Moving the Mail Was the Federal Government’s First Order of Business

A Colonial rider on the Old Post Road makes a delivery in a village along his route.

Note:  Part two of a series on the Postal Service.  Today we learn that mail service predated both independence and the Constitution and has been vital at every stage of our national development.

Postal service in America can point to various birth dates and milestones, but on February 20, 1792 President George Washington signed into law the legislation that created Post Office Department.  That regularized the new Constitutional Federal Government’s already loosely organized postal service and elevated the Post Master General to cabinet rank.

Benjamin Franklin, as he was so many other instances, was key in developing a Colonial postal system beginning in 1737 as postmaster in Philadelphia.  He did such a good job in organizing mail services in Pennsylvania’s principle city and his political connections were so good that he became joint postmaster general for all of the British Colonies in 1753.  This was a lucrative political plum—his remuneration came partly from a cut of postal fees.  It also gave him an edge in circulating his newspaper, almanac, and other products of his printing business.

But Franklin threw himself into organizing a haphazard postal system that barely operated between many cities.  He oversaw surveying and marking regular routes from Massachusetts’ northern settlements in what is now Maine to Georgia.  The Old Post Road, stitched together from local roads followed the route that became U.S. Highway 1.  Using relay riders he established overnight service between Philadelphia and New York and between New York and Boston.  And he worked out standardized postage rates based on weight and distance.

Benjamin Franklin kept his lucrative post as Colonial Post Master General even during his long residence in London as a Colonial agent.  This portrait was done shortly after his arrival in England in 1757

By the time Franklin departed for London in 1857 for his long residency there as Colonial Agent for Pennsylvania and subsequently other colonies, the postal service was well established and functioning.  He kept his appointment—and the emoluments that went with it—while others managed its day to day affairs.  That cozy relationship ended when he was ousted in disgrace for his part in intercepting and sending to Boston for publication embarrassing letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson urging the Crown to crack down on obstreperous Bostonians in 1773.

When Franklin finally returned in 1775 he found the Colonies in an uproar and his postal system rusty and disrupted by political tensions.  By the time he made his way to Philadelphia in May of that year, fighting had already broken out at Lexington and Concord and a hastily assembled militia army was laying siege to British occupied Boston.  Franklin was quickly appointed a delegate to the Second Constitutional Convention.

Meanwhile another Philadelphia printer and newspaper publisher, William Goddard vexed by disruptions in circulating his Pennsylvania Chronicle, drew up a detailed proposal for the Colonies’ own Continental Post and laid it before Congress on October 5, 1774.   When Franklin took his seat he enthusiastically endorsed the plan.  With the outbreak of war, Congress turned almost immediately to the Post plan—really its first important piece of business not directly tied to the war. 

The interest was understandable.  After all, the new nation owed its existence to the Patriots’ Committees of Correspondence which both spread vital news but also fostered some cooperation between the Colonies in opposing British taxation and punitive measures.  And while each Colony still viewed itself as an independent sovereign state only loosely allied and sectional differences put a strain on even that relationship, postal service was the fragile link that stitched them together.

On July 26, 1775 Congress adopted the Goddard plan and naturally appointed Franklin as its first Postmaster General.  He did not serve long before he departed to Paris to take up new duties as Minister to France.  But Franklin made sure that the job went to his son in law Richard Bache in November, 1775.

Through the inevitable disruptions of the Revolution and under the barely functional Articles of Confederation, postal service limped along and actually deteriorated.  It was unreliable outside a narrow coastal strip and virtually non-existent in frontier settlements.  When Washington took office in the temporary capitol in New York, Samuel Osgood served as Post Master General overseeing the rag-tag service he had inherited from the Confederation government.

When the Capital moved to Philadelphia Timothy Pickering, a Revolutionary War veteran and rising political star, assumed the job.  With the establishment of the Post Office Department, he was officially elevated to the Cabinet joining the Secretaries of the Treasury, State, and War, and the Attorney General.  He became a staunch ally of Alexander Hamilton in the growing rift with Thomas Jefferson.

Pickering served as Postmaster General under Washington until 1795 when he was briefly made Secretary of War and then Secretary of State replacing Jefferson.  He continued in that role under John Adams until being dismissed for his vocal opposition to the President’s policy of negotiating an end to the Naval Quasi-War with France.

One of the primary duties of early Postmasters General was recommending local postmaster appointments.  Under Washington these were generally deferred to the recommendations of local officials and dignitaries generally regardless of political opinions, although the Old General often showed favoritism to veterans, especially his former officers.  This was in keeping with Washington’s opposition to faction.  But as tensions rose between Hamilton and Jefferson and their supporters, Hamilton’s ally Pickering began to screen political opinions.

This took greater hold under John Adams after the emergence of the Federalists, Democratic-Republicans and the two party system.  Although incumbents were rarely turned out unless they were particularly noisy or an important local Federalist wanted the job, new appointments were reliable Federalists.  When Thomas Jefferson triumphed in the Revolution of 1800, he likewise rewarded loyal Republicans although he also refrained from wholesale replacement.

The growing young nation required hundreds and then thousands of local postmasters for the expanding system.  It was the largest domestic undertaking of the Federal Government, outstripping the skeletal military establishment, customs collection, land sales offices, and the rudimentary Federal court system.  Appointments were coveted because duties were not onerous for the largely part time positions and there was a steady, if unspectacular income from collecting postage fees—then customarily from the recipient. 

More importantly most postmasters set up their operations in the stores, taverns, and inns that they operated as their primary businesses.  Since there was no home or business delivery, mail had to be picked up in the local post offices, located in these businesses in all but the largest cities.  That made the postmasters’ establishments natural community centers which attracted customers and loafers alike.  They were places where politics was always a hot topic of discussion.  It was profitable both for the postmasters and for the political parties that sponsored them.

In addition as postal services grew there were more postal employees—couriers, clerks, and such each and every one of which was a job filled by Presidential appointment.  And there were contracts for carrying the mail to be allotted to stage coach lines, river boats, coastal packets, and eventually railroads and each contract was an opportunity to reward faithful party supporters.   Patronage for the administration in all of its forms became the engine that drove the post office.  Postmasters General became the chief political operative in the cabinet and the President’s ties to his party.  He could award jobs by proxy to local party bosses to shore up support and prevent defections to potential challengers in the President’s own party—a big advantage for unpopular chief executives.

From 1800 on all of those advantages fell pretty much entirely to the Republicans, as the Jeffersonians became known during the so-called Era of Good Feelings while the Federalists winked out as a political force.  But with the election of John Quincy Adams as a National Republican against a split field led by Andrew Jackson running as an old conservative, that began to change.  Jackson was defeated in 1828 but came roaring back to win a historic victory in 1832 at the head of the re-named Democratic Party.

This anti-Jackson cartoon lamented the spoils system which made the Post Office a political plumb.

Jackson ran as the popular candidate of the common man.  One of the explicit points of his platform was instituting the spoils system—“to the victor belong the spoils,” He declared.  He painted this as a democratic reform to replace all of the stuffed shirts and little plutocrats employed by that “haughty aristocrat” Adams.  True to his word, Jackson was no sooner in office than he went to work cleaning house in the Post Office from top to bottom replacing postmasters and clerks with loyal Democrats no matter how rustic.  In doing so he also unleashed the hordes of office seekers who would mob the halls of the Executive Mansion and pester presidents for decades to come.

Young Abraham Lincoln was appointed Post Master of New Salem, Illinois under a Whig administration and operated out of his small grocery store until it failed.

When it came their turns, Whigs and Republicans played the game with same fervor as the Democrats and the post-Civil War Republicans got it down to a machine-like science.

Despite this, the Post Office matured and grew with country adding innovations that constantly improved and expanded service—adhesive postage stamps, home delivery in urban areas, eventually Rural Free Delivery as well,  the transportation of vast quantities of mail by rail, and the introduction postal sorting on the fly in specialized mail cars.  In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries the remarkable efficiency of the U.S. Post Office was the envy of the world.

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) was a boon to countryside residents and voters did not forget that it was a Republican administration that provided it

Political patronage and the spoils system became central political issues of the Gilded Age.  After fits and starts Civil Service Reform made most Post Office and other low-level Federal jobs merit positions to be filled by qualified applicants who could pass competitive examinations.  But local postmasters and higher level managers and executives remained political appointees.  The game was changed, not eliminated.

Urban mail men like these in the 1890s carried not only letters and publications in their pushcarts but all sorts of packages and other items directly to homes and businesses.

In keeping with the tradition of highly political Postmasters General, for instance, Franklin D,  Roosevelt tapped the political operative most responsible for his rise in New York Democratic circles and securing the presidential nomination in 1932—James A. Farley.

The Post Office adapted to the post-World War II America with great success.  It employed tens of thousands of veterans who got additional points added to their civil service examinations.  It also became truly integrated even in the Jim Crowe South and lifted many Blacks and other minorities into the middle class.  It adapted air mail to the jet age, eventually eliminating it as a separate mail class and moving most Frist Class Mail where possible by air.  The introduction of the Zip Code and automated sorting sped the mails and kept down postage rates.

Then the Post Office Department was reformed right out of existence under President Richard Nixon in 1971 and reborn as the United States Postal Service, a quasi-public corporation run by a Board of Governors but answerable to Congress.  The Postmaster General vanished from the Cabinet.  The new corporation was charged with running like a business and expected to turn a profit.  That was made difficult by a number of restrictions placed on it by Congress and then made impossible when the USPS was mandated to fully fund pensions decades into the future, huge payments that make it impossible to report a profit and has allowed rightwing ideologues in Congress to declare it a failure and push for massive service cuts, continuing steep annual postage rate hikes, and eventually its complete replacement by competing private companies like Federal Express and UPS.

Letter carriers return to work after a 1971 Postal Strike that gave Richard Nixon leverage to dump the Post Office Department and replace it with a quasi-public corporation meant to run like a business and turn a profit.

Under this pressure service has suffered and employee moral destroyed by speed-up schemes, doubled workloads, and an intentionally harsh and repressive management style.  American mail service now lags far behind that in other developed industrial countries.  If it fails and is replaced by private industry expect home delivery to be cut back to once a week.   Thousands of local post offices will be closed and the private companies will have no obligation to serve small and isolated communities at all just as unregulated rail and bus services have left such places.

After all in the coming Randian Libertarian utopia the Republicans promise us private profit is everything and any losers get exactly what is coming to them at the hands of their betters.  Why to embrace the idea of postal service as a public utility operating for the common social good would be damn socialism!  Just what old Ben Franklin and George Washington had in mind.

Postal Sabotage is a Coup Attempt in Plain Sight

Note—The first of two parts about the Postal Service.  Today—an existential threat to the institution and to democracy itself.

Most of us in the depths of our wildest despair and paranoia expected that it would come to this—that the President of the United States is openly and brazenly destroying the only agency of the Federal Government so essential that it was specifically mentioned in the Constitution not any cabinet office but a national postal service.  And he is explicitly doing so to undermine free elections and perpetuate himself in office no matter the overwhelming disgust of the American people.

If you have not been paying attention the Cheeto-in-Charge has appointed a wealthy crony and toady, Louis DeJoy as Post Master General.  DeJoy, who unashamedly owns stock in United States Postal Service (USPS) competitors hit the ground running dismissing or demoting most senior Postal Service officials and replacing them with reliable rubber stamps.  He ordered an end to all overtime by postal employees including distribution workers, mail sorters, and letter carriers and ordered them to leave behind any mail that they could not expect to deliver on theirs shifts.  The predicable result has been a delay of service with some urban neighborhoods reporting that they have not had home delivery for three weeks or more. 

Post Boxes being removed in Portland and around the country mostly in Democratic cities and strongholds.

As if that was not enough, postal collection boxes were ordered removed all over the US but somehow especially in Blue states.  Social media has been flooded with images of the boxes being hauled away or crowding Post Office yards and warehouses.  Where the boxes could not be removed quickly enough some were welded or bolted shut an others wrapped in plastic.  While not every box has been removed postal patrons will have more difficulty finding convenient receptacles for mail in ballots and any other business.

If that does not sufficiently slow service, hundreds of high volume automatic mail sorters have been removed for postal distribution centers, another huge bottleneck.

The resulting delays in Postal service will not only sabotage the November election it will delay the delivery of vital medications, interfere with Social Security and other benefit payments, and delay both bills and bill payments.  Payments received late can be subject to hefty late fees and charges and damage credit ratings.

Protests in support of the Postal Service and against sabotaging the election are spreading across the country

Meanwhile Trump and his cronies are trying to starve the Postal Service to oblivion. Even before Coronavirus pandemic the USPS faced a financial crisis.  The Post Office Department was reformed right out of existence under President Richard Nixon in 1971 and reborn as the United States Postal Service, a quasi-public corporation run by a Board of Governors but answerable to Congress.  The Postmaster General vanished from the Cabinet.  The new corporation was charged with running like a business and expected to turn a profit.  That was made difficult by a number of restrictions placed on it by Congress and then made impossible when the USPS was mandated to fully fund pensions decades into the future, huge payments that make it impossible to report a profit and has allowed rightwing ideologues in Congress to declare it a failure and push for massive service cuts, continuing steep annual postage rate hikes, and eventually its complete replacement by competing private companies like Federal Express and UPS.

Attempts to increase Postal Service support through the regular budget process were regularly stonewalled in the Republican controlled Senate.  The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives earmarked emergency aid in their version of the original Covid-19 emergency stimulus bill.  Under pressure from the White House and its point man on the stimulus package, Treasury Department Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the Senate rejected the Democratic plan for a $13 billion direct grant that the Postal Service would not have to repay.  Mnuchin threatened to block the whole $2 billion dollar relief bill if aid to the USPS was included.  “You can have a loan, or you can have nothing at all.” Eventually an inadequate $11 billion loan was approved with plenty of strings attached.  Despite the authorization the administration dallied in actually delivering the loan.

House Dems attached more funding in the second stimulus package which it sent to the Senate in mid-May.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to take up the House bill and took until mid-summer to offer a Senate version sans postal aid.  Negotiations on a compromise broke down.

As the stalemate continued Trump last week baldly assert that he was holding up Postal Service aid because of Democratic proposals to provide $3.6 billion to states to run elections and $25 billion in aid to the postal service. “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

In obedience to his master McConnell recessed the Senate until well after Labor Day without passing anything.  That means no extension of $600 emergency unemployment benefits which have expired, no continued Federal suspension of evictions, no funds for states and cities to keep afloat, and no new aid for small business.  It is a disaster for millions of Americans and is expected to deeply damage the already perilous economy.

There we howls of outrage over Trump’s moves, but he has stood by them with only a little verbal waffling while not changing course.  Experts believe the actions are blatantly illegal but law suits to stop it have little chance to be heard and decisions appealed even on an emergency basis in time to prevent disruption of the election.  They would also have to survive rulings by the many Trump appointees to the appellate bench and Supreme Court.

Others suggest that the President, DeJoy and other officials could be charged with felony interference with the mail.  As delightful as that prospect may be, no one will be placed behind bars for a long time and Trump can always use his pardon powers preemptively.

The names and contact info for members of the USPS Board of Governors who could fire Post Master General DeJoy and block his destructive rampage.  Could, but probably won't.

A campaign is underway to urge the nine presidentially appointed members of the Postal Service Board of Governors to fire the Post Master general and block his efforts to sabotage the agency.  But there are six Republicans, all nominated by Trump, and only three Democrats on the Board.  They are unlikely to vote against DeJoy, who they dutifully elected on Trump’s nomination on June 15.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Sunday that she was calling the House back into sessions immediately following this week’s Democratic National Convention to take emergency action to block Trump’s sabotage. 

In a joint press conference with the Speaker Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put the issue in stark terms—the sabotage of mail-in voting is proof that Trump knows that he “can’t win without cheating."

Senate Minority leader Chuck Blasted Trump and Republican Majority Leader Mich McConnell for trying to steal the election by destroying the Postal Service and Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the House back into session to deal with the emergency.

The most likely vehicle for action will be a version of a bill introduced by House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney earlier this week that would prohibit USPS from implementing a planned organizational overhaul that critics would handicap mail-in voting.  But unless a handful of Republicans in the Senate respond to growing bipartisan outrage, the measure will be dead in the water in the higher chamber.

In the face if the growing backlash, the administration has tried muddy the waters.  On Friday DeJoy told a Congressional panel that he would not remove post boxes, but there is no evidence the removal has actually been stopped and no guarantee that either already removed boxes would be put back in place or that regular and timely mail pickup from them would be scheduled.  Trump’s Chief of Staff de jour Mark Meadows told a Sunday morning news show that “I’ll give you a guarantee right now that the President of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their vote in a legitimate way, whether it’s the post office or anything else.”  But of course his boss has repeatedly said that mail-in-voting, at least in Democratic states would be fraudulent and illegitimate. 

Of course the attack on the USPS is just part of a much wider attack on the election.  Once again officials in Republican states will ramp up their voter suppression efforts including last minute voter purges, slashing in-person polling places especially in minority communities, blocking equitable distribution of voting machines, and outright voter intimidation.  In response to grass-roots efforts to turn out the vote despite postal delays Trump allies have even filed a Federal law suit against counting any mail in ballot without a postmark.  That would counter recommendations that voters hand deliver their ballots to local county clerks, other election agencies, or the secure lock boxes provided for in Illinois and other states.  The suit is frivolous and will likely be dismissed, but it adds uncertainty.

The secure lock box at the McHenry County Administration Building is suppored to recieve mail-in ballots that are hand delivered to avoid uncertain mail delays.  Now a suit in Federal Court is trying to challange counting mail-in ballots that do not have postmarks.

All of this fuels justifiable paranoia.  What if Trump’s demands for opening the economy and schools is actually an attempt to have a raging epidemic that makes voting in person as difficult as voting by mail?  Could he use it as an excuse to declare a national emergency and postpone the election?  Constitutional experts say no, but that might to stop him from trying.  What if withholding unemployment benefits and barring eviction protections is a plan to increase homelessness which could lead to challenges to voters for not having a current address?  Unthinkably draconian?  Yes, but somehow not impossible.  Could he call on those “very fine people” including his die-hard fans, motorcycle gangs, White nationalists, “patriot” militias, plain old gun nuts to rise up to prevent his ouster in an allegedly rigged election?  Would he really stop short of a civil war?  What might he ask Vladimir Putin and the Russians to do to meddle even more outrageously in our elections and what price may he have to pay to get that help?

Will we have to take to the streets like the citizens of Belarus to get rid of our would-be dictator?.

What can we do? We all have to redouble our efforts against all odds to turn out a massive vote that Trump and his allies cannot overcome.  That means ignoring all of the many attempts that will be made to turn against each other against and there will be many.  Then if he retreats to his White House bunker and refuses to go quietly and peacefully we may need to flood the streets not just for one-time-marches but for the kind of day after day massive protests that have brought down other tyrants and are right now playing out in Belarus where the people are demanding the end of Alexander Lukashenko’s 25 years of dictatorial rule after his fraudulent re-election earlier this month.  Today workers will stage a general strike in support of the hundreds of thousands in Minsk who have defied violence and repression.

 

Tomorrow—Moving the Mail Was the Federal Government’s First Order of Business.