[On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States postal system. So this week for the 250th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and other histories and stories of the USPS, leading up to a weekend tribute to these vital federal workers!]
On one
moment when the mail was falsely perceived as threatening, other moments when
it genuinely was, and how we can put them in conversation.
I highlighted
the pernicious and profoundly un-American Espionage and Sedition Acts as part
of this
July 2020 post, but didn’t specifically address there a main way that those
totalitarian acts were enforced: through monitoring and censorship of the mail.
In Chapter Five of my
book Of Thee I Sing I write about one such example from 1917: “The Postmaster
General refused to mail copies of The Jeffersonian, a newsletter published
by the Southern populist and anti-war activist Tom
Watson; when Watson fought back in court a federal judge called the
publication and its pacifist sentiments ‘poison.’” Even if we agree with that assessment
of Watson’s particular political perspective and points—and obviously I very
much do not agree—this action of the USPS would in any case, at least to my
mind, represent a striking and significant overreach, the use of perceived,
ideological “threats” to abdicate its core responsibility to deliver American mail.
I used scare
quotes around “threats” deliberately there, not only because I don’t believe The
Jeffersonian comprised a threat of any kind, but also and especially because
we do have definitive, recent historical examples of the mail posing a threat
to Americans: “Unabomber”
Ted Kaczynski’s multi-decade domestic terrorist attacks largely conducted through
the use of mail
bombs; and the four anthrax-laced
letters that were sent (apparently
by government scientist and embittered anthrax vaccine developer Dr. Bruce
Ivins, although Ivins took his own life in 2008 before the investigation could
fully conclude) to journalists and government officials in October 2001. In the
concluding couplet of the beautiful song “You’re Missing” from his
post-9/11 album The Rising (2002) Bruce Springsteen expresses the
mindset of collective anxiety created by such threatening acts of postal
terrorism quite succinctly and powerfully: “God’s drifting in heaven, devil’s
in the mailbox/I got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.”
The most
straightforward, and certainly the most accurate, way to put those two
paragraphs in conversation is to note that the existence of mail bombs and anthrax-laced
letters makes clear just how non-threatening a newsletter is in comparison (even,
again, if said newsletter contained ideas that I disagreed with). Unless a
mailing’s content is far more blatantly and unquestionably illegal—child pornography,
for example—it simply should not be the case that the USPS refuses to mail
something on ideological grounds. But I would take the contrast a significant
step further—one of the best things about the USPS (as I’ll discuss more in my
weekend tribute post) is the ways it can connect Americans across this incredibly
large and disparate nation of ours; and yet of course, as with anything American
including (if not especially) our best things, that element can also connect and
all too often has been connected to our worst characteristics and impulses, of
which domestic terrorism is frustratingly exemplary. The best and worst of America,
in our mail.
Last
USPStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Postal histories or stories you’d share?
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