it and reach of it and the way in which it’s financed.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So are you really going to leave us here without explaining why he’s named Return?
Joanne Freeman:
Our Return was not the first. Apparently according to family lore, the first Return Meigs was named that because his father was courting a woman. She initially turned him down. He turned to leave and Hannah, the woman, he was courting, yelled out, “Return, return.” And they then married. They had children and the fifth child was thus named Return in honor of that courtship moment. I have no idea. You and I, Heather, discussed whether what we think about those details and I want it to be true. And so we are repeating it here because it should be true.
Heather Cox Richardson:
It’s too good a story not to at least want it to be true, although now it’s killing me that he was their fifth child. What did they name the first four?
Joanne Freeman:
I know you got to wonder what those names were. That’ll be for another episode I think, Heather.
