The Communications Revolution

Abstract

Institutional history may be even more out of fashion than the study of great men. But with this perceptive interpretive biography of the postal system, Richard John, assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, reminds us how important and useful institutional history can be. The creation of the postal system had two different, but inseparable, facets: was the system itself, the network of post roads and post offices that allowed for the to be sent; the second, perhaps more important for John, was the nature of the itself. Taken separately or together, they had profound implications for American society. This is not merely the history of a postal network, but the history of a revolution in communications. The creation of a postal network was in itself an achievement. While France in 1828 had 4 post offices for every 100,000 people, and Great Britain had 17, there were 74 post offices for every 100,000 Americans. The United States postal system was so efficient that Canadian government officials sent their interprovincial by way of the United States. In 1832 political scientist Francis Lieber ranked the post office with the mariner's compass and the printing press as one of the most effective elements of civilization (pp. 7-8). Like the printing press and the compass, the postal system generated other innovations. Perhaps the most important was a system for sorting a large volume of mail, a and system that remained in place from 1800 until the Civil War, when the railway mail system of continuous sorting on railroad cars displaced it. Still, the hub and spoke system continues to work for Federal Express, which routes all through its Tennessee hub. Washington was the central hub for the postal system. From this hub, the post office reached into every community in ways other government offices did not. But the federal presence was personal, not architectural. Federal post offices, like court houses, did not have their own buildings until after the Civil War. Post offices were found in taverns, hotels, stores, basements, the postmaster's house, and even a brothel. New York City's post office for a time