June 17, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, The United States Postal Service was founded in 1792, and more than 230 years later, it remains a vital part of American life. But what many don’t know is that the idea of a national post office sparked intense debate among the Founding Fathers. Should the federal government even run the mail? Daniel Piazza of the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum shares the surprising story behind the birth of the USPS and how it became one of the most trusted institutions in America.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
The United States Postal Service was established in seventeen ninety two.
It's hard to believe that a service that was created
over two centuries ago is still used by everyone every day.
What's even more shocking is that there was actually a
(00:32):
lot of debate about whether there should even be a
federal post office in the first place. Here's Daniel Piazza
of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
The post Office Department was created in seventeen ninety two
with an Act that President Washington signed into law that year,
but it had antecedents going back to the early eighteenth century.
The British Crown had established a post office in the
colonies as early as the reign of Queen Anne. This
was in seventeen eleven, and in those days, the post
(01:04):
office was generally a contract that was farmed out to
someone who paid the crown a fixed sum for the
right to operate a post office and then got to
keep the revenue. So the early colonial Postmaster's General in
America actually bought their jobs. Benjamin Franklin becomes joint postmaster
General in seventeen fifty three. Along with William Hunter, Franklin
(01:28):
managed all of the post offices from Maryland north, while
Hunter was in charge from Virginia to Georgia. We frequently
hear about Franklin as being the first postmaster General of
the United States, which he was, but it's less well
known that he was also the last postmaster general under
the British Crown, and in fact he had a much
(01:48):
longer postal career under the British than he ever did
under the Americans. The Continental Congress, which formed during the
Revolution and was the de facto government of the United
States until seventeen eighty nine, formed a separate American Post
Office in seventeen seventy five and appointed Franklin as the
first postmaster General. For nearly twenty years, the post office
(02:11):
had been authorized and reauthorized on a temporary basis, usually
only until June of the following year. The founders were
uncertain about creating a federal post office because in the
years leading up to the Revolution the British Post Office
had been used to spy on them. Loyalist postmasters in
America and postal officials in England regularly opened the mail
(02:35):
and reported on its contents. In other words, they functioned
as spies. And so the founders disagreed on whether there
should be a standing postal establishment in the new nation
that they were setting up, and they debated the question
for nearly twenty years. In the beginning, the post office
was a rather small operation. It operated very differently from
(02:56):
what we're used to now, with basically a post office
in every town serving every community. It was largely along
the eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia, and there were
only about five or six dozen post offices in the
entire country, and mail was only carried from post office
to post office. No postman came to your house with letters.
(03:17):
You had to go to a post office to both
send and pick up your mail. You had to just
periodically go and inquire whether there was any mail for you,
and if your mail was sitting there uncalled for for
some time, the postmaster would actually advertise in the local newspaper,
sometimes very long lists of people who had letters waiting
(03:37):
for them. Letters were not paid for when they were mailed,
the recipient paid for the letter, and so because there
was no home delivery and because the system relied on
the individual to come in and look for a letter
or respond to an advertisement that there was a letter
waiting for them at the post office, a fairly large
percentage of the mail went undelivered, therefore unpaid, So the
(04:02):
Post Office Department transported a lot of mail that it
never got paid for. The Postal Act of seventeen ninety
two comes about because the question of whether or not
to have a permanent post office couldn't really be kicked
down the road any further. The Constitution of seventeen eighty
nine had authorized the Congress to establish a post office,
(04:23):
and the new Washington administration was in favor of it.
One of the main reasons was quite simply the fact
that the federal government needed money. The Constitution provided very
few mechanisms by which the federal government could raise money. Really,
there were only customs and excise duties and postage rates.
Income tax doesn't come until much much later. There are
(04:46):
heavy debts left over from the Revolutionary War. The new
Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, has a very aggressive
plan for paying off that debt to establish the United
States National Credit, and the big th actor in that
is the excess revenue that's expected to come in from
postage rates. Articles and pamphlets of the time regularly referred
(05:08):
to postage rates as at tax. They considered it at tax,
and any misgivings the founders had about how the post
office might be misused were ultimately overcome by the fact
that the government needed money badly. The post Office Department,
as it was set up in seventeen ninety two, had
a dual nature. It was expected to make money for
(05:30):
the federal government, to turn a profit that would help
retire the revolutionary war debts, and certainly not to cost
the government anything. That's a goal which it sometimes achieved
and sometimes didn't, but the expectation was there. But then
it was also expected to operate like a public service,
to contribute to the good of the nation, to educate
(05:52):
the population through the circulation of literature and news. Both
of these expectations were present from the very beginning. At
different times, one or the other of them is pushed
to the fore or emphasized by the party in political power,
but the other half of the equation never goes away.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the bulk
(06:14):
of the mail carried by the post office was not
letters or birthday cards from Grandma. The bulk of the
mail consisted of newspapers. Right in the Postal Law of
seventeen ninety two, there's a carve out for newspaper publishers.
Very low postage rates are set for the carriage of newspapers,
and that continued for well over one hundred years right
(06:36):
through the nineteenth century. And the reason for this was
the idea that the post office should be a public service.
What that meant in the early Republic was that it
should facilitate the spread of news. So publishers were allowed
to send their newspapers to each other for free, so
that articles could circulate and be picked up and republished
(06:58):
all over the country. The idea of virtuous citizenry was
accepted at the time, which meant in part that citizens,
in order to participate in government and society, needed to
be informed. The post office was the most efficient way
that pamphlets, newspapers, political tracts, and opinions could be exchanged
(07:20):
all over the country.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
And what an interesting story when we come back more
of how the post office came to be here on
our American stories, here at our American Stories. We bring
you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
be told. But we can't do it without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
(07:45):
to make. If you love our stories in America like
we do, please go to Our American Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot,
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our American
(08:12):
Stories and too. The story of the United States Postal
Service and how it all got started us Daniel Piazza
with more, picking up with how the postal service helped
enable the expansion of just about every transportation network throughout
our country.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
In the nineteenth century. The New Country is expanding rapidly westward,
expanding not only the number of post offices but the
network of post roads. By the eighteen forties, of course,
they've got to figure out the logistics of getting mail
across the continent into California. This brings some controversy because
most of this is done through postal contracts, and there
(08:52):
can be a lot of politics involved in government contracting.
There's debate in the seventeen nineties over believe it or
not whether stagecoach companies should be used to carry the mail,
not because anybody objected to stage coaches, but because you
know who's going to get these contracts and who's going
to control who gets these contracts. Eventually, the stage coach
(09:15):
lines do get contracts, and those subsidies help to develop
the road network. This repeats itself over and over again.
In the eighteen thirties and forties, the Post Office becomes
an early adopter of railroads and steamships to carry the mail,
and those postal subsidies from contracts incentivized the rail and
(09:35):
shipping lines to expand to add new trackage and new routes.
Postal contracts are a predictable, steady source of revenue for
transportation companies that allows them to set a kind of
baseline on which they can expand their networks. The same
thing happens in the early twentieth century with civil aviation.
(09:57):
After the First World War, the first airlines are forming.
In the late nineteen teens and twenties, the first regular
air mail routes in the United States were between Washington
and New York, a couple of years later the route
included Boston, and within the space of ten years, the
airmail network made it all the way across the continent,
(10:17):
and then passengers and cargo followed in the wake of
the mail. So really, postal subsidies have enabled the expansion
of just about every important transportation network in the country
since the eighteenth century. Before the postage stamp was introduced,
postage rates in the United States had become very complicated.
(10:39):
Rates were based on a tangle of factors that resembled
algebraic equations, including the number of sheets of paper that
were in your letter, whether it had enclosures, how far
the letter was traveling, and so on. It was a
headache both for users of the postal system and for
postal clerks, who have a very elaborate system of rates
(11:01):
that they have to apply to each letter individually. Postage
rates of forty cents, fifty cents or more on a
letter were not uncommon, and that's a lot of money.
In the eighteen thirties and forties. This leads to pressure
for postal reform. People are reforming all sorts of things.
The first women's rights movements, abolitionism, temperance laws, and the like,
(11:24):
and although it's all but forgotten today, one of the
biggest reform movements of all was the postal reform movement,
led by people who felt that simplifying the postage rates
and giving people more equal access to postal service would
also help all of the other reform movements that were
underway to flourish. Feminist literature, abolitionist tracts, notices of temperance
(11:48):
meetings could circulate more easily and cheaply, So in a sense,
postal reform is the meta reform that makes a number
of other movements possible. Postage stamps were invented in eighteen
forty in Great Britain. It was a one penny stamp
that's known to collectors everywhere as the Penny Black because
(12:09):
it was printed in black ink and shows the profile
of Queen Victoria. The first US postage stamps were issued
in eighteen forty seven. The introduction of the postage stamp
apart from being a cultural phenomenon that includes the artistry
and imagery of stamps and the whole field of stamp collecting,
it represents a complete change in the postal business model.
(12:34):
Until the eighteen forties, most letters were carried through the
postal system unpaid. Most letters were paid for when they
were picked up at the post office. Some people actually
went and sorted through their mail and decided which letters
they wanted to take and pay for and which letters
they were going to leave. A high percentage of letters
(12:54):
became what are known as dead letters and were destroyed,
undelivered and paid for. The idea of postage stamps is
to simplify the whole system by requiring that letters be
prepaid before they enter the system. This allowed the postage
rates to be drastically reduced and led to an explosion
(13:16):
in the number of letters carried by the post office.
And you can buy these little things called postage stamps
which have stored value. There like IOUs or coupons, you
buy from the post office and redeem it at any time.
The idea of a postal savings or banking system actually
began overseas and was adopted by the United States rather late.
(13:41):
The United States started postal savings in nineteen eleven. This
is the high tide of unrestricted immigration to the United States.
You've got millions of immigrants coming into the United States.
Many of them do not have bank accounts. They do
not have a lot of money, and banks are very
much for the wealth healthy in this period, and so
(14:01):
the idea is that the postal service could provide a
sort of parallel banking system for small depositors. And actually
postage stamps come into play here too, because postal saving
stamps are issued so that users can save small sums, pennies, nickels,
quarters in the form of a saving stamp that can
(14:21):
then be saved up to make larger deposits or even
to buy government savings bonds. There were a number of
crises in the post Office department in the nineteen sixties
related to wages, understaffing, and poor working conditions in some
post offices, especially in large cities. Added to this, the
(14:44):
volume of mail was steadily increasing. This resulted in a
number of strikes in various places, primarily in New York
and Chicago, but there were smaller strikes and work stoppages,
slow downs, and other sorts industrial action in other places
as well. And then there were other places where the
(15:04):
mail system simply stopped functioning. The National Guard was called
in to sort and deliver the mail in many places,
and the mail was being rerouted from cities experiencing strikes
to smaller post offices, so the need to reform the
Post Office Department, which really had not at that point
undergone any major changes since the Great Reform of the
(15:27):
eighteen forties one hundred and twenty years in the past.
At that point the need became pretty evident. What ends
up happening is the Postal Reorganization Act, and the old
Post Office Department is actually abolished, replaced with a new
United States Postal Service, which comes into existence on July first,
(15:49):
nineteen seventy one. This is the creation of the organization
that we have now, a quasi independent government corporation basically
whole owned by the federal government, but not receiving any appropriations,
and empowered to some extent to make its own business
decisions about how it's going to run its organization and
(16:12):
manage its operations. I think that the Post Office is
still a major facet of American life for a few reasons.
One is that it has continually adapted to change and consumers' needs.
Sometimes it was in the lead, sometimes it lagged a
little behind, but it always evolved. And in some ways
(16:32):
our needs haven't changed since the seventeen nineties. We have
certain human needs for communication, for exchange of information and
ideas for exchange of business correspondents and packages. The Postal
Service still fulfills these needs for the most people at
the lowest price. It has lots of competitors, particularly in
(16:54):
the package business, but nearly all of them have lots
of places they can't or won't del de livered to
because it's not cost effective. The Postal Service has to
deliver to everybody, and that universality represents a lot of
what the post Office offers that private competitors don't.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And a terrific job on the production and storytelling by
our own madisone Derricott, and a special thanks to Daniel
Piazza of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. And we learned
that a lot hasn't changed in America about some of
the early debates. It's not most skeptical about forming a
national postal service for the usual reasons. The British should
use it as a spying mechanism, too much centralization of power,
(17:36):
but yet how to get stuff from A to B?
And in the end, the Continental Congress and the Constitution, well,
the Constitution itself authorizes the formation of the Postal service
and George Washington wanted it because in the end they
needed a way to make money. The story of how
the US Postal Service came to be here on our
American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
The United States Postal Service was established in seventeen ninety two.
It's hard to believe that a service that was created
over two centuries ago is still used by everyone every day.
What's even more shocking is that there was actually a
(00:32):
lot of debate about whether there should even be a
federal post office in the first place. Here's Daniel Piazza
of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
The post Office Department was created in seventeen ninety two
with an Act that President Washington signed into law that year,
but it had antecedents going back to the early eighteenth century.
The British Crown had established a post office in the
colonies as early as the reign of Queen Anne. This
was in seventeen eleven, and in those days, the post
(01:04):
office was generally a contract that was farmed out to
someone who paid the crown a fixed sum for the
right to operate a post office and then got to
keep the revenue. So the early colonial Postmaster's General in
America actually bought their jobs. Benjamin Franklin becomes joint postmaster
General in seventeen fifty three. Along with William Hunter, Franklin
(01:28):
managed all of the post offices from Maryland north, while
Hunter was in charge from Virginia to Georgia. We frequently
hear about Franklin as being the first postmaster General of
the United States, which he was, but it's less well
known that he was also the last postmaster general under
the British Crown, and in fact he had a much
(01:48):
longer postal career under the British than he ever did
under the Americans. The Continental Congress, which formed during the
Revolution and was the de facto government of the United
States until seventeen eighty nine, formed a separate American Post
Office in seventeen seventy five and appointed Franklin as the
first postmaster General. For nearly twenty years, the post office
(02:11):
had been authorized and reauthorized on a temporary basis, usually
only until June of the following year. The founders were
uncertain about creating a federal post office because in the
years leading up to the Revolution the British Post Office
had been used to spy on them. Loyalist postmasters in
America and postal officials in England regularly opened the mail
(02:35):
and reported on its contents. In other words, they functioned
as spies. And so the founders disagreed on whether there
should be a standing postal establishment in the new nation
that they were setting up, and they debated the question
for nearly twenty years. In the beginning, the post office
was a rather small operation. It operated very differently from
(02:56):
what we're used to now, with basically a post office
in every town serving every community. It was largely along
the eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia, and there were
only about five or six dozen post offices in the
entire country, and mail was only carried from post office
to post office. No postman came to your house with letters.
(03:17):
You had to go to a post office to both
send and pick up your mail. You had to just
periodically go and inquire whether there was any mail for you,
and if your mail was sitting there uncalled for for
some time, the postmaster would actually advertise in the local newspaper,
sometimes very long lists of people who had letters waiting
(03:37):
for them. Letters were not paid for when they were mailed,
the recipient paid for the letter, and so because there
was no home delivery and because the system relied on
the individual to come in and look for a letter
or respond to an advertisement that there was a letter
waiting for them at the post office, a fairly large
percentage of the mail went undelivered, therefore unpaid, So the
(04:02):
Post Office Department transported a lot of mail that it
never got paid for. The Postal Act of seventeen ninety
two comes about because the question of whether or not
to have a permanent post office couldn't really be kicked
down the road any further. The Constitution of seventeen eighty
nine had authorized the Congress to establish a post office,
(04:23):
and the new Washington administration was in favor of it.
One of the main reasons was quite simply the fact
that the federal government needed money. The Constitution provided very
few mechanisms by which the federal government could raise money. Really,
there were only customs and excise duties and postage rates.
Income tax doesn't come until much much later. There are
(04:46):
heavy debts left over from the Revolutionary War. The new
Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, has a very aggressive
plan for paying off that debt to establish the United
States National Credit, and the big th actor in that
is the excess revenue that's expected to come in from
postage rates. Articles and pamphlets of the time regularly referred
(05:08):
to postage rates as at tax. They considered it at tax,
and any misgivings the founders had about how the post
office might be misused were ultimately overcome by the fact
that the government needed money badly. The post Office Department,
as it was set up in seventeen ninety two, had
a dual nature. It was expected to make money for
(05:30):
the federal government, to turn a profit that would help
retire the revolutionary war debts, and certainly not to cost
the government anything. That's a goal which it sometimes achieved
and sometimes didn't, but the expectation was there. But then
it was also expected to operate like a public service,
to contribute to the good of the nation, to educate
(05:52):
the population through the circulation of literature and news. Both
of these expectations were present from the very beginning. At
different times, one or the other of them is pushed
to the fore or emphasized by the party in political power,
but the other half of the equation never goes away.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the bulk
(06:14):
of the mail carried by the post office was not
letters or birthday cards from Grandma. The bulk of the
mail consisted of newspapers. Right in the Postal Law of
seventeen ninety two, there's a carve out for newspaper publishers.
Very low postage rates are set for the carriage of newspapers,
and that continued for well over one hundred years right
(06:36):
through the nineteenth century. And the reason for this was
the idea that the post office should be a public service.
What that meant in the early Republic was that it
should facilitate the spread of news. So publishers were allowed
to send their newspapers to each other for free, so
that articles could circulate and be picked up and republished
(06:58):
all over the country. The idea of virtuous citizenry was
accepted at the time, which meant in part that citizens,
in order to participate in government and society, needed to
be informed. The post office was the most efficient way
that pamphlets, newspapers, political tracts, and opinions could be exchanged
(07:20):
all over the country.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
And what an interesting story when we come back more
of how the post office came to be here on
our American stories, here at our American Stories. We bring
you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
be told. But we can't do it without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
(07:45):
to make. If you love our stories in America like
we do, please go to Our American Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot,
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our American
(08:12):
Stories and too. The story of the United States Postal
Service and how it all got started us Daniel Piazza
with more, picking up with how the postal service helped
enable the expansion of just about every transportation network throughout
our country.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
In the nineteenth century. The New Country is expanding rapidly westward,
expanding not only the number of post offices but the
network of post roads. By the eighteen forties, of course,
they've got to figure out the logistics of getting mail
across the continent into California. This brings some controversy because
most of this is done through postal contracts, and there
(08:52):
can be a lot of politics involved in government contracting.
There's debate in the seventeen nineties over believe it or
not whether stagecoach companies should be used to carry the mail,
not because anybody objected to stage coaches, but because you
know who's going to get these contracts and who's going
to control who gets these contracts. Eventually, the stage coach
(09:15):
lines do get contracts, and those subsidies help to develop
the road network. This repeats itself over and over again.
In the eighteen thirties and forties, the Post Office becomes
an early adopter of railroads and steamships to carry the mail,
and those postal subsidies from contracts incentivized the rail and
(09:35):
shipping lines to expand to add new trackage and new routes.
Postal contracts are a predictable, steady source of revenue for
transportation companies that allows them to set a kind of
baseline on which they can expand their networks. The same
thing happens in the early twentieth century with civil aviation.
(09:57):
After the First World War, the first airlines are forming.
In the late nineteen teens and twenties, the first regular
air mail routes in the United States were between Washington
and New York, a couple of years later the route
included Boston, and within the space of ten years, the
airmail network made it all the way across the continent,
(10:17):
and then passengers and cargo followed in the wake of
the mail. So really, postal subsidies have enabled the expansion
of just about every important transportation network in the country
since the eighteenth century. Before the postage stamp was introduced,
postage rates in the United States had become very complicated.
(10:39):
Rates were based on a tangle of factors that resembled
algebraic equations, including the number of sheets of paper that
were in your letter, whether it had enclosures, how far
the letter was traveling, and so on. It was a
headache both for users of the postal system and for
postal clerks, who have a very elaborate system of rates
(11:01):
that they have to apply to each letter individually. Postage
rates of forty cents, fifty cents or more on a
letter were not uncommon, and that's a lot of money.
In the eighteen thirties and forties. This leads to pressure
for postal reform. People are reforming all sorts of things.
The first women's rights movements, abolitionism, temperance laws, and the like,
(11:24):
and although it's all but forgotten today, one of the
biggest reform movements of all was the postal reform movement,
led by people who felt that simplifying the postage rates
and giving people more equal access to postal service would
also help all of the other reform movements that were
underway to flourish. Feminist literature, abolitionist tracts, notices of temperance
(11:48):
meetings could circulate more easily and cheaply, So in a sense,
postal reform is the meta reform that makes a number
of other movements possible. Postage stamps were invented in eighteen
forty in Great Britain. It was a one penny stamp
that's known to collectors everywhere as the Penny Black because
(12:09):
it was printed in black ink and shows the profile
of Queen Victoria. The first US postage stamps were issued
in eighteen forty seven. The introduction of the postage stamp
apart from being a cultural phenomenon that includes the artistry
and imagery of stamps and the whole field of stamp collecting,
it represents a complete change in the postal business model.
(12:34):
Until the eighteen forties, most letters were carried through the
postal system unpaid. Most letters were paid for when they
were picked up at the post office. Some people actually
went and sorted through their mail and decided which letters
they wanted to take and pay for and which letters
they were going to leave. A high percentage of letters
(12:54):
became what are known as dead letters and were destroyed,
undelivered and paid for. The idea of postage stamps is
to simplify the whole system by requiring that letters be
prepaid before they enter the system. This allowed the postage
rates to be drastically reduced and led to an explosion
(13:16):
in the number of letters carried by the post office.
And you can buy these little things called postage stamps
which have stored value. There like IOUs or coupons, you
buy from the post office and redeem it at any time.
The idea of a postal savings or banking system actually
began overseas and was adopted by the United States rather late.
(13:41):
The United States started postal savings in nineteen eleven. This
is the high tide of unrestricted immigration to the United States.
You've got millions of immigrants coming into the United States.
Many of them do not have bank accounts. They do
not have a lot of money, and banks are very
much for the wealth healthy in this period, and so
(14:01):
the idea is that the postal service could provide a
sort of parallel banking system for small depositors. And actually
postage stamps come into play here too, because postal saving
stamps are issued so that users can save small sums, pennies, nickels,
quarters in the form of a saving stamp that can
(14:21):
then be saved up to make larger deposits or even
to buy government savings bonds. There were a number of
crises in the post Office department in the nineteen sixties
related to wages, understaffing, and poor working conditions in some
post offices, especially in large cities. Added to this, the
(14:44):
volume of mail was steadily increasing. This resulted in a
number of strikes in various places, primarily in New York
and Chicago, but there were smaller strikes and work stoppages,
slow downs, and other sorts industrial action in other places
as well. And then there were other places where the
(15:04):
mail system simply stopped functioning. The National Guard was called
in to sort and deliver the mail in many places,
and the mail was being rerouted from cities experiencing strikes
to smaller post offices, so the need to reform the
Post Office Department, which really had not at that point
undergone any major changes since the Great Reform of the
(15:27):
eighteen forties one hundred and twenty years in the past.
At that point the need became pretty evident. What ends
up happening is the Postal Reorganization Act, and the old
Post Office Department is actually abolished, replaced with a new
United States Postal Service, which comes into existence on July first,
(15:49):
nineteen seventy one. This is the creation of the organization
that we have now, a quasi independent government corporation basically
whole owned by the federal government, but not receiving any appropriations,
and empowered to some extent to make its own business
decisions about how it's going to run its organization and
(16:12):
manage its operations. I think that the Post Office is
still a major facet of American life for a few reasons.
One is that it has continually adapted to change and consumers' needs.
Sometimes it was in the lead, sometimes it lagged a
little behind, but it always evolved. And in some ways
(16:32):
our needs haven't changed since the seventeen nineties. We have
certain human needs for communication, for exchange of information and
ideas for exchange of business correspondents and packages. The Postal
Service still fulfills these needs for the most people at
the lowest price. It has lots of competitors, particularly in
(16:54):
the package business, but nearly all of them have lots
of places they can't or won't del de livered to
because it's not cost effective. The Postal Service has to
deliver to everybody, and that universality represents a lot of
what the post Office offers that private competitors don't.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
And a terrific job on the production and storytelling by
our own madisone Derricott, and a special thanks to Daniel
Piazza of the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. And we learned
that a lot hasn't changed in America about some of
the early debates. It's not most skeptical about forming a
national postal service for the usual reasons. The British should
use it as a spying mechanism, too much centralization of power,
(17:36):
but yet how to get stuff from A to B?
And in the end, the Continental Congress and the Constitution, well,
the Constitution itself authorizes the formation of the Postal service
and George Washington wanted it because in the end they
needed a way to make money. The story of how
the US Postal Service came to be here on our
American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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