The historic post office building across from New York’s Penn Station bears the inscription: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” But that’s not the Postal Service’s official motto; it’s actually a reference to an ancient Persian messenger service remembered admiringly by Herodotus. Misconceptions about the post office abound, especially as more Americans demand access to mail-in voting for the presidential election.
Myth No. 1
Ben Franklin founded the Postal Service.
“Benjamin Franklin creates the Post Office Department” reads a 2013 Philadelphia Inquirer headline on a today-in-history feature. In 2016, the Independent, a Rhode Island newspaper, referred to Franklin as “the father of America’s postal system.”
The Continental Congress made Franklin postmaster general in 1775, but he wasn’t the founder of the Postal Service as we know it today. He had been Philadelphia’s postmaster and America’s co-postmaster general under the British Crown, and in 1775 he inherited an existing organization that retained some of its colonial trappings. A rate chart that Franklin issued after he took office, for instance, was substantially similar to one he had issued under colonial rule.
In 1788, the ratified Constitution gave Congress the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” President George Washington sought a postal service that could logistically bind western territories with the Eastern Seaboard. In 1790, he urged Congress’s “establishment of the militia, of a mint, of standards of weights and measures, of the post office and post roads.” James Madison, then a congressman, wanted to ensure the flow of information from citizens to their representatives. The result was a postal organization with an expanded mandate, codified in the Post Office Act of 1792. With this law, Congress subsidized the circulation of information on public affairs, which at that time primarily meant delivery of newspapers. It also set protocols for the establishment of new postal routes: Ordinary Americans were empowered to petition lawmakers to extend mail service to their localities, fashioning the post office as we now conceive it.
Myth No. 2