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Gallagher - How the post office created America: a history

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Gallagher How the post office created America: a history
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How the post office created America: a history: summary, description and annotation

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Starved by two world wars and the Great Depression, confronted with the countrys increasingly anti-institutional mind-set, and struggling with its doubled mail volume, the post stumbled badly in the turbulent 1960s. Distracted by the ensuing modernization of its traditional services, however, it failed to transition from paper mail to email, which prescient observers saw as its logical next step. Now the post office is at a crossroads. Before deciding its future, Americans should understand what this grand yet overlooked institution has accomplished since 1775 and consider what it should and could contribute in the twenty-first century. Gallagher argues that now, more than ever before, the imperiled post office deserves this effort, because just as the founders anticipated, it created forward-looking, communication-oriented, idea-driven America. From the Hardcover edition;Winifred Gallagher presents the history of the post office as Americas own story, told from a fresh perspective over more than two centuries. The mandate to deliver the mail--then the media--Imposed the federal footprint on vast, often contested parts of the continent and transformed a wilderness into a social landscape of post roads and villages centered on post offices. The post was the catalyst of the nations transportation grid, from the stagecoach lines to the airlines, and the lifeline of the great migration from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It enabled America to shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy and to develop the publishing industry, the consumer culture, and the political party system. Still one of the countrys two major civilian employers, the post was the first to hire women, African Americans, and other minorities for positions in public life.;A masterful history of a long underappreciated institution, How the Post Office Created America examines the surprising role of the postal service in our nations political, social, economic, and physical development. The founders established the post office before they had even signed the Declaration of Independence, and for a very long time, it was the U.S. governments largest and most important endeavor--indeed, it was the government for most citizens. This was no conventional mail network but the central nervous system of the new body politic, designed to bind thirteen quarrelsome colonies into the United States by delivering news about public affairs to every citizen--a radical idea that appalled Europes great powers. Americas uniquely democratic post powerfully shaped its lively, argumentative culture of uncensored ideas and opinions and made it the worlds information and communications superpower with astonishing speed.

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OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR New Understanding Ou r Need for Novelty and Change - photo 1
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

Its in the Bag: What Purses Revealand Conceal

House Thinking: A Room-by-Room Look at How We Live

Spiritual Genius: The Mastery of Lifes Meaning

Working on God

I.D.: How Heredity and Experience Make You Who You Are

The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions

PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New - photo 2

PENGUIN PRESS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

Copyright 2016 by Winifred Gallagher

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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ISBN 9781594205002 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780399564031 (ebook)

Version_1

IN MEMORY OF B ENJAMIN F RANKLIN AND B ENJAMIN R USH,

MY FELLOW P HILADELPHIANS

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION W HY THE P OST O FFICE M ATTERS T HE HISTORY OF ITS POST - photo 3
INTRODUCTION
W HY THE P OST O FFICE M ATTERS T HE HISTORY OF ITS POST OFFICE is nothing - photo 4
W HY THE P OST O FFICE M ATTERS

T HE HISTORY OF ITS POST OFFICE is nothing less than the story of America. Of the nations founding institutions, it is the least appreciated or studied, and yet for a very long time it was the U.S. governments major endeavor. Indeed, it was that government in the experience of most citizens. As radical an experiment as America itself, the post was the incubator of our uniquely lively, disputatious culture of innovative ideas and uncensored opinions. With astonishing speed, it established the United States as the worlds information and communications superpower.

After the Revolution, America needed a central nervous system to circulate news throughout the new body politic. Like mail service, knowledge of public affairs had always been limited to an elite, but George Washington, James Madison, and especially Dr. Benjamin Rush (a terrible physician but a wonderful political philosopher) were determined to provide the people of their democratic republic with both. Their novel, uniquely American post didnt just carry letters for the few. It also subsidized the delivery of newspapers to the entire population, which created an informed electorate, spurred the fledgling market economy, and bound thirteen fractious erstwhile colonies into the United States. For more than two centuries, the founders grandly envisaged postal commons has endured as one of the few American institutions, public or private, in which we, the people, are treated as equals.

The America of the Early Republic desperately needed physical as well as political and economic development. The government quickly mapped this terra incognita with post routes that connected towns centered on post offices; it also subsidized the nascent transportation industry, then dominated by the stagecoach, by paying its owners to carry the mail. By 1831, French political philosopher and mail coach passenger Alexis de Tocqueville wondered over Americas unparalleled communications system, which brought the latest national and foreign news even to the Michigan outback.

By the time of Tocquevilles visit, the founders ideal of nonpartisan politics had faded, and the post they created to unite opinionated Americans could divide them as well. President Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, fumed when abolitionists used the network to send their unsolicited publications to Charleston, South Carolina, where irate locals committed a federal crime by burning the maila conflagration that illuminated slavery as a national rather than merely regional issue. Yet Jackson himself scandalously politicized the post with his spoils system, which allowed the party that won the White House to hire its supporters for postal jobs wrested from the defeated rivals ranksa gold mine of patronage that cemented and sustained the countrys two-party system for the next 140 years.

In the 1840s, the post faced the worst crisis in its history. Antebellum Americans, including the migrants moving from farms to cities, and increasingly to the western frontier, protested its high letter postage by turning to cheaper private competitors that contested its exclusive right to carry mail. The post responded by turning personal correspondence, historically a costly luxury, into a cheap daily staple, which both aided its recovery and transformed Americans personal lives. The combination of postage for pennies and the Railway Mail Servicea now forgotten wonder that efficiently processed mail aboard moving trainslater enabled many people to write to a friend in the morning and receive a reply that afternoon.

The post played a crucial role in one of the nineteenth centurys crowning achievements: turning the Atlantic-oriented United States into a Pacific nation as well. The transcontinental telegraph and railroad of the 1860s usually get the credit, but they followed in the tracks of a post that was already responding to the needs of historys greatest overland migration. (Most settlers got their mail at post offices in general stores, much like the one served by the young postmaster Abraham Lincoln on the Illinois frontier.) The post subsidized the Overland Mail Companys western stagecoaches but only paid the Pony Express to carry mail at the end of its short life, when the private service helped to keep distant California slavery-free and connected to the rest of the Union.

Like America itself, the post was transformed by the Civil War. When the Confederacy stole its entire southern network, Montgomery Blair, Lincolns brilliant postmaster general, used the savings from the discontinued operations to pay for expensive new services, including Free City Delivery, which brought mail to urban doorsteps, and the postal money order system, which initially enabled Union soldiers to send their salaries back home safely. The post had been the first, and was for a very long time the only, institution to give jobs to disenfranchised women that offered them rare entre into public life. Most had been small-town postmasters, but Blair went further, hiring women for prestigious positions as clerks even at the departments august headquarters in Washington, D.C. The post had long been prohibited from using enslaved workers, lest they learn from publications circulated in the mail that all men were created equal. After the war, the victorious Republicans underscored their politics by employing significant numbers of African 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 barriers.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the post became a progressive champion for Americans who looked to the government to protect them from the Industrial Revolutions dark side, notably the powerful new monopolies that deprived them of affordable, competitively priced services. Their fearless if improbable spokesman was Postmaster General John Wanamaker, the Republican merchant prince. Critics accused him of running his department like his legendary namesake department store in Philadelphia, but he used his business genius on behalf of average Americans to fight for Rural Free Delivery and broaden the meaning of postal to include parcel delivery and even savings banking.

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