The United States Post Office to some is the bane of their existence. Dealing with delayed packages, lost mail, and below-par customer service can make anyone lose their minds. But the Postal Service is the oldest governmental institution in the nation. A government institution that can be traced to the very beginning of the nation we call the United States of America. In the year 2020, do we still need it?
During colonial days, the only thing mail that was received in America were letters from Britain that made their way on ships crossing the Atlantic, that most of the time arrived sporadically and delayed. Letters were generally left at taverns and inns there were no established locations to deliver mail exclusively. Before independence, Benjamin Franklin, one of our revered founding fathers of the United States, was one of two postmaster generals for the colonies. His posting was in Philadelphia. He made numerous improvements to the mail system, including setting up new, more efficient colonial routes and cutting delivery time in half between Philadelphia and New York by having the weekly mail wagon travel both day and night via relay teams. Franklin also debuted the first rate chart, which standardized delivery costs based on distance and weight.
Due to his involvement in revolutionary activities, he was fired in 1774. However, on July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress established the U.S. Postal Service in preparation for a proposed independent nation and appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first postmaster general. Franklin introduced a vastly improved mail system, with routes from Florida to Maine and regular service between the colonies and Britain. After independence, President George Washington appointed Samuel Osgood, a former Massachusetts congressman, as the first postmaster general of the American nation under the new U.S. constitution in 1789. There were approximately 75 post offices in the country. In 1792 the Post Office Department was created with the passage of the Postal Service Act. The 1792 law distributed newspapers to subscribers for 1 penny up to 100 miles and 1.5 cents over 100 miles; printers could send their newspapers to other newspaper publishers for free. Postage for letters, by contrast, cost between 6 and 25 cents depending on the distance. This subsidy amounted to roughly 0.2 percent of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the time.
For much of the early 1800s, sending mail was an expensive endeavor, especially as the nation began to expand west with the Louisiana Purchase and newfound lands the stretched all the way to the Pacific coast. The postal service expanded with the new nation, sending mail by stagecoach, rail, and steamboat. The mail service was mostly used by businessmen and merchants. It was only until the latter half of the 1800s did Congress slash the price of postage rates for letters and admitted “circulars and handbills or advertisements” into the mail at lower rates than letters, to reclaim revenue lost to private mail companies that competed with the postal service. All private mail companies were banned by law to compete with the postal service, however, they still did. After 1845, the number of letters in the U.S. mail increased by almost double the amount from an estimated 24.5 million to a cool 62 million just six years later. By 1851, Congress cut postage rates even further. Mail volume grew roughly sixteen times faster than the U.S. population. In addition to lower rates, the postal office had introduced government postal cards, which cost only a penny to post for many years up until only 1952. During the civil war, when the southern confederacy stole the postal services entire southern network, Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s brilliant postmaster general, used the savings from no longer supporting operations in the south to pay for expensive new services, including City Free Delivery, which brought mail to urban doorsteps, and the postal money order system, which enabled Union soldiers to send their salaries back home safely.
The mail-order industry, which was the predecessor to online shopping, also took off at this time. In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward created his first one-page catalog which in two years would become 72 pages. By 1897, it was nearly 1,000 pages. Ward’s success was matched by Richard Warren Sears, who overtook Ward in sales cataloging just three years later. Free home delivery of mail in the countryside further fueled the growth of the mail. Mail volume also climbed following the introduction of Parcel Post in 1913, which allowed heavier items to be mailed. Parcel Post electrified the mail order industry: Sears filled five times as many orders in 1913 as it did the year before. More mail created more mail as catalogs, orders, and payments for orders also traveled by mail. Meanwhile, cheaper paper improved printing methods, and cheaper postage rates spurred the growth of newspapers which increased to 11,314 in 1880. Magazines also flourished — their numbers increased by 93 percent in the 1880s. Many advertisers preferred to mail information to potential customers or supporters directly (which would become known as Direct Mail), especially when targeting a select audience. Advertisements didn’t just promote goods and services — they also promoted political candidates, political party platforms, and social and charitable organizations and causes. Basically, mail was like the internet of the past. It would exist as such for many years to come.
The postal service was the first to give jobs to disenfranchised women who had little options to provide for their families. Most were employed as small-town postmasters and others were hired as clerks in cities like Washington D.C. After the civil war, during Reconstruction, the postal service hired significant numbers of Black Americans. As a black woman, sharpshooting, cigar-smoking “Stagecoach” Mary Fields, a former slave who transported the mail by wagon in the wilds of Montana, broke both the black and female barriers as a contractor to the United States Postal Service. Later she would become a mail carrier, becoming the first Black American woman to work for the U.S. Postal Service.
During the early part of the 1900s, the Postal Service single-handedly supported the infant aviation industry with the Air Mail Service (Charles Lindbergh was among its pilots). During the Great Depression, the Postal Service even created a savings program that acted as an alternative to a bank savings account, which was not trusted during this time. In World War II microfilmed Victory-Mail postage letters were a way of correspondence between soldiers and their loved ones back home in the U.S.
After the war, deprived of funds and stuck with long-obsolete equipment and facilities, the postal service managed to cope with the booming middle class’s quadrupling mail volume (due to the baby boomer generation). In 1970, the Postal Service could no longer carry on as a tax-subsidized government organization, as workers went on strike and unhappy with wages and poor working conditions. This led to the signing of the Postal Reorganization Act by President Richard Nixon on August 12, 1970. The Act replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with a new federal agency, the United States Postal Service, and took effect on July 1, 1971. This off government-business hybrid allowed the post to modernize its facilities for handling traditional mail. Within a decade, however, the post—ruled by a fiscally conservative Congress and hampered by its own mismanagement—failed to join, much less lead, the revolution from paper mail to email that was its next logical development.
As the 1990s rolled around, Republicans discussed the idea of privatizing the U.S. Postal Service as it was failing as government institutions with the advent of the internet and email. However, no changes were made. By 2007, the Postal Service reported its biggest deficit. By 2011, the Post was losing money at a rate of about $3 billion per quarter. The postal service has since made several cuts in hiring, jobs, locations, and delivery services ever since but has still consistently reported deficits and has never been able to get back and every year since has reported deficits. On December 17, 2017, President Donald Trump criticized the postal service’s relationship with Amazon. In a post on Twitter, he stated: “Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!” Amazon maintains that the Postal Service makes a profit from its contract with the company. After Trump was elected as president, on June 21, 2018, Trump proposed restructuring the postal service with an eye toward privatization. According to his proposal, privatization would cut costs and give the financially burdened agency greater flexibility in adjusting to the digital age.
Fast forward to 2020, in April Congress, approved a $10 billion loan from the Treasury to the post office. According to the Washington Post, the loan could be used as leverage to give the Treasury Department more influence on USPS operations, including making them raise their charges for package deliveries, a change long sought by President Trump. In May 2020 Louis DeJoy was appointed Postmaster General and immediately began taking measures to reduce costs, such as banning overtime and extra trips to deliver mail. More than 600 high-speed mail sorting machines were scheduled to be dismantled and removed from postal facilities. Mail collection boxes were removed from the streets in many cities.
The inspector general for the postal service opened an investigation into the recent changes. On August 16 the House of Representatives was called back from its summer recess to consider a bill rolling back all of the changes as the changes raised concerns that mailed ballots for the November 3rd, 2020 election might not reach election offices on time. On August 18 – the day after lawsuits against the Postal Service and DeJoy personally was filed in federal court by several individuals- DeJoy announced that he would roll back all the changes until after the November election. He said he would reinstate overtime hours, roll back service reductions, and halt the removal of mail-sorting machines and collection boxes. However, 95 percent of the mail sorting machines that were planned for removal have already been removed, and according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DeJoy said he has no intention of replacing them or the mail collection boxes.
This year with the Coronavirus Pandemic, voting may look completely different than past years for a major election. In general, voting by mail has become an increasingly common practice in the United States, with 25% of voters nationwide mailing their ballots in 2016 and 2018. Due to the pandemic, it is expected that there will be a large increase in mail voting because of the possible danger of congregating at polling places. A state-by-state analysis concluded that 76% of Americans are eligible to vote by mail in 2020 predicting 80 million ballots could be cast by mail in 2020 – more than double the number in 2016. In July 2020, the Postal Service sent a letter to 46 states in July 2020, warning that the service might not be able to meet the state’s deadlines for requesting and casting last-minute absentee ballots. The House of Representatives voted to include an emergency grant of $25 billion to the post office to facilitate the predicted flood of mail ballots. Trump conceded that the post office would need additional funds to handle the additional mail-in voting, but said he would oppose any additional funding so that “universal mail-in voting” would not be possible.
So there you have it, folks. A foundational governmental institution that helped shape the country from its infancy to adulthood. But as the U.S. has become an older nation, like all technologies, its decline is the result of a replacement technology. Now the Postal Service serves as an antiquated organization that is draining the government of funds because its leaders did not position it to succeed at the advent of electronic mail (e-mail). Yet postal mail still serves a physical purpose for some.
Of course, the older generation could not do without physical mail, but what about Millenials and younger? Do we really need physical mail? Could we rely on privatized companies to deliver our packages alone? Is the internet secure enough for voting virtually for a presidential election or corresponding about private matters? What if the postal service was discontinued. Could we trust privatized companies to deliver our mail? What if the US Postal Service was privatized like Amazon, Fed Ex, UPS, and others? Would it help the situation? Like shopping malls, will the postage service be a thing of the past or should we hold on to a piece of history that has shaped our nation?
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Post_Office_Department
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#Operation_and_budget
Untold Stories of Histories Past 