The Tyranny of E-mail (7 page)

Finally, as more and more people communicated by letter, a larger question loomed: Could governments be trusted—as they could not in the early days of mail—to preserve the privacy of the post? Writing in 1960, Summerfield was adamant about the sacredness of first-class mail: “Its privacy is zealously guarded from the moment it is mailed until it is delivered. Not even the President may order it to be censored, or delay its delivery, except in time of war.” This was a convenient caveat for a country regularly at war, as the United States was from late in 1939 through the 1960s and is again today.

In April 1976, a U.S. Senate panel discovered that the FBI, CIA, and several other government agencies had illegally monitored millions of telegrams and opened more than a quarter million letters. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy were implicated. And it was not just a simple scan of letters. As Seymour Hersh reported, James Angleton, the longtime head of the CIA’s counterintelligence division, was personally involved in a “series of (illegal) domestic mail intercepts that enabled the agency to learn how the American Federation of Labor was planning to use the millions of dollars in clandestine funds funneled to it by the C.I.A.” According to one
account, “Angleton would personally deliver copies of the letters to Allen Dulles—and thereby ‘made real hay with Allen’ since ‘it impressed Allen enormously to know in general’ what the AFL was planning to do.”

Swindles and con men—and the occasional government peeper—were not the only problems with the post as the world tipped into the twentieth century. There was also the sheer amount of it. Not everyone was pleased by the large numbers of letters and postcards flying across the plains. At the turn of the twentieth century, worries over the decadence of the age of letter writing popped up in opinion articles and among men and women who saw themselves as protectors of civil society. “There is no standard nowadays of elegant letter writing,” said one woman, “as there used to be in our time. It is a sort of go as you please development, and the result is atrocious. Epistolary accomplishment is considered altogether too puerile a study for the strenuous work of higher education, while rapid note taking at lectures, etc., finishes the ruination of handwriting and style, the result being as you have just observed—that our daughters write like housemaids and express themselves like schoolboys.”

The postcard was often blamed for this drop-off. “It has frequently been remarked during recent years that the art and practice of letter writing has passed away, and the picture postal has helped on this tendency,” wrote one correspondent in
The New York Times
. “People write less than they ever did, and yet they keep their friends at home posted as to their itinerary during a long trip better than ever before. The picture postal tells a story. That is why it is so popular.” As a result, people heard
from one another a lot more, especially when they traveled on vacation. “People will send tourist postcards when they would not write letters.”

Letter-writing mavens in newspapers turned their attention away from simple epistolary etiquette and toward the more pressing problem of the letters one absolutely had to send. “Certain letters, however, must be written,” opined Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, writing under the pen name Julien Gordon; “there is no escape from their claims. These inevitables may be classed as follows: The Family letter; the friendly letter; the business letter; the letter of condolence or felicitation; the love-letter; the miscellaneous note.”

Even President Theodore Roosevelt got into the act of scolding people for their prolixity. “A resolute effort should be made to secure brevity in correspondence and the elimination of useless letter writing,” he argued in November 1905. “There is a type of bureaucrat who believes that his entire work and the entire work of the government should be the collection of papers in reference to a case, commenting with eager minuteness on each, and corresponding with other officials in reference thereto. These people really care nothing for the case, but only for the documents in the case. In all branches of the government there is a tendency greatly to increase unnecessary and largely perfunctory letter writing.”

An unsigned commentary appeared soon after Roosevelt’s scolding comments, applauding his appeal to people’s sense of restraint. It’s worth quoting at length for the way it captures the sense of fatigue, fatality, even, Americans felt when facing the future of words:

We hope the President will be a restraining influence on the flood of words both in correspondence and in
books, but we fear the times are against him. They offer fatal facilities for verbal exuberance. Books today are published in vast numbers, less because authors have anything to say than because printing is easy and cheap and the presses have to be kept at work. So, too, the typewriters click out folio after folio in public offices, not because there is any real reason for that amount of writing, but because the machinery for producing it is at hand….

The stenographer, the typewriter and the printing press are invaluable agents of civilization, but they have their drawbacks. They have inundated us with a plague of words, and we wish that curtailment in the government service could be but the beginning of reform.

In some cases, though, it wasn’t just bureaucrats adding to the blizzard of words. By the end of the nineteenth century, commentators began to complain about being badgered at home by news about political candidates. “Even the Republicans favor me with a tableful of campaign documents, possibly to keep me strong in faith,” wrote William Drysdale in a piece entitled “Does Anybody Read Them?” in
The New York Times
on November 6, 1887. “It occurs to me that maybe these soul-stirring papers are sent to all the good Republicans, in hope that they may feel flattered by the little attention; but I am never flattered by the receipt of anything short of a Patent Office Report, or a bound volume from the Department of Agriculture. As I sweep all these documents into the waste basket with one grand swoop, they inspire me with only one thought. It is—‘How the printers must smile, when they see an election coming on.’”

The basic postal rate—at least in the United States—didn’t go up for another fifty years once it was first lowered, and even then it rose by just a cent. The era of postal overload was here to stay. Aside from businesses and governments, people who had come into a peculiar kind of modern existence—being famous—weathered this overload in exaggerated fashion. The prolific journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken felt duty-bound to respond within the same day out of “decent politeness.” He also followed the do-unto-others rule: “If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.” Therefore, every day, whether the mail brought ten or eighty letters, he read and responded to all of them. “My mail is so large,” he said, “that if I let it accumulate for even a few days, it would swamp me.”

Others had someone close by to do the answering. Thomas Edison received thousands of unsolicited letters per year and employed a fleet of male secretaries to craft his responses and sift the nuts from the fans. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1930, the American novelist Sinclair Lewis began to receive hundreds, including several appeals for help or employment. “I’ll do everything for you,” one woman wrote, “and when I say everything I mean everything.” “My dear Miss,” replied Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, to her husband’s admirer. “My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for ‘everything’ I take care of that myself—and when I say everything I mean everything.”

But an even bigger problem had yet to be confronted: junk mail.

When Henry Raymond unleashed
The New-York Daily Times
upon the city, he appealed to New Yorkers by letter:

The carrier of “The New-York Daily Times” proposes to leave [the newspaper] at this house every morning for a week, for the perusal of the family, and to enable them to receive it regularly. The Times is a very cheap paper, costing the subscriber only SIXPENCE a week, and contains an immense amount of reading matter for that price…. It will contain regularly all the news of the day, full telegraphic reports from all quarters of the country, full city news, correspondence, editorials. At the end of the week the carrier will call for his pay;
and a continuance of subscription is very respectfully solicited.

As people used the world’s emerging postal services more often, business began to use it, too, in order to target customers. The rise of direct-mail solicitations was fast and had been part of life in the colonies from the beginning. The U.S. Postal Service has always operated second-class mail, through which magazines, newspapers, and advertisements travel at a loss, the reason being “that a postal system should help disseminate information as a public service and do so,” Arthur Summerfield observed, “partly at least, at public expense.”
The Federalist Papers
, essays on articles of the Constitution written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others, traveled this way, in the pages of the New York newspapers
The Independent Journal, The New York Packet
, and
The Daily Advertiser
, which in those days arrived by post.

But how much can be classified as information in the public service? Apparently a lot, and it took an energetic British man to truly exploit that wide definition. The advertising circular, which traveled in second-class mail, was invented by G. S. Smith in London in a borrowed office in 1868. Smith was just fifteen, and he addressed all the pleas for purchase by hand. Smith used halfpenny wrappers, owing to postal regulations. Within a short while, he had several men working for him and then an army. Before long his company could issue prospectuses for publicly traded companies in London (1.25 million copies for the Manchester Ship Canal Company) and in America (2.5 million copies for an American finance house). In the early 1900s, he was the world’s biggest purchaser of envelopes, one of his orders clocking in at over 100 million of just one kind of envelope. By the time he died, he employed more than 300 men and 130 “girls.” All of the letters sent out were addressed by hand.

Businesses began to solicit customers by catalog in the middle of the nineteenth century, the first produced by Aaron Montgomery Ward in 1872. Around the same time, companies began selling typewriters by mail. The huge increase in advertising mail led to the U.S. Post Office running a significant budget deficit at the turn of the twentieth century. Marketers got hold of mailing addresses and batched them into groups that could be sold. In December 1913, the president of the Kentucky Distillers Company offered to sell a mailing list of fifty thousand customers—“each individual on the list is a regular user of liquor”—to a Kansas City, Missouri, sanatorium for alcoholics. The Anti-Saloon League then duplicated the letter in a leaflet to show the lengths to which the greedy liquor industry would go to take advantage of its customers.

In the 1930s, looking to bolster its flagging earnings in the Great Depression, the U.S. Post Office began encouraging advertising mail, effectively putting the government into competition with the nation’s newspapers (which couldn’t function without advertisements). “If successful in any large way,” complained Eugene Meyer, the publisher of
The Washington Post
, in November 1934, “[the U.S. Post Office’s campaign] would naturally reduce the legitimate receipts of the daily newspapers of America and thereby weaken their position.” Third-class bulk mail rates were introduced by the United States in 1928, and selling took off.

The phrase “junk mail” first appeared in 1954, and people began to fight back. A Connecticut man, irritated at the state’s avowed practice of selling lists of its registered drivers and all the junk mail he received as a result of it, refused to tell the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles his new address. The list upon which the man’s name appeared had been sold to R. L. Polk & Co., a Detroit marketing firm, for $15,000. The company had
been buying lists of registered drivers from all fifty states for thirty years. The man lost his case, and junk mail has proceeded apace. In 2003, 43 percent of U.S. mail was direct mail, up from 29 percent in 1980.

As the number of pieces of mail entered the billions, post offices around the world began to creak under the pressure. The Canadian Post Office Department became the first to invest in electronic sorting machines. A scientist, Dr. Maurice Levy, was the first man to perfect such a machine, and it went into service in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal in 1957. The United States, which by 1960 had just one-fiftieth of the world’s population but two-thirds of its mail, was not far behind. Machines were installed in major cities that made huge gains in sorting time: an electronic machine could sort 21,600 letters an hour, compared with the 1,500 managed by a good postal worker. Delivery times were speeded up by just 50 percent, though, since the biggest difficulty for the mail wasn’t in the sorting but in getting it into and out of the eleven major metropolitan offices through which two-thirds of all American mail traveled.

Postmaster General Summerfield, however, was not to be deterred. “I will not be satisfied,” he said in 1957, “until we can give patrons delivery of letters between any two American cities on the day after mailing.” The loftiness of this goal explains why, from the early 1960s on into the 1980s, the post office began to invest in a peculiar solution known then as electronic mail— today we simply call it a fax. In 1961, in Washington, Chicago, and Battle Creek, Michigan, a service was tried out through which correspondents sent an electronic message; on the other
end it was printed out and delivered as a regular piece of mail. The service was dismantled in the early 1960s, then tried out again at the end of the decade between Washington and New York City. The experiment was again short-lived due to lack of patronage.