Review by Choice Review
Leonard, a staff writer at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, has produced a highly readable history of a US institution that is often overlooked despite being a ubiquitous part of life; "so big that nobody sees it," in the words of former Postmaster General Anthony Frank. Leonard begins his history with Benjamin Franklin's efforts to organize a postal system out of earlier attempts to provide communication networks in the American colonies. Congress delayed creating a permanent post office until 1792, and even then, some members worried that postal employees would open private mail or that post offices and post roads would become political campaign issues. The post office had to fight off challenges from private delivery companies such as those of Henry Wells and William Fargo, among others, during the early 19th century. Technology developments such as the telegraph, trains, airplanes, and the internet all posed challenges to the post office, as did reformers who transformed it into the Postal Service, but the institution continued to find an important place, allowing Americans to communicate with each other easily and relatively cheaply. This book chronicles that important contribution to life in the US. Summing Up: Recommended. All public and academic levels/libraries. --Jerry Purvis Sanson, Louisiana State University at Alexandria
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
IN 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated the American postal system as a marvel of its day - a "great link between minds." According to Devin Leonard, it may soon vanish. Drenched in red ink, the United States Postal Service has shut offices, reduced opening hours, closed processing plants and slashed its work force. While Leonard's diagnosis of the United States mail as a "dying institution" may be premature (the Postal Service is still America's largest civilian employer after Walmart), the system is clearly in crisis. Leonard's "Neither Snow Nor Rain" and Winifred Gallagher's "How the Post Office Created America" celebrate the mail system's storied past, and chart its declining fortunes. Gallagher, a journalist whose earlier books often focused on behavior science, emphasizes the achievements that made the postal system a crucial American institution. Present in every community and known to every citizen, the service was an obvious marker of the federal government in an era when centralized governance was largely out of sight. Her book is the work of an enthusiast, an ode to a little-heralded but flagship government enterprise. In contrast to the British Royal Post, which, before mid-19th-century reforms, served primarily as a channel of official government correspondence, the United States mail, she tells us, was republican at birth. For example, the Post Office Act of 1792 in effect subsidized newspaper circulation, spreading national and international news to farflung states and making for an informed citizenry. She reminds us, echoing the historian Richard John, that the post office forged a communications revolution just as far-reaching as the later telegraph and internet revolutions. But these public channels of communication could deepen division as well as foster unity, which both Northerners and Southerners knew. In 1802, at the behest of slaveholders who feared free blacks would use the system to foster slave rebellion, Congress barred nonwhites from carrying the mail. Abolitionists, in turn, flooded the South with antislavery literature. After Charleston pro-slavery citizens broke into the local post office in 1835 and burned the mail, the postmaster general sanctioned the suppression of abolitionist mailings to the South, the first in a series of government actions limiting the free exchange of information through the post office. Gallagher glosses over such controversies to present an almost mythic vision of the past, particularly the nation's westward expansion. She tells us of the post office's crucial role in moving information across great distances, and in forging a national presence in Western territories. In the process, however, she simplifies the history of cultural exchange, diplomacy, violence, expropriation and warfare in a West that was, however inconveniently, already settled. In framing Western expansion as a story of "peripatetic Americans" who "fled farming and civilization for a wild life in an unspoiled natural world," she ignores generations of historians who have told a more complex story of settler colonial capitalism, and its tragic meaning for the indigenous populations. Gallagher's discussion of the postal system's "Golden Age" during the Progressive Era is more convincing. Flexible and innovative, with rural free delivery and the popular new parcel post service, the post office stood as a "powerful counter to the argument that private industry always serves Americans better than the government." The Populists revered the American postal system. It stood as a model of how large-scale, bureaucratic and publicly controlled institutions could modernize the nation and make it more equitable. They hoped to establish a postal banking system, and to extend public ownership over the telegraph, the telephone and the railroads. The government did authorize postal banks, but only in regions underserved by established banks, and for very small savings accounts. Private stakeholders fought against a more robust postal banking system. Such battles between private interests and the postal system were as old as the service itself, and Devin Leonard, a staff writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, recounts many of them. His sweeping and entertaining history tells aless celebratory if no less colorful story than Gallagher, but he offers a host of interesting anecdotes, including one about an Idaho family who sent their child 75 miles by parcel post because it was cheaper than going by train. More incidents of "child mailing" led the post office to outlaw the practice. Leonard sometimes presents his historical actors via dialogue, an unusual choice for a history book, and a method that must have involved some creative reconstruction on his part. OVERALL, LEONARD emphasizes a darker side of postal history, from the corruption scandals that periodically erupted after Andrew Jackson politicized the service, creating a gargantuan patronage machine, to oppressive government censorship campaigns. He devotes much of a chapter to Anthony Comstock, the longtime postal inspector and self-styled "weeder in God's garden," who banned and prosecuted the mailing of birth control pamphlets, "marriage aids" and "indecent" literary works like Walt Whitman's poems, lest they pollute public morals. Still another chapter charts the spree of mass killings by overworked, underpaid and aggrieved postal workers in the 1980s and early 1990s. Despite their different emphases, both books present a narrative of decline. In the mid-20th century, the post office was a powerful institution, the lifeblood of commerce, with mail carriers delivering letters twice daily. But because of repeated bare-bones congressional appropriations, the service has been unable to modernize, and mounting volume in outdated facilities has resulted in chaos, inefficiency and dysfunction. In 1967, after Postmaster General Lawrence O'Brien declared the department to be in a "race with catastrophe" and proposed a new model, business interests succeeded in winning a seat at the table for planning its future. In 1970 Richard Nixon's Postal Reorganization Act ended a more than century-long understanding of the post as a public service paid for from general revenues and turned it into a government corporation. Lack of modernization and continued inefficiency opened the door for private express carriers. When the Postal Service argued that such companies infringed on its monopoly over letter delivery, lobbyists fought back, and legislators proved receptive, eroding the service's dominance in commerce and business. Experiments with computerized mail delivery, a postal email service and methods to help customers pay bills online were all slapped down by powerful opposition from private stakeholders and Congress. In 2006, Congress hemmed in the Postal Service's mandate to its core mission: delivering letters, packages and printed matter, constraining its ability to innovate in a digital age. In many European countries, by contrast, national postal systems have so far weathered the internet revolution by innovating and offering digital services. And Congress dealt the Postal Service another blow by forcing it to prepay its future retiree health care costs at the hefty price of $5.5 billion a year for 10 years, deepening its woes. Is the Postal Service, once at the cutting edge of a communications revolution, doomed to become either a quaint relic of the past or a de facto subsidiary of Amazon? The answer depends upon the public and Congress's willingness to reorient policy. Gallagher's and Leonard's reminders of a time when the post office department stood at the center of commerce and communication suggest that innovation and experimentation - a hallmark of the Postal Service at its apex - may be the best way to secure the system's future in an age of instant communication. Perhaps the post office is the place to begin the revitalization - or reinvention - of America's ailing public sector. LISA McGIRR teaches American history at Harvard. Her most recent book is "The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 10, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
In 2016, the U.S. Postal Service seems a tired institution, ready to be dismissed by many unaware of its vital role in American history. According to author Leonard, the USPS nurtured the nation not only by delivering letters and news but also by supporting cutting-edge technologies: it led industry by commissioning optical scanning and assembly-line sorting, and its contracts kept early railroads and airlines in business. Showing that management of the agency has always been contested by critics, Leonard profiles key leaders and tells headline stories from every era: politicians rewarding backers with postal jobs and nonbid contracts; laws restricting the delivery of birth-control literature; courier services trying to usurp delivery of business mail; mail sorters and carriers striking for better wages; and, recently, relying on direct-marketing mail to offset losses to e-mail and other digital communications. Neither Snow Nor Rain is a wide-ranging history about life in the U.S. that will engage many nonfiction readers. Recommended for most public libraries.--Roche, Rick Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Leonard, a staff writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, briskly and ably revisits the origins of the U.S. Postal Service and traces its myriad changes up into the 21st century. He covers the institution's major figures, including founder Benjamin Franklin, who introduced home delivery; President Benjamin Harrison, who first suggested the ideas of rural delivery and a postal bank (ideas that respectively came to fruition under the Theodore Roosevelt and Taft administrations); Anthony Comstock, a zealous anti-vice crusader; and Winston Blount, Nixon's postmaster general and the man who made jobs merit-based at the USPS, long a bastion of patronage. Of note are the chapter on the introduction of air delivery, which features anecdotes of the enormous risks early postal pilots took, Leonard's recounting of the short but devastating postal strike of 1970, and his examination of how the USPS has survived significant challenges from both private delivery companies and the growth of online bill-paying. What currently helps keep the USPS afloat is delivering about 40% of Amazon's packages. Readers may expect is an institutional history of a vast governmental organization (now a semi-private corporation) to be a bit dry, but Leonard is a sure-footed writer who has produced a well-researched work that uncovers some colorful characters and reflects basic dynamics of American democracy. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Elyse Cheney Literary. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How America got mail. In his lively debut history, journalist Leonard, a staff writer at Bloomberg Businessweek, chronicles the evolution of the nation's postal service through the many colorful, sometimes eccentric, personalities that shaped it. The author begins with Benjamin Franklin, who served under the British crown, overseeing postal service finances from London. After the Revolution, Franklin became the first postmaster general, a job he quickly left to become America's ambassador to France. Nevertheless, Franklin and George Washington shared the conviction that the postal service could "be a force that promoted enlightenment, circulating newspapers and political documents that would guard the public from tyrants and demagogues spreading misinformation." In addition, mail delivery could create a sense of connection among distant towns in the growing nation. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited in 1831, he praised the postal service as "the great link between minds." Although there were more than 20,000 miles of post roads by the turn of the 19th century, the cost of sending letters was high, and many communities were not served, spurring competition. Henry Wells, the founder of Wells Fargo, began a delivery company in 1841; for 18 months, the Pony Expresslater celebrated and romanticizedoffered delivery, on horseback, in California. Free home delivery began in 1861, a much-applauded innovation, although during Arthur Comstock's long reign as special postal inspector, the content of those deliveries was subject to investigation for obscenity. Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker emerges as a hero, pushing for reforms such as rural free delivery and parcel post. It was so cheap to send a package that some parents affixed stamps to their children for delivery to relatives rather than buy train tickets. Air mail, the rise of unions, financial troubles, zip codes, and the phenomenon of "going postal" are all subjects of Leonard's brisk, informative narrative. A spirited look at the business and impact of delivering mail. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
