It Can Happen Here

Trump knows he can’t win without trashing the Constitution. And he may just get away with it.

- By Ari Berman

BEFORE THERE WAS a United States of America, there was a postal system. Revolutionaries like Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson hatched their plans using underground postal networks known as committees of correspondence. In 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress created the Post Office Department and named Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster general.

American democracy expanded with the postal system, one of the only institutions that bound the new nation together and aimed to serve the many rather than the few. The Post Office Act of 1792, signed by George Washington, heavily subsidized the mailing of newspapers, laying the groundwork for an informed citizenry. It also made it a crime for the government to interfere with the mail. When the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he marveled at the young country’s postal system—it had twice as many post offices as Great Britain and five times as many as France. The United States’ progressive ideals traveled with the mail. Abolitionists sent anti-slavery publications to the South before the Civil War. The postal system employed women before they had the right to vote, and hired 243 Black postmasters during the 19th century. Ten of the pallbearers at Frederick Douglass’ funeral were mail carriers.