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SPEAKER_02: That's Vivian Campbell.
SPEAKER_02: My name is Vivian Campbell and I am the Postmaster of Peach Springs, Arizona. Vivian works closely with the Supai Post Office and she says there are only a few ways to get mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
SPEAKER_02: You either have to hike down there, ride a mule or ride a horse.
SPEAKER_06: And so every day, rain or shine, mail gets packed on 10 mules to make a two and a half hour trip into the canyon. The Post Office is there to serve the people who live on the Avasuapai Reservation. Avasuapai meaning blue-green water people, named for the waterfall at the bottom of the canyon. The falls are just magnificent. The water is so blue it's not even, it's indescribable.
SPEAKER_02: The Avasuapai receive a lot of food supplies, but otherwise their mail is pretty standard fare.
SPEAKER_06: They get packages from Amazon, they get first class mail, they get bills just like you and me.
SPEAKER_06: The Supai Post Office was established in 1896 and its existence speaks to the lengths that the U.S. Post Office has gone to connect people with each other and to unite us as a country, ever since the service was founded in the late 1700s.
SPEAKER_01: I was sitting on my back porch in Wyoming one night, you know, as the sun sank in the Golden West, and I just jumped up out of the chair and like shrieked at my husband. The Post Office created America. That is author and historian Winifred Gallagher, and she wrote a book based on this revelation called, appropriately,
SPEAKER_06: How the Post Office Created America, a History.
SPEAKER_06: Gallagher argues that the Post Office didn't just create an efficient and inexpensive way to send a letter from Oakland, California into the Grand Canyon. The service was designed to unite a bunch of disparate towns and people under one flag. And in doing so, the Post Office actually created the United States of America. For thousands of years, governments have had ways of sending information across distances, but for most of history, the mail was limited to correspondence between governments, militaries, and eventually, wealthy people who could afford to pay for such a service. And that's what the postal system of early colonized America was like. The Crown's Post was put in place by the English monarchy and was mostly used to get messages from England to America. Once the mail landed from England into America, it would be circulated by a fellow called a post-rider who, just like he sounds, he was a man on a horse.
SPEAKER_01: There were no roads suitable for a wheeled vehicle. At the time, the colonies, which dotted the eastern coast from New Hampshire down to Georgia, weren't that interested in communicating with each other.
SPEAKER_01: The colonies were very fractious, disputatious siblings. They had very little to do with each other. They were clamoring for the attention of Mother England.
SPEAKER_06: But all of this started to change when an enterprising fellow named Benjamin Franklin became postmaster for the Crown. As postmaster, Franklin was in charge in making sure mail in the colonies got to its proper location, and he was determined to improve the bare-bones system.
SPEAKER_01: He actually visited every colony. This was back when it was a real pain in the neck. He established mile posts so you could charge fairly for the distance a letter was going instead of just estimating it.
SPEAKER_06: But as Franklin worked to improve the Crown system, he began to see the colonies differently.
SPEAKER_01: I believe that the process of going around and thinking about these 13 colonies as not just disconnected but links in a chain, I think this started him thinking about ways that they could come together as a people. In 1754, at a meeting of colonial representatives in Albany, New York, Franklin proposed a plan for uniting the colonies.
SPEAKER_01: It was actually kind of sketched out of federal government where the colonies would elect their own representatives as opposed to having them appointed by the Crown. England didn't appreciate Franklin's ideas, and colonists weren't quite ready for them either.
SPEAKER_06: But 20 years later, notions about American self-governance were spreading. Revolutionaries in the colonies needed a way to communicate about the growing movement for independence, and they knew they couldn't use the Crown's post.
SPEAKER_01: Because if they used the Crown system, their letters would be intercepted and they'd be arrested.
SPEAKER_06: In 1774, these American revolutionaries created their own system to communicate called the Constitutional Post. Before they fought the Revolution or had a system of government, before the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Americans had the Post. The underground constitutional post was crucial in fomenting the Revolution, which gave America independence from England, but it was still a very limited system. There were fewer than 100 post offices in the entire country, and the system didn't serve that many people, and was basically a tool for political elites to communicate with each other. The founders wanted a better post, one that would serve all people in their infant nation and help them stay united under one flag. These people who were already spreading over the Appalachians into the wild west of Ohio and Kentucky.
SPEAKER_01: Founding father Benjamin Rush especially believed that the post office would play a crucial role in the new democracy.
SPEAKER_06: He was obsessed with the idea that the post office should circulate newspapers to every American.
SPEAKER_01: You couldn't have an educated electorate if the people weren't literate and they didn't have up-to-date political information. But this would be no small undertaking. They'd need an infrastructure, a roads, and a workforce.
SPEAKER_01: This government had very little money. It was running on fumes. And yet he says we're going to have this very, very ambitious postal system, much more ambitious than anything in Europe. It's really kind of astounding. In 1792, Congress passed the Post Office Act. Under the act, new postal routes were established.
SPEAKER_06: Censoring or stealing mail became a punishable offense and all newspapers could be mailed at the same low rate to promote the spread of information. It set off a huge explosion of newspapers from all sorts of political viewpoints. The post office was the main way, sometimes the only way people got information. It was the media. We were news junkies back then. The founders ensured that we would have an uncensored, lively, contentious political culture.
SPEAKER_01: Because they wanted the people to be exposed to all kinds of views and argue it out and then vote. We've been arguing and gossiping and spreading information, not all of it true, since the very beginning.
SPEAKER_01: In a way, you know, you could take the attitude of they sort of created a Frankenstein, but in fact it was by design.
SPEAKER_06: Around this same time, in the late 1700s, the stagecoach was becoming a more popular way to travel and a better way to carry mail than just packing up a rider on a horse. The post office started to contract with private stagecoach companies to carry mail and these companies worked with cities and towns to build roads. In this way, the post helped carve out the early transportation infrastructure of the country, connecting disparate communities. When a group of people settled in a new place, the residents would petition the government for a post office, which gave them an address and a place on the map.
SPEAKER_01: And then that town would be connected to another town down the road. You started to have this kind of network. It's developed not just our physical landscape with roads, but a social landscape so that you could start to talk about this huge country with like some locations. In 1831, when the French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville toured America, he was amazed by our postal system.
SPEAKER_06: He's riding in a stagecoach through someplace in the Michigan Outback and he sees people coming out of these kind of crude huts, you know, cabins,
SPEAKER_01: desperate to get the newspapers and able to talk about not just American politics, but what's going on in Europe. He's flabbergasted. At this point, the mail in the U.S. was mostly about sending and receiving newspapers. People didn't really send letters because they couldn't afford to.
SPEAKER_06: They kept the rates for letters high and they used that revenue from letters to pay for the delivery of newspapers to all Americans everywhere.
SPEAKER_01: Most people got like fewer than one letter a year. You get a letter saying, you know, Pa has died, or you get like Aunt Leticia's will.
SPEAKER_06: And unlike today, where the person sending a letter covers the cost of postage, back then the recipient had to pay. You go to the post office, you'd stand in line, see if you had mail and then pay for it if you wanted it.
SPEAKER_01: It created this fantastic backlog of unclaimed mail because so many people, so many people didn't want to pay.
SPEAKER_06: In the 1840s and 50s, the population of the country exploded with new immigrants and all these new people wanted a less expensive way to communicate. A movement for cheap postage started to form. This movement wanted people to be able to send letters anywhere in the U.S. for one low price using a new tool, the prepaid postage stamp. They argued that the volume of the mail would increase to a degree that would make up for the revenue and they were correct because the volume of the mail really went gangbusters after cheap postage.
SPEAKER_01: The postage stamp allowed regular people to send letters. People sent enough letters to fill thousands of Ken Burns documentaries.
SPEAKER_06: It was the Victorian era and letter writing became an art form. There were even books with advice on how to refine your letter writing style. Address your correspondent by his or her title, not the first name. Dear husband, beloved brother, dearest friend, honored sir, no matter how close you are, don't address him by his first name.
SPEAKER_00: Begin your letter with, I take pen in hand, please pardon the poor paper, the scratchy pen, the ungraceful language.
SPEAKER_06: Women especially became avid letter writers. Women actually started wearing little lockets around their necks with their stamps inside.
SPEAKER_06: With more women using the post office, the place itself began to change. Post offices historically had been often in the backs of taverns. They were men's social spaces. You know, there were prostitutes at the post office supplying their wares and pickpops, famously pickpockets.
SPEAKER_01: When women started sending letters, post offices added special ladies windows so that ladies could pick up their letters without coming into contact with these unseemly elements.
SPEAKER_06: Slowly, post offices transitioned into more professional spaces. By 1860, there were some 28,000 post offices in the US. People were sending thousands of letters and newly invented greeting cards to each other. But they were also using the post just like the founders intended, to disseminate political information. Abolitionists, for example, were using the mail to spread ideas about ending slavery. In the 1860s, when the Civil War was being fought over some of those very ideas, the American post office would bifurcate for a time. No mail would be sent between North and South. And the Civil War brought another big change in America's postal system, home delivery.
SPEAKER_01: A postal employee in Ohio named Joseph Briggs found it heartbreaking during the war because people desperate for news of their soldiers away would have to stand in long lines at the post office.
SPEAKER_06: Often these people would be receiving news of a loved one's death. And there were just scenes of terrible, terrible grief in public. They didn't even have privacy.
SPEAKER_01: And he found it so heartbreaking that he ran this pilot program of bringing people the mail.
SPEAKER_06: Home delivery caught on and by the mid 1860s, many cities were offering it. About 30 years later, people living in rural areas would also get home delivery. But while people in the eastern United States entered a letter writing boom, news settlers in California felt isolated. It was hard to receive mail on the West Coast. So the mail could go by train to Missouri, but then it had to be hauled by stagecoaches through really terrible conditions.
SPEAKER_01: The other option would be to send a letter on a 13,000 mile six month trip around the tip of South America by boat.
SPEAKER_06: Californians, as they became more powerful by the Golden Rush era and the succeeding years, became outraged by the fact that they had this lousy postal service.
SPEAKER_01: And they demanded to have a reliable stagecoach mail that would depart and arrive on predictable times. Eventually they got what they wanted.
SPEAKER_06: By 1857, the post office had a fairly reliable route from east to west. It took 25 days, which was better than it had been. It was still not great. A group of businessmen led by a guy named William Russell thought they could do better than the U.S. Post. Russell thought his little startup company could get the mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in just 10 days.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, he did it. People didn't think he'd be able to do it. Russell's competing service was called the Pony Express.
SPEAKER_06: Riders on horseback would race at full speed for about 10 or 15 miles to relay stations where they would trade out for a rested horse. This change was supposed to take only two minutes. Horses were to carry no more than 165 pounds, including the rider. If an exhausted horse collapsed on the trail, the rider was to run on foot to the next location with his bag of mail. It was a very expensive endeavor, and it didn't last long, about a year and a half. Which was okay, because by 1861, the Transcontinental Telegraph would reach California, and rail service would soon follow. Trains would eventually deliver mail all over the U.S. and not just deliver it, but become moving post offices. In fact, subsidies from the post office allowed the rail system to expand throughout the country. Trains couldn't afford to run on passenger fare alone. The money they got from the post office was crucial in helping them expand service. Years earlier, these postal subsidies had done the same thing for stagecoaches, and after World War I, the post would do this again for aviation. Planes were not a viable form of transportation until the post office poured money into the industry.
SPEAKER_01: The aviation industry wasn't able to pay for itself with passenger service until well into the 1940s.
SPEAKER_06: The industry survived and expanded by carrying mail for the post office. In fact, before Charles Lindbergh made his historic non-stop flight across the Atlantic, he had another job.
SPEAKER_01: Charles Lindbergh was a night pilot. He carried the mail.
SPEAKER_06: If the post office truly created America, and I think Winifred Gallagher makes a pretty good case that it did, it's now playing a more supporting role. In the last 40 years or so, Congress has cut back considerably on services. And if you've noticed longer lines at the post office and delays in receiving your mail, that's why. In my opinion, no one should be mad at the post office. They should be mad at Congress.
SPEAKER_01: Congress has prevented the post office from modernizing and running itself efficiently and tragically going digital, which it should have done back in the 80s. Gallagher believes the post office missed an opportunity to facilitate email and other digital communication.
SPEAKER_06: But she argues the U.S. Postal Service probably isn't on the brink of death either. Conservatives talk about privatizing the whole operation, but right now, Gallagher doubts that this is possible. Actually, the private competitors, neither FedEx or UPS is equipped to handle the volume of American mail.
SPEAKER_01: They would certainly risk bankruptcy if they tried.
SPEAKER_06: The post office has an unparalleled delivery infrastructure and employs an enormous workforce. And we still need the service they provide because, unlike FedEx and UPS, the U.S. post office cannot pick and choose where they deliver based on profit. It is obliged by law to provide pickups and deliveries to every community in the country, even if that community is located in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle with Delaney Hall, Sharif Yousif, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Sam Greenspan and me, Roman Mars. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director, Taryn Mazza takes care of the office and us all, Sean Real composed all the music, and Michelle Loeffler knows a lot about the post office. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. You know, treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRS urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRS aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRS is most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRS to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRS steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
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