Charting the annual tally of post offices in the United States produces a pattern that looks like a roller coaster ride. It starts at the ground level in 1789 with just 75 post offices before steadily gaining elevation over the next 70 years. The ride briefly jolts down around the Civil War before resuming its dizzying climb up all the way up to 76,946 post offices in 1901. This is the peak of the roller coaster, that thrilling moment before the stomach-churning drop. The ride then plunges down over the following decade before embarking on a more gradual but steady decline for the remainder of the twentieth century. By 2000, there were fewer than 28,000 post offices operating in the United States, despite serving a population that had nearly quadrupled over the previous hundred years. What caused this precipitous drop from its 1901 peak? The answer hinges on a single three-letter acronym: RFD, or Rural Free Delivery.1
Figure 7.1 The Rollercoaster
The number of post offices operating in the United States peaked on June 30, 1901, with 76,946 offices. United States Postal Service Historian, “Pieces of Mail Handled, Number of Post Offices, Income, and Expenses Since 1789,” United States Postal Service, February 2020, https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pieces-of-mail-since-1789.pdf, accessed April 23, 2020.
Today, door-to-door delivery defines the modern mail service. Carriers for the US Postal Service transport millions of pieces of mail each day directly to specific addresses where people live or work. In the 19th century, however, sending or receiving mail usually meant making a trip to the local post office. It wasn’t until 1863 that the Post Office Department instituted its first experiment with residential mail delivery, first offering the service only in large cities with more than 50,000 people.2 Over the following decades Congress gradually lowered this population cutoff to 10,000 people, so that by 1890 letter carriers were making door-to-door deliveries in some 450 cities across the country.3 Limiting residential delivery to these urban areas allowed the postal system to keep down costs: the denser the population, the fewer letter carriers needed to be hired. But what about the tens of millions of people who didn’t live in cities? Rural Americans were left to trek to the nearest post office in order to get their mail. The urban/rural gap in mail delivery first started to close under the administration of Postmaster General John Wanamaker in the early 1890s, as he argued that extending residential mail delivery into the countryside would bring “countless benefits for rural dwellers.”4 Although Wanamaker himself made little headway in securing funding from Congress, his administration planted the initial seeds for universal door-to-door mail service. Following successful experiments with the service during the late 1890s, Congress began to enlarge its operations and finally voted to establish Rural Free Delivery as a permanent service within the Post Office Department in 1902.5
Rural Free Delivery fundamentally altered the spatial structure of both the US Post and the rural United States by shifting the basic unit of delivery from a post office to an individual residence. Once people didn’t have to travel to the nearest post office to get their mail, the Post Office Department was able to consolidate its network by shutting down thousands of rural post offices—hence the steady decline in the number of post offices over the twentieth century. The effects of Rural Free Delivery were profound. Residential mail delivery brought Americans within an expanding orbit of national markets, politics, and culture. Daily newspapers, rather than weekly editions, became a new possibility for those living on RFD routes, and they began to subscribe to many more periodicals than their peers who didn’t have door-to-door delivery. Rural mail carriers also delivered mail-order catalogs directly to customers’ homes, allowing them to order from national companies like Sears, Roebuck & Co. or from regional stores like Sacramento’s Weinstock, Lubin & Co. By extending these connections to the doorstep of rural Americans, Rural Free Delivery stood poised to deliver a fatal blow to the isolation that had defined rural life for centuries.6
Perhaps not surprisingly, Rural Free Delivery has become a powerful symbol of the nation’s transition from its agrarian past into a modern, interconnected society.7 For more specialized scholars of the American state, Rural Free Delivery embodied a wider shift toward bureaucratic governance during the early twentieth century’s Progressive Era. From the municipal level up to the federal government, reformers during this period extended the reach of government through the guiding hand of professional experts. As a top-down initiative launched by department administrators, Rural Free Delivery has become a canonical example of what one scholar describes as entrepreneurial civil servants carving out “bureaucratic autonomy” independent of politicians or special interests.8
At first glance, the rise of Rural Free Delivery in the 1890s and early 1900s should have sounded a death knell for both the gossamer network and the agency model that powered it. But the geography of this service and its expansion reveals a far messier story. The initial extension of Rural Free Delivery was not universal. Instead, its rollout led to yawning disparities in the US Post’s underlying geography. In some parts of the country Rural Free Delivery revolutionized mail service and postal administration. Other areas, especially the western United States, were left virtually untouched by this new system. There was no clean break with the past, no triumphant march into modernity for the western postal network and the American state.
The origins of Rural Free Delivery were closely connected to the rise of the People’s Party (also known as the Populists) during the early 1890s, and both were the result of a decades-long wave of agrarian reform. During the late 19th century the United States rapidly transitioned into an industrial world power. As manufacturers, financiers, and corporations exercised more and more influence over the national economy, farmers and small producers increasingly called on the government to even the playing field. By the late 1880s, the movement had turned into a full-fledged political insurgency. The Populists championed an activist state to reign in the excesses and abuses of private markets and, more specifically, to work for the benefit of rural Americans. For Populist reformers, no other government institution embodied this ethos more than the Post Office Department. In 1892, the People’s Party convened in Omaha, Nebraska, and drafted a party plank that explicitly allied it with the US Post: “We believe that the power of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify.”9
Populist reformers found an unlikely ally in the postmaster general John Wanamaker, a fabulously wealthy Philadelphia businessman best known for founding one of the nation’s largest department stores. Wanamaker seemed like exactly the sort of man who would represent the interests of eastern financiers and manufacturers. Instead, Wanamaker—who fashioned himself a “country boy”—became a vocal advocate for the rural United States. In 1890, Wanamaker convinced Congress to appropriate $10,000 in order to launch an experiment with Rural Free Delivery. Wanamaker used the funds to inaugurate a temporary door-to-door mail service along 46 rural mail routes in the spring of 1891. Just as importantly, Wanamaker began drumming up a widescale campaign to lobby for his new initiative. Agrarian organizations such as the Farmer’s Alliance immediately embraced the cause, recognizing that residential mail delivery would directly benefit the nation’s rural residents. A flood of petitions from farmers poured into Congress. These petitions painted residential mail delivery as a panacea for the ills of rural America: it would alleviate the boredom and isolation of country life, allow farmers to more easily sell their crops, link businessmen to distant markets, and stem the tide of people who were vacating the countryside for the nation’s increasingly congested cities.10
John Wanamaker’s early venture into Rural Free Delivery was a top-down initiative implemented by government officials in Washington, DC—a sharp departure from the typically decentralized pattern of rural postal expansion. It was part of a broader effort to bolster the power of postal administrators and bring the system’s operations under greater centralized supervision. Although many of Wanamaker’s boldest proposals never gained traction—such as nationalizing the telegraph industry and placing it under the control of the Post Office Department—he was more successful with quieter sorts of internal reforms. For instance, in 1891 Wanamaker launched an ambitious campaign to gather information about the nation’s more than 60,000 post offices. The department distributed standardized questionnaires to several thousand postmasters located at county seats and then asked them to conduct on-site inspections of all of the post offices in their particular county. Within a year, these county-seat postmasters had conducted in-person surveys of around 70 percent of the nation’s post offices. Although this still left some 20,000 post offices unaccounted for, it was nevertheless a notable surge in the administrative capacity of postal officials to monitor and regulate its dispersed communications network.11 A 19th-century system that had long been defined by its decentralized structure and local autonomy was ever so slowly being brought under tighter centralized administration.
Unfortunately for John Wanamaker and his allies in the populist movement, the first foray of Rural Free Delivery in 1891 coincided with a new legislative session of Congress. In the previous fall elections the Democratic Party had won back control of the House of Representatives and its power over appropriations. The Democratic majority was not interested in helping John Wanamaker, a noted Republican partisan. Although the postmaster general may have been a bold reformer in certain respects, these impulses did not extend to civil service reform. One the era’s most notorious “spoilsmen,” Wanamaker oversaw the removal of tens of thousands of Democratic postmasters during his administration. Perhaps not surprisingly, his requests to extend Rural Free Delivery were largely ignored by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. The initial venture had been an important landmark for Rural Free Delivery, but it largely sputtered for the remainder of his administration.12
In 1892, the Democratic Party took back the presidency, and with it control of the Post Office Department. John Wanamaker was promptly replaced by Wilson Bissell. A reformer of a different sort, the new postmaster general focused on pruning back the department’s costs rather than expanding its services. Bissell dismissed Rural Free Delivery as an extravagance, writing in his 1893 annual report that “the Department would not be warranted in burdening the people with such a great expense.” The service languished until he was replaced by a new postmaster general in 1895 who proved more amenable to the initiative. The following year Congress granted new funds to extend Rural Free Delivery, allowing the department to institute 82 new door-to-door routes on a temporary basis in 1896.13
When Congress took up debate over Rural Free Delivery during the 1890s, it faced two options for how to operate these new rural mail routes. The US Post could continue to contract with private companies to carry the mail, or it could use salaried mail carriers who were subject to civil service regulations. Essentially, it could use the agency model or a civil service bureaucracy.14 These two options mapped onto the two primary ways in which the nation’s mail traveled by land, through the star route service and the Railway Mail Service. The Railway Mail Service was by all accounts the gold standard of professionalized administration within the Post Office Department.15 It employed a full-time staff of postal clerks and agents who were subject to rigorous examinations. By the 1890s, these employees had developed a cohesive esprit de corps within the framework of an effective and hierarchical bureaucracy. In short, it was the polar opposite of the star route service and its scattered collection of lightly regulated private mail contractors. The Railway Mail Service and the star route service were also on different trajectories. After years of rampant growth, the star route service leveled off during the last two decades of the 19th century. Some of this was due to cleaning up the corruption in the contracting division, but the stagnation was also due to the ascendancy of the Railway Mail Service. Between 1880 and 1900, the US post’s railway mileage more than doubled, while its star route mileage grew by only 14 percent. Although the star route system was still more geographically expansive than postal railway routes, it had nevertheless lost ground. By the end of the century the Post Office Department was spending more than seven times as much on its railroad service than its star routes.16 Ultimately, lawmakers took their cues from the ascendant Railway Mail Service and decided to use salaried employees rather than private mail contractors to operate Rural Free Delivery routes.17
The growth of the Railway Mail Service was part of a slow shift toward more centralized administration within the Post Office Department. One can see these changes play out on the ground at Bell Ranch, a large cattle operation located in northeastern New Mexico Territory. The ranch’s owner managed to obtain a post office in 1888 that was, in many ways, emblematic of the agency model and the gossamer network. It was a small-scale operation, one of New Mexico’s smallest post offices, whose main clientele consisted of the ranch’s employees.18 It was also a privatized operation, with the ranch’s on-site business manager doubling as its postmaster. And it was a remote post office, located dozens of miles away from the nearest settlement. Despite its tiny size and relative isolation, Bell Ranch was nevertheless connected to the rest of the postal system by a star route contractor who picked up and delivered its mail three times a week.19
For much of the 19th century, this kind of rural post office would have been largely left alone by Washington officials. Yet over 13 months spanning 1896 to 1897, postal officials in Washington, DC, repeatedly reprimanded the postmaster and manager of the Bell Ranch Post Office. The first salvo came from the auditor of the Post Office Department, who told him that his quarterly account paperwork was late and that he had 12 days to file it or he would be fined. The following year, postal officials chastised him for not accurately recording the departure and arrival times of the mail. “Be more careful in the future,” admonished one official, or he would risk being removed from office. The postmaster’s sloppiness wasn’t particularly surprising, given that he was probably more concerned with managing Bell Ranch’s livestock operations than its postal facilities. What was surprising was the fact that postal administrators actually caught these discrepancies. Just one decade earlier, Postmaster General William Vilas had tried, and failed, to dispatch inspectors to review the on-site operations of all of the nation’s tens of thousands of post offices. Now, officials were successfully monitoring what time the mail left a tiny post office in rural New Mexico.20 Of course, more centralized oversight brought some benefits for the nation’s postmasters. A few weeks after his latest reprimand, the Bell Ranch postmaster received a brand-new map of surrounding post offices and mail routes from the Post Office Topographer’s Office in Washington, DC. It had been mailed on October 7 and reached his post office just five days later. Walter Nicholson, the former director of the Topographer’s Office, would have been astounded were he still alive. A mapmaking division that had once struggled to collect even basic geographical information about the western postal system was now providing up-to-date maps to a tiny post office on its western periphery.21
The Bell Ranch Post Office exemplified an institution that was extending centralized management not just over the network’s operations but also over its expansion. Like so many westerners before him, the Bell Ranch postmaster had submitted a request to the department to establish a new, one-hundred-mail route that would better serve his office. In the spring of 1897, postal officials notified him that they were denying his request. They had solicited opinions about the proposed route from neighboring communities, weighed competing needs, and determined that an expansion of mail service was not warranted. Compared to the rampant and largely unchecked postal expansion of earlier decades, this unremarkable bit of bureaucratic administration was in fact a noteworthy departure. Local communities on the periphery had long determined the course and speed of the gossamer network’s expansion, but by century’s end that balance had started to shift.22 By the end of the 1890s, administrators were exercising a degree of regulatory oversight over the day-to-day operations and growth of the nation’s postal network that would have been inconceivable just a few decades earlier.
Rural Free Delivery followed a similarly exacting, top-down model of expansion. Unlike the approval process for new post offices and star routes, postal officials established explicit guidelines for establishing a new RFD route. Any community that wanted the service first had to petition its congressman, who would then send it on to the department with their own recommendation. The difference, however, was what came next. Once postal officials had received the request, they would send out a special agent to visit the area and collect information about local conditions, including literacy rates and the quality of roads.23 A new RFD route had to meet very specific criteria: it had to be between 20 and 30 miles in length, run on roads that were passable during all seasons, and serve at least one hundred families who would otherwise have to travel between two and 12 miles to a post office.24 If the postal agent decided that the area could indeed support an RFD route, he would then map the course of the route and hire a mail carrier to begin service. Compared to the decentralized, haphazard process by which the department had extended its gossamer network over the preceding decades, the extension of Rural Free Delivery was a top-down project managed by agents, inspectors, and other postal officials with an eye toward efficiency and cost-consciousness.25 It was a remarkable transfer of power from local private agents on the periphery to bureaucrats at the system’s center in Washington, DC.
The shift in administrative power over the nation’s mail routes had been quietly underway for the better part of two decades. For most of its existence, the Post Office Department had to defer to Congress’s “postal power,” which meant that it couldn’t legally provide mail service on any route that Congress had not officially designated as a post road.26 By the 1880s, the sheer scope and breakneck pace of postal expansion had created an administrative bottleneck. Not only did Congress have to spell out the geography of every new mail route; it also had to approve alterations to existing ones—all of which were packed into the annual post road bill that could encompass thousands of different routes. Even then, the Post Office Department still had ultimate discretion over whether or not to actually provide mail service on these routes. By one legislator’s estimate in 1883, he and his colleagues had established some 50,000 official post roads that the department had essentially ignored: “If there ever was a bill that is a farce year by year, it is this bill.”27 So in the spring of 1884, Congress relinquished its postal power by declaring all public roads and highways eligible for mail service. It marked a quiet handoff in administrative authority over the nation’s mail routes from the legislative branch to the Post Office Department, helping to lay the groundwork for Rural Free Delivery’s centralized rollout the following decade.28
By 1899 postal officials were launching a landmark experiment to provide an entire county in Maryland with RFD routes. The success of this venture prompted Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith to lobby Congress to make Rural Free Delivery a permanent and widespread feature of the US Post. In his annual report to Congress in 1900, he described the burgeoning service as “the most salient, significant, and far-reaching feature of postal development in recent times.”29 Plenty of people in the Post Office Department would have agreed with Smith’s assessment, but not all of them saw this as a good thing. Rural Free Delivery was a direct challenge not only to mail contractors on existing star routes but also to the nation’s legions of small-town postmasters. Door-to-door mail delivery disrupted the agency model that had fueled postal operations in the countryside. If people no longer had to travel as frequently to their local post office, this meant lower commissions and fees and less foot traffic into a postmaster’s private store or business. As one postmaster from Utah complained in 1899, a recently established RFD route near his post office “seriously interferes with the patronage of this office, and it does not seem fair or just to me, as it passes my office, collecting over an extent of about 4 square miles of my patronage.”30 The postmaster saw the surrounding area as a kind of personal fiefdom within which residents paid tribute at his post office, and Rural Free Delivery threatened that territorial arrangement. For all of his complaints, the Utah postmaster was one of the luckier ones. At least he retained his position after the launch of a nearby RFD route. For other postmasters, the adoption of Rural Free Delivery ended their time in public office. Residential delivery meant that people no longer needed a post office in such close proximity to their homes, which meant that the department could in turn consolidate the number of post offices in the surrounding area.
In 1902, Congress officially institutionalized Rural Free Delivery and appropriated more than four million dollars for the department to launch the service, marking a turning point for both the spatial and administrative structure of the US Post. New RFD routes spread like wildfire in the subsequent years.31 By 1910, there were more than 40,000 of these routes connecting millions of households across the countryside. The department’s RFD budget that year was $37 million—a long way from the initial $10,000 appropriation Postmaster General John Wanamaker had been granted to start testing the service two decades earlier.32 The explosion of RFD routes caused a corresponding contraction in the number of rural post offices: the nation’s postal system shed some 18,000 post offices in the decade following Rural Free Delivery’s 1902 launch. The spread of this new service didn’t necessarily change the US Post’s sprawling geographical coverage—if anything, it extended its reach all the way to the doorsteps of Americans—but it did change how that coverage was constituted. Residential mail delivery redefined the geography of the US Post and, in turn, the arrangements that defined daily life in the rural United States.33
By shifting the lowest common denominator in the nation’s postal infrastructure from a post office to an individual residence, this network reconfiguration helped spur on a corresponding sea change in administration within the Post Office Department. The localized agency model gave way to more centralized administration during the early 1900s. Wielding more and more administrative capacity, reformers in the Post Office Department launched sweeping initiatives to expand the purview of the postal service within American society. The first postal savings banks opened in 1910, allowing people to receive interest from the government by depositing their money at their local post office. Three years later, the Post Office Department instituted a full-fledged parcel delivery service for the first time. In its first six months, the department delivered more than 300 million packages across the country. Much like Rural Free Delivery, these were top-down initiatives implemented and overseen by bureaucrats in Washington, DC, rather than the periphery-driven expansion of the gossamer network.34
The Post Office Department’s move toward centralized bureaucracy and professionalized management was part of a wider shift in the American state during the Progressive Era of the early 1900s. This period witnessed a flourishing of reform movements aimed at expanding government’s capacity to improve society, and while many of the progressive movement’s most enduring successes took place at the municipal or state level, federal agencies also expanded their capacities during these years. The US Department of Agriculture was arguably the most successful. After its establishment in 1862, its leaders repeatedly carved out a larger and larger foothold for the agency by cultivating scientific expertise centered on resource management. By the early 1900s, it leveraged this expertise to successfully lobby for two major initiatives. In 1905, Congress granted the Department of Agriculture administrative authority over some 63 million acres of forest reserves, all to be overseen by the Forestry Service under the scientific management of conservationist Gifford Pinchot. The following year, the Pure Food and Drugs Act granted the Department of Agriculture new authority to inspect and regulate food and goods moving across state lines—a landmark precursor to the Food and Drug Administration. Like the US Forest Service, this new regulatory apparatus was to be overseen by civil servants with scientific training. Just as Rural Free Delivery was spreading across the American countryside during the early 1900s, technocratic bureaucracy were spreading across the landscape of the American state.35
Rural Free Delivery embodied the Progressive Era’s impulse to actively use the power of the state to improve the lives of American citizens, all under the professional guidance of trained experts. It extended an important public service that private companies were unable or unwilling to provide—a solution to the classic “last mile” problem endemic to transportation and communication networks. Residential mail delivery might be taken for granted today, but it marked an important new chapter for millions of Americans, mitigating long-standing challenges of distance and isolation. And no other part of the country was so defined by distance and isolation as the rural West. It was the nation’s least densely populated region, with far-flung settlements separated by miles and miles of imposing terrain. If any group of Americans stood to benefit from the shift to residential mail delivery, it was the homesteaders, ranchers, and miners who lived in the western United States. One would expect, then, for Rural Free Delivery to have triggered a sea change across the American West. But it didn’t. Or at least not initially.
By 1904, there were 24,556 RFD routes operating nationwide, the result of more than a decade’s worth of administrative reform efforts. But only 3 percent of these routes were operating west of the Kansas/Colorado border. The lack of coverage was especially extreme in the western interior: just 11 routes in Montana, eight in Arizona, five in Wyoming, three in New Mexico, and one solitary route in the entire state of Nevada. The majority of RFD routes were concentrated in the Midwest and (to a lesser degree) the Northeast. In fact, in 1904 there more than four times as many RFD routes in the single state of Illinois (2,123) than in all of the states and territories of the Far West combined (480). The initial tidal wave of Rural Free Delivery barely touched the western half of the country.36 Unlike the expansive geography of the gossamer network, Rural Free Delivery was strikingly limited during its early years. Much like the Post Office Department’s money order system, its initial adoption made it a specialized service rather than a universal one. Two seemingly antithetical factors contributed to this uneven geography: partisanship and bureaucratization.37
Figure 7.2 The Limits of Rural Free Delivery
Thousands of Rural Free Delivery routes were established between 1896 and 1904. This map locates each of those routes by its originating post office. Varun Vijay compiled the data from US Postal Service Historian, “First Rural Routes by State” (United States Postal Service, April 2008), https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-rural-routes.htm.
Old-fashioned partisanship remained alive and well in the Post Office Department. Over the 1890s and early 1900s, civil service reformers had made inroads in bringing the federal government’s largest civilian organization under more technocratic management. But an entrenched patronage-based system did not suddenly disappear during the Progressive Era. In fact, elements of both political patronage and technocratic administration didn’t just coexist; they often worked in tandem. Take the case of Rural Free Delivery. Congress had voted to employ salaried mail carriers along these routes rather than private mail contractors, and these employees would be subject to civil service examinations and protections. Although this helped depoliticize how RFD routes were operated, it did not depoliticize how those routes were allocated. When postal officials received an application for a new RFD route, they would seek input from the congressman in that district in deciding whether to approve the request. Much in the same way that postal officials had long relied on legislators to help appoint or dismiss postmasters, designate new post roads, or establish new post offices, the allocation of Rural Free Delivery routes was subject to political considerations as much as technocratic ones.38
Congress’s influence over Rural Free Delivery had a predictable impact on where the Post Office Department established new RFD routes. During the late 1890s and early 1900s the Republican Party controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress—an uninterrupted reign from 1897 to 1911 that happened to coincide with the initial expansion of Rural Free Delivery. RFD routes became a form of patronage for Republicans to strategically distribute based on their party’s electoral needs. In one study, political scientists found that Republican incumbents from swing districts were more than ten times as likely to receive new RFD routes in their districts during the lead-up to the 1900 election than Democratic incumbents in swing districts.39 The Midwest and Northeast—the electoral strongholds of the Republican Party—received the vast majority of the nation’s new RFD routes. By 1903, one Democratic congressman from Georgia complained that while these Republican districts enjoyed a “dense forest” of RFD routes, Democratic districts had only “an occasional cottonwood on a bald prairie.”40 He was right. Iowa, which had voted Republican in the last presidential election, had 1,484 routes. The congressman’s own state of Georgia, which had voted Democratic, had roughly the same number of residents as Iowa but less than one-third the number of RFD routes. The early geography of Rural Free Delivery followed familiar patterns of patronage and party politics that had long defined the 19th century’s gossamer network.41
Partisanship wasn’t the only factor that contributed to the uneven spread of Rural Free Delivery during its early years. A seemingly countervailing factor also shaped this geography: bureaucratization. When the Post Office Department began instituting Rural Free Delivery, it adopted standardized regulations about which places qualified for an RFD route, including certain thresholds for the number of people a route would serve, the literacy rates of those inhabitants, the distance of a route, and the quality of its roads. All of this was part of a turn toward technocratic management and organizational efficiency. After all, more densely settled routes allowed each mail carrier to serve more people and the Post Office Department to employ fewer mail carriers. Higher literacy rates meant more mail, bringing in more revenue from stamps and postage, and well-graded roads led to faster and more dependable travel. These regulations were put in place to ensure that the government service was both effective and efficient—hallmarks of the Progressive Era’s push for governance by trained experts.
The department’s bureaucratic management of Rural Free Delivery routes had an especially pronounced impact on the western United States. As much as southern Democrats may have protested the lack of RFD routes in their districts, their western colleagues—even Republican ones—had far more cause for complaint. If the landscape of Rural Free Delivery in Democratic districts looked like “an occasional cottonwood on a bald prairie,” then most of the American West resembled the surface of Mars. This was because the department’s regulations surrounding new RFD routes were much harder to meet in some places than others. Paloma, Illinois, for instance, was a much different place than Palomas, Arizona. The western Illinois farming community was located on a flat stretch of prairie just off the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. It was home to around six hundred surrounding residents and had narrowly voted Republican in the 1896 elections. In short, Paloma was an ideal location for a Rural Free Delivery route. So, in November of 1900, postal officials hired a mail carrier to begin operating a 24-mile RFD route in the community. Palomas, Arizona, on the other hand, was a small ranching and mining settlement on the Gila River in southwestern Arizona Territory. Unlike its Illinois counterpart, the Arizona town’s rugged terrain, lack of graded roads, and sparse population disqualified it from receiving its own RFD route. So while the residents of Paloma, Illinois, began receiving mail at their doorsteps in 1900, the Arizona residents would continue to trek to their local post office until it eventually shut down in 1927. The two communities shared a name but little else when it came to how they fit within the new landscape of the US Post.42
The Post Office Department’s most important regulation for Rural Free Delivery was that a new route must run along well-graded roads that were passable during the entire year. At first blush, this was a straightforward policy to ensure that mail carriers were able to do their jobs year round without getting mired in mud or snow. In practice, it linked the Post Office Department to another reform group: the good roads movement. Originally started by urban cyclists during the 1880s, the good roads movement called for the construction and maintenance of well-graded country roads that would allow them to go cycling outside of crowded cities. By the 1890s, the movement had grown to encompass farmers who wanted better means of travel and railroad companies that wanted to make their railway depots more accessible. This coalition of cyclists, farmers, and railroad companies found two main allies inside the federal government: the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Road Inquiry and the Post Office Department’s Rural Free Delivery division. The Office of Road Inquiry was first established in 1893 but was prohibited from actually constructing roads beyond small-scale experiments. Instead, the division acted as the technocratic research arm of the Good Roads Movement, gathering data about rural roads and disseminating reports free of charge under the Department of Agriculture’s postal franking privilege.43
The US Post’s Rural Free Delivery division had an even more direct impact on the nation’s roads. The Post Office Department framed its regulations over RFD routes as straightforward bureaucratic measures: well-graded roads would allow their mail carriers to serve more households, more efficiently, and in more places. In practice, these criteria turned Rural Free Delivery into a policy wedge for federal officials to pressure state and local governments to improve their infrastructure. At the time, the federal government had little administrative authority over the nation’s roads. It wasn’t until 1916 that members of Congress—many of whom were suspicious of federal overreach into state and local affairs—managed to pass the first major federal legislation that granted funds for road development through the Federal Highway Act. Prior to that, officials instead turned to what historian Gary Gerstle describes as a “surrogacy strategy” in which policymakers used existing areas of federal jurisdiction to make policy in areas where they did not have explicitly enumerated powers. The Post Office Department’s sweeping authority over the nation’s mail system had long made it an ideal match for this surrogacy strategy. When it came to road policy, Rural Free Delivery gave the federal government a means of enacting changes to local and state roads despite the fact that it did not have the power to do so directly. In short, if a rural community wanted residential mail delivery, it would have to spend money to improve its roads.44
Rural Free Delivery followed a long tradition of the US Post reconfiguring rural space in the American countryside. But Rural Free Delivery only reconfigured certain kinds of rural space, namely, places that were able to build and maintain an infrastructure of public roads. This effectively shut out large sections of the western United States. Road construction and maintenance were difficult and expensive in the rugged and sparsely populated western interior. One government survey in 1904, for instance, found that Nevada had only around 12,000 total miles of public roads. This was less than Connecticut, New Hampshire, or Vermont, despite the fact that Nevada was several times the size of all three states combined. The reason for this stunted infrastructure was a familiar cocktail of demographic and environmental challenges that plagued the western United States. Roads in the West had to cover much longer distances and much rougher terrain than in the East, which made any sort of public infrastructure difficult to build and maintain. Moreover, very little of the public road infrastructure that did exist in the West was “improved,” or surfaced with stone or gravel. As of 1904, for instance, there were exactly two miles of improved roads in the entire territory of New Mexico. The same was true across much of the mountainous western interior, where Utah was the only state or territory that had improved even 5 percent of its public roads.45
As it had done so many times before, western geography imposed real limits on institutional reform within the Post Office Department. What had changed, however, was who benefited from these limitations. For much of the 19th century, an expansionary postal policy meant that the federal government extended its gossamer network across the West without westerners themselves having to bear the costs of that development. Rural Free Delivery flipped this arrangement on its head. If western states and territories wanted access to this new service, they would have to build the necessary infrastructure to support it. The problem, of course, was that there were far fewer people in the West to fund road construction and maintenance. There were, for instance, only three residents for every mile of public roads in Nevada in 1904—compared to 164 residents per mile of public road in Massachusetts, or 181 per mile in Rhode Island. The story was similar across the West: of the 15 states and territories with the fewest people per mile of public roads, all of them lay west of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t that westerners were unwilling to fund road improvements; on a per capita basis, western states and territories were actually spending more on public roads than their eastern counterparts. It was that this funding didn’t go nearly as far. There were simply too few people spread across too rugged an environment to meet the Post Office Department’s new bureaucratic regulations.46
Rural Free Delivery’s rollout led to a paradox. Its bureaucratic management helped unleash a wider shift toward centralized administration in the Post Office Department, but that same impulse simultaneously limited its impact in the western United States. In the characterization of one scholar, the decline in rural postmasters and mail contractors helped sweep out an “old regime” of patronage-laden postal administration and inaugurated a new age of centralized, bureaucratic management.47 But that characterization was only true in the eastern half of the country. With so many western communities unable to meet the department’s technocratic criteria for new routes, Rural Free Delivery simply did not extend across most of western United States during its early years. And without this new spatial framework for mail delivery, the administrative framework of the agency model remained entrenched. The region’s small-town post offices did not undergo the same wrenching consolidation of small fourth-class post offices as other parts of the country. Nationwide, the Post Office Department shed 13,490 fourth-class post offices between 1898 and 1908 in order to accommodate nearly 39,000 new RFD routes. Ohio and Indiana, two of the states on the frontlines of Rural Free Delivery’s rollout, lost nearly half of their fourth-class post offices in this single decade. West of the Kansas/Colorado border, however, the number of fourth-class post offices didn’t decline at all between 1898 and 1908. In fact, the total number of fourth-class offices in the Far West actually increased by 14 percent over that period, and in some states and territories in the western interior that figure climbed above 30 percent. The spatial and administrative transformations unleashed by Rural Free Delivery largely petered out at the hundredth meridian.48
Figure 7.3 The Survival of the Gossamer Network
Rural Free Delivery’s uneven expansion resulted in post office closures in some parts of the country even as the number of post offices in other parts of the country continued to grow. This map shows the percentage change in the number of fourth-class post offices operating in each state or territory between 1898 and 1908. United States Post Office Department, United States Official Postal Guide, 1898 (New York: Metropolitan Job Print, 1898), 1037, available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000003071618; United States Post Office Department, United States Official Postal Guide, 1908 (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon, 1908), 707, available online at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b2919443.
The survival of the gossamer network and its localized agency model meant that bitterly partisan “post office rows” would continue to rage unabated in the West, even in the face of efforts to depoliticize the Post Office Department. In December of 1908, near the end of his final term, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order that brought roughly 15,000 fourth-class postmasters under civil service regulations. This was a landmark policy for the federal workforce. Notably, however, Roosevelt’s executive order only applied to postmasters in the northeastern United States.49 For thousands of small-town postmasters in the West and South, partisanship would continue to define their appointments and tenures in office. New Mexico provides a useful example. In January of 1912, New Mexico was admitted as a state after more than 60 years as a federally administered territory. One of its two new senators, Republican Thomas B. Catron, promptly took up the pressing issue of postmaster appointments. President William Howard Taft (a fellow Republican) had informed Catron and other New Mexico Republicans that any postmasters who had been appointed before statehood were fair game for removal. Less than two weeks after being sworn into office, Catron was already scheming to install local allies and party operatives as postmasters in his home state.50
One of Senator Catron’s exchanges highlights the degree to which postal administration remained an intensely localized affair in many western communities. During New Mexico’s constitutional convention, a postmaster in the town of Santa Cruz had drawn the ire of fellow Republicans. One of these local politicians wrote to Catron “to see if you cannot do something to get him out of there.”51 Catron replied five days later from Washington, DC, assuring his colleague, “We can easily have that post-office changed” and asked for the name of a replacement postmaster.52 He was then put in touch with a Santa Cruz businessman who made the following proposition: appoint one of his young employees, Ignacio Madrid, to replace the incumbent postmaster at Santa Cruz. The storeowner would house the post office on his premises, and Madrid would operate it. Catron acquiesced, forwarding Ignacio Madrid’s name to the Post Office Department. Five days later, he received word that Madrid had been appointed the new postmaster of Santa Cruz.53
As the new appointee started filling out paperwork, however, there were rumblings that Madrid would not be able to meet certain departmental requirements to take office. Anticipating trouble, a different storeowner from the town wrote to Catron nominating himself for the position in the event that Madrid’s nomination fell through.54 He was proven correct, when three weeks later the Post Office Department tersely notified Catron “that Mr. Madrid is not of legal age, that he can neither read nor write and does not speak English, and that the father and other members of the Madrid family made an assault upon the post office last November detaining the mail and breaking the glass in a window.”55 This left Catron scrambling to find a replacement until Ignacio Madrid’s employer eventually put his own name forward: “Anything to take [the incumbent postmaster] Morris out of the way.”56 In the end, a member of the United States Senate who was in the midst of overseeing New Mexico’s transition to statehood had exchanged no fewer than 19 different communications to try and replace a small-town postmaster whose position paid him a grand total of $140 a year.57
The correspondence from New Mexico may give the impression that little had changed in the previous four decades, when a similar “post office row” back in 1873 had left an exasperated congressman to write in his diary about “the smallness of the material out of which men can get up a fight.”58 But change was coming. In October of 1912, several months after Thomas Catron had resolved the post office row in Santa Cruz, outgoing president William Howard Taft issued an executive order strengthening civil service protections for the vast majority of the nation’s fourth-class postmasters (not just those in the Northeast). Although civil service reformers lauded him, his opponents accused the president of fighting a rearguard action to make it harder to remove Taft’s own Republican appointees from office. His successor, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, promptly passed his own executive order in May of 1913 that made incumbent postmasters—not just new applicants—subject to competitive civil service exams.59 The decentralized agency model that had so long defined the rural postal system was being brought under increasingly centralized oversight. Although localized patronage and politics would never disappear from the US Post, they were nevertheless on the retreat.
The history of Rural Free Delivery underscores the need to think more materially about the relationship between the American state and its geography. Spatial factors influence the administrative arrangements of institutions, which in turn shape the space over which they administer. But there is nothing deterministic or comprehensive about that relationship. Faced with newly seized and sparsely settled western territory, the US Post’s decentralized agency model extended the network’s reach into remote locations and fueled the world’s most geographically expansive postal system. Rural Free Delivery marked a departure from this model and a turn toward centralized, technocratic management that would have been inconceivable just a few decades before. In doing so, it extended the US Post’s geographic reach all the way to the doorsteps of millions of Americans, fundamentally altering the space of the rural United States. But the uneven spread of Rural Free Delivery underscores how particular kinds of rural space posed stubborn challenges to bureaucratic administration. Although the coming decades would bring new changes to the American state’s organizational structure, none of these changes were tidy or complete. Like musical notes lingering long after a musician has put down her instrument, both the decentralized agency model and the spatial challenges of governance would continue to echo down through the twentieth century and into the present.