MAIL, THE CONSTITUTION, CIVILIZATION, AND LETTERS FROM COLLEGE

                            

 

Thank goodness the political season is over.  My mailbox and inbox have been packed and stacked with solicitations.  Begging, pleading, demonizing opponents, personalizing pleas to “Dear Fredric,” frantic messages about opponents outspending them, urgent pleas to meet deadlines, membership cards, cute address labels, and personal letters from Presidents, former Presidents, Secretaries of State, Navy SEALs, and other close friends.  

Yes, we hate junk mail, but it’s one of the prices we pay for civilization and order, something the Founders understood. 

Our Constitution is extraordinary; it was built to last; Ford Tough; brief and flexible.  The creators of this framework of government whom James Madison called, “a meeting of demi-gods,” were stingy with words.  They created a skeletal document, allowing future generations to flesh it out.  They established flexibility by only delegating seventeen powers to Congress, with the eighteenth allowing them to do everything they deemed “necessary and proper” to ”execute” those powers.  Some, like the power “To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high seas,” do not seem relevant in 2024; others were farsighted and brilliant. 

Enumerated power #7, “To establish Post Office’s and Post Roads,” is simple enough, but these seven words indicate they understood that a postal system is necessary for business, for government, for personal communication, in effect for civilization itself. Interfering with mail is still considered a federal crime. 

 When Thomas Jefferson was our ambassador to France in the 1780s, he was guaranteed to receive letters from family members, friends and from the newly formed American government.  When John Adams was Ambassador to Great Britain in 1785, he communicated with Congress through the mail.  When John Quincy Adams was ambassador to Russia in 1809, he could be certain that letters from Washington, DC (as well as from his aging parents, John and Abagail Adams) would travel thousands of miles over land and sea, to find him in a far corner of the world.

When Adams and Jefferson were elderly, they exchanged a remarkable series of letters, Jefferson in Monticello, Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts.  They had been political adversaries, but now in the twilight years, they exchanged ideas, pleasantries and their visions for the future.  Their letters, written with quill pens, were carefully crafted, lofty, seemingly pompous to our ears, as was the style of the time.  With their great accomplishments behind them, they wrote for posterity; they knew we would be listening.  Letters between the men of the age, and with their wives and children, were not tossed into colonial fire places, but saved as historical documents, providing biographers a gold mine of insights.

The Founding Fathers were not the first to recognize the vital importance of a postal system.   Most of us think that a phrase etched into the New York City Post Office is its official motto. 

 Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

 Surprisingly, the phrase is neither the motto of the postal service, nor recent, nor even American.   Two thousand, five hundred years ago, the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, reported on the Persian Empire’s courier system in which mounted riders, raced along a route to deliver messages for the king.  Herodotus wrote:

Now there is nothing mortal which accomplishes a journey with more speed than these messengers, so skillfully has this been invented by the Persians: for they say that according to the number of days of which the entire journey consists, so many horses and men are set at intervals, each man and horse appointed for a day’s journey… The first then rides and delivers the message with which he is charged to the second, and the second to the third; and after that it goes through them handed from one to the other, as in the torch-race among the Hellenes…

Yes, it’s true, the Persians invented the pony express; the United States borrowed the concept and adapted Herodotus’ words -  neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness of night prevents from accomplishing each one the task proposed to him, with the very utmost speed. 

A poem by Charles Eliot president of Harvard University from 1869 – 1909

 summarizes the many blessings provided by a reliable postal service.

Messenger of Sympathy and Love 

Servant of Parted Friends 

Consoler of the Lonely 

Bond of the Scattered Family 

Enlarger of the Common Life 

Carrier of News and Knowledge 

Instrument of Trade and Industry 

Promoter of Mutual Acquaintance 

Of Peace and of Goodwill Among Men and Nations.

Kevin Costner’s 1997 film, The Postman, takes place in a dystopian future where civilization has broken down.  Costner’s character becomes a hero for realizing that the free flow of mail was essential for resurrecting civilization. The movie was almost universally panned.  Reviews described the film as “mishandled.” “The plot is dumb and riddled with gaping holes of logic.” “A piece of tedious sci-fi junk.” “Fundamentally goofy” and “A bad idea poorly executed.”

 While this artistic criticism may be true, Costner’s premise was correct: a reliable mail system is necessary for a civilized order, a robust economy, social contact, and perhaps even sanity itself.  At the end of the film, with order restored, a statue is raised in his honor.  Here’s a clip.

 SUBSTACK SIDEBAR

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As I made my way through life, I saved important letters from important people, knowing I would someday write about them. I exchanged letters with college friends who lived a scant five hours from me; phone calls were “long distance.”  Too expensive.  That era is long gone. No more letters, no more long distance.  E-mails do not exactly have the eloquence of Jefferson and Adams.

Shortly before my dad died, he handed me a thick envelope stuffed with all the letters I had sent from college. “I’m not sure why I saved them,” he said, “but here they are.”  The letters were quite boring; mostly chit-chat - I took this exam, I wrote that paper. I’m dating so-and-so, pledging Phi Delt.  Others were reminders of long-forgotten incidents, like the three times I was called into the Dean’s office.  

Technology has been a boon to civilization - and to me personally. I would not want to go back to the days of pecking on a manual typewriter using carbon paper, ribbons that stained my fingers, and correct - o - type. But we lost something with technology: long, newsy letter worth saving, replaced by quickly typed emails, soon to be deleted. I no longer keep handwritten letters because I never get any. All those Facetime calls negate that human connection.

At least we still get hundreds of personal letters a year asking for $.

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