Did the Post Office Grow America?

There are 4,543 words in the US Constitution, and it can be read in about 30 minutes. One of the most important parts in the formation of America are seven words in Article I, Section 8. Welcome to Tracing The Path. 

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a theory of human motivation, which is now called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It describes the psychological stages a person goes through in their personal growth journey. Typically, it is portrayed as a pyramid, the base of which is our basic needs of food water and shelter.

This theory can easily be demonstrated through the actions of the first European settlers to the North American continent. Upon arrival without question, their first goal was food, water, and shelter. There was certainly no factory building or book writing before those basic needs were met and satisfied.

But once established, the colonists could move on to safety and security, the second stage of Maslow’s hierarchy. Safety, according to Maslow, is our desire for personal security, employment, resources, health, and property. This is what the development of the 13 colonies established for the colonists.

But it is the third stage of Maslow’s plan that we begin our story.

Level three of the hierarchy needs is love and belonging. That’s characterized as friendship, intimacy, family, and a sense of connection. As such, our story starts with the Crown Post, a post office of the British Crown.

The 13 colonies were quite isolated and independent of each other. Few people had relatives or friends at the other colonies, thus neither mail nor good roads connecting them were important. In the beginning, the only real mail that was sent or received was to the UK. But without a post office, sending things and receiving them was problematic. 

The first colony to request a remedy for this problem was Massachusetts Bay. On November 5, 1639, the general court of that colony directed that Richard Fairbanks’s Tavern would be where letters were delivered and picked up, giving Richard one cent for each letter he managed.

In the New Netherlands colony, the Dutch West Indies Company, who ran the colony, made a similar determination. They constructed a box at the port for letters to be picked up and mailed. But there was no general consensus or common interest among the colonies to take it any further, and the only times the problem came to a head is when the colonies faced a common enemy, but had no roads or mail to aid in their communication.

It wasn’t until the reign of William III in England in 1690 that any sort of postal system was established. William III had assessed his colonies which had now grown to 200,000 people and decided he wanted to have postal communication between Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. He had some roads built but didn’t send money to do much more than that. But in 1753 all that would change.

Benjamin Franklin became the postmaster for the Crown Post in Philadelphia. At the time he took it over, it took six weeks to get a letter all the way to Boston. And letters often had to travel back to the UK first before getting to Charleston or the West Indies.

So from 1753 to 1774, Benjamin Franklin improved the entire system, getting mail time down to under a week between even the furthest of places. The New York to Philly trip would be the next day. And the system became profitable, sending money for the first time back to England.

While the Crown loved that, the colonies were beginning to feel like their taxes let alone postal revenues, which were being sent back to England, were providing the colonies no value. And 1773, they dumped all the tea into the harbor to protest.

Seeing letters and articles Franklin had written being very pro-colony, England decided to remove him from the Postmaster General position, which freed Franklin to help start and lead a new colonial post office, the Constitution Post.

Needing the colonies to be united in their fight for self-governance, Franklin and others felt they would need a post office that couldn’t be intercepted by the British. The Constitution Post would be the first office created by the US government and would lead directly to their Declaration of Independence. 

Franklin would use his Crown Post experience to make the Constitution Post, efficient. With 76 Post Office locations between Maine and Florida, he had it running smoothly before becoming a diplomat to France. All colony growth would happen along these post routes, putting cities and villages all along the eastern seaboard. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, moving up and down the eastern seaboard.

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, moving up and down the eastern seaboard was easy because it satisfied the first three levels of needs. Having established working colonies, everyone would have access to food, water, and shelter. And level two provided safety, jobs, and security. And the post routes made sure they were connected and had access to loved ones even if by mail alone. The third stage of hierarchy’s level of needs.

What further kept everyone connected was a goal put forward by George Washington. He felt newspapers, magazines, and gazettes were very important for the culture to gel, understand the issues, and have a desire to read.

In 1788, George Washington said, “I entertain the high idea of the utility of periodical publications. In so much that I could heartily desire copies of magazine’s newspapers, as well as common gazettes, might spread through every city, town, and village of America. I consider such easy vehicles of knowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and matriculate the morals of an enlightenment and free people.”

In 1792, the first postal law was enacted, providing rock-bottom newspaper rates, one cent per pound, and allowing newspaper people to mail for free to each other. And it wasn’t until 1879 that they began to even raise those rates.

To subsidize such low rates for newspapers, magazine periodicals, they decided to charge 6 cents to 25 cents per letter, depending upon the distance. While it was expensive, it would underwrite the price of newspapers.

However, when others felt they could start to deliver the newspaper cheaper, the government was forced to enact a law making the post office the only legal deliver of letters. And to build confidence in the public, they chose to actually subsidize the newspaper and periodicals and lowered the rate to two cents per letter.

That was good news for everyone, especially 19-year-old Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts. She was fond of Valentine’s Day, and decided she could make beautiful cards and sell them. At first, she had her dad and brother try to sell them while on their sales calls. But when the price of postage came down, for the first time, she decided to advertise in the local paper.

And that turned her into a businesswoman forming the first greeting card company in the US, the New England Valentine Company. And now she has considered the mother of Valentine’s cards.

But her company would go on to make much more than that. She would eventually add greeting cards and Christmas cards and other things made of paper and actually sold them in a catalog.

 Aaron M. Ward is another one who saw opportunity through the mail. In 1865, he had been working as a dry goods salesman for the Field, Palmer and Leiter Company, which would one day become the Marshall Field Company.

He spent his days traveling among small communities selling goods, but also noting how many people complained about the low variety of goods that were available at the General Stores. He also noticed the difference between what retailers sold their products for and what they were able to purchase them for from wholesalers.

And so he had an idea. The post office didn’t charge much for the likes of newspapers, magazines, periodicals, catalogs. He had enough contacts, he could fill a room with goods and sell them by mail order.

People who were far from the city retailers could then get whatever they wanted. So in March of 1871, the Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalog was born. But just as quickly as he put it together, his entire business went up in flames in the great Chicago Fire.

Nine months later, after gaining a business partner and raising 1,600 more dollars, Montgomery Ward catalog was officially selling products. His first catalog had 163 items, and as long as you could get to a rail station, you could get what you ordered.

The Post Office made it extremely economical to deliver the catalog, but not quite so to deliver the goods.

Up in Redwood, Minnesota, a railroad worker by the name of Richard Sears, was always hearing what people were talking about on the trains. Wholesalers would often talk about having more supply than demand.

Hearing that, Richard reached out to one and bought some watches at an extra low price to sell. He sold those quite readily and continued to to buy more, until he heard a rumor. The Post Office had been delivering to people’s homes for free if they lived in the city. But now they were considering delivering to rural addresses for free.

So in 1893, Richard Sears and a watchmaker friend in Chicago teamed up and decided they too would sell watches in a catalog. Alva Robuck and Richard Sears created more wholesale connections and eventually had enough product to fill a catalog. And thus, the Sears Robuck catalog was born.

And only two years later, rural free delivery was enacted. Both Montgomery Award and Sears would change the face of the nation. Not only could settlers stay connected to loved ones by mail, but now could also get everything they needed by catalog. More than watches, Americans could buy cars, bicycles, radios, heaters, sheds, and even a house through a mail order catalog. 

Staying connected to loved ones through green cards or even filling out catalog forms, or writing valentines and Christmas Day cards all required a certain level of penmanship. But the kind of penmanship that was used to create documents like the Declaration of Independence, that kind of cursive or calligraphy took a lifetime to learn and get right.

Platt Roger Spencer, a store clerk, decided to come up with a new form of cursive. His form, called the Spencarian method, was easy and it just involved connecting angled letters and was quickly adopted and started to be taught in schools. It was the first time penmanship became a product of the school system.

That’s not the only thing we can describe to the Post Office. 

Because back in 1800, the speed by which mail could travel was dictated by the pace of the horse or the speed of the currents. It didn’t take long before steamboats were used for mail. In 1823, Congress actually declared the waterways to be Post Roads. The money steamboats got from carrying a mail allowed them to expand and build facilities further and further down the waterways. 

Between 1845 and 1855, the distance mailed traveled by steamboat doubled from 7,625 miles to 14,619 miles. The connection to the colonial world by steamboat and the connection to loved ones by mail satisfied Maslow’s third level of needs.

But it wasn’t long before mail needed to go where the rivers didn’t. In 1832, Congress then declared that all railroads would be Post Roads. And in so doing, mail time was cut in half or more. For example, it took 94 hours to get mail from New York to Raleigh, North Carolina in 1835, but that was just cut to 19 hours a few years later.

In 1860s, railway Post Offices were set up, which became social hubs as people from all over would go there to receive their packages. Those railway post offices were just what people like Andrew Montgomery Award needed to make his catalog business a success.

By 1850 there were 9,000 miles of railroad in the United States. In 1848 the California Gold Rush hastened the post office needs to get mail all the way across the country. With no other means, the Post Office was back to hiring stagecoaches pulled by horses. The Gold Rush actually broke Maslow’s model.

The promise of Golden Riches overtook the need for safety, love, and companionship.

Thousands of people leapt into the unknown and just headed west. But Maslow’s third level didn’t escape the need of those who stayed back. Feeling a need to provide safety, comfort, property, and security to those in the west, Congress enacted two laws:

• a land grant to railroad companies
• and the Homestead Act 

Both offered property rights for those willing to go get them. The railroad companies used revenue from their mail-hulling experience to mount such expeditions to claim land for their routes.

 By 1860 there were 28,000 Post Offices.

Most cities were connected by rail, and mail could travel from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California in just seven days and 17 hours by a way of the Pony Express.

And then in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad was finished. The Civil War was over, and a new America emerged.

That brings us to the 20th century, where cars and bicycles were beginning to dominate city streets.

The post office had added free home deliver to rural addresses, and in 1913 they added package delivery, making the railroad post offices a thing of the past. By 1919, Rand McNally had blazed 50,000 miles of roads, and the post office became interested in aviation.

In 1918, the Post Office began scheduling all phases of airmail and started hiring their own pilots and mechanics across the country. For six years, all mail, that was flown airmail, would be flown by government pilots and planes. But in 1925, Congress enacted the Kelly Act, which authorized the government to contract with private companies to deliver the mail, which officially kicked off commercial air transport.

One of the first companies they would hire would be out of St. Louis, the Robertson Aircraft Corporation, and their star pilot, was a young Charles Lindberg. Lindberg worked for two years as a mail pilot, which gave him the experience and confidence he needed to fly across the Atlantic in his Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. 

In 1953, the Post Office got a boost from the president. Roosevelt started a public relief program to help mitigate the effects of the Great Depression called the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC. It employed unmarried, unemployed men to help conserve and restore forests and agricultural lands. The workers planted over 2 billion trees and spent 6 million hours fighting forest fires. On top of that, the CCC helped fix build and repair thousands of Post Offices across the country. 

The 1920s introduced another invention in American homes, the telephone. For the post office, the telephone reduced the need to write letters to catch up on things. While it didn’t drastically cut into mail service, it did satisfy Maslow’s third level and allowed people to settle even further away without needing immediate postal service.

It wouldn’t be until after World War II, however, and the 1947 invention of the transistor that phones would be found in every home. The sheer number of U.S. households with a phone forced the phone companies to institute an area code in 1951.

By 1960, most areas had been converted to an area code system. The post office had a similar problem. So much mail. They got more mail than ever before.They were handling 31 billion pieces of mail per year.

And so 1963, they too decided to institute a numbering system, a five-digit zip code. In the big cities, they already had a two-digit code. That’s because, during the World War II, many of the postmen went off to war, and with them, they took a vast amount of neighborhood delivery information.

To help acclimate the substitute mailman, the Post Office created a two-digit code by breaking the cities into zones. But that didn’t help the nation. They now wanted to add a three-digit prefix to make a 5-digit zip code. The first digit would indicate the state, and the next 2-bit digits would indicate the region. This would allow them to add automated sorting and make mail much more efficient.

To do that though, to get the entire country, to start using zip codes, they created a nationwide advertising campaign with signs, buttons on mailmen, and advertising everywhere. They even created a cartoon character, Mr. Zip, to explain how it worked.

And within three years, the zip code had 86% adoption in the country. And mail became faster and more reliable overnight. While the zip code is actually owned by the post office, they decided not to copyright or trademark or protect it all.

Its function would be available to anyone to use, and in so doing it took on a life of its own. The zip code has been adopted by thousands of groups creating an unknown number of benefits. The Inspector General calculated in a 2013 report that the zip code is worth about 9.5 billion dollars a year to the economy.

With automated sorting alone, everyone who transports goods can ensure fuller, more efficient trucks, trailers, and boats. Insurance companies use the zip code to calculate rates. Credit card companies calculate risks with zip codes. Direct mail companies like Columbia House Records, Readers Digest, and VALPAK can better target their offerings. The U.S. Census uses it to hire workers and identify people who haven’t responded. Universities use the zip code to improve classroom diversity. And your local pizza place uses it to make sure only people in their delivery area get door hangers.

All of these things, greeting cards, penmanship, the Sears Christmas Wishbook, roads, railways, boats and commercial air service, zip codes, America’s expansion west, and the $5 off at Domino’s P2 coupon you get in the mail are all products of seven words in the U.S. Constitution.

Back when Benjamin Franklin and George Washington decided a postal service would be important to this future, to the future success of this country, they made sure it was included in the written Constitution.

Article 1 of the Constitution is about the legislative branch, the Senate and House of Representatives. These seven words about one of the powers Congress has to do may have made the most impact on America.

It says Congress has the power “to establish post offices and post roads”. 

Without that, who knows where America might be today?

You’ve been listening to Tracing the Path with Dan R Morris.