Delivering the Mail: We Did It Once and We Can Do It Again
Dickson, Paul
Delivering the Mail We Did It Once and We Can Do It Again by Paul Dickson The major precedent for our sad and ever so unpopular Postal Service is one that dates back before 1776. At that time...
...Recently The Washington Star uncovered evidence that employees at the Washington Bulk Mail Center in Largo, Maryland, had been throwing away sizable amounts of mail almost daily...
...The report also projected a postal deficit of $15 billion by 1978 unless something was done...
...The horror stories have continued to pile up, and what was called the “postal mess” in the late 1960s is now the “postal nightmare” of the 1970s...
...Now that it’s supposed to be a profit-maker, you pay 22 per cent...
...top-flight Madison Avenue ad agencies were being signed up to promote the use of air mail and other special services...
...The Christmas 1972 mailing was a disaster...
...routine 24-hour air mail service to Great Britain was just around the corner...
...James C. Armstrong, a former postal official who left to become corporate planning manager of American Telephone and Telegraph Co...
...The nostalgia has many strains, ranging from those who fondly recall the single-digit firstclass stamp, the less-than-a-nickel penny postcard, and the postmark that told you where your letter actually came from (not PA 217, which is postal newspeak for Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania) to the business patron who only has to think back a few months to the good old days before once-a-day delivery...
...Armstrong said the Postal Service could encourage the public to use these envelopes by charging lower postage if they are used...
...Back to politics and service...
...Ronald Kessler, in his Washington Post series, pointed out a simple but dramatic saving the post office could make : “Many of the Postal Service’s problems would be solved if it offered standard-size envelopes with preprinted boxes where mail users would write zip codes, according to Dr...
...This took place during the watch of Lyndon Johnson’s Postmaster General Lawrence O’Brien, who took a look at things, made his famous remark about the Post Office being in “a race with catastrophe,” and told Johnson that a major reorganization was in order...
...Clyde Kelly: “Those who see this institution as a great service enterprise may be sure that it has been one of the mightiest factors in American progress, paying dividends in enlightenment and mutual understanding beyond the power of money to express...
...As the old Post Office was being dismembered in favor of the new, old-timers fretted that reform would mean assigning big-city hotshots to run things for a large rural county (or vice versa...
...Conservative: Besides they’ll run out of things to do and start issuing oppressive guidelines and make our lives miserable...
...pointed with pride to the Post Office as an example of the benefits a government-owned business might bring to the people...
...There is more to their mutual unease than simply keeping the firstclass letter rate below a quarter or testing different philosophies of government...
...Not long after launching a major ad campaign to sell domestic air mail service, the Service itself discovered that first class was just as quick...
...This was cause for rejoicing in Washington not that many years ago...
...A more obvious ingredient in the successful recipe was the aforementioned policy of service first, accompanied by a wary eye, but not a phobia, for the postal deficit which has been with us for all but a few of the last 100 years...
...A Race with Catastrophe How did we become so confused that we forgot that what we wanted from the postal system was not profit but service...
...Dissatisfaction with that ’ business-like operation was, as many historians have stated, just the kind of thing that led to independence...
...But it is important to emphasize that many of those difficulties were unique to the period 1945-70...
...Rut perhaps the most poignant bit of nostalgia is shared by liberals over 35 who recall cherished moments like this: Conservative: How can you possibly call .for the government to get involved in (fill in the blank...
...Postal service is the one thing government provides that comes closest to being universally received and universally useful, the only outward and visible sign of the federal government that the average American comes in contact with every day...
...So politics will help, standardization will help, but nothing will help more than a return to service as the primary aim of the post office...
...The press, which had almost universally supported the idea of a new organization during the debate, was primed to listen uncritically as the litany of new departures was presented: a new, fast, and damagefree parcel post service would be in place by 1975...
...rural free delivery was bringing service to every corner of the nation...
...The only vindicated factions are those who feared the loss of rural post offices and the few who were convinced that creating a break-even postal corporation did not add up to true reform...
...The beginnings of the answer are simple enough...
...Liberal: Actually all I wanted to Conservative: .(Loud gulp...
...There should be a balance between the continuity of expertise provided by a tenured civil service and the accountability of the political appointee...
...Another advantage of the political system was that it virtually guarinteed that management was local and therefore responsive to local needs and especially attuned to take pride in their work...
...All this hoopla was followed by a broad series of rate increases, with more to come...
...For all these reasons, there is clearly more to the past triumphs and present failures of the U. S. Mail than the U. S. Mail...
...But the balance has shifted way too far in favor of the former...
...Meanwhile, on the fiscal front this was the first year in which the postal deficit reached the billion-dollar mark...
...A new generation of machines have learned to eat packages and letters...
...When government forgets that its object is to “deliver the mail”-whether it is in the form of an efficient military, an excellent national park system, or a letter on your desk the next day-it’s time to remind our elected representatives that they at least are accountable, Paul Dickson is a Washington writer...
...Such things simply couldn’t happen if the postal system was accountable to the public...
...One clue to why politicians were so willing to jettison politics in this realm may be in the way votes are obtained...
...When, for instance, the eight train carloads of mail which contained an emergency mass appeal from CARE for the relief of victims of Nicaragua’s Christmas earthquake were lost for nine days, CARE officials maintained that great damage had been done to their urgent campaign...
...Above all he praised the efficiency of the postal system as the ultimate proof that government could work...
...even the leaders of the tarnished Postal Service admit that things were better a generation ago...
...You know what’ll happen, don’t you...
...Within a few months no less than a half-dozen separate bills were calling for the abolition of the new organization and a return to the old...
...We wanted the mail delivered...
...Save for the few who argued for breaking even, most modern legislators, Postmasters General, and Presidents were quite content with an agency of government which pleased the people and paid back the lion’s share-85 per cent to 90 per cent-of its costs in revenues (this year under the new setup it will recover only 78 per cent...
...In 1976 both the Liberal and the Conservative huddle together in awe of a quasi-governmental disaster that disproves both the former’s notion of effective government ownership and the latter’s urge toward business-like self-sufficiency...
...As The Washington Post’s Ronald Kessler concluded after a stinging series of reports on the excesses and failures of the new Service, “. . . postal management has shown remarkable consistency...
...This is not the beginning of a “Bicentennial Minute,” but a recollection of the Dolicv of a service-first post office &hi& lasted five years short of a full 200...
...In The American Mail, Wayne Fuller wrote, “Politics in the Post Office, like leaven, was the ferment that forced changes in the postal system, made the service responsive to the will of the people, and made the Post Office a mechanism for developing the nation’s political system...
...What a lesson for us...
...About all the individual legislator could do was stuff the Congressional Record with horror stories...
...Typical were these lines from a 1931 book on postal policy by Rep...
...It’s no wonder that most of the postal union members think that way...
...It has been the nation’s most profitable institution, inspiring fraternity of feeling and community of interest, and furnishing the surest guarantee of the stability and security of the Republic...
...The American Post Office was mismanaged, too political, technologically backward, inefficient, and in dire need of new equipment, buildings, and ideas...
...Congressmen, who had relinquished most of their power over the Service, were stunned...
...Liberal: OK, but...
...R. Gross and several allies uncovered some cases of flagrant overspending and waste...
...But a congressman who was responsible for the appointment of the inept Cedar Rapids postmaster could have lost the next election...
...This, not profit or anything else, is its primary purpose...
...2) That the government will serve the people well is best assured by making it politically accountable to the people...
...By the 1920s there was ample evidence that the policy had worked to the extent that the nation was in proud possession of a system complete with all the postal services that a modem industrialized nation could ask for...
...these doubters were looked on as unprogressive types harboring outdated notions about “outside” managers...
...Both of them seem quite capable of telling and retelling horror stories to underscore how bad it is, but neither is certain about its meaning or solution...
...For the modern politician, the burden of responsibility for local appointments ‘outweighed the potential benefit...
...all sorts of snazzy consulting firms and think tanks were being brought aboard to help tackle the most vexing problems inherited from the old Post Office...
...Even the resigning head of a postal employee’s union, James Rademacher, admits, “The trouble with many members is that they do not understand the give and take of collective bargainThe Washington Monthly/July-August 1976 ing...
...Oldstyle postal patronage gathered few votes and a lot of complaints-compared to well-executed, 30-second spots...
...The standard-size envelopes and uniform zip codes could easily be read by relatively inexpensive machines, Armstrong said...
...Since 1970, they’ve “bargained” successfully for a 60 percent increase in wages...
...This was a new high in the ‘‘s cr e w-you-buddy-I’ve-got-mytenure” movement, but nonetheless indicative of where things are going...
...Patronage and Postmasters Here are some of the reasons why it worked: For one thing, the politics that were taken out of the Post Office in the name of reform in 1971 had their dark side, but they were also a major strength of the old system...
...This is not to say that putting politics and service back into the postal system will necessarily solve all its problems...
...At that time one of the complaints the colonists had against the King was a postal system that emphasized profits over service...
...I know...
...Ironically, it was the politicians who turned against the political Post Office while others had a higher respect for it...
...One needs no commission report or poll to conclude that most people’s perception of the quality and efficiency of government is directly tied to postal services...
...Obviously the postal system was having difficulties before it became a corporation...
...service, and the growth of commerce, culture, and education fostered by the beloved system which ties the nation together...
...Professor Fuller wrote this in 1972, when hopes for the new corporation were still high...
...The era of civil service has produced a bureaucracy that is practically immune to the concerns of the public...
...When faced with major decisions, it invariably chooses the w.r..o ng course...
...Occasionally, the doltish brother-in-law of a congressman or party leader was given the local mail and postal service dukedom, but not often...
...There is no reason to believe the public would not accept the use of such envelopes, particularly as an alternative to further deterioration of postal service, as readily as it accepted direct long distance dialing using area codes...
...Not to a system that is solely political...
...and then there was the death of Look magazine replete with a post-mortem that in part blamed new 10 rates for the demise...
...During those boom years the volume of mail leaped from 37,917,000 pieces to 84,881,000, while a major element of the postal system, the railway mail service, was collapsing along with its sister, passenger service...
...The Kappel report was delivered in June 1968 and was clearly negative...
...By 1966, problems began surfacing, Reports were reaching Washington of snafus all along the line, the most dramatic of which took place in October, when the main post office in Chicago gagged on 10 million pieces of mail and stopped functioning for almost three weeks...
...For the first 18 months, there was great optimism about the new Postal Service, amood abetted by the encouraging statistics and announcements of innovations coming from the office of Postmaster General and Board Chairman Winton M. Blount...
...It is also one of the most easily comprehendable elements of government, in that it is all but impossible to gloss over or cover up deteriorating service...
...If anything, most of the touted solutions of the early days of the postal corporation have added to the problem...
...At this point our liberal went into a devastating discourse about innovation (the first group to put the airplane to practical use, to string telegraph lines between cities, etc...
...The policy ended in 197 1 when a “business-like” postal corporation was created to make the system pay for itself...
...What we’re getting is reduced mail delivery, which is producing not profit but more deficit, because poorer service means lower volume...
...Johnson, in turn, created the blue-ribbon Commission on Postal Organization under, the direction of Frederick Kappel...
...Conservative: I know...
...The postmaster in Cedar Rapids need not fear the wrath of the local citizens if he is a career civil servant...
...At this moment, nostalgia for the old pre-1971 system is widespread...
...As Wayne Fuller points out in his recent book, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life, “Those who saw the abuses of unbridled capitalism...
...You as a taxpayer subsidized ten to fifteen per cent when it was a service...
...They want to take, but they don’t want to give...
...Postal workers have reported that mail is allowed to stack up for as long as 24 hours in order to get “uniform flow” for new canceling machines...
...Your lost merchandise could be bought by your competitor at a discount...
...Its prime remedial suggestion was that the Post Office was a business and as such should be reorganized as a government corporation which in time would have no deficit...
...Liberal: But what about the...
...As we go forward to take on the task of bureaucratic reform-which is now inescapably necessary, not just for the Postal Service but for the government as a whole-here are the simple truths we must remember : 1) Government should serve the people...
...They’ll screw it up and the only people who’ll be served by it are those who run it...
...Despite factions in Congress which occasionally toyed with the notion of putting all or part of the system in 8 private hands, the formula of “service first, worry about deficits later” was never significantly challenged, for the simple reason that it was working...
...An expensive electronic system designed to monitor the comings and goings pf mail delivery trucks has replaced a simple, index-card system that worked...
...Back To Politics The big question is where do we take it from here...
...The situation is now bleak: a steadily rising deficit, now about $3 billion, talk of bankruptcy, almost certain cutback to five-days-a-week delivery, the prospect of a 17-cent first-class letter rate by year’s end...
...For instance, even though local postmasterships were assigned by political patronage, they were generally demanding, highly visible jobs which not only spotlighted the person in the job, but also the elected and party officials who got that person the job...
...Instinctively, [ the colonists] believed in postal service,” one of these historians has remarked, “not postal profits...
...A few examples tell the tale: .Early retirement schemes cut the payroll to some extent but also weeded out some of the system’s best and most experienced hands when they were needed most...
...Perhaps you read in this magazine’s Tidbits and Outrages column last month aEt-how the Postal Servicewas auctioning off the contents of the parcels that are mangled by its machines...
...an ombudsman was now in his office ready to accept and rectify patrons’ complaints...
...Postage was cheap...
...You’re going to tell me about the TVA...
...Window Dressing The new corporation took flight on July 1 , 197 1 when the anachronistic Pony Express symbol gave way to the stylized eagle...
...and all the extras-postal savings, money order service, parcel post, airmail, special delivery, and more-were in place...
...Think about that for a while...
...By the way, this is not nostalgia speaking...
Vol. 8 • July 1976 • No. 5
