Giving Thanks: The United States Postal Service

A great new work of history on one of the country's oldest institutions.

This is supposed to be the week for giving thanks, so I want to give thanks to something I think many of us take for granted while also being true to the origins of this newsletter as a place for recommending books.

The thing I’m giving thanks for is the United States Postal Service. The book I’m recommending is Delivering for America: How the Postal Service Built a Nation.

In my Chicago Tribune column this week I shared some recommendations on bookish gifts for book lovers, including a handful of recommended coffee table books, a list on which I would have included Delivering for America had I received the book in time to include it.

The nearly 500-page history of the United States Postal Service, an entity as old as the country itself, is an amazing historical document which genuinely fulfills the promise of the book’s subtitle. It is inconceivable that we would have a United States without the USPS. The mission has always been straightforward, connect the people of the United States by allowing them to send mail, packages, and parcels from anywhere in the country to anywhere else in the country (or even the world). This has been done by horse, carriage, train, balloon, truck, car plane, and of course by foot as mail carriers, particularly in cities, continue to deliver door-to-door.

My appreciation for the USPS is not confined to outside observation because for one summer (1991) I was a temporary employee in the Dundee Road, Northbrook, IL 60062 post office. Those few months helped gave me my first experience of what happens when lots of individuals come together to fulfill a much bigger public mission, and how these mission-focused organizations allow us to take advantage of our best capacities, while also mitigating against our lesser selves.

(At their best, colleges and universities are like this also.)

The summer jobs at the PO came through a word-of-mouth network of a friend’s older brother getting my friend in, and then my friend moving his friends in over a series of years. I had a couple of buddies who spent multiple summers at the PO, but I just did the one before my senior year of college. I had hoped to be an outside mail carrier like my friends, but for reasons still mysterious to me, I failed the driving test and was consigned to an inside job as an all-purpose sorter/mail handler, essentially at the beck and call of the supervisors to move pieces of mail from one place to another.

Having made the early mistake of demonstrating reasonable competence and willingness to follow directions, I was moved to the 2am to 10:30am swing shift when most of the mail is handled inside the facility. My main supervisor was a Korean immigrant named Henry who was a PhD in his home country, but had left because of the upheaval and student protests during the period of the 5th Republic. A huge portion of the mail sorters were immigrants, including many other Koreans, who used their communal ties to support the studying for and taking of the Civil Service exams.

A significant portion of the mail carriers were Vietnam veterans, having received preferential hiring status following their return from the war. Over the 4th of July holiday, my friend Mark innocently asked one of the carrier supervisors if he was going to see the fireworks and he replied, “Once you’ve seen an ammo dump go up when you’re knee-deep in a rice paddy outside Da Nang, you’re not into fireworks anymore.” I don’t know if he was sincere or having some fun tweaking the sheltered suburban college kids, but either way no one asked questions like that again.

The work was both physically taxing and often dull and repetitive, but also requiring a high degree of concentration to make sure each piece of mail moved in the right direction.

You remember those old weekly sales circulars that 90% of the people ignored, but had to go in every mailbox anyway? Those arrived in giant bound stacks on pallets that had to be distributed to the correct sorting case, depending on which route it had been earmarked for, even though every single piece was identical. And most would wind up in the garbage. For a while I was tasked with sorting the corporate mail which was delivered in bulk to local companies like A.C. Nielsen and Allstate, both headquartered in Northbrook. For three or four hours straight I’d sit on a stool in front of a three-sided case, slotting each individual piece in the correct cubby hole. I had a Grateful Dead bootleg I’d put on my Walkman to try to help me get in the correct flow state for the task. By the end of the summer, I didn’t even have to shift my head to fire the letter piece into the proper slot, my muscle memory thoroughly trained to the task.

Remember those ads for BluBlocker sunglasses? My town had some kind of order fulfillment operation for the product, and hundreds of those things would move through every day. I also remember there was some kind of second-rate televangelist who would send out personally blessed prayer cloths. You could feel the fabric through the envelope. Sometimes they’d get snagged in the stamp cancelling machine.

People worked hard at the post office, but they weren’t expected to be full automatons privileging total efficiency over everything else. The estimated time to sort and then deliver a particular amount of mail was determined by the yard, each two-foot mail tray representing a certain number of minutes of work. If you finished early versus the estimate, you could sometimes claim that time as your own. I had one friend who would jog through this outside walking mail route so he had enough time to go home for lunch or take a nap. My guess is much has changed over the intervening 34 years as we’ve steadily made many jobs less humane. We’ve all heard the stories about Amazon taking similar work and driving humans past their physical and mental limits.

This is the thing. It was hard, but it was humane and sustainable, sometimes even kind of fun. When the incoming flats (anything large than letter-size that’s not a package) would come in from the outside collection boxes, four or five of us would gather around a sorting table to segregate the local from out of town mail. We’d compete on speed and talk a little trash. Taking a breather was allowed, but you couldn’t float around doing nothing all day. (I got switched to the swing shift because the summer temp in there before me had a penchant for disappearing. They once found him curled up inside a giant mail sack, sleeping.)

I would get off work, go home, eat lunch, go to sleep, wake up to hang out with my friends who got off work, nap from midnight to 2am and go to work.

Another mail handling supervisor, Gary, a man with many years of service who was also the union steward would occasionally pluck a periodical off the line and declare that he was going to go “burn a mule” or “lay some wolf bait” (his euphemisms for taking a dump). Gary had earned the right to take a break on the can.

What I recall is that there was a general agreement around the mission. Individuals had their role as part of the whole and you were expected to do it, but not required to ruin yourself in the bargain. Helping out someone else in a pinch happened without question. The pay for summer casuals, as I recall, was quite good, much better than my previous summer work as a sports camp counselor. The full-time employees who put in their years of service could retire with a pension that, at least in theory, would allow for an ongoing life of reasonable security and dignity.

My few months at the PO are reflected in Delivering for America. The USPS is an organization that had room for people of all stripes and backgrounds to come together and deliver (pun intended) on the mission.

For sure the corporatists set their sights on things like the USPS in the name of sucking up public money for private gain, a mentality that the Trump regime has taken as its raison d’être, but I also think there’s a certain amount of resentment over the fact that these organizations actually work without the interventions of capital and management completely focused on squeezing human labor past its limit. It’s almost like they’re offended at the thought that something can be made by the public, for the public.

(See also higher education.)

The USPS is one of our country’s most amazing achievements. Check out Delivering for America and see for yourself.

Links

Check out my column of bookish gifts for readers at the Chicago Tribune.

The playwright Tom Stoppard has passed away at age 88.

Time has named their 100 Must-read books. The New York Times has named its 100 notable books. Despite reading books being a professional obligation and personal pleasure, I’ve read only a handful from each list.

I think I forgot to link to the Tournament of Books long list when it was first released. Even if I did it before, it never hurts to do it again.

Lincoln Michel, whose book Metallic Realms is on the ToB long list has an interesting post at his newsletter about the intersection of literature and philosophy.

Nicholas Hune-Brown editor of Toronto-based publication, The Local, tells the story of sniffing out a scammer using large language models to fabricate convincing versions of reality and selling them to publications around the globe. It’s going to be a real challenge figuring out what information and writing is trustworthy in a world where a machine can make bullshit at scale.

An entertain collision of literary and pop culture highlighted this week McSweeney's “The Stranger Things They Carried” by Casey McConahay.

And if you haven’t seen the 80th issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly, you should check it out. It’s styled like an old-school Trapper Keeper.

Photo courtesy of Kevin Guilfoile who texted it to me.

Recommendations

1. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
2. Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann
3. The Paris Library by Janet Charles
4. Knife by Salman Rusdhie
5. The Night Watchman by Louise Ehrdrich

Cameron S. - Oakland, CA

For Cameron I’m recommending an intriguing little book that’s a few years old but I think captures the spirit of discontent that seems to infuse so much of society these days, Sugar Street by Jonathan Dee.

I hope everyone who observes had a holiday filled with thanks. See you next week.

JW
The Biblioracle