It was a wet and cold winter morning in 1895 when Walter L. Mobley opened up his general store, unlatching the doors that opened onto North Bloomfield’s Main Street and trading pleasantries with a few of the early customers before walking back behind the counter. They may have remarked on the crippling blizzard that had shut down the east coast or, more likely, complained about their own gloomy rain that had started the previous day and continued through the night.1 One of Mobley’s customers that Tuesday morning was Mrs. J. B. McKinney. The longtime resident of North Bloomfield was hoping to buy something from a Sacramento department store and wanted to pay for it through a postal money order, which would allow her to safely make her payment without sending actual money through the mail. Perhaps she did some last-minute calculations as she filled out her paperwork at the small post office window in the corner of the store. When she finished, Walter Mobley collected her money, stamped the form, and added it to a short stack of similar orders behind the counter. The stack would grow throughout the day: McKinney’s husband sent $35 to a fraternal lodge in a nearby town, the town butcher placed an order with a furniture store, and the owner of North Bloomfield’s hotel remitted a payment to his wife in San Francisco. In total, 14 money orders passed through the small corner window into Walter Mobley’s hands. Early the next morning a stagecoach picked up the town’s mail, sending those same money orders on their way to destinations as far away as Chicago and New York.2
The postal money orders that left North Bloomfield that day in 1895 added a few more drops to a river of financial transactions that flowed through the US Post. Twenty-three million postal money orders in total would pass through the mail that year, in aggregate worth some $169 million (the equivalent of roughly $5.4 billion in 2019).3 The money order system was one of the era’s most popular postal services, providing an affordable public channel for conducting small-scale transactions. It allowed people like Mrs. J. B. McKinney to remit small sums of money—no more than one hundred dollars—without having to send actual currency that might get stolen or lost in transit. To do so, the sender would simply go her local post office, fill out a short form, and hand over the funds she wanted to transmit to the postmaster. Then, for a small fee, the postmaster would mail the completed form to its recipient in order for them to redeem it at their local post office for the specified amount. Despite their distance, westerners could use money orders to send personal remittances both domestically and abroad. Just as importantly, they could use money orders to purchase goods and products from distant suppliers, a key channel through which the region participated in the United States’ growing consumer economy. Money orders, much like the larger US Post, quietly wove together the strands of national integration in the western United States.
The Post Office Department’s money order system was more than just a popular public service; it was also an efficient one. Unlike most government services, the Money Order Division was fiscally self-sustaining, paying for itself from the fees it charged the public. This was due in large part to the efforts of a technocrat named Charles Macdonald who managed the division for the first three decades of its existence. Between the system’s initial launch in 1864 and Macdonald’s retirement in 1893, he expanded the service while maintaining a relentless drive for economy and thrift. The Money Order Division was an exemplary government enterprise and an early pocket of centralized, technocratic management within the larger US Post. The story of its expansion is in some ways a triumphant narrative about the growing bureaucratic capacity of the American state and its ability to connect people and communities into national financial orbits.
There is a flip side to this story. The money order system was the exception rather than the rule across the American countryside. The very efficiency of the service was, in fact, predicated on limiting its accessibility and geographic coverage. Money orders were not available at every post office. As valuable as the service may have been, it was far from a universal one. This was especially true in the western United States, where the money order system’s cautious, constrained spread put it at odds with the wider expansionary ethos of the US Post. Finally, zooming down to the individual town of North Bloomfield provides a glimpse into a surprisingly regional pattern of where westerners were actually sending their money. Charting the geography of the money order system reveals the limits of both bureaucratization and national integration within the West’s gossamer network.
In May of 1864, Congress passed legislation establishing an experimental money order service, which the Post Office Department officially instituted in November. The architect behind this new initiative was Charles F. Macdonald, a former doctor and schoolteacher who was appointed the inaugural superintendent of the Money Order Division.4 It proved to be immediately popular, especially for Union Army troops wanting to remit wages back to families on the home front. The money order system protected funds by making them non-fungible. Rather than send physical currency, a person would mail a form to its recipient for them to redeem for the funds. To ensure safety, the form was only redeemable if: (a) the sender had identified the recipient, and (b) the recipient was at the post office specified by the sender. In short, a money order’s financial value was unlocked only once it reached its proper destination and its proper recipient; while in transit it was just a piece of paper. The service was meant to facilitate small and medium-sized remittances, with the maximum size of an order initially capped at $50.5 Although money orders were originally intended to facilitate remittances to family members or friends, Americans quickly started using them for long-distance consumer purchases such as subscribing to the San Francisco Chronicle, ordering a patent medicine, or paying a Freemason membership fee.6
Charles Macdonald wasted little time expanding his division, both domestically and overseas. In 1869, just five years after the domestic money order service was inaugurated, Macdonald brokered an agreement with Switzerland to allow money orders to travel between the two countries. Two years later, in 1871, Macdonald traveled to London and Berlin to finalize similar agreements with Great Britain and Germany, followed in short order by Canada, Italy, and France.7 Macdonald’s negotiations placed him within a larger cohort of government bureaucrats who were launching postal reforms across the globe. In Japan, for instance, the postal system became a core part of the state’s modernization efforts during the Meiji restoration that began in 1868. Its leading postal official, Maejima Hisoka, took a trip to the United States and Great Britain in 1870 in order to gather information before launching Japan’s own postal system the following year. Maejima borrowed heavily from the British Post while simultaneously tailoring his country’s postal system to meet the needs of the Meiji imperial government. A few years later, Maejima hired four US postal officials to help manage Japan’s postal operations.8 Maejima Hisoka and Charles Macdonald never met each other, but they were part of a growing transcontinental network of technocrats and civil servants.9
At home, Charles Macdonald’s Money Order Division continued to grow during the 1870s as he extended money order facilities to thousands of new post offices. But what this expansion meant for Americans living in those places and how they ended up using the new service are surprisingly difficult questions to answer. Postal officials collected annual statistics about the postal system—the number of postmasters or the mileage of mail routes in each state, for example—but it was much harder to track the billions of pieces of mail that Americans sent each year. Money orders were an exception. Due to their financial value and Charles Macdonald’s exacting bureaucratic oversight, postmasters had to keep detailed records about each money order that left their office, including the sender, the recipient, its destination, and the amount of money being transmitted. Macdonald’s office then aggregated this information into annual snapshots of the number and amount of money orders that were issued in every state in the country. Surviving records from individual money order offices are even more valuable than these annual statistics, offering a detailed glimpse of where people were sending their money. One set of surviving money order records comes from the boom town of Hamilton, Nevada.
Following the discovery of silver in east-central Nevada in the mid-1860s, a community of miners successfully petitioned the government to establish the Hamilton Post Office in 1868. Just three years after it was established, the office was already the fifth busiest in the state, and by 1872 the Post Office Department had extended money order facilities to Hamilton.10 A surviving registry book from the 1870s documenting every money order that left the office gives a snapshot of how the city’s residents used the service to remit their money. Over the course of 1878, for instance, Hamilton’s residents sent 865 money orders totaling $19,718 (half a million dollars in today’s terms), part of more than four hundred thousand dollars that Nevadans remitted through the service that year. As shown in Figure 6.1, Hamilton’s residents sent their money orders to nearly 130 different locations across the country. New York was far and away the most popular destination, with 30 percent of all of the town’s orders going to the nation’s leading commercial metropolis. San Francisco anchored Hamilton’s remittances on the other side of the country, along with a handful of other western locales in Nevada, Utah, and California. The rest of the town’s remittance network was scattered across an arc of towns and cities stretching from eastern Kansas and Nebraska through the Midwest and into New England.11 The remittances that flowed out of Hamilton, Nevada, in 1878 reflected just how eagerly westerners embraced the money order service. By 1880, the average westerner was sending more than twice as much money as his or her eastern peers on a per capita basis. Western residents like those in Hamilton, Nevada, had become the system’s “power users.”12
Figure 6.1 A National Remittance Network
Destinations of money orders sent from Hamilton, Nevada, in 1878, sized by the number of orders. Data transcribed from Register of Money Orders Issued at the Post Office of Hamilton, White Pine County, Nevada, MSS 2011/175 v.1, Bancroft Library, University of Berkeley, California.
By providing an affordable channel for small-scale personal remittances and consumer purchases, the money order system was a public counterweight to a private financial sector seen by many as exploitative and discriminatory. Wells, Fargo & Co., the region’s largest express company, had been carrying gold and specie across the region for decades. But it charged high rates for this service, and, unlike the US Post, it pegged its rates to the distance that the money traveled.13 Banks and other financial institutions, meanwhile, provided checks, drafts, and other financial instruments for westerners to transfer funds. But these services were often more expensive than an equivalent money order and were rarely available for sums less than five dollars. The money order system had no such constraints and was explicitly meant to facilitate these sorts of small-sized transactions.14
Postal money orders were not only cheaper than other financial services; they were also more widely available. In 1880, just a few dozen national bank branches operated in the entire Far West—compared to nearly three hundred in New York alone. The few banks that did operate in the West tended to be clustered in a small number of urban centers like San Francisco and Denver or second-tier cities like Sacramento and Boulder. Westerners who didn’t live in or near these cities and their financial institutions faced higher interest rates, scarce currency, and a general lack of credit and liquidity to buffer the period’s cyclical financial downswings. Not surprisingly, many of the region’s residents resented a financial system that was stacked against them. Although postal money orders were not available at every post office, the service operated in many more locations than the region’s banking infrastructure.15
Figure 6.2 Financial Infrastructure in the Far West
Post offices offering money order services (left) were much widespread than national banks (right) in the Far West in 1880. Bank locations come from Scott L. Fulford, “Replication Data for: How Important Are Banks for Development? National Banks in the United States 1870–1900,” V1 (July 1, 2015), distributed by Harvard Dataverse, http://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PQ6ILM, accessed May 31, 2017.
During the late 19th century the US Post became involved in one of the era’s most divisive political debates: the “currency issue.” Prior to the Civil War, the United States did not have an official national currency, instead allowing state and local banks to print their own notes. When war broke out, the federal government issued so-called “greenbacks” as its first national paper currency. Over the following decades debate swirled around the nation’s currency. So-called “hard money” advocates lobbied for the United States to peg its money supply to a gold standard and limit the number of greenbacks in circulation, which would benefit creditors, merchants, and financiers. “Soft money” advocates, drawn from the ranks of agrarian producers and debtors, thought that gold-backed currency unfairly benefited eastern financiers.16 In 1876, meanwhile, the US Treasury began to limit the amount of silver coin in circulation, leading to a shortage of small-value currency. The US Post provided several alternatives.17
Postage stamps acted as a kind of shadow currency during the 19th century. After all, stamps had a universally recognized and stable value, could be purchased and “spent” at any post office in the country, and (unlike scarce silver coins) could be easily combined into fractional sums. Stamps were such a common alternative that many companies accepted them as a valid form of payment.18 In 1880, officials proposed an idea for a more official kind of fractional currency: a “postal note.” Capped at a maximum of five dollars, postal notes could be transferred from person to person and redeemed at post offices across the country. Three years later Congress signed off on this new bureaucratic innovation and put it in the hands of Charles Macdonald’s Money Order Division. The department issued its first postal notes in September of 1883, and over the next nine months Americans sent nearly 3.7 million of them.19
The 19th-century US Post was one of the most admired, trusted, and popular public institutions in the country. This was doubly so for reformers who called for a more muscular state intervention in the national economy. As historian Charles Postel notes, “The striking success of the federal postal service in delivering the nation’s mail fueled reformers’ imaginations about the viability and necessity of state-run enterprise.”20 There were few more obvious examples of the “striking success” of the nation’s postal service than the money order system. Under Charles Macdonald the money order system was one of the most cost-effective divisions in the entire organization, largely paying for itself or generating a modest surplus each year. This was especially notable given that the Post Office Department as a whole operated at a deficit in 26 out of Macdonald’s 29 years in office. Set against this institutional backdrop, Macdonald’s management was the bureaucratic equivalent of turning water into wine.21
In 1893, Charles Macdonald finally decided to retire. With his wife ailing, he requested a move to a cooler climate and was transferred to a consulate in Ontario, Canada.22 Macdonald left behind a remarkable legacy. Over the course of three decades he had worked under no fewer than nine different presidential administrations and 17 postmasters general. From a wartime experiment the postal money order service had grown into an admired institution whose reach stretched both across the country and overseas. Fittingly, even during Macdonald’s last year in office he managed to hammer out additional agreements for money order exchanges with the British colonies of Bermuda and South Australia, the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg, and the Republic of Salvador. After decades of bureaucratic diplomacy by Macdonald and other officials, Americans could remit money orders to scores of different nations and colonies across the globe. That same year, Macdonald proudly reported that out of the 14,365,734 money orders that were sent domestically and abroad, just 113 had been improperly paid out to the wrong recipient—a 99.9992 percent success rate.23 Over Macdonald’s three-decade tenure he earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the federal government’s most competent and dedicated officials. In fact, his commitment to public service ran so deep that he later bequeathed two thousand dollars in his will to the Post Office Department to be used for “the improvement of the money-order system.”24
Charles Macdonald was the platonic ideal of a civil servant, from his technocratic management to his relentless pursuit of efficiency to his decades-long tenure in office. The Money Order Division, meanwhile, was a harbinger of the sort of administrative agencies that would flourish in the 20th century. One could imagine Macdonald discussing the finer points of quarterly audits with New Deal bureaucrats in the Works Progress Administration or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On first glance, then, the Money Order Division would appear to tell a story about a rising tide of bureaucratic reform. In reality, the money order system remained the exception rather than rule in the late 19th-century state.
For all of its success, the Money Order Division was a small bureaucratic nook within the Post Office Department. When Charles Macdonald stepped down in 1893, his division was processing just over 22 million domestic and international money orders and postal notes each year. That might seem like a large number, but it made up less than 1 percent of all the mail that traveled through the US Post that year.25 Newspapers and periodicals, by comparison, made up roughly 20-25% of the mail during the 1890s. And unlike money orders, periodicals traveled under heavily subsidized postage rates that wreaked havoc with the department’s annual balance sheet.26 From 1885 onwards, the department even carried local newspapers entirely free of charge, provided that they were delivered in the same county in which they were published.27 These local papers joined other sorts of mail that the department carried for free, including correspondence between public officials, congressional documents, census material, bulletins and reports from executive agencies, and even seed samples sent through the Department of Agriculture. As shown in Figure 6.3, this “free matter” dwarfed the volume of money orders and postal notes that traveled through the mail. Charles Macdonald may have ensured that the money order service was self-sustaining, but this was far from typical within the 19th-century postal system.28
Figure 6.3 A Drop in the Ocean
In the 12 months between July 1, 1892, and June 30, 1893, the Post Office Department transmitted more than 20 times as many pieces of mail free of charge than the combined number of money orders and postal notes sent through the mail. Data from 1893 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), xxxi, 688-91.
There is a fundamental tension between providing an efficient government service and providing an accessible government service. The money order system was efficient in part because it was not universally accessible. From the very beginning, Charles Macdonald’s drive for bureaucratic efficiency trumped the extension of the service into new places. From Macdonald’s perspective, a location needed to demonstrate that it could support the service. For example, it wasn’t until February of 1866—some 15 months after the service was first launched—that the first money order facilities appeared in the western United States. By that point there were already hundreds of money order offices operating in the eastern United States.29 The limited rollout in the West was due to the department’s exacting regulations about which post offices qualified for the service. A money order office, like a miniature bank, needed to have a large amount of cash on hand to redeem incoming money orders. The service, then, was originally confined to post offices that both generated a requisite amount of revenue and whose postmaster could supply a four-thousand-dollar bond to safeguard against loss or theft of funds. These conditions were easier to meet at post offices that served larger, more prosperous, and more densely populated communities. Rural parts of the country struggled to meet these qualifications.30
By 1880, a decade and a half after the money order service was first launched, just 265 post offices in the Far West had money order facilities (roughly 10 percent of all post offices). The state of Illinois alone had more money order post offices than all of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming combined.31 But the fact that a local post office lacked money order facilities didn’t mean the service was entirely unavailable to its community. After all, people could always travel to the nearest post office that did offer money order facilities. One way to evaluate the accessibility of the money order system is to combine post offices with money order facilities with other post offices that were within 10 miles of a money order office. Although not a perfect measurement, this offers a rough approximation of which communities could regularly access the money order system. This metric reveals a vast range of accessibility across the Far West. Residents of California and Colorado enjoyed the best “coverage” of money order facilities: 49 percent of post offices in California and 43 percent of post offices in Colorado either offered money order facilities or were within 10 miles of an office that did offer them. At the other end of the spectrum, just 8 percent of Arizona post offices either offered the service or fell within a 10-mile radius of a money order office.32
Figure 6.4 A Limited Service
The map on the left shows which communities could access the money order system in 1880, as defined by: (a) post offices offering money order facilities, or (b) post offices that fell within 10 miles of a money order post office. The map on the right shows communities that could not easily access the money order system, as represented by post offices that were more than 10 miles away from the nearest money order post office. Dina Hassan collected and analyzed this data from United States Post Office Department, 1880 United States Official Postal Guide, vol. 2, no. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880).
For a region accustomed to the capacious coverage of the US Post’s larger gossamer network, the money order service’s limited and cautious extension was both frustrating and unfamiliar. In 1867, one California correspondent grumbled about “the want of postal facilities for the transmission of money orders” in his particular town. It was a ridiculous complaint, given that his tiny local post office had nowhere near the necessary funds on hand to operate a money order service.33 A decade later, westerners were still grumbling. In 1877, Charles Macdonald had to write a letter to Montana’s outraged territorial delegate, Martin Maginnis, to explain why the paltry revenue at a small Montana post office disqualified it from becoming a money order office.34 Rural and western congressmen from both sides of the aisle nevertheless continued to lobby for an expansion of the money order service into less settled parts of the country. One congressman from Arkansas spoke for this rural bloc when he complained that the money order system shouldn’t just serve the “haughty dweller in the metropolitan city” but should also “follow the footsteps of the hardy pioneer wherever he may go in his brave and rugged march over our broad Western plains and distant mountains.”35
Many of the Congressmen who called for extending the money order service into rural areas were the very same politicians who closed ranks to defend the rampant overexpansion of the star route service during the 1870s. In both cases, they argued that the West’s right to postal facilities trumped the department’s desire for efficiency. The difference between the star route system and the money order system, however, was that Charles Macdonald’s specialized division did not have a mandate to provide a universally accessible service. The US Post did. In the years after the US Civil War, it extended into all the “nooks and corners” of the western United States.36 Even when the high costs of this expansion project became clear, department officials continued to reiterate their commitment to “providing adequate postal facilities for all communities, without regard to geographical location.”37 Charles Macdonald and his Money Order Division had no such commitments. He took geography into full account when it came to providing money order facilities, and many of the West’s remote, lightly populated, and cash-strapped communities simply did not meet his exacting qualifications. The cost-conscious technocrat was dedicated to providing an efficient service rather than a universally accessible one, which left rural areas effectively outside of its reach.
The money order system underscores the relationship between geography and administrative structure. The decentralized agency model produced a spatially expansive but unstable infrastructure. The bureaucratic model of the Money Order Division produced a much more geographically constrained system. But the two didn’t operate independently of one another. In many cases, Macdonald had to overlay the money order service onto the existing infrastructure of the gossamer network. This put his division’s top-down, technocratic administration at odds with the localized arrangements of the agency model. The clerical labor involved with processing money orders was much more onerous than selling stamps or sorting letters. Money orders required postmasters to fill out and mail multiple blank forms for every transaction, issue receipts to customers, keep those transactions tabulated in three separate account books, and remit excess funds to postal depositories at regular intervals. Whereas most postmasters had to settle up their postal accounts with department headquarters every three months, postmasters at money order offices had to send in their accounts on a weekly basis. For those accustomed to the agency model and its part-time, lightly regulated postal duties, working under the bureaucratic Money Order Division would have been jarring.38
Macdonald kept down costs in the money order system in part by limiting how much money postmasters received for their work. In the 1880s, postmasters received just 3.5 cents for every money order and one cent for every postal note that they processed.39 Postmasters complained that these fees were entirely insufficient. As one group of postmasters put it, money orders “consume one-third of the postmaster’s entire time . . . yet [bring] him, as a rule, not one-twentieth part of the income which he derives from his office.” Another postmaster noted that his post office had “recently been made a money order office which adds a very little to my income and a great deal to the responsibility and labor of the office.”40 The normal commissions and fees that came from a fourth-class post office might not have paid postmasters very well, but they also didn’t ask very much of them. Money orders paid just as poorly but required them to do much more work.
Charles Macdonald spent much of his career successfully fending off demands to expand the money order service in ways that would align it with the gossamer network’s more capacious coverage. During his last year in office, he finally relented. In 1892 the money order system underwent an unprecedented expansion to thousands of new places. The impetus for this expansion came from Macdonald’s boss at the time, Postmaster General John Wanamaker. The department-store magnate was a wealthy Republican operative who had received his position as a reward for funding Benjamin Harrison’s successful 1888 presidential campaign. Unexpectedly, Wanamaker became one the 19th century’s most important postal reformers. While in office he called on Congress to set up postal savings banks, institute a parcel post to compete with express companies, and even take over the nation’s telegraph and telephone network. These campaigns ultimately failed, but Wanamaker proved more successful in launching a series of quieter institutional reforms to reorganize and build up existing postal services. This included expanding residential mail delivery, bolstering the Railway Mail Service, and, finally, extending the money order system to thousands of new communities. In order to accomplish this last reform, the Post Office Department relaxed its longstanding regulations about which post offices qualified for the money order service by lowering the minimum revenue cutoff for a post office and reducing the bond a postmaster had to provide. Finally, it changed the previous “opt-in” mechanism for establishing a money order office in which a postmaster had to actively apply to become a money order post office. Moving forward, department officials in Washington would automatically enroll a post office in the system once it met the new qualifications. Seemingly minor administrative tweaks had a dramatic impact on the nation’s money order system. Over 12 months spanning 1892–93, the number of money order offices in the United States exploded from 12,000 to more than 18,000 offices—by far the biggest annual jump in the history of the division.41
The sudden expansion of the Money Order Division marked an important administrative shift by melding Charles Macdonald’s longstanding centralized bureaucratic management with the expansionary ethos of the larger gossamer network. Unlike the bottom-up expansion of post offices and mail routes driven by local communities, the sudden jump in money order facilities in 1892 was the result of a top-down initiative enacted through regulatory changes. With the stroke of a pen, thousands of communities across the country were suddenly able to access a valuable government service. But what did this newfound access mean for the people who lived in these places? How did they actually use this service and the nation-spanning financial connections it enabled? Answering these questions involves a familiar trip to the corner post office window of Walter Mobley’s general store in North Bloomfield.42
North Bloomfield could stand in for a number of western communities in the late 19th century. Located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the town lay within the regional orbits of several neighboring urban centers. A stage road connected it to nearby Nevada City, which in turn was linked to Sacramento via a 60-mile railroad line. From Sacramento, one could ride 90 miles to San Francisco. North Bloomfield, like so many towns in the West, was dependent on extractive industries. Gold seekers had founded the town in the early 1850s during the California Gold Rush, but over the following decades large-scale mining companies had replaced individual prospectors. One of the largest of these companies was the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company. In the late 1870s the company became the object of a famous lawsuit over its hydraulic mining operations, as farmers who lived downriver accused the company of creating silted runoff that had ruined their farms. In 1884, the California Supreme Court banned the practice of hydraulic mining in the state. As the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company pared down its operations, the town went into a slow decline. In the 1890s, however, it was still home to roughly one thousand residents, two schools, a church, and a smattering of small businesses—including the McKillican and Mobley General Store and post office.43
North Bloomfield was one of thousands of towns that benefited from the Post Office Department’s sweeping expansion of the money order service during the last year of Charles Macdonald’s administration. On October 18, 1892, some 60 California towns were officially inaugurated into the money order system, including the North Bloomfield Post Office.44 The new development was a welcome one for the town’s residents. Previously, sending a money order would have required them to embark on a 28-mile roundtrip journey over mountain roads to either North San Juan or Nevada City. Now, they could simply walk to Walter Mobley’s general store and immediately remit funds to some 18,000 different locations.45 Fortunately for historians, Mobley saved the copious paperwork from his time as the town’s postmaster, including individual records of the money orders that left his office. Much like the equivalent records saved by the postmaster in Hamilton, Nevada, the records from North Bloomfield capture each order’s recipient, destination, and sender along with the amount of money remitted. Included in these records are some nine hundred money orders that left the North Bloomfield Post Office over the course of eight months in 1895.46 These scraps of information offer a glimpse into a largely understudied corner of economic history and the commercial integration that was washing over the western United States.
Postal money orders present a bottom-up perspective on how individual people (albeit largely middle- and upper-class people) remitted money from a distance.47 The data from eight months’ worth of North Bloomfield money orders, fragmentary as they may be, show some surprising patterns. First, a majority of the town’s money orders went to companies and organizations rather than people. A system that had originated as a personal remittance service for Union soldiers had increasingly turned into a channel for commercial transactions. A list of the most common recipients for North Bloomfield’s money orders reads more like a business directory than a social network, littered with names like Weinstock Lubin & Co., Nolan Brothers Shoe Company, and Hale Brothers & Co. These money orders point to a larger economic transition unfolding in the late 19th century, as an older commercial system of regional markets gave way to a national consumer economy dominated by large companies, brand-name products, sophisticated advertising techniques, and large-scale distribution systems.48
The US Post provided some of the forgotten infrastructure of an expanding consumer culture, and no sector of this new economy was more dependent on the postal system than mail-order businesses.49 By the end of the 19th century, two companies had come to dominate the market. The Chicago-based firms of Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. mailed hundreds of thousands of catalogs to rural households and shipped goods across the countryside. In the words of one South Dakotan, “When you live ninety miles from a town, a Montgomery Ward or Sears Roebuck catalogue gets read more than the Bible or Shakespeare.”50 The mail-order industry, with its ability to provide local customers with a standardized array of mass-produced goods, exemplified the growing reach of a national consumer market. The residents of North Bloomfield in 1895 were in many ways ideal potential customers for money order companies. Constrained by the limited selection at Walter Mobley’s general store, they presumably pored over mail-order catalogs and sent money orders to the Chicago headquarters of Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. Except for one problem: they didn’t.51
Surprisingly, North Bloomfield’s residents sent just 11 money orders combined to Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. over the course of eight months in 1895 (around one percent of all orders). If the two national mail-order behmoths had come to dominate the long-distance retail market one would have expected them to have a much larger foothold in a town like North Bloomfield. Instead, its residents largely ignored them. Despite expectations about a rapidly nationalizing consumer culture, major commercial centers in the eastern United States were eclipsed by a regional network of retailers. San Francisco and Sacramento were far and away the most popular destinations for North Bloomfield’s money order purchases, towering over the eastern metropolises of Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. If the money order system was like a network of streams and rivers running out of North Bloomfield, most of its water stayed pooled in Northern California.
Figure 6.5 Regional Streams
This chart shows the number of money orders from North Bloomfield, California, that were sent to businesses located in different cities during February, March, April, June, August, September, October, and December of 1895. Destinations in northern California (dark gray) outnumber all other destinations (light gray) by a factor of three to one. Jenny Barin and Alex Ramsey transcribed data from Money Order Applications—January–December 1895, box 6, folders 12–16, Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California.
So if North Bloomfield’s residents weren’t sending money orders to the mail-order giants of Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co., where were they sending their money? The single most common recipient of their money orders was a Sacramento department store that has long since faded into obscurity named Weinstock, Lubin & Co. Over eight months in 1895, North Bloomfield’s residents sent 123 money orders there, more than 10 times the number they sent to the two Chicago mail-order companies combined. Harris Weinstock and David Lubin, Jewish half-brothers from Poland, had launched their store in 1874 as a one-room dry goods shop. By the 1890s it had become one of the largest retail outfits in the western United States, with a dozen different departments housed in a three-story building that covered an entire city block in downtown Sacramento.52 Department stores like Weinstock, Lubin & Co. were part of the same consumer revolution that had produced the mail-order industry. Whereas mail-order companies brought rural Americans within the orbit of national markets, department stores performed a similar function for urban consumers.53 Weinstock, Lubin & Co., however, blurred the boundary between these two types of businesses. The Sacramento department store was an urban retailer that simultaneously catered to a rural clientele. And it did so through the US Post.
Harris Weinstock and David Lubin had long relied on the mail. In 1878, they took out a front-page advertisement in the Sacramento Daily Record-Union announcing a new retail division of their dry goods store. In it, they highlighted their burgeoning mail-order department by assuring customers that “a person living hundreds of miles away can obtain as much for their money as one who applies personally to our store.”54 Three years later, the company’s “Country Order” department was processing hundreds of orders a day. And by 1891, the company claimed that their annual catalog reached a quarter of a million readers “from New Mexico to Washington.”55 Although certainly inflated, the claim testified to the importance of the US Post to the store’s business model. Weinstock, Lubin & Co. wasn’t unique in this regard, but its regional geography made it especially reliant on the mail. Large eastern department stores like Macy’s in New York or Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia also offered mail-order services, but Sacramento was not New York or Philadelphia. With fewer than 30,000 residents, Sacramento wasn’t even Hoboken, New Jersey. Instead, Weinstock, Lubin & Co. had to cultivate a more dispersed clientele.56
The US Post gave Harris Weinstock and David Lubin the tools with which to build a far-reaching customer base. It did so in three ways: advertising in newspapers, mailing customers their catalogs, and collecting payments via money orders. First, the store’s newspaper advertisements were heavily subsidized by the US Post. Newspapers and periodicals traveled under a second-class postage rate of one cent per pound, or 1/32nd the price of sending letters under first-class postage. This benefited not only the newspaper and magazine industry but also companies like Weinstock, Lubin & Co. that advertised in their pages.57 Second, the store’s catalogs traveled under third-class postage rates reserved for books and other printed material. Although not as steeply discounted as second-class mail, third-class postage was still less expensive than mailing an equivalent letter. Just as importantly for a company whose clientele was scattered across the Far West, distance did not factor into any of these postage rates: newspapers and store catalogs could travel hundreds or even thousands of miles for the same discounted price.58 Third, Weinstock, Lubin & Co. collected payments from their customers using postal money orders. This service allowed their customers—many of whom had never set foot inside their store—to make purchases from long distances without fear of their money getting lost or stolen in transit.59 Weinstock, Lubin & Co. were well aware of their reliance on the US Post and their remote customer base: one of its 1891 advertisements trumpeted, “We value to the utmost our out-of-town post office acquaintances. Uncle-Sam is our hard-working ally and we have no disposition to make his tasks lighter.” The advertisement included an illustration of a particular kind of “post office acquaintance” that had become central to the store’s success: two well-dressed women walking into a post office to place their orders.60
By the 1890s, most of Weinstock, Lubin & Co.’s retail items were aimed at women. Its catalogs were stuffed with items for female consumers, from “a splendid knockabout summer skirt” that sold for $1.25 to a best-selling line of petticoats that were “the most successful 50-cent item of this kind ever introduced.”61 The store offered gloves and hat pins, ribbons and sewing machines, shawls and parasols. Male customers were almost an afterthought in its catalogs; the first item exclusively targeted at men didn’t appear until some 50 pages into one of its catalogs.62 Consequently, women made up the bulk of the store’s customers. In North Bloomfield, for instance, women sent 80 percent of the town’s money orders to Weinstock, Lubin & Co.63 Although it’s unknown what women like Julia Hook or Maggie Watson were buying from the store, their purchases were part of an ascendant consumer culture. Women were a central part of this cultural and economic shift, but most of the attention paid to their roles as consumers has focused on urban spaces like retail shops, department stores, tearooms, dance halls, and restaurants.64 Yet the same gendered consumption practices that were reshaping New York City were also penetrating homes in small towns like North Bloomfield. They just happened to take place at a distance. Catalogs from Weinstock, Lubin & Co. were marketed in part as fashion guides for women “who want to know ‘what’s going on’ in the world of dress.”65 The company filled its catalogs with commentary such as: “Uwanta skirt lengths have gained an enviable reputation with California women” or “The kimono has taken the place of a dressing sacques to a great extent throughout the East.”66 The women of North Bloomfield may have lived along a dusty mountain stage road, 60 miles away from the nearest major city. They might not have been able to regularly browse the aisles of urban department stores. But they could still stay connected to national consumer shifts through the distance-shrinking medium of the US Post.
The postal connections that ran between North Bloomfield and Sacramento present something of a puzzle. In an age of national integration, why did so many of the town’s consumer purchases never leave northern California? How did a Sacramento department store manage to keep mail-order behemoths like Montgomery Ward at bay? After all, the Chicago company could use the US Post to reach North Bloomfield just as easily as a store in Sacramento. It too could advertise in newspapers, mail out catalogs, and collect money orders. The difference lay in how merchandise traveled compared to mail. Prior to the advent of parcel post in 1913, the Post Office Department only transported goods and products that weighed less than four pounds.67 Its “fourth-class” postage rate for parcels and packages was also quite expensive, so most long-distance retailers turned to railroad and express companies to send the majority of goods. Unlike the US Post, private transportation companies factored distance into their rates. The farther an item traveled, the more they charged.68 This meant that national mail-order houses headquartered two thousand miles away from California simply couldn’t compete with Weinstock, Lubin & Co. on shipping costs to the region. Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Co. may have captured the hearts and money of midwestern farmers in Iowa or Nebraska, but the challenges of distance and geography continued to limit its ability to make inroads in the Far West.69 If the late 19th century was an age of expanding national connections and a growing consumer market, the spatial patterns that these connections produced could remain quite regional.
By nearly any measure, the American West of the 1890s was far more integrated into the rest of the country than it had been at any point in its history. Thousands of miles of new railroad tracks and telegraph lines connected the West and East to a degree that had been unthinkable just a few decades before. The incorporation of six new states between 1888 and 1890 gave westerners new clout in national politics. The region’s mining, livestock, and other extractive industries linked it to distant manufacturers, markets, and financiers.70 So how did these accelerating forces of national integration change the spatial practices of individual westerners? Postal money orders are one way to understand the changes that had unfolded in the region. Comparing North Bloomfield’s money orders to earlier postal records from Hamilton, Nevada, provides a useful snapshot of where and how westerners remitted money at two different points in the region’s history. The two mining towns were not perfectly analogous. In 1895, North Bloomfield had existed for some four decades but was in the midst of a steady if gradual decline. In 1878, Hamilton was still a new and booming population center. Nevertheless, money order records from the two communities capture some of the changes that had unfolded over the intervening two decades.
The nation’s money order infrastructure had expanded considerably between 1878 and 1895. Whereas there were just over four thousand money order post offices in 1878, by 1895 that number had jumped nearly fivefold to some 20,000 locations.71 Over that time the Post Office Department had increased the maximum size of an order from $50 to $100 while also lowering its fees; a money order that would have cost 15 cents in 1878 dropped in cost to just three cents in 1895.72 Those same orders also covered ground faster than ever. Over the intervening years the time it took the mail to travel across the country from New York to San Francisco fell by more than two full days.73 In short, North Bloomfield’s residents in 1895 could remit funds to more places, more quickly, and more cheaply than Hamilton’s residents in 1878. The money order system was the very embodiment of the national integration that had reshaped the West by the end of the 19th century.
Given all of this, one would expect North Bloomfield’s remittance network to encompass a much more expansive geography in 1895 than Hamilton’s network in 1878. Instead, a map comparing money orders from the two towns reveals precisely the opposite pattern. As seen in Figure 6.6, North Bloomfield’s remittance network was much more geographically concentrated in 1895 than Hamilton’s network was in 1878. Despite North Bloomfield sending around three hundred more remittances over the same eight months than Hamilton, all of those extra money orders went to fewer total locations.74 They also didn’t travel very far. Whereas most of Hamilton’s money orders were sent more than one thousand miles away (many to the eastern United States), the majority of North Bloomfield’s orders stayed firmly within a 150-mile radius. Rather than a national consumer economy pulling North Bloomfield into an ever more expansive commercial orbit, it was as if a giant magnet kept the town’s remittances anchored to northern California. Integration, counterintuitively, had produced a narrowing of spatial practices.
Figure 6.6 National Integration and the Narrowing of Commercial Space
These two maps compare the 571 money orders sent from Hamilton, Nevada, during eight months in 1878 (top) versus the 876 money orders sent from North Bloomfield, California, during the same eight months in 1895 (bottom). Despite sending more orders and having access to many more potential destinations, North Bloomfield’s residents sent their money orders to fewer distinct destinations. Both maps only display orders from the following months: February, March, April, June, August, September, October, and December. Hamilton data was transcribed from Register of Money Orders Issued at the Post Office of Hamilton, White Pine County, Nevada, Bancroft Library, University of Berkeley, California. North Bloomfield data was transcribed by Jenny Barin and Alex Ramsey from Money Order Applications, January–December 1895, box 6, folders 12–16, Malakoff Diggins State Park Historical Collection, California Department of Parks and Recreation, Sacramento, California.
The remittance networks from North Bloomfield and Hamilton are based on fragmentary scraps of information—just eight months’ worth of data from two western towns. The remittances from another town or from another year might look very different. But the differences between these two towns point to a larger lesson: national integration does not always unfold as expected. When historians and geographers talk about integration, they often conflate the capacity for connections with spatial practices themselves. Potential connections are not the same as realized ones. The fact that North Bloomfield’s residents could send money orders to nearly five times as many locations as their predecessors in Hamilton didn’t mean they actually did so.75 The growth of a national mass market, the extension of transportation infrastructure, the rise of industry and capital, the spread of the US Post—all of these developments integrated the American West into the larger scale of the nation. But this did not necessarily produce a similar expansion of spatial practices. The maturation of the Anglo-American West, at least in northern California, meant that in certain respects the region had become more self-contained and self-reliant by the 1890s than it had been just two decades before. Why order a petticoat from a national mail-order catalog if one could buy it for a lower price from a Sacramento department store? Why pay for a subscription to the Chicago Tribune if the same standardized news content appeared in the regional Sacramento Daily Union? From the perspective of westerners, the need for individual connections with the rest of the country was not as pressing as it had once been.76
Nor, too, did integration always follow a relentless upward trajectory toward more and more connections. Some parts of the West like California grew by leaps and bounds in the late 19th century, but other areas declined or collapsed entirely. This was especially true in the extraction-driven interior. And when people left, so too did the US Post and its gossamer network. Hamilton, Nevada, was one of those places. Between the 1870s and the 1890s the town underwent a precipitous decline. At its peak in 1875, the town’s postmaster earned $2,100 a year as a full-time, salaried government official. Twenty years later, the town’s post office had been downgraded to a fourth-class office, and its postmaster’s compensation had dropped to less than $250 in part-time commissions. Whereas Hamilton had once been a hub for six different mail routes in the 1870s, by 1896 it was serviced by a single mail line. At least the Hamilton Post Office stayed operational, which is more than could be said of many nearby communities. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, the area surrounding Hamilton had turned into a graveyard of discontinued post offices: Eberhart, Treasure City, Mineral City, Duck Creek, Pinto, Diamond, Egan Canyon, Vanderbilt. In terms of its postal infrastructure, this particular corner of the West had grown less connected, not more, to the wider world.77
Figure 6.7 Shrinking Connections
Postal service in Hamilton, Nevada, decreased from six mail routes in 1876 (left) to one mail route in 1896 (right). Left: Post Office Department, Post Route Map of the States of California and Nevada (Washington, DC, December 1, 1876). 1:760,320. Located in National Archives II, College Park, Maryland, RG 75, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Map 278. Right: United States Post Office Department, Composite: Post Route Map of the States of California and Nevada (Washington, DC, June 1, 1896). 1:696,960. Available online at the David Rumsey Map Collection, https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/bkp613, accessed April 19, 2020.
The postal money order system during the late 19th century was certainly a force for national integration, in both the public and private sectors. Its bureaucratic structure under Charles Macdonald was part of a small but growing movement for a more centralized kind of governance managed by professional civil servants and technocrats. It was a type of administration that diverted power away from local individuals and networks and into the hands of national administrators in Washington. The money order system itself concurrently facilitated a process of commercial integration in the private sector as well. Providing a public service for remitting small amounts of money allowed companies and consumers to conduct long-distance transactions cheaply, safely, and reliably. Yet for all of its distance-shrinking, integrative properties, the money order system was notable also for its geographical limits. Macdonald’s technocratic commitment to cost-effective administration meant that for the first three decades of its existence, the money order service was constrained to a relatively small number of densely populated places. It operated a skeletal infrastructure compared to the sprawling coverage of the wider US Post.
Not until Postmaster General John Wanamaker launched a broader expansionary campaign in the early 1890s did the money order system extend its coverage into smaller, more rural places like North Bloomfield. This expansion was part of an important period of institutional reform under Wanamaker’s administration that attempted to both modernize the US Post and expand its purview within the nation’s political economy—exactly the kind of model offered by Charles Macdonald and the Money Order Division. But the history of the money order system is an important reminder about the limits of these types of reforms. Inside the federal government’s largest organization, the reformist vision for a centralized administrative state faced fundamental challenges during the 1890s. Across the American countryside, the US Post’s localized and decentralized structure still reigned supreme. In tens of thousands of rural places, the forces of institutional reform and national integration were shaped by the spatial and administrative arrangements of the 19th century’s gossamer network. Change, however, was on the horizon. Ultimately, it would come in the form of a radical new kind of mail service that Postmaster General Wanamaker first proposed in 1891: Rural Free Delivery.