Signed, Sealed & Delivered | America in Pursuit

0:00This message comes from 48 Hours with the 48 Hours Post Mortemortem podcast. Host Anne-Marie Green joins producers and correspondents to discuss key evidence, dead ends, and stranger-than-fiction twists they faced in the field. Listen on your favorite podcast app. This is America in Pursuit, a limited series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Ramtin Arablui. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year. As we count down to July 4th, I've been thinking a lot about the fact that when the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, they were literally starting a new country from scratch.

0:42And it was a country based on ideas, ideas that had to somehow be shared widely. The first U.S. government was really an information and communications network. This is Winifred Gallagher. I am a journalist. My book is called How the Post Office Created America. And like her book title implies, Winifred believes the Postal Service provided the technological infrastructure the American Revolution needed in order to succeed and then run a new democratic republic. We know that revolutions are often fueled by new technologies. Take the role Twitter played in organizing and connecting uprisings that took place a little over a decade ago in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria during this so-called Arab Spring.

1:27The American Revolution might have taken place centuries ago, and the post office might not seem anything like social media. But consider that back then, the post office gave people in the American colonies a new way of sharing information more easily across more places than they could ever before. And it would become a lifeline connecting people, quietly at first, to ideas that would change the world. So today, me and Run bring you the story of how the U.S. Postal Service fueled a revolution and gave rise to the United States of America. That's coming up after a quick break.

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2:41Winifred Gallagher started thinking about the role of the post office because... Because for 15 years, I've more or less commuted between New York City and a little cowboy town in Wyoming. She spoke to us from that little cowboy town, Du Bois, Wyoming. And she said that taking that trip so often gave her. A lot of time to think about what linked one half of the country to the other half of the country. And it was the post office. Just a heads up. We talked to Winifred in the summer of 2020 at the start of the pandemic. So the audio quality may not be what you're used to hearing on this show. Can you describe how the founders thought about the postal system and why it was such an important part of the nation from the beginning in terms of being able to connect different parts of the colonies that then became a country, a nation?

3:30Well, the post office was really woven into America's DNA by Benjamin Franklin. He was, of course, a founding father, but also our first postmaster general. His earlier experience of running the primitive mail system that linked the Great Britain's 13 colonies gave him the managerial skills, but much more important, it also convinced him that these 13 very quarrelsome little fiefdoms would be far more powerful together than apart. The Patriots' first concerted acts included the creation of underground communications networks that enabled them to conspire under the British radar. The first was called the Committees of Correspondence and then the Constitutional Post.

4:18These informal networks were the thing that linked Thomas Jefferson and Sam Adams and the other revolutionaries, enabled them to talk treason. But they were also not just the incubators of the new post office department, as it would be called, which was established in 1775, but of the United States government itself. You could argue that the first U.S. government was really an information and communications network. Wow. So it makes sense that it was super important to the founders, right? It was partly the reason why the country was able to be created, it sounds like. I mean, Information. That's right.

5:01It was the nervous system of the Republic, the early Republic. And the same people who ran these communications networks ended up running the government. Things changed a lot in 1792 because Benjamin Rush and James Madison, I mean, these guys were political philosophers. They weren't just like some guys. They were very impressive intellectuals in their own right. They realized that a democracy, if it's going to work, it requires knowledgeable voters. So they decided that they would use their new postal network to create an informed electorate. And this is really crucial. They devised this kind of Robin Hood scheme that used very costly postage for letter mail.

5:50Then most people didn't even get one letter a year. They were mostly sent by businessmen and lawyers. So they soaked these businessmen on their letter mail, and that money subsidized mailing cheap, uncensored newspapers to every citizen. This was considered wildly radical in Europe. In Europe, the governing powers didn't want the people to know what was going on. So this really very enlightened postal policy is the thing that really sparked America's very lively, disputatious political culture, which we see every day, and also made us the global communications and information superpower of the world with amazing speed.

6:35So basically, given the speed of the information that was being shared, how did this sort of change the trajectory of the country in those early years? Well, the post mandate to deliver the news throughout a very rapidly expanding country, it was already moving west over the Appalachians, that very quickly organized the country's physical and social landscape around post offices that were connected by post roads. In order to get the newspapers to the people, the department had to jumpstart a transportation industry. There was no way to get from point A to point B until the post office started paying, initially, horseback riders and stagecoaches to deliver the mail as quickly as possible.

7:20So by the time de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, the system already had, our mail system already had twice as many post offices as Great Britain and five times more than his own France. He was astonished at how quickly it developed. Of course, most newspapers then had no way to distribute themselves widely other than the mail. I mean, if you had a newspaper, you could sell whatever you could sell on the street corner, but you wanted to have like a more wide distribution, you depended on the post office. Part of the mandate to create an informed electorate also led the post to have very low prices for mailing books in magazines, which still exists today.

8:06If you're mailing somebody a book, always write book right down the front. You pay like less than half. And in a country, a lot of which was agrarian for, you know, well, well, well into the 20th century, this business of sending magazines and books very cheap throughout the country really amounted to what was for a lot of people an informal educational system, sort of like a secondary educational system, where people really learned about what was they got the National Geographic and they got, you know, Ladies Home Journal to learn about health. And this was really the way people kept themselves informed and educated.

8:48Jennifer, you spent a lot of time, obviously, thinking about writing about the post office and, you know, on those like long rides to Wyoming, you were thinking about it. I guess I'm wondering, you know, for someone listening today in the present context, why do you think this story matters to Americans today? And what would you want them to take away from understanding the role it had in creating the country? I think just that the post office did arguably create the country and create our political culture. There are good days and bad days, but we do have this extraordinary freedom of information and communications that's kind of made us who we are.

9:37It's hard to overstate the value of a delivery system that can reach every house with potentially urgently needed materials. So I think it is an excellent time for people to think about the value of the system.

9:56That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit, a limited series from NPR and Three Line. If you want to hear more about the role of the U.S. Postal Service in the years after the American Revolution, check out the full-length ThruLine episode called, you guessed it, The Postal Service. And make sure to join us next week when the American Revolutionaries start building the U.S. government from the ground up. The executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judiciary. The Supreme Court is going to be situated in the basement of the Capitol, and that gives you a sense, actually, of the hierarchy of what people at the time thought about the Supreme Court.

10:36How the Supreme Court went from the least powerful branch of government to the powerful arbiter it is today. Don't miss it.

11:06We're your hosts, Ramtin Arablui and Rand Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.