“The United States Post Office stands to-day with all American institutions at the threshold of a new era,” the high-ranking postal administrator Daniel Roper declared in 1917. Over the preceding half century, the Post Office Department had become what Roper called a “modern postal system.” When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, much of the nation’s mail was sorted by hand and traveled by stagecoach and horseback. By 1917, the US Post had become an industrialized organization, deploying automobiles, conveyor belts, punch card readers, electric letter openers, and folding machines in order to process and transport billions of pieces of mail each year. Over that same period, the US Post had grown from a largely eastern institution into a continent-spanning network boasting a range of new services—money orders, postcards, parcel delivery, postal savings banks, and Rural Free Delivery—that wove the mail system deep into the fabric of American society. Roper attributed these developments to “modern principles of efficient control” deployed by technocrats like himself.1
But the modernization process was not yet complete, Roper lamented, for the nation’s thousands of local post offices still lacked uniformity and had yet to comply with the “centralized authority” of professional administrators in Washington. In order to step fully into this “new era,” Roper wrote, the institution would have to make a final and decisive break with the 19th century’s haphazard and localized operations. As he grandly put it, “The barnacles of the dead past must be stript from the institution.”2
What Roper considered “barnacles” were the very same features that had enabled the US Post to become such an important institutional force in the western United States in the first place. The decentralized agency model was at odds with Roper’s vision of centralized bureaucratic management, but it had nevertheless allowed the US Post and the wider federal government to incorporate a massive amount of western territory over the preceding half century. By delegating mail duties to thousands of local business owners and stagecoach companies, the US Post had spread with remarkable speed, shaping the pace and character of colonization in the West. Its ephemeral infrastructure facilitated a chaotic, unstable, and occasionally fraudulent brand of regional expansion that culminated in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Extending lines of communication into remote places helped Americans like the Curtis siblings occupy distant corners of the region, cementing the state’s hold over recently seized Native territory. The US Post’s expansive spatial coverage acted as a channel for political and commercial integration as well as territorial occupation, connecting the region’s far-flung towns like North Bloomfield to national patronage systems and a growing consumer economy during the 1880s and 1890s. By the early 20th century, the gossamer network had helped transform the western United States from a sprawling and remote territory over which the state had only a tenuous hold into an integrated region occupied by American settlers, industry, and government.
Writing in 1917, Roper believed that the agency model and the gossamer network would soon be washed away by a rising tide of modernization and bureaucratization. His confidence was understandable. Whether in private firms or government institutions, organizations were growing larger and more hierarchical during the early 20th century, overseen by a rising professional class of managers. Technocrats and civil servants in the federal government were taking on more administrative functions, from regulatory commissions to a newly instituted federal income tax. Technology, meanwhile, promised to extend central administrators’ reach, as federal officials could use telephones, radios, automobiles, and airplanes to coordinate their bureaus from a distance, receive updates from subordinates, and conduct in-person inspections of remote places.
The kind of governance championed by Roper and other Progressive Era reformers has come to define to the emergence of the “modern” state: the pursuit of efficiency and reform, faith in expertise and professionalized management, and the triumphant march into a more rational age of industry and innovation. Few, if any, of these benchmarks of modernity would have applied to the 19th-century western postal network. It is tempting, then, to follow Roper’s lead in dismissing the operations of the 19th-century postal system as “barnacles of the dead past,” an anachronistic set of arrangements waiting to be displaced by the emergence of more recognizably bureaucratic structures. Yet many of the characteristics that defined the 19th-century postal system—including the decentralized agency model and the stubborn challenges of American geography—would continue to shape the US Post and the wider federal government throughout the 20th century and into the present.3
Even as the US Post adopted new technology and modes of transportation in the 20th century, it often ended up applying the older agency model to these initiatives. During the 1920s, for instance, the Post Office Department started experimenting with carrying mail via airplanes. At first, it turned to salaried government employees rather than private companies to conduct this service. But in 1926, it turned back to the familiar contracting system, paying private aviation companies to carry mail on the government’s behalf. Much as it had done with stagecoach and steamship businesses in the 19th century, the US Post ended up subsidizing the burgeoning aviation industry through its mail contracts. And, in echoes of the star route frauds of the 1860s and 1870s, this culminated in scandal during the early 1930s as some companies manipulated the bidding process to win ill-gotten government contracts. The technology had changed, but much of the same decentralized, semi-privatized administrative structure survived.4
In the 19th century, the United States had faced the difficult task of extending a universally accessible mail service across the rugged and remote geography of the American West. Those spatial challenges did not go away in the 20th century. Even as Americans flocked to cities in ever-growing numbers, tens of millions of people remained in the countryside. In many rural areas, the costs of providing mail service would continue to outstrip postage revenue. By the 1960s, Congress was allocating more than one hundred million dollars each year towards a “Rural Allowance” to subsidize rural mail service, including payments to private star route contractors. Star routes steadily declined for the first half of the 20th century before making a dramatic comeback in the 1960s: buoyed by the construction of a federal highway system, star route mileage more than doubled over the course of this decade. At the same time, periodic attempts by postal officials to consolidate small-town post offices or rural mail routes met with fierce resistance from primarily western and southern congressmen. Much as it had in the 19th century, the network’s rural periphery routinely stymied attempts at centralized reform.5
The mid-20th century brought a series of institutional crises for the Post Office Department. Aging government facilities buckled under the weight of a postwar boom in mail matter, even as the department suffered from lackluster leadership, a dearth of Congressional funding, and growing competition from long-distance telephone companies. The breaking point came in 1966, when a backlog of mail at the Chicago Post Office, then the largest postal facility in the world, sent delays and interruptions cascading through the country and paralyzed the national mail service for three weeks. The disruption spurred the creation of a government commission to reform the Post Office Department, which, after several months, came back with a radical call for change: to transform the US Post from a typical government agency into a “Postal Corporation” placed under “businesslike management.”6 In 1970, Congress followed the commission’s recommendation and passed the Postal Reorganization Act. This created the modern US Postal Service as an “independent establishment of the executive branch,” operated as a fiscally self-sustaining entity that was cut off from taxpayer funding.7 The legislation marked a turning point for the nation’s postal system, changing it from a flagging public institution to a more efficient business enterprise.
At least that was the hope. In reality, the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 birthed what one historian has termed “a kind of government-business jackalope.”8 The already blurry line between public and private within the nation’s postal system became even more muddled. Like a private business, the US Postal Service was expected to generate enough revenue to cover its costs without the help of taxpayers. Unlike a private business, it was legally required to operate in places where it was prohibitively expensive to do so, including rural communities. In fact, this was one of seven guiding principles for the new organization, enshrined into law on the very first page of a 69-page document: “The Postal Service shall provide a maximum degree of effective and regular postal services to rural areas, communities, and small towns where post offices are not self-sustaining.”9 As it had for so much of its existence, the organization would continue to struggle with the tension between providing a universal public service and operating a cost-effective system. But going forward, it was forced to provide that public service without the benefit of public funding.
The late 1990s and 2000s brought further financial challenges for the US Postal Service, as email and electronic communications caused letter writing to plummet. By 2019, the volume of first-class mail carried by the US Postal Service had been cut nearly in half from its peak in 2001.10 At the same time, the growth of online shopping during the 2010s led to a boom in parcel transportation that has become one of the few bright spots on the US Postal Service’s otherwise dire balance sheet. Private carriers lacked an established infrastructure in rural areas that they had long deemed unprofitable. The US Postal Service, with its mandate to provide universal service regardless of location, already had this infrastructure in place. Private companies subcontracted with the US Postal Service to carry their packages over the “last mile” to rural parts of the country. Much like the residents of North Bloomfield making long-distance department store purchases in the 1890s, 21st-century online shoppers similarly rely on the US Postal Service’s expansive geographical coverage.11
Despite the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act’s attempt to reorganize the institution under “businesslike management,” its public-private status has created obstacles that few private businesses have had to face, including having its operations subject to direct congressional intervention. In 2006, for instance, Congress passed a law requiring the US Postal Service to prefund future retiree health benefits, forcing it to set aside an average of $5.5 billion annually over the span of 10 years to cover future pension costs. One economist described this aggressive pre-payment schedule as having “no obvious economic logic” and “little precedent in the private sector.”12 Weighed down with this fiscal albatross and in the face of steadily declining postage revenue, the US Postal Service has run an annual budget deficit for 13 years and counting.13
The institution’s ongoing 21st-century fiscal struggles have triggered a resurgence of some of the very features that defined the 19th century’s rural postal system. In 2011, the postmaster general announced plans to shut down some 3,700 post offices whose operating costs far exceeded their revenue, many of them in rural areas.14 Communities and elected officials rallied to try and save their post offices. One Montana senator issued a statement that could have been written by one of his 19th-century predecessors: “In Montana and across rural America, post offices define communities and serve as lifelines to the rest of the world. . . .We must put sideboards on the Postal Service to prevent closures from disproportionately hurting rural and frontier America.”15 The bipartisan effort succeeded and the closure plans were abandoned. Once again, reformers in Washington, DC, found themselves stymied by communities on the periphery who demanded an accessible public service regardless of their location and the costs that came with providing that service. The nation’s star routes, meanwhile, have been renamed Highway Contract Routes but are still operated by private transportation companies paid through government contracts. In 2016 the US Postal Service disbursed some three billion dollars per year to roughly 8,300 contractors to carry mail along its Highway Contract Routes. That same year, the Office of the Inspector General conducted an audit of the nation’s Highway Contract Routes and discovered a familiar lack of centralized oversight. In language that might as well have been describing the 19th century’s rural star routes, the report described “limited management and oversight,” a “decentralized . . . reporting process,” and “no centralized method to manage performance irregularities.”16
In an effort to cut operating costs, the US Postal Service now operates some 3,400 combined “contract postal units,” “community post offices,” and “village post offices,” many of which bear a striking resemblance to 19th-century post offices.17 Under these arrangements, the US Postal Service contracts with local business owners to offer a limited range of postal services inside a gas station, store, or other private business. The first Village Post Office in the country opened in August 2011 inside Red’s Hop N’ Market, a convenience store in the tiny town of Malone, Washington. The storeowners, Cheryl and Johnny Kim, received around two thousand dollars a year from the government to rent out mailboxes and sell stamps alongside their usual offerings of coffee, cigarettes, milk, and beer. Aside from the merchandise on its shelves, this rural western post office didn’t look all that different from the one housed by Walter Mobley in his North Bloomfield general store during the 1890s.18
The village post office established inside Red’s Hop N’ Market in 2011 is a reminder that the “barnacles of the dead past” criticized by Daniel Roper in 1917 have not been scraped away by the forces of modernity. Indeed, the US Post is illustrative of a larger pattern: the decentralized agency model has continued to play an important and underappreciated role within the modern American state for the past century. Even during the period spanning the 1930s to the 1960s, a four-decade golden age of bureaucratic management and top-down statism, the federal government continued to rely on a web of “associational” arrangements with state and local governments, private companies, special interest groups, and nongovernment organizations in order to enact policies and provide services.19 New Deal agencies were often administered at state and local levels and drew widely on the private sector. The Homeowner’s Loan Corporation, established in 1933 to help homeowners who were hard hit by the Great Depression, was “a widely distributed and decentralized system” that relied on “local real estate brokers, fee attorneys, and appraisers.”20 Mobilization for World War II and the Cold War further expanded the federal government’s centralized bureaucratic apparatus, but many of the federal agencies established during these years, including the Department of the Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency, continued to use a system of contracts and grants, including procurement contracts to industrial manufacturers and research grants for universities.21 Great Society reforms during the 1960s, such as Medicare and Medicaid, seemed to mark a culmination of the federal government’s top-down, technocratic management. Yet these federal initiatives were often implemented through block grants to state governments, municipal-level agencies, and nonprofit organizations, along with payments and contracts to private firms.22 The federal leviathan of the mid-20th century was not a bureaucratic monolith. Its capacity had radically expanded, but much of that power flowed through far more decentralized administrative structures.
The modern American state was never able to fully surmount the administrative challenges posed by the nation’s expansive rural geography. Instead, it continued to rely on the organizational precedents set by the 19th-century US Post. The clearest example lies in the western United States, where the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administers some 245 million acres of federal land on which it oversees a dizzying “multiple-use” mandate of activities such as grazing, mining, conservation, and recreation.23 Since its founding in 1946, the BLM has resembled the 19th century’s rural postal network: a decentralized organization vulnerable to political meddling and entangled with local private interests. Powerful western politicians exerted pressure on administrators in Washington, DC, while its dispersed field managers were often accused of acquiescing to local interests. In particular, the BLM’s generous allocation of permits and leases to private mining and grazing companies led to the derisive nickname of the “Bureau of Livestock and Mines.” Today, each of the agency’s roughly two hundred rangers are responsible for monitoring, on average, one million acres of land. This means that the actual enforcement of laws and regulations on federal land often falls on state police departments, county sheriffs, or other local law enforcement officials. In the words of one historian, the BLM “has always been a highly decentralized and fragmented agency.”24
The US Post’s reliance on stagecoach companies and local storeowners during the 19th century foreshadowed a swell of privatization and contracting that came to fruition in the late 20th century. The presidency of Ronald Reagan during the 1980s marked an ideological shift towards free-market, antigovernment policies, perhaps most clearly articulated in Reagan’s inaugural address: “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” He then moved to institute a hiring freeze for civilian agencies while slashing the budgets for the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Education, and Energy. Although the Reagan administration may have sought to shrink the federal government, its main impact had less to do with the size of the state than with how it operated and what its workforce looked like.25 The 1980s witnessed a substantial growth in the number of “indirect” government workers, or employees who were paid through contracts and grants rather than “direct” salaried employees. This rebalancing was especially pronounced in the nondefense sector of the federal government: between 1984 and 1990, the federal government’s workforce of nondefense contract employees nearly doubled from 835,000 to 1.6 million people. By 2017, the federal government’s total indirect workforce, both military and nonmilitary, had expanded to 5.3 million people, outnumbering direct government employees and active-duty military personnel by nearly one and a half million people.26
The sheer size of the government’s indirect workforce is a reminder of the need to think more expansively about how the state exercises power. Contractors and grant employees currently perform a dizzying range of functions on behalf of the federal government. In 2018, for instance, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 256,085 people from the United States, using a large bureaucratic apparatus of roughly 20,000 full-time employees. Yet even this display of coercive power and bureaucratic capacity depended on the agency disbursing some five billion dollars’ worth of government contracts, or approximately two-thirds of it’s 2018 budget. Rather than building and operating an entirely public infrastructure, ICE contracted with private security firms to run detention centers, chartered flights to transport detainees, and paid technology companies for data hosting and analytics. Large state projects—whether conquering and colonizing Native land in the 19th-century US West or detaining, incarcerating, and deporting immigrants today—depend on a much wider constellation of channels than simply coercion and bureaucracy.27
The American state’s capacity for centralized oversight may have improved since the 19th century, but its reliance on private contractors continues to outstrip its ability to effectively regulate them. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General found that “ICE does not adequately hold detention facility contractors accountable for not meeting performance standards.” Failure to impose those standards on private contractors had led to overcrowding, inadequate medical care, and the use of solitary confinement. To make matters worse, ICE outsourced the task of actually monitoring these facilities to yet another private company, which was itself faulted for lax inspection practices.28 The growth of private contracting has further exacerbated geographical challenges of administration facing the American state. With millions of people scattered across the country and the globe, one high-ranking government official acknowledged in 2018 that nobody knew precisely how many people were part of the federal government’s indirect workforce.29 One can imagine Walter Nicholson, the 19th-century mapmaker who struggled to keep pace with the West’s ever-shifting postal system, nodding along in sympathy.
At its broadest level, Paper Trails is about the large-scale structures, systems, and networks that quietly shape our world. Today, the state is not the only entity that wields this kind of structural power. Technology companies like Google and Facebook have become enmeshed in modern life and exercise enormous influence over society. They define the conditions under which people make decisions and take actions, including the videos we watch, the news we read, the people we date, the clothes we purchase, and the routes we drive. Seemingly minor design changes implemented by Facebook’s developers can quietly alter the behavior and attitudes of millions of people. We are living in an “algorithm age,” in which the structural power of digital platforms and online networks defines everyday life.30 Even more so than the US Post, the machinery that underlies these systems quietly whirrs away in the background. Most users have little understanding of how these platforms work or the labor arrangements and regulatory frameworks that underlie them.
Studying the machinery of the 19th-century western postal network holds lessons for thinking about large-scale structural forces today. For one, the arrangements and structures of organizations can exercise just as much influence as their consciously implemented policies. The expansive, semi-privatized, and ever-shifting western postal network may have helped 19th-century settlers colonize plundered Native land, but its breakneck growth was not centrally coordinated by officials in Washington, DC. Western communities, businesses, and politicians drove its expansion on the periphery. If anything, the network’s decentralized geography repeatedly short-circuited attempts at top-down reforms. Today’s digital networks can similarly gallop ahead of the people tasked with administering them. Indeed, Postmaster General John Wanamaker’s 1889 characterization of the postal system—“the machinery is set up and then let alone”—is an apt description of many of the platforms that have come to define modern life. A host of unintended consequences, including the spread of misinformation through social media, racially biased criminal sentencing software, and massive security breaches of consumer data, has led to calls for greater transparency and regulations around how today’s algorithms are made, the data they use, and the contexts in which they are implemented.31
Structural forces tend to fade from view. This book has attempted to bring one of these structural forces into focus by asking the seemingly straightforward question of: Where? Where were post offices and mail routes located in the American West? Where and when did they spread? How did this geography compare to other government institutions? The pattern that emerged of a sprawling, fast-moving and unstable network opened up a window into the organizational model behind it and the impact these arrangements had on the 19th-century United States. A similar accounting is needed for the networks, systems, and structures shaping our world today, whether government institutions or private technology platforms. We need a fuller grasp of what, exactly, these forces are, what they do, and how they work. Only then can we start to tackle larger questions about what they should be. What are their responsibilities? How should they operate? What are their limits? What are their possibilities? These are not new questions; Americans have been wrestling with them for centuries. But they have never been more urgent.