This is Democracy – Episode 99: The Post Office and American Democracy

Announcers: This is Democracy. A podcast that explores the interracial, inter-generational and inter-sectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. This week we have with us one of the foremost experts on American democracy, communication, and in particular, the Post Office. The Post Office has played a crucial role in the development of American democracy and it’s likely to continue to play a crucial role in our democracy today. We will discuss those issues with our guest. Richard John is a historian who specializes in the history of business, technology, communications, and American political development. He teaches and advises graduate students in Colombia’s PhD program in communications and he’s a member of the core faculty of the Columbia History Department, teaching courses on history of capitalism, as well as the history of communications and various other topics. Richard has written a number of important articles and books that have been very influential for me and many other historians. My two favorite works of his are two of his books. The first, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, which was published in 1995, and more recently, wonderful book, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, published in 2010. Richard, thank you for joining us today.

Richard John: Happy to be here.

Jeremi Suri: Before we turn to our discussion of the Post Office and American democracy with Richard, we have, of course, Zachary Suri’s scene setting poem. What is the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: Delivering Freedom, Save the Post Office.

Jeremi Suri: Well, that’s a provocative title. Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: There are no cheeky businessmen to send the veterans’ medicine across the country to his bungalow in Iowa. No entrepreneur in their right mind to bring welfare check safely into the hands of broke Louisiana shrimp fishermen. No one to send messages of comfort to scared boys in prison cells. No corporations to bring me postcards from my grandmother or to send my thank you notes to Seattle and Concord in West Orange. No one to protect the freedom of the press for profit or bring Internet to the Mississippi Delta. We are letting adrift stalwart postal workers in the steaming white trucks. We are letting you drift into the abyss of profit, dry for prices, political attacks, and no one seems to care. You, mailman who always waves to me with a smile, you are the ancestor of the very essence of federalism, the bleak frontier outposts of civilian government. Democracy isn’t just an ideal, it is a practice, a logistical endeavor of its own, and it has flown airmail across oceans or settles in giant male bands that drive through endless towns to promote financial literacy, to find an outlet for every voice, to bring me my favorite car magazine, political commentary, and the census forms. We are fascinated with logistics. Enterprising Americans reliant on the electrical webs that endlessly operate within giant computer servers. The logistical undertakings of vast ships carrying millions of boxes of toilet paper across the world. But what about the superhighways of democracy? The arteries and veins of Republican idealism. When did we forget about the infrastructure of freedom and begin to let it rot in monetary concerns or shake it in earthquakes of reasonless ignorance?

Jeremi Suri: What is your poem about, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about the place that the Post Office holds in American history and in American society and the vital public good that it does every single day and how important it is to our democracy.

Jeremi Suri: Beautifully said, Zachary. Richard, why has the Post Office been so central to American thinking going all the way back to the founders? It’s even in the constitution. Why?

Richard John: Oh boy, Zachary put it very well. Here’s a short answer. Post Office was in the constitution because the founders took it for granted that we needed a basic infrastructure, communication channels to circulate information on commerce and public affairs. Now, the understanding of public affairs when the constitution was drafted in 1787, was much narrower than the conception of public affairs that would emerge by 1792. I underscore this because if you read editorials today about the Post Office, it’s often said to have been established by Benjamin Franklin in 1775 and more or less often running from that point. But in fact, Franklin’s conception of the Post Office was not that different from the conception that was held by British government administrators, circulate information on commerce, public affairs, mostly for an elite. Franklin experimented with newspaper delivery in the mail but there was absolutely no legal provision for the circulation of newspapers through the Post Office, which was the primary channel for the circulation of information. At the time of the founding, there was no provision for that, 1787, 1788, all that would change in 1792, and a key figure in that new thinking was James Madison himself.

Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

Richard John: When James Madison wrote his federalist essays, 1787, 1788, known to many Americans, college students, those federalist essays. He envisioned lawmakers returning home to their constituents to talk about affairs of state. In other words, it would be a meeting of the minds face-to-face. He did not envision the circulation of newspapers on a continent wide scale. In fact, he does not use the phrase public opinion in The Federalist. All that would change by 1791, 1792. Madison is now in the opposition, Thomas Jefferson, and they recognize the enormous importance of creating new channels, not just for the government to get its message across but for the citizenry to communicate with the government. That led to a remarkable expansion in the mandate of the Post Office, completely in keeping with its original purpose, which is to circulate information in public affairs and commerce, but now it’s expanded to include the primary medium for the circulation of political information, and that medium was the newspaper. So from 1792 on well into the 20th century, the federal government massively subsidized the circulation of newspapers sent through the mail. Now, what does that subsidy mean? Well, here’s an example, you sent a letter from Philadelphia to say Georgia, it could cost you as much as 50 cents if that had an enclosure of two sheets. Newspaper you could send for a penny and a half, even though the newspaper was much bigger, it’s a huge subsidy. Within a couple of years, newspapers made up as much as 95 percent of the weight of the mail. So the Post Office was not really a letter delivery infrastructure, if you think about weight, bulk, it was a newspaper delivery infrastructure. The newspapers were full of information about public affairs. Now, the letters generated the bulk of the revenue. The merchants paid for everybody’s newspapers. But it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference had not lawmakers, Congress, the Second Congress, insisted upon keeping control over the expansion of the network. That is to say, before 1792, in keeping with British precedent, it remained British precedent, the Postmaster General would decide when a new route would be extended, and he’d be concerned about financial considerations. Would it pay? Because he was evaluated on his ability to more or less balance the books. In Great Britain, Benjamin Franklin’s Post Office was a revenue generator. In fact, Alexander Hamilton thought the US Post Office might be a revenue generator too. But in 1792, he loses the debate because Congress rests control over the establishment of new routes from the Postmaster General. You can imagine what happened if you were living in a settlement far from Atlantic seaboard, far from the Post Road, which was the spine of the network. That is to say, it was a single route that extended from Maine to Georgia, the Old Post Road, If you lived far from that spine, you wanted access to information, well, you would petition lawmakers.

You get your friends to sign the petition, but go to Philadelphia and then after 1800, go to Washington. We’d like a post drought. It’s going to help commerce. We want to learn what’s going on in the nation’s capital. Congress then would grant that request. So you have very low cost circulation of newspapers plus a network that is spatially extensive, much more extensive spatially than the comparable networks in Britain or France, let alone Russia or other spatially extensive countries. There was a third provision of the 1792 Act that’s interesting that perhaps might even have some special relevance today.

Jeremi Suri: Sure.

Richard John: Many of the lawmakers who served in Congress were familiar with the opening of letters in Britain and on the continent by government postal administrations. It was common to, in effect, spy on your own subjects. Post Office Act of 1792 includes a provision that’s illegal to open anyone’s letter. To this day, posted letters are among the most secure means of communication. Those are the three key provisions of the 1792 Act. There was no ringing preamble. Let’s say, its significance is only become evident to us really in the last century. No ringing preamble, but you have a provision for the circulation of information on public affairs at very low cost, massive subsidies for newspapers. You have a provision for the extension of the network in advance of demand. There’s, of course, those little rural hamlets would now be able to pay their own way.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Richard John: But that was never a consideration. You have what we would come by the 1840s to refer to as privacy. The term privacy was not current, but the first references to the circulation of letters in the Post Office as a right to privacy would emerge by the mid-19th century. That’s a pretty stunning achievement of the Founders, which created an institution that by the 1830s, would become a wellspring of democracy. Post Office jobs made up about 90 percent of all federal government jobs. There were jobs that were eagerly sought after by politically active men and women who were involved in the electoral process. If your party won, you might be rewarded with the postmastership. Contracts for delivering the mail were important; they were given out to supporters of the party. There was controversies about that. This was the first great Pork Barrel Project and democracy has a material foundation. Material foundation is not only the circulation of information, which is absolutely essential for democracy, but it was also, in effect, funding of elections. We had publicly financed elections through the patronage of the Post Office. So that’s a pretty remarkable record for an organization that today is under threat.

Jeremi Suri: It’s extraordinary, Richard, and you and you went through that so well and really evaluated three of the key pillars that come up time and again in our discussions of democracy, accessed information, the extension of that information across boundaries that are economic as well as geographic. Then of course, Privacy and Protection of one’s individual opinions. Would you argue that the flowering of democracy that we usually look to around the Jacksonian period, what Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed when he came to the United States, that what was made possible because of the postal service?

Richard John: The material foundations of the mass parties lie in Post Office. Alexis de Tocqueville himself, when he came to America, was astonished at the circulation of political information, mostly in the form of newspapers in the hinterland. Tocqueville famously wrote, he predicted that when he traveled from the seaboard to Michigan, he thought he would be recapitulating the history of civilization in reverse. That is to say, well, be pretty civilized there on the seaboard. I may get out to Western Pennsylvania, well, little more primitive and you get out to Michigan, you’re going to be at the very beginnings. He had conventional ideas about Native Americans, that they were less civilized and so on. But what he discovered was when he made it out to Michigan, they were every bit as civilized as the New Yorkers. What does that mean? Well, you went into a hut of a settler and there you would find his Bible, his ax, and his newspaper. The newspaper came in the mail and Tocqueville was aware of that. He actually has statistics, a little counting up exercise of the numbers of newspapers that circulate in the United States versus Lille in France, in the an American city outside of the very centers of power, and there’s much more circulation of information in the United States than in France. If we associate democracy as I believe we should access to information with the ability of ordinary people to speak truth to power, to engage in public life, not simply to receive message coming from the seat of power. Then the Post Office was absolutely fundamental in the period that we associate with the flowering of democracy, Jacksonian America.

Jeremi Suri: Now what’s interesting, Richard, about this is those newspapers that I think you’re rightly pointing to is the central sources of information and mobilization. They were, of course, partisan, and filled with what we would today call fake news. Isn’t that true?

Richard John: Yes. This is a very good question. What was in the newspapers was not what in the mid-twentieth century, we would call “objective news.” The editors of newspapers, for the most part, had a political identity. Some were more partisan than others. They were all supportive of the government project of the American Republic. Now, how would they get the material in their newspapers? Well, they would clip from other newspapers. They really had a paste pot and scissors. Another provision of the 1792 Act is an unlimited number of newspapers could go free of charge in the press. Most of the information in these newspapers, which by the way were just four pages long, was clipped from other papers. It was selective. But there are two caveats that are important and neglected by journalism historians. First, the most respected newspaper in the early republic was Niles’ Weekly Register, published out of Baltimore. I asked my students at the Columbia Journalism school, what was the most important word in that title? Niles’ Weekly Register. Well, some say, “Well, it was a register, because in fact it consisted primarily of government documents and speeches that he just printed verbatim.” Well, that’s part of it. “It was weekly, was periodical.” Well, that is important too, but the most important element of Niles’ weekly register is that Hezekiah Niles was trusted.

Jeremi Suri: Right.

Richard John: He was trusted as an arbiter. He was situated in Baltimore, which is between the North and the South. It’s a slave state, but it’s a commercial city, and it’s familiar, very close to what’s going on. Philadelphia, New York, much more so they say than Richmond. He had a sense of what we would today call the Overton window. That is to say, what is the permissible boundaries of dissent on public issues? He would report or really just clip, but therefore report on radical movements from different parts of the country, reactionary movements from different parts of the country, and we’d all get into Niles’ Register. So helps to make Niles’ Register such a valuable source for historians. So there was a concept of information that was reliable. I’m not using the word objective, that’s a 20th century norm, but Chairman the other caveat here, we’ve got Niles. The other caveat here is that the commercial press, which is much more important than it’s often recognized, the editors of the Commercial Press had a vested interest in making sure that commercial information was reliable. There was a tendency to challenge rumors and fake news, which existed in abundance. The single most pervasive category of fake news was news meant to tip financial transactions, floating a rumor in order to make a gain.

Richard John: Commercially, insider trading. The editors at commercial press were very sensitive to that because their market, which is largely subscription-based, their market was knowledgeable merchants who didn’t want to be duped.

Jeremi Suri: Right. So in a sense, the market worked to provide trusted sources people knew to look to if they wish to. Why didn’t the telegram just replace this, the telegraph?

Richard John: What a good question. Samuel Morse, who had the patents for the telegraph, he was a lucky fellow. He was the roommate of the patent commissioner and he’d fallen in love with the patent commissioner’s daughter, who gives him a very broad patent in part to keep the Brits out. That’s nice work if you can get it. So Samuel Morse has a very broad patent. He decides that he’s going to license it in a franchise model to promoters. In New York City, the promoter who gets the franchise is a fellow by the name of Samuel Colt. There may be a few of your listeners who are familiar with the Colt six-shooter, with the gun. Well, Colt it turns out, not only made guns, but he was also very good at explosives. He early came to attention because he would be able to blow up a ship in a harbor by attaching to it what was called a torpedo, which was not something that runs through the water, but instead was a bomb that was just connected to the ship. Now the question is, how is that torpedo going to be charged? The answer is you’d have a wire under water. So this is a long way of saying, that he was very good at underwater insulation. So Morse taps Colt for the first electric telegraph in New York City. You need underwater communication in New York City because it’s an island and you’ve got water on both sides. So Colt sends out this broadside, where he says, “The newspapers are doomed. Because we’re going to set up a telegraph network from New York to New Orleans that’s going to make it possible to under bid the New York City Press.” That is to say, we’ll be able to get the information to New Orleans by telegraph faster than the New York City Press can. Therefore, the newspaper will be a thing of the past. New media is going to doom the newspaper. Well what happens? Well, the newspapers fight back. New York Press forms, a news brokerage, which would become the New York Associated Press and many years later under different management, the Associated Press of today to get control over news. They’ll also go to the New York state legislature to get extraordinary privileges for journalists. As a consequence, the New York Associated Press fights off the challenge of the telegraph. Perhaps the single most important feather in its cap was that they guaranteed the quality of information against speculation. There was a tremendous concern with the electric telegraph that a promoter could float phony news, fake news, send it to the press, it would get out quickly and that would rile the markets. It happened multiple occasion. New York Associated Press says, “We’re going to guard against that you should trust journalists rather than telegraph promoters.” So at that moment, could have gone either way. There were plenty of newspaper stories in the 1840s saying the newspaper press is doomed, there’s new technology. Well they didn’t use the word technology, but there’s new tactical contrivances emerge that’s going to destroy it. The journalists fought back and they preserved the sanctity of information about commerce and public affairs.

Jeremi Suri: That required the Post Office then to continue to deliver the newspaper.

Richard John: The newspapers would continue to go through the mail, yes. That’s the Post Office angle here. Since I teach in a journalism school, there is also a journalism angle to it. The journalists work so closely with the Post Office to guarantee a market. Abraham Lincoln, for example, he would have read the country edition of the New York Tribune in the 1850s, which would’ve come to Illinois through the Post Office. It’s the fundamental indispensable mechanism for the circulation of information on commerce and public affairs.

Zachary Suri: When did the Post Office prominence in American Democratic conversations begin to fall out of the public consciousness?

Richard John: Well, it’s a long way after the 1840s. The Post Office is still on the rise, 1845 you have legislation that leads to low cost letter postage. So now the government guarantees low cost, convenient circulation of information, not only in commerce and public affairs, but also on personal matters. Immigrants by the million communicate via letter. Well into the 20th century, letters were the key means of long distance communication. The telegraph never became an inexpensive, long distance medium of communication for ordinary people. So the Post Office is on the march in the late 19th century, in the 1880s, critics of the telegraph will say, “Why don’t we run the Western Union like the Post Office?” Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Vision was the government taking over businesses and running them like the Post Office. There’s almost a Post Office triumphalism into the early 20th century. Then you have parcel post in the Wilson administration, you have postal banking. 1930s, 1940s, the heyday, there was a movie called The Miracle on 34th Street.

Jeremi Suri: The what?

Richard John: You remember the movie, Jeremi? One of the key plot twists is, does Santa Claus exist? Well, how do we know if Santa Claus exists? Well, the Post Office delivers mail to the North Pole. So that shows that Santa Claus has to exist because you trust the Post Office to get that sort of thing right.

Jeremi Suri: I think it’s an important point if you just touched on it briefly, but the fact that the Post Office was a trusted banker during the crisis. Yes?

Richard John: The postal banking was essential for millions of immigrants. They did not trust commercial banks in Europe. It was hemmed in in various ways by lobbyists for private banks. So it never gave high-interest. To this day, in Japan, Post Office banking is thriving. That’s another kind of access, democratic access, access to credit. You see, you can’t really have a democratic society if everyone in that society did not have access to credit, Post Office banking did that. So to get to a very good question, what happened? Well, after the Second World War, postal volume is still increasing. But there’s tension with certain unions, Post Office is one of the biggest union employers. There is administrative challenges coming from this conflict between professional administration and political patronage. 1960s, you have a near collapse of the Chicago Post Office and that leads to calls for reform. The calls for reform culminated in the establishment of what we today call the institution, which is the United States Postal Service. That’s a relatively a new phrase, new term, but date from 1970-1971. So there were challenges long before the coming of Internet. Post office tried to get its rates in order. You tried to reduce the subsidies it was giving to magazines and that led to the collapse of two magazines. Jeremi, some of your older listeners might be familiar with Life magazine and Look magazine. They simply couldn’t pay the postal charges. Then under the US Postal Service after 70/71, the Post Office is no longer a line item in the federal budget. In fact, the Post Office lost money most years between the 1850s and the 1960s. Congress just paid up whatever the Post Office needed to operate. It was not a public issue. It was considered to be so essential to democratic self-government that it didn’t really matter. But it was running a deficit. But by 1970, let’s change the foundations of it. Let’s make it nonpartisan. Congress had a lot of other places to go to keep the party supporters happy. All those military contracts, all those road-building contracts, Post Office was less consequential. Let’s make the Post Office more meritocratic. You get the 1970-’71 reforms. The current crisis of the Post Office really goes back to 1990s, steady decline, first-class mail following commercialization of the Internet. Then 2006, congress enacts a law that oblige the Post Office to pay forward its pension funds, extraordinary bizarre clause that got into that act. Without that clause, the Post Office would be more or less breaking even until the COVID-19 crisis. But with that clause, Post Office has been in fact borrowing money for some time. Then the question is, at some point, will it be unable to borrow money? Then you’ve really got a crisis. That’s where we are at this present juncture.

Jeremi Suri: Richard, I think this history is so crucial today, not just for understanding the Post Office, but because it raises an important question that a lot of our young listeners might not recognize how essential postal delivery of letters and news and information still is in our world today. In fact, delivery of things beyond that. Why is it so important?

Richard John: Absolutely. In the 1880s and ’90s, government administrators, journalists, floated the idea of the Post Office principle. But what is the Post Office principle? The Post Office principle was that the government had an obligation to circulate information and after the 1910s parcels throughout the country, independent of cost, that is to say to the smallest time, but Zack’s poem was wonderful on this, the smallest towns, as well as the big cities. The big cities tended to generate a lot more revenue than the small towns, and that remains the case today. It has that obligation to blanket the country, no commercial carrier. FedEx, UPS, has anything like that in its DNA. They could go out of business into some other business tomorrow. FedEx and UPS, just recently someone did the calculations, they deliver in a year what the Post Office delivers in 13 days, and they do not deliver it to the kind of places that the Post Office delivers it. We still have uniform postage for small parcels, letters, throughout the country. That’s extraordinary, that’s not cost-effective. If somehow it became commercial, you’d immediately lose that kind of access. The idea that we’re all in this together, we’re all part of a common project at a basic level is predicated on the idea that we can all share information with each other. Now some young, they say, “Well, what about e-mail? I can, or what about Skype? I can communicate anywhere around the world. It costs well, not everyone in the country has access to Internet. But even if they do have access to Internet, there are certain things you get in the Post Office which you’re not going to be able to get in the Internet. Medicine, after I did a Washington Post up there, I got letters from servicemen who tried out any number of expedience for getting the medicine. One serviceman needed eight kinds of medicine with the only reliable institution that guarantee to get his medicine was the Post Office. What about mailing ballots? What happens this fall if the COVID-19 crisis is not resolved? Only the Post Office has that kind of access. What about notices for jury service, other kinds of civic obligations? Post office provides those services, and it could provide many more if it wasn’t so hemmed in by Congress. Earlier on, I talked about Congress saying you have to deliver anywhere. Well, Congress has kept its finger on the pie, it’s very important for democracy that it has, but it also means that the Post Office has not been able to go into lucrative businesses or lucrative sectors really that other businesses have. Because the Post Office fundamentally is not a business. Zack said that so well. It’s never been judged on its ability to make profit. It lost money for much of its history. Early on, it was simply supposed to break even. That was all that was demanded of it, and it does sorts of things that businesses do not do, particularly in our current age when businesses are supposed to adhere to an extremely narrow mandate to maximize return for shareholders. The Post Office is different from that. It’s a public service. Its infrastructure, that’s its DNA. It’s DNA is coeval with the foundations of our experiment, democratic self-rule, and that’s pretty extraordinary.

Jeremi Suri: It is, and there is a digital divide in our society, but there is not a postal divide because anyone can get a mail delivered to them, and anyone can buy a stamp for the same price that someone else pays, regardless of where they live. We should be thinking about the Post Office then as a utility. Is that the right way to think about it?

Richard John: What utility is is very interesting. It was originally a socialist idea from the 1890s that then was taken over by electric power companies and gas works. It is a utility. It’s infrastructure, it’s part of our social skin as a democracy. It’s that basic and that fundamental. It is hard, I think, for coastal elites and that people who show up on Sunday morning talk shows to quite recognize how essential Post Office remains in rural America, outside of the centers. If there were no Post Office, remember that other services would then become more expensive because the Post Office acts as access, kind of a watchdog in terms of pricing. Yes. That’s exactly right.

Jeremi Suri: Richard, we always like to close our episodes with a forward looking question, and it really is about how, especially our young listeners, how they can be a part of helping our democracy grow and flourish in these difficult times. With regard to the Post Office, what is it that young people should be doing? How should they encourage our government to continue to not only fund the Post Office, but help the Post Office continue to flourish. Because certainly, you argued that there is at the very least a historical correlation between the Post Office and our democracy. How can we continue to make sure that that remains central to our society as we go forward?

Richard John: Well, I’ve received many Emails, phone calls from people around the country, who are reminding me that they today are petitioning their congressmen to make sure the Post Office stays open, to make sure it’s open on a schedule that is convenient to them. That’s a great American tradition of engaging directly with your lawmakers to remind them that Post Office matters to your everyday life. I suppose you could write more letters, but that’s not really at the center of the future of the institution. More parcel delivery, more providing medicine, other kinds of parcels, goods that are impossible to obtain in any other way. Here’s just a thought. Ordinary Americans often claim that they love their mailmen, and we had the wonderful pay into the mailman from Zack early on, but they dislike that city Post Office clerk, who have to stand in line, and mail a parcel. But you could ask yourself, why are so many people standing in line to mail parcels? It’s because it’s so much cheaper and convenient than any other alternative. There is something about standing in line, or at least being aware that an awful lot of Americans are willing to stand in line for a long time to mail a parcel that reminds us of how the Post Office binds us together. Maybe that’s a thought that ordinary young people could carry forward. We also could think about the Post Office as a low cost broadband provider. There’s been a lot of proposals for the Post Office to get into broadband, that could be secure, no advertising, no espionage, no surveillance. We could think about Post Office banking, which could be extremely important for underserved communities. We could think about relaxing some of the restrictions on Post Office to engage in certain kinds of commercial activity that could help subsidize circulation of information and goods. Just as in the early republic, commercial correspondence subsidize political information and information on personal matters, and eventually goes. That’s just some ways to think about it. I think it’s very sad that we live in a society in which every institution is judged against a single metric, and we don’t see the ways in which the Post Office has helped to contribute and continues to help to contribute today to bind the nation together as lawmakers said about a half century ago. That’s something worth cherishing, worth celebrating, and worth really struggling to uphold.

Jeremi Suri: Yes. I think that’s so well said, and it is fundamentally why judgment of public service has to be at the center of our democracy, how are our institutions serving the public. Zachary, as a young person, do you think that this discussion of the Post Office can excite young people? Is this an issue that young people can focus on? When I was growing up, we still collected stamps, and that was a way we sort of thought about the importance of the Post Office. Obviously your generation doesn’t collect stamps. Do you agree with Richard that there’s a way in which young people can see this as essential not just to the mail, but to democracy as they think about it?

Zachary Suri: I think there’s a real opportunity for increased education around the issue with the postal service, and about reexamining its role in our democracy. I think one of the real problems that has led us to the point where we are in regards to the Post Office is that we’ve had a real lack of education to this point about what the Post Office does beyond just delivering mail. I think that’s something that our schools, our teachers, and our educational administrators need to work on. I think it’s something that they will work on.

Jeremi Suri: Well, thanks to Richard, his scholarship, and his public work, more and more people can become knowledgeable about this. Richard, thank you for all that you’ve done to elucidate and not just the Post Office, but elucidate the ways in which democracy requires means of communication and an infrastructure of connection that you have covered so well and the possibilities this provides going forward. I love the idea of inexpensive postal Internet, postal broadband. Thank you for joining us, Richard.

Richard John: Well, thank you, Jeremi. Thank you, Zachary. It was a splendid poem.

Zachary Suri: Thank you.

Jeremi Suri: Yes, Zachary. Thank you for adding your poetic insights as always, and thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of This is Democracy.

Announcer 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Announcer 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

Announcer 3: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives on Democracy.