99% Invisible - 244- The Revolutionary Post

Episode Date: January 25, 2017

Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America: A History, argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a letter. The service was designed to unite a bunch of disparate towns and people … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There are currently more than 31,000 post offices in the United States. There are grand old ones that take up entire city blocks, and there are smaller, humblet ones hiding away in the backs of general stores and towns across rural America. But this one in Arizona may be the most rural post office in the Continental US. The Sioux Pie Post Office is located at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. That's Vivian Campbell. My name is Vivian Campbell, and I am the Postmaster of Peach Brings Arizona. Vivian works closely with the Sioux Pie Post Office,

and she says there are only a few ways to get mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. You either have to hike down there, ride a mule, or ride a horse. And so every day, Rainer Shine, mail gets packed on 10 mules to make a 2.5 hour trip into the canyon. The post office is there to serve the people who live on the Avasupai reservation. Avasupai meaning blue-green water people, named for the waterfall at the bottom of the canyon. The falls are just magnificent. The water is so blue, it's not even indescribable. The Avasupai receive a lot of food supplies, but otherwise their mail is pretty standard fare. They get packages from Amazon, they get first-class mail, they get bills just like you and me.

They could just from Amazon, they get first class mail, they get bills just like you and me. The Supa Post Office was established in 1896, and its existence speaks to the links that the US Post Office has gone to connect people with each other and to unite us as a country. Ever since the service was founded in the late 1700s. I was sitting on my back porch in Wyoming one night, you know, there's the sun, sank

in the Golden West, and I just jumped up out of the chair and then shrieked at my husband, the post office created America. That is author and historian Winiford Gallagher, and she wrote a book based on this revelation called, appropriately. How the post office created America, a history. Gallagher argues that the Post Office didn't just create an efficient and inexpensive way to send a letter from Oakland, California, into the Grand Canyon. The service was designed to unite a bunch of disparate towns and people under one flag.

And in doing so, the Post Office actually created the United States of America. For thousands of years, governments have had ways of sending information across distances. But for most of history, the mail was limited to correspondence between governments, militaries, and eventually wealthy people who could afford to pay for such a service. And that's what the postal system of early colonized America was like. The crown's post was put in place by the English monarchy and was mostly used to get messages from England to America. Once the mail landed from England into America, it would be circulated by a fellow called a postwriter who just like he sounds, he was a man on a horse. There were no roads suitable for a wheeled vehicle.

At the time, the colonies which dotted the eastern coast from New Hampshire down to Georgia weren't that interested in communicating with each other. The colonies were very fractious, disputacious siblings. They had very little to do with each other. They were acclimoring for the attention of Mother England. But all of this started to change when an enterprising fellow named Benjamin Franklin

became postmaster for the crown. As postmaster, Franklin was in charge in making sure male and the colony has got to its proper location. And he was determined to improve the barebone system. He actually visited every colony. This is back when it was a real pain in the neck. He established myelposts so you could charge fairleaf for the distance of the letter was

going instead of just estimating it. But as Franklin worked to improve the crown system, he began to see the colonies differently. I believe that the process of going around and thinking about these 13 colonies as not just disconnected, but links in a chain. I think this started him thinking about ways that they could come together as a people. In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York, Franklin proposed a plan

for you nutting the colonies. He actually kind of sketched out a federal government where the colonies would elect their own representatives as opposed to having them appointed by the Crown. England didn't appreciate Franklin's ideas, and colonists weren't quite ready for them either. But 20 years later, notions about American self-governance were spreading. Revolutionaries in the colonies needed a way to communicate about the growing movement for independence, and they knew they couldn't use the crown's post.

Because if they used the crown system, their letters would be intercepted and they'd be arrested. In 1774, these American revolutionaries created their own system to communicate, called the Constitutional Post. Before they fought the Revolution or had a system of government, before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Americans had the Post. The underground constitutional post was crucial in fomenting the revolution, which gave America independence from England, but it was still a very limited system. There were fewer than a hundred post offices in the entire country, and the system didn't serve that many people.

It was basically a tool for political elites to communicate with each other. The founders wanted a better post, one that would serve all people in their infant nation, and help them stay united under one flag. These people who were already spreading over the Appalachians into the Wild West of Ohio and Kentucky. Founding father Benjamin Rush especially believed that the post office would play a crucial role in the new democracy. He was obsessed with the idea that the post office should circulate newspapers to every American. You couldn't have an educated electorate if the people weren't literate and they didn't have up-to-date political information. But this would be no small undertaking. They need an infrastructure of roads and a workforce.

This government had very little money. It was running on fumes. And yet he says we're going to have this very, very ambitious postal system, much more ambitious than anything in Europe. It's really kind of astounding. In 1792, Congress passed the Post Office Act. Under the Act, new postal routes were established. Sensoring or stealing mail became a punishable offense, and all newspapers could be mailed at the same low rate to promote the spread of information.

It set off a huge explosion of newspapers from all sorts of political viewpoints. The Post Office was the main way, sometimes the only way people got information. It was the media. We were news junkies back then. The founders ensured that we would have an uncensored, lively, contentious political culture because they wanted the people to be exposed to all kinds of views

and argue it out and then vote. We've been arguing and gossiping and spreading information, not all of it true since the very beginning. In a way, you know, you could take the attitude of they sort of created a Frankenstein, but in fact, it was by design. Around the same time in the late 1700s, the stage coach was becoming a more popular way to travel and a better way to carry mail than just packing up a rider on a horse. The post office started to contract with private stage coach companies to carry mail, and

these companies worked with cities and towns to build roads. In this way, the post helped carve out the early transportation infrastructure of the country, connecting disparate communities. When a group of people settled in a new place, the residents would petition the government for a post office, which gave them the address in a place on the map. And then that town would be connected to another town down the road. You started to have this kind of network. It's developed not just our physical landscape with roads, but a social landscape so that you could start to talk about this huge country with like some locations. In 1831, when the French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured America, he was

amazed by our postal system. He's riding in a stage coach through some place in the Michigan Outback, and he sees people coming out of these kind of crude huts, you know, cabins, desperate to get the newspapers and able to talk about not just American politics, but what's going on in Europe? He's flabbergasted. At this point, the mail in the US was mostly about sending and receiving newspapers. People didn't really send letters because they couldn't afford to. They kept the rates for letters high and they used that revenue from letters to pay for

the delivery of newspapers to all Americans everywhere. Most people got like fewer than one letter a year. You get a letter saying, you know, Pa has died or you'd get like Aunt Latisha's will. And unlike today, with a person sending a letter covers the cost of postage, back then, the recipient had to pay. You go to the post office, you'd stand in line and see if you had mail, and then pay for it if you wanted it. It created this fantastic backlog of unclaimed mail because so many people, so many people didn't want to pay. In the 1840s and 50s, the population of the country exploded with new immigrants, and all these new people

wanted a less expensive way to communicate. A movement for cheap postage started to form. This movement wanted people to be able to send letters anywhere in the US for one low price, using a new tool. The prepaid postage stamp. They argued that the volume of the mail would increase to a degree that would make up for the revenue, and they were correct, because the volume of the mail

really went gangbusters after cheap postage. The postage stamp allowed regular people to send letters. People sent enough letters to fill thousands of Ken Burns documentaries. It was the Victorian era, and letter writing became an art form. There were even books with advice on how to refine your letter writing style. Address your correspondent by his or her title, not the first name. Dear husband, beloved brother, dearest friend, on its sur. No matter how close you are,

don't address him by his first name. Begin your letter with, I take pen in hand. Please pardon the poor paper, the scratchy pen, the ungraceful language. Women especially became avid letter writers. Women actually started wearing little rockets around their necks with their stamps inside. With more women using the post office, the place itself began to change. Post offices historically had been often in the backs of taverns. They were men's social spaces. You know, there were prostitutes at the post office supplying their wares and pickpock,

famously pickpockets. When women started sending letters, post offices added special ladies windows so that ladies could pick up their letters without coming into contact with these unsimly elements. Slowly, post offices transitioned into more professional spaces. By 1860, there were some 28,000 post offices in the US. People were sending thousands of letters and newly invented greeting cards to each other. But they were also using the post just like the founders intended to disseminate political information. Abolitionists, for example, were using the mail to spread ideas about ending

slavery. In the 1860s, when the Civil War was being fought over some of those very ideas, the American Post Office would bifurcate for a time. No male would be sent between North and South. In the Civil War brought another big change in America's postal system, home delivery. Postal employee in Ohio, named Joseph Briggs, found it heartbreaking during the war because people desperate for news of their soldiers away would have to stand in long lines at the post office. Often these people would be receiving news of a level one staff.

And there were just scenes of terrible terrible grief in public. They didn't even have a privacy. And he found it so heartbreaking that he ran this pilot program of bringing people to mail. Home delivery caught on, and by the mid-1860s, many cities were offering it. About 30 years later, people living in rural areas would also get home delivery. But while people in the Eastern United States entered a letter writing boom, new settlers in California felt isolated. It was hard to receive mail on the West Coast. So the mail could go by train to Missouri, but then it had to be hauled by stage coaches

through really terrible conditions. The other option would be to send a letter on a 13,000-mile six-month trip around the tip of South America by boat. Californians, as they became more powerful by the Golden Rush era and the succeeding years, became outraged by the fact that they had this lousy postal service and they demanded to have a reliable stagecoach male that would depart and arrive on predictable times. Eventually they got what they wanted. By 1857, the post office had a fairly reliable root from East to West. It took 25 days, which was better than it had been,

but it was still not great. A group of businessmen led by a guy named William Russell thought that they could do better than the US post. Russell thought his little startup company could get the mail from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in just 10 days. He, in fact, he did it. People didn't think he'd be able to do it.

Russell's competing service was called the Pony Express. Riders on horseback would race at full speed for about 10 or 15 miles to relay stations where they would trade out for a rusted horse. This change was supposed to take only two minutes. Horses were to carry no more than 165 pounds, including the rider. If an exhausted horse collapsed on the trail, the rider was to run on foot to the next location with his bag of mail. It was a very expensive endeavor and it didn't last long, about a year and a half, which was okay because by 1861, the transcontinental telegraph would reach California, and rail service would soon follow.

Transcontinental telegraph would reach California, and rail service would soon follow. Trains would eventually deliver mail all over the US and not just deliver it, but become moving post offices. In fact, subsidies from the post office allowed the rail system to expand throughout the country. Trains couldn't afford to run on passenger fare alone. The money they got from the post office was crucial in helping them expand service. Years earlier, these postal subsidies had done the same thing for stage coaches, and after World War I, the post would do this again for aviation.

Plains were not a viable form of transportation until the post office poured money into the industry. The aviation industry wasn't able to pay for itself with passenger service until well into the 1940s. The industry survived and expanded by carrying mail for the post office. In fact, before Charles Lindbergh made his historic nonstop flight across the Atlantic, he had another job. Charles Lindbergh was a night pilot, you know, he carried the mail. If the post office truly created America, and I think Winiford Gallagher makes a pretty good case that it did, it's now playing a more supporting role.

In the last 40 years or so, Congress has cut back considerably on services, and if you've noticed longer lines of the post office and delays in receiving your mail, that's why. In my opinion, no one should be mad at the post office. They should be mad at Congress. Congress has prevented the post office from modernizing and running itself efficiently and tragically going digital, which it should have done back in the 80s. Galliore believes the post office missed an opportunity to facilitate email and other digital communication, but she argues the US Postal Service probably isn't on the brink of death either. Conservatives talk about privatizing the whole operation, but right now, Gallagher doubts

that this is possible. Actually, the private competitors, neither FedEx or UPS, is equipped to handle the volume of American mail. They would certainly risk bankruptcy if they tried. The Post Office has an unparalleled delivery infrastructure and employs an enormous workforce, and we still need the service they provide because unlike FedEx and UPS, the US Post Office cannot pick and choose where they deliver based on profit. It is obliged by law to provide pick-ups and deliveries to every community in the country, even if that community is located in the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Katie Mingle with Delaney Hall, Sheree Fusef, Avery Trufflement, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. Kurtstead is our digital director, Taren Mazza, takes care of the office, and us all, Sean Rial composed all the music. And Michelle Loeffler knows a lot about the post office. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram and Tumblr too. But if you want to read a story about the British Navy building an unsinkable ship made of ice and wood pulp instead

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