Why The Post Office Is Even More Awesome Than You Think It Is.
A love letter to a vital national treasure.
by Risa Mickenberg
The Postal Service is the largest employer in some states. It delivers 48% of the world’s mail, including social security checks, stimulus checks, voting ballots, medication, and hospital supplies.
Since the 1970s, the post office has not received government funding. In 2019 over 600,000 postal employees delivered 142.6 billion pieces of mail to 160 million places. If it were a private sector company, the Postal Service would rank 44th in the 2019 Fortune 500.
How could its existence be threatened? How could our government threaten to withhold emergency assistance to a vital part of our lives during a time of crisis? And how can we fix this?
The Post Office created America before America existed.
In her book, How The Post Office Created America, Winnifred Ghallager writes, “The post office was designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen — a radical idea that appalled Europe’s great powers.”
The Post Office was formed in July 1775 by the Continental Congress, even before the Constitution was signed. The first American Postmaster General was that inventive badass, Benjamin Franklin.
“In 1792, George Washington and James Madison created legislation to allow newspaper companies to send their products through the mail at very low rates and to protect correspondence from any prying eyes. That act is credited with cementing Americans’ rights to free information and privacy, ” writes Nicole Goodkind in Fortune magazine.
Ladies have rocked the P.O. from the get-go.
Mary Katherine Goddard was the first women postmaster in the United Colonies. A printer, she also was the first person to print the full Declaration of Independence with all of the signatories’ names, a radical document that she risked accusations of treason by the British to publish.
Postal Workers Are First Responders
During times of disaster, postal workers are on the scene early, delivering crucial supplies.
Mara Wilson in The Atlantic writes that delivering mail makes the post office a logistics company, putting them in a special position to help when disaster strikes. In a 2011 USPS case study, the agency emphasized its massive infrastructure as a “unique federal asset” to be called upon in a disaster or terrorist attack. The USPS’s philanthropic arm, the USPS Foundation, helps disaster-struck areas rebuild using its trucks, warehouses, and planes to deliver food, medicine, and water.
The Post Office created a path to the middle class for Black America.
Many Black Union Army veterans joined the postal service after serving in Civil War when, in 1864, a bill banning discrimination in postal employment was passed.
The National Alliance of Postal Employees fought employment discrimination throughout the federal government, working with the NAACP in the early twentieth century. In 1940, they convinced President Roosevelt to drop the application photo requirement that was often used to screen out Black applicants.
By 1940, 14 percent of all Black workers who earned above the national median income worked for the post office.
They went postal on WWII. How the Six Triple Eight served with honor.
The first all female, African-American battalion of 824 troops served overseas as the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Their mission was to sort and route a huge backlog of mail and packages to American troops.
During World War Two, civil rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to convince President Roosevelt to admit African-American women to the armed services. Thousands volunteered to serve.
Recruits underwent a full 18 weeks of basic, physical and specialist military training. The 6888, like all female U.S. troops, were not allowed to carry firearms, so they learned jiujitsu to protect themselves from enemies of all kinds.
They braved German U-Boat waters and air raids to travel to wartime England and France. Working multiple shifts, 7 days a week, in wintertime in unheated warehouses with blacked out windows, completing a job estimated by the military to take 6 months in 3 months. This, while running their entire battalion, with their own officers, their own mess hall, hair salon, transportation, and rec facilities.
They served under a segregated military, a segregated Red Cross. They were not honored at the national level until 2016 when they were inducted into the U.S. Army Hall Of Fame.
Famous Postal Workers
Along with Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, other famous postal workers include Charles Mingus, Dick Gregory, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, Richard Wright, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Charles Lindbergh, Sherman Hemsley, and Steve Carell who called it, “The hardest job I ever had.”
Postal carriers protect our elderly and disabled citizens
Sometimes contact with a mail carrier is the only human contact home-bound people get. Thanks to the national USPS Carrier Alert Program, USPS letter carriers can alert emergency personnel if they notice a buildup of mail or suspicious circumstances that indicate an accident or illness. This community service works in cooperation with local service organizations like the United Way, the Red Cross, or a local Council on Aging.
Participants receive a sticker or magnet for the interior of their mailbox.
NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg said in 2008, “Nobody knows our neighborhoods better than the letter carriers who visit the homes of seniors and people with disabilities every day.”
The post office can test, and drive, new technology.
In Alaska, until 1963, the mail was delivered by dogsled. Carrying mail is still part of the Iditarod Race that runs along the original mail route.
The Greenville South Carolina Post Office began using Harley Davidsons to deliver mail around 1906. There have been all kinds of inventive and excellent-looking vehicles made part of the post office fleet — a huge national asset that can continue to evolve and to serve the entire country.
The U.S. Post Office Inspection Service is a vital law enforcement agency.
In 2014 alone, the agency reported 6,000 arrests and 5,300 convictions ranging from identity theft to bomb and anthrax mailings, to child exploitation and drug money laundering.
In 2018 postal law enforcement efforts last year resulted in 5,969 arrests and 4,648 convictions related to the investigation of postal crimes.
This includes interdiction of opioids. 2017 & 2018 marked a 375% increase in international parcel seizures and an 880% increase in domestic seizures.
The internet is not a public utility. Until it is, the post office is our link to each other.
Rural delivery, starting in 1896, eased social isolation by bringing mail directly to farms. Before that, getting mail required a lengthy trip into town. In 1909, one customer claimed rural delivery had “cut down the cases of suicide and insanity among farmers’ wives fully 50 percent.”
For people serving in the military, for people who are incarcerated, it is vital.
The post office has enabled the success of all American businesses.
From the creation of postal roads, to the invention of home shopping with the Sears catalog, to Amazon and UPS, to home businesses, we owe our success and comforts to the post office and the infrastructure it gives us. It has been an affordable public service that benefits everyone.
Mail is art.
From Ray Johnson’s Correspondence School Of Art to teenagers mailing each other potatoes, to stamps, mail is an art form.
The post office has the potential to be the banking system we all need now.
Banking for the little guy, the small town, and the whole country.
Katherine McFate, President and CEO of the Center for Effective Government in Washington, writes,
“The USPS could raise tens of billions of dollars each year by reinstating post office savings accounts and banking services, which it efficiently provided for 55 years in the first half of the 20th century.
After the Great Depression, people rightly mistrusted private banks that had failed. Then, like now, most banks were not using peoples’ savings to give loans or make investments in local businesses.
People felt safer, pre FDIC, putting their money in a public institution that was backed by the government: postal banks.
Customers got 2-percent interest on their savings accounts, the post office loaned that money to community banks, which then made loans to local businesses. This virtuous circle benefitted the entire community.
Slate Magazine writes, “By 1934, postal banks had $1.2 billion in assets — about 10 percent of the entire commercial banking system.”
During World War 2, FDR used postal banks to sell Treasury Bonds — and “Defense Savings Stamps.” By the end of World War II, the government had raised $8 billion in war funding from the post office alone.
Postal banking can be a game changer for banks and people.
From The Atlantic (2015): “Postal banking” — which just means that post offices run savings accounts, cash checks, and perform other basic financial services — is common in most of Asia and Europe, and only about 7 percent of the world’s national postal systems don’t offer some bank-like services.
Postal banking is a really good way to reach people who haven’t had access to standard savings accounts. One estimate figures that more than 1 billion people have used post offices for making deposits.
The reason why this would be so useful in the U.S. is that somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of the population has to rely on check-cashing or payday-lending services, which in some places charge usurious rates that send people into spirals of recurring debt.”
In How the Other Half Banks, author and professor at University of Georgia School Of Law, Mehrsa Baradaran, writes “These institutions would remain affordable because of economies of scale and because of the existing postal infrastructure in the U.S. Plus, in the absence of shareholders, they would not be driven to seek profits and could sell services at cost.”
Post offices can also serve rural and urban locations that don’t have banks. Most post offices are in bank “deserts.” 59% of post offices are in ZIP codes with zero or one bank branch, making the post office well positioned to serve people who have little or no access to banking services.
Postal Carriers’ heroics go beyond the call of duty.
Ivan Crisostomo of Sacramento, CA, spotted a young girl hiding behind a tree on his route and, after some discussion, learned that she had just fled her kidnappers, who were searching for her. He remained with her until emergency responders arrived, and is the 2019 Special Carrier Alert winner. The award was created to acknowledge the many heroic deeds that postal workers do beyond their call of duty.
The post office is a failsafe for the internet from hackers and foreign governments.
With buildings in every city, fleets of vehicles, and information that doesn’t belong in private hands, the post office is a hands-on web of connection through the entire country. You don’t have privacy over the internet. But no one is allowed to interfere with your mail.
We depend on the post office for voting and during this crisis.
“Restricting who can vote by mail this year at best makes voting unnecessarily difficult, and at worst puts their citizens at unnecessary risk of catching the coronavirus,” writes Matthew Harwood from the Brennan Center for Justice, which says that nearly 80% of Americans want a mail in ballot option this November. Elderly and differently abled people, in particular, need to be able to vote by mail.
We can’t let our democratic infrastructure be sold to private interests at fire sale prices in a time of crisis, leaving a vital informational network, a fleet of vehicles, and some 32,000 buildings in every city to the coziest corporate bidder.
The post office is magic and that’s why we love it.
It’s in our culture. It’s in our blood. From The Postman Always Rings Twice to Wait A Minute Mister Postman to Mr. McFeely on Mr. Rogers. We love the people at the post office. We sense their superpowers. If you’ve ever mailed a demo or a manuscript and asked your favorite post office employee to bless it, you know what I’m talking about because, friends, it works.
What can we do to improve the post office?
First, stop trying to kill it. Though the post office does not receive funding from the government, government imposes extraordinary restrictions on it.
In 2006, Congress passed The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act requiring the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future.
No other private company or federal agency has to pre-fund retirement health care benefits. If they did, many corporations would run huge deficits or tumble into bankruptcy. Without these retiree health payments, USPS would have reported operating profits.
Congress has also limited the post office’s ability to invest in anything but U.S. Treasury Bonds and prohibits it from offering additional services, like banking.
Let postal vehicles be of even greater service.
Katherine McFate of the Center for Effective Government suggests, “The Postal Service’s fleet of vehicles — the largest in the country — could be equipped to detect air pollutants and report potholes, water leaks, and other infrastructure repair needs.”
Make the post offices local meeting places with free wifi, and connect them to libraries?
In many small towns, the local post office continues to be a community hub, a place to meet neighbors and get news.
They could be connected to laundromats, telephone services, community centers, shared places to read the news. They could have rocking chairs. They could have day care centers and senior centers. It could be great.
Appreciate the post office for its incredible accomplishments and potential.
As Sarah Anderson and Brian Wakamo write in Inequality.org, “Rather than the story of a Postal Service facing dire financial straits, it is time we see the Postal Service for what it really is: a well-loved public institution that has risen to every challenge and innovated its way to new services even in the face of an unprecedented congressional mandate. All the while it has delivered high-quality jobs, in big cities and small towns across the country — all without a dime of taxpayer money.
What can you do to save the post office?
Call them. Sign this petition. And this one. And this one.
Join the campaign for postal banking.
Learn how to vote by mail in all 50 states.
Call our elected representatives.
Buy stamps here and write post cards to:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Sources and Further Reading:
The United States Postal Service: An American History: (Free PDF) https://about.usps.com/publications/pub100.pdf
Who We are Postal History. Printable history booklet from USPS: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/desktop-printable-history-booklet.pdf
Slate Magazine: Postal Banking Already Worked In The USA and It Will Work Again https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/08/postal-banking-already-worked-in-the-usa-and-it-will-work-again.html
What We Lose When We Privatize The Postal Service https://www.foreffectivegov.org/blog/what-we-lose-privatized-postal-service
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/african-american-workers-20thc.ht
mMost Recent Fiscal Report for U.S Postal Inspection Service
Historian
United States Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW
Washington, DC 20260–0012
The historian maintains Postmaster Finder, the Postal Service’s national historic record of postmasters by Post Office, online at http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postmasterfinder/. The historian’s staff can provide guidance in researching specific aspects of postal history. Upon request, the historian’s staff can provide the names and appointment dates of postmasters who have served at particular Post Offices, Post Office establishment and discontinuance dates, and the dates of any Post Office name changes. Response time varies with the number of requests received.
The historian also manages the Postal Service’s collection of historical material, including the Annual Report of the Postmaster General since 1789, Postal Laws and Regulations since 1794, the United States Official Postal Guide from 1874 to 1954, and the Postal Bulletin since 1880. (Exact titles vary.) The collection is open to the public by appointment.
http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postmasterfinder/
The Library’s Geography and Map Division has early post route, railroad, and other historical maps. From www.loc.gov, search for “map collections.”
National Postal Museum
Smithsonian Institution
2 Massachusetts Avenue NE
Washington, DC 20002–9997
www.postalmuseum.si.edu
Railway Mail Service Library
117 East Main Street
Boyce, VA 22620–9639
www.railwaymailservicelibrary.org
The Railway Mail Service Library has artifacts, mail route schedules, schemes of mail distribution, and publications relating to the Railway Mail Service/Postal Transportation Service. The library is open by appointment and handles requests by mail.
American Philatelic Research Library www.stamplibrary.org
How To Draw A Bunny: Ray Johnson documentary directed by John Walter https://vimeo.com/110857936
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