The numbers don’t look good for the U.S. Postal Service. Last
year it reported its sixth straight annual operating loss in the amount of $2.7
billion. During fiscal year 2017, the USPS delivered 149 billion pieces of
mail, down from 154 billion the previous year — and a major drop from its peak
of 213 billion in 2006.
The average American is no longer using the mail to send greeting
cards or newsy letters, family photos at Christmas or postcards from vacation.
In fact, the average American couldn’t tell you the cost of a stamp. (It’s 50
cents, up a penny from the 2017 rate.)
So we are all to blame — Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps
disproportionately — for the struggles of the postal service.
And yet, reports of its demise have been exaggerated greatly. It
averted a 2009 proposal to cut back to five days of delivery a week and defied
reports that it was going out of business.
In 2015, it appointed its first female postmaster general. In
2017, it launched Informed Delivery, a free service that provides a digital
preview of the mail that will be landing in your mailbox later that day. And
last month it issued a set of scratch-and-sniff stamps.
The postal service offers a remarkable value proposition. For
just 50 cents, mail carriers will deliver your handcrafted message anywhere in
the United States. The distance from Anchorage to Miami spans nearly 5,000
miles, breaking down to a hundredth of a penny per mile.
Compare that with the Pony Express pricing in 1860 — $10 an ounce
— and, adjusting for inflation, you see a business that has improved drastically
its service at ever lower prices.
Amid continued murmurs of doom and gloom, of a failing business
model in a rewired communications landscape, I find it refreshing to consider
the USPS’s history, beginning in 1775 when Benjamin Franklin was appointed the
first postmaster general. The postal service is one of the few government
agencies explicitly authorized by the U.S. Constitution, and over the centuries
it has innovated again and again.
In 1845, it hired the first woman to carry mail, ferrying it from
the train depot to the post office in Charlestown, Md. By 1860, a woman worked
a contract route, a “tall, muscular woman” the Boston
Daily Globe dubbed “Brave Polly Martin.” In the winter, Martin said in
an interview, she often had to dig her horse out of snow drifts, and once she
was accosted by robbers. The man who grabbed her reins paid the price; she
“pounded him in the face” with her horsewhip, she said. “He had tackled the
wrong customer that time.”
The postal service pioneered airmail delivery, building an entire
aviation infrastructure years before passenger airline service became
profitable. Eddie Gardner, one of its first pilots, was nicknamed “Turkey Bird”
because his wobbly takeoffs resembled a turkey trying to fly. In 1918, he
tested a proposed route from New York to Chicago, breaking his nose in a rough
landing and paving the way for a regular New York-Chicago airmail service that
took effect the following year.
To appreciate the postal service’s history is to recognize how
much it has weathered and how far it has come — and, as a byproduct, to believe
in its future.
So, too, is it with the Catholic Church. Reports that we are
losing members faster than any other denomination in the U.S. are troubling.
But the oldest Christian faith offers a service like no other: food for the
soul.
To reimagine our future, we must remember our past — beginning
with an education for young Catholics, whose appreciation for history may
surprise you.
Where we are headed depends on where we have been.
Capecchi is a freelance writer from Inver Grove Heights,
Minn.