Whether by train, plane or dog sled, the US Postal Service has kept America connected

USA Today

5 days ago

America's Founding Fathers had the foresight to recognize that an efficient postal service would be an essential tool of democracy. Odds are they didn't envision mailboxes stuffed with grocery ads, prescription medicines and AARP The Magazine.
On Saturday, the United States Postal Service will mark 250 years of serving a mission unthwarted by rain, sleet, snow or gloom of night. A key mechanism of an informed citizenry, a building block of U.S. independence and a storied part of American culture, the agency has faithfully delivered letters nationwide, regardless of geographic distance, all for the price of a stamp — even as its challenges to do so without delay or a deficit have grown.
'The post office was created a year before the Declaration of Independence and has been there at every step along the American journey,' said Steve Kochersperger, the agency's postal historian. 'It goes everywhere Americans have gone and keeps us united.'
To name a small handful of those who have carried mail to your door: Walt Disney; actors Morgan Freeman, Steve Carell and Rock Hudson; folk singer John Prine, jazz bassist Charles Mingus, vocalist Jason Mraz and guitarist Ace Frehley, a founding member of KISS.
But just as it did more than two centuries ago, the postal service faces danger and uncertainty, this time in the face of financial and logistical challenges that threaten to see it privatized or merged with the U.S. Department of Commerce. Such a merger was proposed earlier this year by President Donald Trump, who called USPS "a tremendous loser for this country."
According to the U.S. General Accountability Office, the agency has operated at a deficit for the last 15 years, with a net loss of $100 billion since 2007. Meanwhile, costs are outpacing revenue as once dependable First-Class Mail has fallen in volume, among other factors.
In spite of its troubles, the postal service trails only the National Park Service in terms of public favor, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey. Meanwhile, the agency's new postmaster general, David Steiner, assured postal employees in a video address last week that he supported keeping the agency in its current form.
"I do not believe that the Postal Service should be privatized or that it should become an appropriated part of the federal government," he said. "I believe in the current structure of the Postal Service as a self-financing, independent entity of the executive branch."
Today, according to its website, the postal service serves nearly 169 million addresses nationwide with a staff of 640,000, the bulk of them career workers, and a fleet of almost 258,000 vehicles. In 2024, the agency handled more than 116 billion pieces of mail, most of it so-called junk mail.
'It was conceived as an expansive public service,' said Cameron Blevins, a professor of history and digital humanities at the University of Colorado Denver. 'It has changed a lot over its history, but that dedication to providing a service to American citizens, regardless of where you live, has been there since the beginning.'
On Wednesday, USPS is marking its milestone with two separate stamp releases, including a Forever series depicting a mail carrier on her community rounds and a modern interpretation of a 5-cent stamp, first issued in 1847, that portrays Benjamin Franklin, the nation's first postmaster general.
The agency's role is cited in the U.S. Constitution in a clause empowering Congress to establish post offices and their delivery infrastructure. At the time, American democracy was still an experiment in a world of monarchs and empires, dependent on a free exchange of ideas.
'Democracy needed to have informed voters and the post office was integral in making sure they had the information they needed,' said Christopher Shaw, author of 'First Class: The USPS, Democracy and the Corporate Threat.'
Notable figures have labored in its service. President Abraham Lincoln served as a local postmaster before pursuing law and politics; so too did Nobel Prize-winning American novelist William Faulkner, though not as effectively.
'He preferred playing cards or leaving early to go golf,' Kochersperger said of Faulkner.
While its delivery modes, offerings and workforce have changed throughout the years, its basic mission of ensuring an informed and connected public has not. That tradition endures as books, magazines and newspapers continue to enjoy reduced shipping rates; so do mailings by charities and other nonprofit organizations like arts entities and political advocacy groups.
'If you look at post-Second World War social movements – the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, all those organizations – the main way they raised money and let supporters know what was happening was through the mail,' Shaw said. 'So historically, it's been a bedrock of democracy and getting information.'
The agency's role was crucial from the beginning, Kochersperger said.
In 1775, as the fight for American independence began, the Second Continental Congress appointed George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army.
But how to communicate with its military? The American revolutionaries couldn't very well use British-established postal channels for correspondence that would have been seen as treasonous.
'They needed a postal service, so they picked Benjamin Franklin to head that up,' Kochersperger said.
Franklin, who'd spent nearly four decades as Philadelphia's postmaster, had a genius for efficiency, Kochersperger said. He devised a system in which military correspondence was delivered by messengers on foot and riders on horseback, forging a major advantage for colonial forces in their war against the British.
'The same orders from London would take two months,' Kochersperger said. 'The postal service was crucial to American independence.'
A vital part of Western expansion
In 1848, as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico bequeathed half of its territory following a U.S. war of aggression against its southern neighbor. The U.S. gained what is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and parts of four other states.
Hundreds of thousands of people streamed into the American West, said Blevins of CU Denver, many pursuing newly discovered gold in California, thousands of miles away from their communities and population centers in the East.
Seeking to facilitate their communications with families, neighbors and business associates back home, the U.S. leaned on the postal service to do the job. The agency farmed out some duties to contractor operations such as the famed Pony Express, whose riders delivered mail on horseback from Missouri to California from 1860-61.
As contracts and correspondence traveled back and forth across the miles, the postal service served as the connective tissue of Western expansion, carrying news of engagements and growing families, of business booms and busts.
'It did not discriminate on the basis of distance,' said Blevins, whose research focuses on role of the federal government in the American West of the 1800s. 'A gold miner who went to the fields of southwest Colorado, thousands of miles away from his family in say, Ohio, could mail a letter back home for the same price as his cousin living in Ohio a couple of counties away.'
Many early post offices were not the familiar standalone government facilities staffed by uniformed workers familiar to people today. Instead, businesses such as general stores collected commissions in exchange for distributing incoming and outgoing mail.
'You would go in and buy flour or coffee,' Blevins said, 'and ask if you had any mail.'
Sled dogs and hovercraft
In the 1890s, postmaster general Jon Wanamaker, a former retail wizard, pushed for the postal service to expand free mail delivery service to rural areas and conceived the notion of commemorative stamps that people could collect and not necessarily use.
Mail was delivered by stagecoach, steamboat and then railway, sorted on board moving trains. Other modes of delivery have included sled dogs, mules, reindeer and hovercraft, but the agency's most transformative upgrade occurred in 1918 with the development of airmail at a time when airports were still a budding concept.
'The post office had to build runways, install radios and train its own pilots,' Kochersperger said.
In the 1920s, the postal service again relied on contractors to provide many of those services, forming the foundations of today's airline industry as some providers found they could boost profits by transporting people.
'That really helped kickstart aviation in this country,' Shaw said. 'The majority of early revenues, before passengers, came from transporting U.S. mail.'
ZIP codes, introduced in 1963, allowed mail to be more efficiently sorted – and ultimately for American consumers and voters to be categorized and profiled. 'Try to do something today that doesn't involve a ZIP code,' Kochersperger said. 'You can't even order a pizza without a ZIP code.'
Postal workers throughout the years have faced various degrees of peril. Franklin's revolutionary mail carriers faced capture by British soldiers. Frontier carriers dodged thieves and robbers. Weather, terrain and faulty equipment posed their own deadly obstacles; flying accidents claimed the lives of 34 airmail pilots from 1918 to 1927.
Today, the most common danger is dogs. More than 6,000 dog bite incidents were recorded nationwide in 2024, USPS senior spokesman David Coleman said.
'The best ideals of American democracy'
Until 1971, said author Shaw, the post office was a federal department that historically operated at a slight deficit. Postage accounted for most of its revenue, he said, with U.S. Treasury funds making up the difference.
Under the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the department was restructured as the United States Postal Service, an independent federal agency under executive control, with the idea that it would be self-funded. Recent decades have brought financial struggles, most notably the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which both limited how the agency could make money and required it to pay billions into a fund to finance future healthcare obligations for retirees.
Then came the financial recession and the rise of online bill pay, both of which took a bite out of postal revenue.
'All these things kind of hit at once,' Shaw said. 'On the other side, expanding e-commerce has meant new revenues. There's less mail being delivered but more packages being delivered, so it has balanced out a bit.'
While the post office still exists to provide information and communication, it's under more intense financial pressure to do so with Congress no longer offsetting its shortfalls. That has prompted talk of privatization, a move Shaw fears would inhibit the agency's ability to adapt with the times.
'The post office provides a lot of economically inefficient services,' Shaw said. 'A for-profit company would not want to be delivering mail to the most rural Americans. But because the mission of the postal service is to bind the nation together, it provides universal service to everyone.'
In that sense, Shaw said, part of the postal service's ongoing legacy is that whatever its flaws, it still embodies the nation's democratic ideals.
'The federal government through the postal service commits to serving everybody equally whether you're rich or poor, rural or urban, whether you live in Alaska or New York City,' he said. 'It's been an expression of the best ideals of American democracy and demonstrated the ability of the government to actually deliver on that promise…. It's still around, and for an institution to exist for 250 years shows there's a reason for it to exist and that it's doing something right.'