On this day, in 1792, President George Washington signed into law the Postal Service Act. The law transformed the delivery of American mail from a facsimile of the British system — a glorified revenue stream for the elite, and one that didn't value the press — to the modern, now endangered United States Postal Service, which balanced privacy, since the government could not open the letters, with public knowledge, as newspapers were mailed at low rates. The act placed such a high value on the mail that it declared robbing a mail carrier punishable by death.
In the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, post officers made up well over 70 percent of the federal civilian workforce — even before Saturday delivery arrived in 1863. And in plain truth, the USPS became a wonder of the world. As even Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "There is no French province in which the inhabitants knew each other as well as did the thirteen million men spread over the extent of the United States." In his telling, the post office embodied the American democratic dream: spreading information of fellow countrymen even to the frontiers. He wrote of riding on a stagecoach through the Michigan forests to deliver mail to the woodsmen. As Richard John wrote in his wonderful book, Spreading the News:
"Tocqueville reminisced, during the night as well as the day, along recently cleared paths that paths that passed through immense forests of evergreens. When the darkness became impenetrable, the stagecoach driver lit a larch branch to illumine the way. From time to time, the driver paused for a moment to drop an enormous bundle at a hut in the forest. The hut, Tocqueville laconically explained, was the post office, and the bundle was the mail."
Tocqueville called it "treasure." A treasure that under the 1972 act, cost between six and 25 cents, depending on how far the letter needed to travel. Under 30 miles: 6¢; over 450: 25¢. According to one inflation calculator, in 2012 dollars, that's a range of $1.43 to $5.95. And with that, a brief reminder: Today, mailing a letter to anywhere across 3,000 U.S. miles costs $.46. Yes, it was another time (only killing a mail carrier can earn someone a life sentence in 2013). But in some ways, it seems that even the Founding Fathers would support raising the prices, USPS.