Author(s): | John, Richard R. |
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Reviewer(s): | McGuire, Mary K. |
EH.NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Business
and EH.Net (August 1999)
Richard R. John. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from
Franklin to Morse. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1995. vii + 369 pp. Tables, endnotes, primary sources, and index.
$54.00 (cloth), ISBN 0
-674-83338-4; $18.95 (paper) ISBN 0-674-83342-2
Reviewed for H-Business and EH.NET by Mary K. McGuire, Department of History,
Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
The U.S. postal system has received surprisingly little historical attention
over the
years, and even less so in recent historical discussions of the state,
politics, political culture, and administration. Even in the latest turn
toward the state, notably among the “new institutionalists,” the postal system
has remained on the fringes of
historical inquiry. While there may be many reasons for this,
I suspect that part of the problem is a sense that it has all been said before.
After all, conventional wisdom knows that the history of the U.S. postal system
is the history of the “spoils sys tem,” of civil service reform, of the weak or
non-existent pre-New Deal federal state.
And for many historians, the study of large-scale political institutions such
as the Post Office Department is mired in the worst excesses of the
“old” political history-a place we have left behind and with good reason.
Despite some recent works that have attempted to reconsider the subject from
various perspectives, the history of the U.S. postal system seems remarkably
resistant to a sustained historical inquiry or interest.
In this work, Richard John not only directs our attention to this relatively
neglected area of study, but he does so from an innovative interpretive
position that opens new ways of approaching and understanding the subject.
Taking, as he terms it
, a contextualist approach, he examines the postal system within the historical
context of the early Republic and the role it played in important social,
political, and cultural changes taking place over a nearly seventy year period.
In an arena where too few have ventured to show the way, John has set himself
a large task-a task made larger by his insistence on understanding the postal
system as an agent of social change in its own right, with significant impact
on shaping the contours and outcome of certain critical moments.
Specifically, he is concerned “not merely to locate the postal system in
the social process, but to explore its role as a social process, and, in
particular, to consider some of the ways in which the communications revolution
that it set in motion transformed American public life” (p. 24). This is an
ambitious project equal to the size and significance of its subject, and John
does an impressive job of developing his thesis with a wealth of detailed
historical information and
deftly handled political, social, and cultural analysis.
Both symbol and reality of the federal government in the early decades of the
fledgling republic, John asks us to consider the postal system’s significance
as the centerpiece of a communications ”
revolution.” As John makes clear, this was a revolution with very decided
market implications and intentions, creating a network of federally designed
and funded transportation and communications links that drew together the
people, producers, and places
of an increasingly far-flung nation.
In the first chapters of this book, he examines the policy and structural
innovations that established and deepened federal postal dominance in this
communications revolution. But, true to his thesis,
John goes beyond a mere discussion of the politics behind this transformation
to the impact of the transformation itself on shaping a new, national, public
sphere for this new, democratic republic.
According to John, the Post Office Act of 1792 laid the cornerstone for postal
impact on American public life when it permitted the transmission of newspapers
through the mails, alongside laying the groundwork for a greatly expanded
postal network. It also protected the sanctity of the mails from surveillance
and other interference-a critically important innovation in a world context
where privacy in communications was far from a right in law or in practice.
Then, turning to one of the central political-administrative figures of the
early postal system, Postmaster General John McLean, John identifies the early
administrative innovations of this nascent bureaucratic enterprise under
McLean’s leadership. In so doing, John asks us to reconsider our assumptions
about national politics and the federal state in the early Republic
, which is an important addition to our understanding of the supposedly
“stateless” United States in the period before the New Deal. For historians of
bureaucracies and of business enterprises, John makes another significant
contribution when he identifies administrative and managerial innovations in a
time and a place where we would hardly have expected to find them. It is
virtually a commonplace among business historians to date the introduction of
middle management practices from the middle nineteenth century and the
creation of huge railway enterprises. In this study, John shows that middle
level management techniques and principles already existed in a well-defined
form within the postal system-a system which could not have functioned without
its
three-tiered administrative structure and its
“hub and spoke” distribution system.
Bringing together the federal level politics and the federal level
administrative developments that occurred under John McLean as Postmaster
General, John explores and ex plains the administrative structure being set in
place even as politics influenced and shaped the postal system that was being
developed-and more. As he concludes: “By greatly expanding the power of the
Postmaster General, the completion of the postal network threatened to tilt
the delicate balance between the postal system, the rest of the executive
branch, and the individual states” (p. 110). It was this consolidation of
political and administrative power in the federal state, in the form of the
Post Office Department, which would influence the political and administrative
battle over “spoils” and states rights in the Jackson presidential campaign and
administration. In his later chapter on the Jacksonians, John expands this
political analysis in a discussion of the efforts by Jacksonians to hold the
federal state administration accountable to their understanding of the
classical republican creed.
Rotation in office-the so-called “spoils” system-wreaked some havoc with the
administrative operations and structure of political institutions like the
Post Office Department, but it also laid the groundwork for building the mass
party system that the Jacksonians had brought into existence in the election of
1828.
This analysis of the spoils system is not altogether a new one, but John ties
it to the power of the postal system as the centerpiece of a central, federal
state-the very thing that states’ rights advocates like the Jacksonians were
concerned to limit. For political historians, the power of his analysis lies
here, by showing how the Jacksonians manipulated the power of appointment to
public office to bring together their political creed of the democratic
republic and their political
need to build the mass party that had brought them into power. In
other words, it might be said there was an internal logic to the spoils system
that, abuses notwithstanding, was not entirely at odds with earlier assumptions
about the role of the postal system in creating an informed and politically
active public among its widespread communities and citizens. The nineteenth
century notion of “the egalitarian ideal,
which held that every citizen had the necessary ability to hold public office
and in this way to participate directly in the affairs of state”
(p. 1 35), was widespread, but not until the Jacksonians would it become
policy.
But this policy, like the politics behind it, was limited to free, white men.
In one of his most fascinating discussions, John looks at the public spaces
controlled by the postal
system. Here he argues that the postal system facilitated “an imagined
community that incorporated a far-flung citizenry into the political process”
(p. 168)-and this despite, or perhaps because of, the constraints placed on
free blacks and on women in
that public space. This is a wide-ranging discussion,
which deals with the aristocratic tradition and influence in securing public
office, the introduction of the military model for public officers, the
exclusion of free blacks from mail delivery, and the problems faced by women
in the male-dominated public space of the post offices. Arguing that “official
norms helped to shape public attitudes regarding the boundaries of American
public life” (p. 142), he concludes that “(t)hrough a combination of customs,
laws, and social conventions,
the central government and ordinary Americans had together constructed a new
social type-the citizen as free, white, and male-and a new kind of social
space-an imagined community that was more or less congruent with the
territorial confines of the United States” (p. 168). As the only public
institution as widespread as the citizens of the nation it served, the postal
system was a central factor in creating and regulating that new social space.
However, it is also here,
as well as in his chapters on Sabbatarianism and on abolitionism, that some
may find it difficult to see the postal system as an agent of social
change with such powers to shape the emergent nation’s political culture and
social conflicts. John’s treatment of the Sabbatarian
controversy–transmitting the mails and opening the post offices on the
Sabbath-is compelling, as is his argument that this needs to be seen as “a
struggle over the proper role of the central government in American public life
and
not, as is often presumed, merely a struggle between competing social groups”
(p. 191).
Likewise, his discussion of the abolitionist controversy-the mailing of
unsolicited abolitionist literature to southerners-brings to light an important
incident in the
battle over states’ rights vs. federal authority in the years preceding the
Civil War. However, it is less convincing in these cases to see the postal
system as the agent of change. It seems more reasonable that the postal
system was the
medium used to provoke change, or was the space in which certain
battles over social change would be fought. John himself seems to suggest this
when he notes of the Sabbatarian controversy that “it demonstrated how easily
a small group of activists could take ad vantage of the communications
revolution
that had been wrought by the postal system, the stagecoach industry, and the
press to mobilize public support throughout the United States” (p. 202). Who
is agent and who is subject here?
I am not interested in splitting hairs, and I am more than willing to accept
the postal system as an agent of social change. And, certainly,
John seems to equate “agent of social change” with the “communications
revolution” he has so ably shown the postal system to have initiated in this
period. However, that seems to me less a clarification of “agency”
and more an opening to explore what it means for the state to act as an
agent of social change. Published in 1995, John’s study came out at a time
when new works on the state, ideology, law, policy, and institutions had
somewhat recently begun to appear-some in response to the much earlier effort
to “bring the state back in”. Many of these works take as their central
premise the notion of the state or its institutions as agents of social
change, and a vibrant discussion emerged among the political scientists,
sociologists, and historians who take the state seriously as an agent in its
own right. In a very important way, I believe John’s study contributes to that
discussion
,
although without directly engaging it, and that is to be regretted. For
example, his short conclusion takes us back all-too-briefly to the
“communications revolution” where, in his interpretation, it all began.
But after such a journey through administrative history, politics,
political culture, public life, and social conflicts, it would have helped
tremendously to tie it all together with some more generalized attention to how
the postal system acted as the agent of social change and in “shaping
the boundaries of American public life” (p. 283).
Even so, this does
not diminish the power of John’s study, or his astute
analysis of the postal system in this early period of U.S. history.
Situating this postal history in its larger historical context and political
significance, John has done a very fine job with a huge,
complex, and unwieldy subject. This is an exhaustively researched study and it
draws on a wealth of detail to make its case. More than that, it raises some
important new ways of under standing events, such as Sabbatarianism and
abolitionism, that should be of interest to historians of nineteenth century
America. Political historians will be especially interested in his treatment
of Jacksonian democracy in action and his attention to political culture and
American public life.
Business and economic historians will find his discussion of the communications
revolution and the expanding postal network useful additions to our knowledge
of government policy influences on the early development of the national
market in this period. And those of us who study the state and state formation
should find this a welcome contribution as well, not only for taking on a
neglected and important subject, but also for taking that subject in new
direction s.
Subject(s): | Markets and Institutions |
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Geographic Area(s): | North America |
Time Period(s): | General or Comparative |