A Short History of the American Post Office
26 August 2020
The postal service in the United States slightly older than the country itself. It essentially begins with the appointment of Benjamin Franklin as Postmaster General at the Second Continental Congress in 1775. The importance of a postal service is indicated by its specific enumeration of the powers held by Congress in Article One, Section 8, “to establish Post Offices and Post Roads.” The ability to pass information easily (and relatively quickly) around the new nation was considered a very important element of maintaining its democratic ideals. Informational materials, such as newspapers, were given special rates to facilitate people’s understanding of current events so that they could be informed voters. It also served to physically connect the disparate parts of the country, thereby helping to maintain a national feeling rather than allegiance to one’s state or locality.
This last element became more important as the country expanded toward the Pacific. As the American frontier pushed westward, postal roads and services maintained the connection between the established states and cities in the East with the newly established territories in the West. As steamboats and railroads were included in ways the country was connected, they carried mail as well as people and goods. All waterways used by steamboats were designated as post roads in 1823, which encouraged the opening of new boat operations and helped to assure the upkeep of these rivers. Railroads gained a similar designation in 1838, also helping to expand their reach. Railroads in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, for example, were partially paid for by federal funds, with the understanding that these railroads would offer discounted rates for government officers and services, including the mail. These developments had a great deal more influence on cross-country communications than the more famous Pony Express.[1] Through the Nineteenth Century, the postal service saw little change except for the expansion across the continent.
As the Twentieth Century began, the Post Office added to its services. Rural Free Delivery (RFD), added in 1896, and Parcel Post, added in 1912, were both boons to mail-order catalog services, such as Sears Roebuck. With lower shipping costs, they could reduce the shipping charged to their customers, which encouraged the customers to buy more or more often. Air Mail was added in 1918, when the Post Office Department took over the service from the Army Air Corps. With these additions to the service, there was nowhere in the United States and its territories that was out of the reach of the Post Office.
This universality across the country prompted another addition to the services offered at one’s local post office: Postal Banking. This was added in 1911, with the idea of serving people in areas which did not have banks. Postal bank accounts required a minimum balance of one dollar, thereby providing people with a means to save money that wasn’t hording cash in their mattress. Postal Banking services ended in 1967, but a reinstatement of those services has been much discussed in recent years.
One of the core elements of the postal service has been to preserve the sanctity and privacy of the mail. Postal workers are not allowed to open anyone’s mail or prevent it from being delivered because of its contents (dangerous materials being the exception to the rule). But the Post Office is also subject to the laws of the country, meaning that if Congress decides something is not to be mailed, it cannot be. For example, in both World Wars, the Post Office was in the position of delivering censored letters between soldiers and their loved ones. The best-known example of this are the Comstock Act laws, put into place in 1873. These laws prohibited the distribution of materials considered to be “obscene,” namely pornography, birth control and abortifacients (and information about these), as well as sexually explicit private letters. The Post Office was required to abide by these regulations, though not all postal workers did; plenty of copies of Margaret Sanger’s birth control pamphlet made their way across the country. The Comstock Act was never repealed, but most of its statues have been ruled unconstitutional by various Supreme Court cases over the last half of the Twentieth Century; birth control was legalized by Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), Roe v. Wade (1973) regarding abortion, and Stanley v. Georgia (1969) regarding the private possession of pornography.
The Post Office was restructured in 1971 by the Postal Reorganization Act. This was done in response to a number of issues facing the Post Office Department, the most pressing of which was the poverty-level wages earned by most postal workers. These workers sought to unionize to improve their pay and working conditions, but were not able to do so until they conducted a strike in 1970. The strike began in New York City, and was supposed to be contained there, but it spread across the country. The strike ended with the workers earning the right to unionize, but it also required that the Post Office be moved out of direct government control as a Cabinet-level organization in the Executive Branch. The Post Office Department became the United States Postal Service (USPS), a government-owned company which was expected to cover its own costs without government involvement. This newly minted service worked just as well as it had previously, covering all of their costs and even running a profit. In the late 1990s, the USPS had to increase prices due to the reduction of letters and other mailings prompted by the widespread use of email. Still, they were able to maintain themselves without too much trouble, in part because of the increase in packages being delivered from online stores.
In 2006, Congress passed a law limiting the services of the USPS to delivery of mail and packages and the elements needed for these (stamps, boxes, etc.). This, in and of itself, was not deemed (at the time) to be a problem. More potentially damaging was the requirement that the USPS maintain a retirement fund holding sufficient resources not only to account for current and immediately upcoming retirees, but to cover the expected pension needs for the next 75 years. In other words, they are required to have cash on hand to pay the pensions of people who have not yet been hired, and maybe have not yet been born. Even this odd requirement, one that no other company (including their private competitors UPS and FedEx) has, was not a problem until the Great Recession. As of 2008, the USPS has not been profitable, and as of 2012, they have not been able to fully pay into that long-term retirement fund. Day-to-day operations were not greatly affected by this shortfall until recently.
Since its reorganization in 1971, there have been some calls by more conservative members of government to privatize the USPS, though this has generally considered to be extreme by most people, both within and outside of government. Recent weeks have seen attempts to undermine the ability of the USPS to do its job, through the removal of equipment and personnel. As with the calls for privatization, this is purely political issue, done with a particular party’s aims in mind.
The USPS is not and cannot be treated as a political football. It is probably the most respected Constitutionally-mandated organization in the history of the United States and it is also one of the most important. I don’t generally include calls to action in these essays, but with this I ask you to support your local postal workers; send a card or handwritten letter to a loved one, use USPS for shipping packages, and buy stamps. Together, we can protect this beloved institution.
For further information:
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/welcome.htm
on this page there is a link to a PDF version of the book The United States Postal Service: An American History.
Boyce Upholt, “The Tumultuous History of the United States Postal Service,” National Geographic, May 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/05/tumultuous-history-united-states-postal-service-constant-fight-survival/
An audio Majority Report interview with the President of the American Postal Workers’ Union on 10 August 2020.
https://majorityreportradio.com/2020/08/10/8-10-defending-the-post-office-w-apwu-president-mark-dimondstein
[1] The Pony Express was part of a private company who sought to be given a contract by Congress to carry mail. The service lasted only 18 months and they did not get the contract. See Jim deFelice’s West Like Lightening.