Editor’s Note: Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of “Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres.” The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.
Even in an era of constant outrage, President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on the US Postal Service have struck a nerve. Beyond Trump’s transparent attempt to suppress votes for his opponent, why does undermining the agency feel like such a violation of democratic norms?
The value of the USPS remains one of our few areas of bipartisan agreement. A March poll by the Pew Research Center ranked the USPS as the most popular federal agency, with 91% of those surveyed holding a favorable view of it. The poll showed nearly identical support for the agency among Republicans and Democrats.
The USPS is not just a service but a symbol of a functioning society. Attacking it strikes us as outrageous because a reliable post has been a prerequisite for some of the defining features of modern democracy.
In Great Britain and the United States for the past 400 years, the expansion of government postal systems has gone hand in hand with the emergence of democratic ideals such as the freedom of the press, the right of average people to participate in the public sphere and the importance of equitable and accessible communications. In fact, we could say that those ideals could only be realized because people could rely on the post for connection in a modernizing, globalizing society.
Before the invention of long-distance communications technologies like the telegraph, television, and internet, the equal ability to send and receive mail – a principle that solidified from the 17th to 20th centuries – allowed people to see themselves as connected to national affairs through the circulation of letters, newspapers, and pamphlets.
One of the earliest centralized mail systems was the English state post, which initially operated the colonial system and later provided a model for the US one. In 1660, the Post Office Charter opened the government-run system to the public, which previously had relied on private messengers. This was an important shift, establishing the post as a basic government service, but the system was slow and expensive.
Over the course of the 18th century, the network of routes filled in and the invention of mail coaches accelerated delivery times. In 1840, a major reform of the system standardized the cost of letters at one penny and introduced innovations such as stamps and envelopes, making the system equal and accessible. Similar reforms passed in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s.
In colonial America, the postal service was part of the imperial system that operated out of the General Post Office in London. One of the revolutionaries’ earliest targets was the British post, which routinely surveilled letters, with the Boston committee of correspondence proposing in 1774 to replace the existing system with a “New American Post-Office.”
The imperial post was defunct by 1775 and Benjamin Franklin, who had been deputy postmaster general in the old system, was appointed the first Postmaster General of the new American system. At the outset of war, a functioning post was a military priority.
These origins helped make the post office a symbol for the new nation. The Post Office Act of 1792 emphasized its public role, setting low rates for mailing newspapers, which were subsidized by more expensive letters. In both Britain and America, free or reduced postage for newspapers ingrained the idea that the circulation of news was one of the post’s most important functions.
Contrary to what we might expect, there was little in-person local news reporting in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead, publishers compiled short paragraphs summarizing the letters they had received from their “foreign correspondents.” British newspapers often blamed a lack of interesting news on westerly winds delaying ships crossing the English Channel and American papers prominently featured London datelines.
At the other end of production, news also reached readers through the mail. The British print industry was consolidated in London, which meant that provincial readers had to rely on the post to receive newspapers. Similarly, in colonial America and the early United States, people often received their newspapers with their mail. The printers of newspapers secured themselves positions as local postmasters to gain access to incoming news and ensure that their own papers traveled freely.
In addition to circulating the news, the postal system helped more people engage with politics and other public issues. Early periodicals and magazines, such as the influential “Tatler” and “Spectator”, solicited reader feedback, with the latter providing a mailing address for “all such Papers as may contribute to the Advancement of the Public Weal.” These earliest letters to the editor helped develop the idea that average people should comment on politics and culture, and that their opinions could be as newsworthy as those of government officials and professional critics. The growth of the public sphere relied on the circulation of information to readers who could then respond with their own commentary.
In some ways, postal services were even available to the illiterate, who could dictate their letters to a transcriber. Eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson, author of the groundbreaking epistolary novels “Pamela” and “Clarissa,” attributed his “knowledge of the female heart” to his early work as this kind of amanuensis.
The principle of equal access to the mail—the fact that a letter to or from anywhere in the country costs $0.55—has made the postal system an icon of equality more broadly. In the 20th century, the USPS was a stable source of employment for Black workers and font of Black activism through its unions. Black postal workers were a link between unionization efforts and the Civil Rights Movement, with many letter carriers active in the NAACP.
Today, the agency could also offer more services to further counter discrimination. For example, activists are calling for postal banking, which existed in the early 20th century, to serve largely Black and brown unbanked communities.
Of course, like any American institution the postal service has perpetuated structural racism. In 1802, Congress banned Black people from carrying the mail partly due to fears that access to information would increase the likelihood of slave uprisings. Under President Woodrow Wilson, Black and white postal employees were segregated, and throughout the first half of the 20th century, discrimination kept Black postal clerks out of supervisory positions. But today, minorities constitute about 40% of the USPS workforce.
For Americans, the postal service symbolizes the connection across vast distances that allows us to imagine a unified nation even as we are separated geographically, culturally, and politically. Politicizing the service and sabotaging it for electoral gain is shocking even to our polarized moment.
In coming together to fund the agency and protect it from Trump’s interference, Congress could pursue a truly bipartisan initiative that would continue the postal system’s long history as a precondition for democracy. Going further, Congress must end the 2006 Republican-authored mandate, imposed on no other federal agency or private business, that the USPS prefund its retirees’ anticipated health and retirement benefits for decades, a move intended to financially hobble the agency. The House passed a bill in February to end the mandate.
Trump’s attacks have shown that we value the USPS for more than its daily delivery of letters and packages, and we must reaffirm its central role in establishing democratic ideals.
