During his long stretches on the road, Woody Guthrie sang the following to his daughter, “I’m-a-gonna wrap myself up in paper, I’m gonna daub myself with with glue, Stick some stamps on top of my head; I’m gonna mail myself to you.” In Guthrie’s time, a stamp cost three cents, and airmail was a relatively new concept. There were no zip codes, the penny postcard still cost a penny, and only a few catalogs came in the mail: Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Aldens.
The greatest historians of all, my grandparents, told me that receiving mail was not that different from today. Most mail would be delivered in three days or less, except during the war, when it would sometimes take a little longer.
My grandmother kept my grandfather’s love letters until they were destroyed in a flood 10 years ago. That destruction remains among her greatest losses. I similarly keep my letters in a box, proudly display my postcards on my wall, buy books of “forever” stamps, and know all the mailboxes in the neighborhood.
Little rhymes with “USPS,” but letters are a central theme in pop music, from Bill Monroe to Ethel Waters, to Son House’s famous blues tune “Death Letter.” E-mail—along with high fuel prices and the recession—has severely cut the number of mail-related songs, as well as cut mail delivery by 12 million pieces. (“Hey now wait a minute, Mr. Gmail” somehow has a different ring to it.)
From the singing telegram to the postcard, for most of its history, America’s mail use was creative and innovative. For example, the postcard, the most American feeling of all letters, was patented in 1861 in Philadelphia, though it was first used in Turkey .
Because nothing is more American than a rushed, scribbled “I love you” on the back of a picture of Niagara Falls, many American artists and collectors were prolific postcard senders, including Walker Evans and Andy Warhol.
Though an indispensable part of American pop, art, history, and culture, last year it seemed that there was a death letter on the way for the USPS.
When the US Postal service asked for a bailout last year, it was not received warmly, to say the least. John E. Potter, the Postmaster General, tops $800,000 per year in salary, and the USPS is run notoriously inefficiently. Potter threatened to cut jobs and pensions, close rural post offices, and even deliver mail five days per week if Congress did not provide the money.
A few weeks ago, the USPS offered a $15,000 buyout and retirement incentives to cut jobs. Banks and junk mailers currently use the USPS the most and are cutting back, creating an inevitable loss for the USPS. Potter implored Congress to save “an institution that is older than the country itself.”
It looks like Congress will bail out the USPS, but is the post office an outdated and dying institution? The reasons for eschewing the post office are manyfold, but it seems impossible to imagine a world without mail service.
With a note of fear in her voice, my grandmother asked me if all communication is going to be digitized. If it is, we’ll read the Core on our Kindles (not that far away. Every year Free Culture @ Columbia hands out flash drives with the Core embedded.), and care packages from Mom will be outmoded, unless someone can think of a way to send homemade cookies over the Internet.
Jennie Halperin is a Barnard College senior majoring in American Studies.
Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt runs alternate Tuesdays.
Comments
We're looking for comments that are interesting and substantial. If your comments are excessively self-promotional or obnoxious you will be banned from commenting. Consult the comment FAQ and legal terms.