How the post office influenced the course of US history
Special delivery: A large flat rate box of USPS history
Welcome to The Breaking Point, a weekly newsletter that draws on the historical legacies of injustice based on the news cycle and culture trends to understand what in the world is going on. If you like what you see, please feel free to forward it around. I’m a one-woman team, so the structure of this newsletter may change over time as I learn new things.
Beyond text messages and video calls, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has been one way my family and I have stayed connected over the years. I’m in New York City, my younger sister is in Berkeley, California, for college, and my parents are roughly 7,810 miles away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in my home island of Saipan. Sending us a large flat rate box of snacks that remind us of home — like cans of spam and tuna, packets of pancit canton, boxes of Pocky sticks or instant coffee and matcha — has become my parents’ way of showing love from a distance.
As most of you probably know by now, the USPS is in trouble. Donald Trump, in the middle of the pandemic and with elections looming, has made it his mission to dismantle the agency that governs the most efficient mail system in the country, if not, the world. Already, USPS mailboxes are being removed from the streets, high-speed mail sorting machines are being unplugged, and work hours for postal workers are being axed across the country.
It’s intense, but it isn’t exactly new. The federal government has a long history of using the post office as a tool to influence politics and stop radical movements. If you go back in time, you’ll learn that the roles the nation’s postal system played or continue to play have been significantly instrumental in many ways. It’s a complex history in American politics that weaves in injustices rooted from western colonialism. If you keep reading, you will probably find it as intriguing as I did.
Figure of the week: 1.56 million
The number of acres of coastal plain in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that the Trump administration has approved for oil drilling, an area the size of Delaware and home to polar bears and caribou. (Uh, this is bad!!)
Photo by Tareq Ismail on Unsplash
The birth of the U.S. postal service was thanks to the growing interest in newspapers. A man named William Goddard was infuriated that the British postal service at the time didn’t properly deliver his paper Pennsylvania Chronicle to its readers. So Goddard laid out an improved postal service plan that guaranteed privacy before Congress in 1774, but it wasn’t until Benjamin Franklin helped promote the plan and became the first postmaster general under the Continental Congress — nearly a year before America gained its independence from British rule — did it gain momentum.
In the wake of America’s independence from British rule, George Washington signed the Postal Act of 1792. The policy became revolutionary in the way people communicated and received news. The post office systematically and strategically fashioned a complex system of delivery routes and roads that virtually connected every American to messages and news information out there. Post offices and postal roads multiplied. By 1831, postmasters soon made up three-quarters of the entire workforce, a number greater than the U.S. army at the time. The postal service was also the backbone of American journalism’s early days that it gave birth to a large number of news publications which vastly influenced U.S. politics.
As the first legitimate federal agency, the postal service over time faced the racial storm brought by slavery and land grabbing. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, he appointed Gideon Granger as the agency’s postmaster general to spearhead news postal regulations. One of the regulations Granger imposed was that only “free white persons” could be employed to deliver mail, prohibiting Black people from the job due to white (Southern) fears of slave rebellions.
Another notorious instance was on July 29, 1835, when a group of white men from Charleston, South Carolina — who called themselves the Lynch Men — broke into the town’s post office in the middle of the night and stole sacks of mail. The mails the group took were said to be newspapers and pamphlets from white abolitionists and at the time the newly formed American Anti-Slavery Society. The Lynch Men eventually set the mails ablaze and built a huge bonfire on the city’s military academy in front of an elated mob of over 2,000 townspeople.
The first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper. Source: Wikimedia Commons
It wasn’t just limited to the abolitionist movement. The first Native American newspaper, Cherokee Phoenix, launched at a time when Indian lands were being taken away by white settlers. The articles published in the Phoenix exposed each new attack to Indian rights and held white people in power accountable for their actions. The post office eventually halted the delivery of the paper’s supplies and resources. Then in 1833, the newspaper’s editor at the time spotted a sign at the Nashville post office ordering restrictions to all newspaper exchanges with the Cherokee Phoenix. “It thus appears that the postal system was used intermittently to cripple the ability of the Phoenix to reach its readers — much as occurred with abolitionist newspapers mailed to the South,” according to the book News For All The People. (This book is a must read for journalists and news nerds like me!!) Despite all this, the post office survived.
With the seemingly endless pandemic threatening to upend the crucial 2020 presidential elections as people worry about exposure by going to polling places, American voters are opting to cast their ballots by mail. The move has terrified President Trump that he is sounding the alarm to the possibility of voter fraud. Even celebrities like Taylor Swift called out Trump’s “calculated dismantling” of the postal service in a tweet:
“He is WELL AWARE that we do not want him as our president. He’s chosen to blatantly cheat and put millions of Americans’ lives at risk in an effort to hold on to power,” Swift said. “Donald Trump’s ineffective leadership gravely worsened the crisis that we are in and he is now taking advantage of it to subvert and destroy our right to vote and vote safely. Request a ballot early. Vote early.”
(Read more: Trump’s finger-pointing on USPS is latest attempt to rewrite history in real time, an analysis by Maeve Reston, CNN)
The circulation of abolitionist newspapers and the like threatened white political leaders back in the day. Now mail-in ballots seem to threaten Trump’s chance at re-election that he is willing to put lives at risk during a pandemic that killed 170,000 people. The political leaders in both circumstances went for the same thing: the postal service system. In other words, the USPS is essential and powerful. Americans rely on it for necessities like jobs and money, and to also stay connected in times of social distancing. Dismantling the agency would be disastrous.
(PS* Happy Democratic National Convention week! Don’t forget to register to vote.)
Critical reading list, because I said so 📖
Labor rights mobilized women during suffrage — and now by Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th
Health Officials Knew COVID-19 Would Hit Pacific Islanders Hard. The State Still Fell Short by Anita Hofschneider, Honolulu Civil Beat
‘A national crisis’: As coronavirus forces many schools online this fall, millions of disconnected students are being left behind by Moriah Balingit, The Washington Post
Kenya Is Trying to End Child Marriage. But Climate Change Is Putting More Young Girls at Risk by Neha Wadekar, TIME magazine
How social justice slideshows took over Instagram by (my friend) Terry Nguyen, Vox
thanks for reading, and don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already. see you next week!