2025 Chapters (Layout Features)

The Universal Postal Union, Parcel Post, and Postal Policy in the United States of America, 1894–1912

John, Richard R.

This essay traces the influence of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) on the public debate that took place in United States between 1894 and 1912 over the expansion of the mandate of the US Post Office Department to admit merchandise into the mail. This debate can be said to have begun in 1894 with the publication of an audacious tract by Cowles in which he proposed the establishment of a nationwide government-owned merchandise-delivery channel to be operated by the US Post Office Department. The merchandise-delivery issue would remain on the public agenda until 1912, when the US Congress enacted the first comprehensive parcel post law. This new law would go into effect on New Year’s Day in 1913; among its most prominent advocates was Oregon Senator Jonathan Bourne Jr. Though the UPU influenced this public
debate in various ways, it had little effect on either the timing of the 1912 law or its rationale. Far more important was the shifting balance of power in the US Congress, and, in particular, the emergence after 1910 of a bloc of lawmakers sympathetic to big-city mail-order houses and unbeholden to the powerful phalanx of country shopkeepers who had for over a decade mounted a powerful challenge to any legislation designed to reconfigure the channels of trade.