In his academic journal article titled “The Press, Post Office, and Flow of News in the Early Republic,” communication scholar Richard B. Kielbowicz describes the fledgling United States Postal Service as “a system of mass communication indispensable to a growing nation.”

In his lectures, he emphasized the point, spotlighting the United States postal system as among the defining examples of mass communication, essential to the dissemination of information, expressly political information, to the farthest reaches of the burgeoning United States of America in the late 1700s.

So is it any wonder as among his students, I find recent acts perpetrated against the postal system alarming, disheartening and dismaying?

Earlier this month Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced alleged cost-cutting measures, “displacing the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations” of the United States Postal Service and reassigning, displacing or otherwise moving 23 postal service executives, a strategy which “de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge,” noted Jacob Bogage writing for The Washington Post.

The postal service, as an institution dates back to the early United States, among its most venerable leaders none other than Benjamin Franklin.

The postal system in the United States was established by the Second Continental Congress in July of 1775.

In his biography of Franklin, author Walter Isaacson, describes Franklin as establishing the first home-delivery system for letters and creating the original dead letter office. Franklin also toured and inspected post offices as deputy postmaster for the colonies, the top slot in the postal service at the time.

Isaacson writes “an even greater benefit of the job, both to him and history, was that it furthered Franklin’s conception of the disparate American colonies as a potentially unified nation with shared interests and needs.”

The postal service can be traced to ancient times.

Greek historian Herodotus gave us what would become the phrase often considered the informal motto of the postal service while observing a system of messengers. Messengers and their horses were stationed within one day’s ride of each other and would relay messages. “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” Herodotus wrote of the messengers in his account. The phrase would go on to be inscribed in granite over the entrance to the post office on Eighth Avenue in New York City.

Perhaps the phrase “election year politics” should be added to the list of potential obstacles.

A little closer to the present day in 1958, in an episode titled “The Case of The Daring Decoy” Fred Calvert, under a grilling by television’s Perry Mason, confesses to stealing a letter moments before admitting to murdering his wife. After answering no multiple times to Mason’s barrage of questions surrounding a letter seen poking from the dead woman’s mailbox, Calvert finally comes clean and admits he took the letter.

“It’s against the law ... tampering with the mails, you know,” Calvert said as he breaks down.

According to the Cornell School of Law website, a fine and imprisonment of up to five years, or both, may await those who do steal letters, packages, post cards and the like. In the song “Stealing People’s Mail,” the punk band Dead Kennedys list of items stolen from the mail include “license plates, wedding gifts, tax returns/Checks to politicians from real estate firms/Money, bills and cancelled checks/Pretty funny pictures of your kids.”

The USPS delivers everything from birthday cards from grandparents, wedding invitations, newspapers, magazines and ballots to, as a friend recently pointed out while we brainstormed for this piece, prescriptions.

In pandemic parlance the United States Postal Service is essential.

Let’s not tamper with the mail.

April Peterson

editorial assistant

East Penn Press

Salisbury Press