The American Stamp: Postal Iconography, Democratic Citizenship, and Consumerism in the United States 9780231208246, 9780231208253, 9780231557337

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T H E A M E R I C A N S TA M P

THE AMERICAN S TA M P

Postal Iconography, Democratic Citizenship, and Consumerism in the United States

L A U R A G O L D B L AT T A N D RICHARD HANDLER

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldblatt, Laura, author. | Handler, Richard, 1950– author. Title: The American stamp : postal iconography, democratic citizenship, and consumerism in the United States / Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022015218 (print) | LCCN 2022015219 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231208246 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231208253 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231557337 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Postage stamps—United States. | Commemorative postage stamps—United States. | National characteristics, American. Classification: LCC HE6185.U6 G65 2022 (print) | LCC HE6185.U6 (ebook) | DDC 769.56973—dc23/eng/20220411 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015218 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015219

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

The whole social world seems populated with forces that in reality exist only in our minds. We know what the flag is for a soldier, but in itself it is only a bit of cloth. Human blood is only an organic fluid, yet even today we cannot see it flow without experiencing an acute emotion that its physiochemical properties cannot explain. . . . A cancelled postage stamp may be worth a fortune, but obviously that value is in no way entailed by its natural properties. . . . Collective representations often impute to the things to which they refer properties that do not exist in them in any form or to any degree whatsoever. — É M I L E D U R K H E I M , T H E E L E M E N TA R Y F O R M S O F T H E R E L I G I O U S L I F E

He was waiting for something, a sound like nothing else on earth. It came in a moment. It was the sound of something being pushed into the front door mail slot. — R AY M O N D C H A N D L E R , FA R E W E L L , M Y LOV E LY

FOR OUR CHILDREN: M O L LY, L O U I E , J A C K , A N D I S A A C

•

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

PART I. MAILING, COLLECTING, CATALOGUING 1 THE POSTAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP 23 2 CREATING POST- POSTAL VALUE: STAMP COLLECTING 41 3 U.S. STAMPS: CATALOGUING POLITIES AND FRAMING NATIONAL CULTURE 66

xCO NTENTS

PART II. STORIED ANCESTORS 4 FIXING THE ICONOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL ANCESTRY: DEAD HEADS AND MOVING BODIES DURING THE U.S. CIVIL WAR 87 5 MINING HISTORY AND MARKETING STAMPS AT THE WORLD’S FAIRS 110 6 THE PEOPLE IN THE POSTAL POLITY: TWENTIETH- CENTURY DEFINITIVE STAMPS AND THE ICONOGRAPHY OF DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION 130

PART III. THE STAMP OF NEOLIBERALISM 7 POSTAL PEOPLE: FROM INDUSTRIAL LABOR, BLACK POWER, AND SOCIAL SERVICE TO CARTOON CITIZENSHIP 169 8 SEGREGATING STAMPS: FROM WHITE DEFINITIVES TO RACIALIZED COMMEMORATIVES 201 9 HOW TO DO THINGS WITH STAMPS, PART I: FIRST- DAY COVERS 226 10 HOW TO DO THINGS WITH STAMPS, PART II: SHOOTING THE MOON 243

CO NTENTS xi

CONCLUSION: POSTAL CIRCULATION AND CITIZENSHIP AT THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY 256

Acknowledgments 267 Appendix: How Many People Collect Stamps in the United States? 271 Notes

275

Bibliography 321 Index

341

T H E A M E R I C A N S TA M P

INTRODUCTION

A

postage stamp is a most mundane object, a small piece of paper with print on one side and adhesive on the other. Mundane, yes, but also materially and symbolically potent. As a material object, the stamp has served since its invention in 1840 as a key device or tool in the functioning of national postal systems, facilitating the circulation of billions of messages and parcels throughout the nationstate and the world. This functional role quickly led to a second career for the postage stamp as the bearer of messages from the state to its citizens in the form of images of exemplary persons, scenes, and narratives. And as national post offices began to exploit the messaging possibilities of stamps, stamps became consumer goods in their own right—first, for the postal patrons purchasing them from a selection of functionally identical but iconographically different items and, second, for the collectors who made them the focal item of one of the most widespread hobbies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: stamp collecting. This book concerns the postage stamps of the United States. We argue that close attention to these tiny devices reveals a central tension in the U.S. experience: the tension between democratic citizenship and consumerism. Is sovereignty to be defined by political agency or by purchasing power? By equal representation or by equal opportunity to purchase commodities? Postage stamps, the images they bear, and the ways people have used

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them, we contend, dramatize this national debate and suggest trenchant answers to such questions.

STAMPS, DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP, AND CONSUMERISM

Stamps differ from other vehicles of nationalist messaging—such as monuments, museums, and textbooks—and from other consumer goods in several important respects. They are centrally controlled by a postal agency, yet they change rapidly—resulting in the deployment of more than three thousand different images from the middle of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century in the United States. Produced by the billions and functionally central to one of the most important masscommunication systems of that period, stamps have been connected to people’s daily lives in a way that no other vehicle of nationalist ideology can match.1 The ubiquity of stamps in national life, the fact that they change regularly yet remain controlled by a remarkably stable national agency, and their accrued identity as consumer items have made them a site where some of the deepest principles of U.S. national citizenship and those principles’ relationship to democratic practices have been articulated and debated. In this case, “articulation” and “debate” occur not only in postal iconography but also in the different ways people have discovered to use postage stamps for purposes other than mailing a letter. For this reason, a study of the iconography of postage stamps that fails to consider what postal patrons and collectors do with them and how those acts influence  the authorities who control the iconography would be seriously incomplete. As we argue in this book, the postage stamp has afforded an iconographic space for and a material instantiation of a long-term debate concerning two views of U.S. citizenship—one centered on the freedoms afforded by democracy, the other on the freedoms afforded by consumerism.

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Once the United States Post Office Department (USPOD), along with other national post offices elsewhere, realized the peculiar appeal of stamps as consumer goods and collectibles, it began exploiting their commercial potential by producing more and more varieties of stamps that were not  needed for postal functioning. Moreover, the POD had a monopoly over the production and sale of its stamps. Only it could produce “official,” government-authorized postage stamps, even as it had to compete against powerful private enterprises for the right to expand its service offerings into new domains of mass communication and transportation. This has meant that the U.S. postal service has never been free to fulfill its public mission without regard to private competitors, and at the same time it has been given almost free rein to market stamps as consumer goods for purposes other than postal use. U.S. postage stamps did more than make available an iconographic space for debate about democracy and consumerism; as they became collectibles, they came to instantiate the latter.2

CONTAINERS, CIRCULATION, AND CITIZENSHIP

Stamps move the mails, and as they do, they call attention to a key trope for us in this book: the container–contents couplet. Containers are central to capitalist economies in which goods must be packaged or contained to be circulated in other containers such as vehicles and pipelines from producers to consumers. Containers preserve the integrity and privacy of their contents while also hinting at what’s inside. Likewise, stamps affixed to envelopes and packages provide information necessary for the conveyance of containers without revealing much about their contents. Moreover, stamps as material objects are tiny frames that contain nationalist imagery, and often included in that imagery are picture frames. Thus, even as they perform the work of moving other containers, they are both containers and icons of containers that deliver ideological content from the nation-state to its citizens—literal and metaphorical containers, we might say.

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There is another way in which the design of stamps—not their iconographic design but their design as material objects—is both a literal and metaphorical version of a key trope of modern society: citizenship. Postage stamps are mass-produced as identical images in sheets (of a few dozen identical items), ready to be detached, one by one, to be used in the mail. Millions of identical images—especially when the images are portraits of individual persons, as they often are—present a literal analogue of the citizenry of a democracy: millions of linked individuals, all ostensibly of equal value. No one stamp on a sheet is theoretically better or more deserving than any other, and all are functionally equivalent as currency to purchase postal services. At the same time, because each stamp is easily detachable from the larger “retail” unit (the “pane” or “sheet” of stamps), it is also an analogue for the separate existence of each citizen. As containers of ideological content, postage stamps frame images of the nation, the body politic, and exemplary citizenship—of which they are also a material analogue. From the moment a five-cent stamp bearing a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and a ten-cent stamp featuring George Washington were created in 1847, U.S. stamps have treated national citizenship as an empty container to be filled by different, unique personages. Explicitly in contrast to British stamps, which featured the head of the monarch, U.S. stamps proclaimed that merit, not birth, made particular persons worthy to represent the nation and its citizens in official iconography. Over time, as people with social attributes very different from the Franklins and Washingtons struggled to achieve the full rights of citizenship, stamps were increasingly taxed with representing both social diversity and national unity. Yet to do so they had to perform a sleight of hand in representing the ideal of democratic rights for all citizens even as that ideal was challenged, delayed, and thwarted in national life. We argue here that postage stamps have performed this ideological magic trick by transposing the idea of equality from a political register— all citizens should be equal before the law—to a consumer register—all shoppers should have an unlimited choice of equal alternatives. U.S.

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stamps for most of the nineteenth century stuck to the political register, featuring a small cast of characters—great white men of politics and warfare. A decisive change occurred in connection with the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, for which the USPOD (which we often refer to generally as the “post office” or the “postal system”) created the first U.S. “commemorative” stamps. These stamps celebrated the moment—the fair and the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage—but were not intended to stay in circulation after that or to displace the stamps already in use, which gradually became known as “regular-issue” or “definitive” stamps. The creation of commemorative stamps to circulate alongside regular issues opened the door to consumer choice as a driver of postal iconography. Interest groups soon learned to lobby the post office for stamps depicting their heroes and agendas, and the post office began to think more seriously about the public not merely as citizens paying for postal services but also as consumers buying government-issued souvenirs.3 With the full flowering of the consumer society after World War II, the post office issued more and more commemorative stamps. This proliferation gave postal patrons an ever-growing number of choices among products that were functionally identical but iconographically different. Because, however, the iconography was intended (indeed, required) to speak to issues of national history and identity, the consumer imperative of unlimited choice among similar alternatives came into tension with the democratic imperative of representing exemplary citizenship and its history. The result, as we will show, is a 150-year-long sequence of official national symbolism in which certain definitive choices—such as Franklin as the father of the modern U.S. postal service and Washington as the father of his country—were overtaken by a consumer’s cornucopia of commemoration, which conveyed a message much like President Donald Trump’s infamous assertion concerning the neo-Nazi demonstrators and counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017: there were “very fine people, on both sides.” In brief, a strategy of  iconographic accumulation of different kinds of exemplary persons

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overwhelmed the original exclusive focus on great white men without ever dislodging the ideological principles that underpinned that focus.

FROM 1866 TO 197 1: THE NAR RATIVE ARC OF POSTAL ICONOGRAPHY

Postage stamps were born bearing images of state sovereignty and authority. Taking their cue from coins and banknotes, postal officials understood that the stamps they were printing to facilitate the circulation of letters and packages among the population could also be used for a different kind of circulation: that of state imagery. Postage stamps, tiny though they were, nonetheless had space enough for the state to use them to circulate messages announcing its own supremacy. Iconic images of flags and coats of arms began to circulate on stamps, but, above all, stamps hosted portraits of the personages deemed uniquely suitable to stand for the nation-state: heads of state, allegorical figures, military heroes, and other historically important men. From the beginning, then, stamps depicted state power condensed in images of exemplary personhood even as they provided ordinary people with an important means for communicating with one another.4 The prototype for the depiction of exemplary personhood on postage stamps was the Penny Black, the world’s first stamp, issued by Great Britain in 1840 and featuring a bust of Queen Victoria, originally designed for a medal in 1837. This image of the young queen circulated unchanging on billions of British stamps until 1901, when Victoria died, and her reign ended. As the living monarch of Great Britain, Queen Victoria represented both the nation and the monarchy as an unending string of figures divinely ordained to rule and represent Great Britain. Like the Penny Black, the first U.S. stamps featured portraits of notable persons, but they differed from the British version in two important ways. First, unlike Victoria—who remained ever youthful on British stamps for more than sixty years—Franklin (d. 1790) and Washington (d. 1799) were long dead by the time they took their place on postage

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stamps in 1847. Second, unlike the portrait of Queen Victoria, which floated, only partially framed, the portraits of Franklin and Washington were set inside heavy frames, a feature that, we argue, indicated their deadness and became a core part of democratic postal iconography in the United States. As we discuss in chapters 3 and 4, the convention prohibiting images of living persons on U.S. coins and currencies—debated at the time of the founding of the U.S. Mint in 1792 and codified into law in 1866— was intended to safeguard democracy from tyranny and moral corruption. In 1792, it was decided that an allegorical person, the goddess Liberty, could be featured on U.S. coins, but not President Washington. To place a living person on these tokens, many argued, would be “monarchical” and therefore antithetical to the very principles that birthed the U.S. republic in the first place. By prohibiting images of living human persons from circulating on federal coins and currencies, while leaving open the possibility that actual people could be featured, but only after their deaths, the authorities who controlled money’s design leveraged historical processes to determine just what it meant to be “exemplary.” To be featured on these tokens proclaimed that history—not hereditary succession or politically motivated contemporaries—had established one’s national greatness and righteousness. Put otherwise, these figures were deemed to have been chosen for coins and currencies on the basis of merit, an evaluative practice that was codified into law during a time of great national peril, the Civil War. Nevertheless, the first U.S. stamps shared important similarities with the Penny Black. Like Victoria, Franklin and Washington were propertied white elites, and although they were not technically aristocracy, their wealth and power qualified them as part of the group that Thomas Jefferson deemed a “natural” aristocracy: those who by dint of their intellect, character, and service were uniquely qualified to rule. Neither Franklin nor Washington was born into a position of government leadership, as Victoria was, but they  were  nonetheless among the socioeconomic elite of their society. They and the small group of men like them who eventually would make up the cast of characters of nineteenth-century postage stamps were far better situated than other

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social ranks to achieve the success posterity required for enshrinement on a postage stamp. Only such men could circulate freely throughout the nation to take advantage of political and economic opportunities. In other words, if early stamps were to feature only people who, in an ostensibly neutral historical reckoning, had made outstanding contributions to the nation, then only white men would have the chance to become qualified for that distinction. There is one further similarity between the Penny Black and early U.S. stamps. Exemplary elites were not and could not be laborers. That criterion became visible to us only when we focused on the Postal People series of 1973, a ten-stamp set that depicted postal employees at work. Then we realized that this series was the only one in the entire catalogue of U.S. postage that depicted human activity in such a way as to define it as labor and celebrate it as such. In other stamps featuring active people—for example, men rowing ashore or Olympic athletes performing—the pictured activities were always defined as something other than labor: discovering a new world or competing for the glory of the nation, for instance.5 The Postal People set was issued at a moment of critical political transition from the New Deal social welfare state to the neoliberal state. Nowhere was that transition more publicly marked than in the transformation of the USPOD, which had been a department of the federal government since the early nineteenth century, into the United States Postal Service (USPS), a government corporation, in 1971. That transformation occurred after decades of declining federal investment in the POD, which made it ever more difficult for the department to function, and, more proximately, in the wake of nationwide wildcat postal strikes carried out by a large, unionized workforce demanding better pay and benefits. In that context, the Postal People stamps seem to face both backward and forward: backward to the midcentury high point of organized labor but forward to corporate discourses celebrating and thereby mollifying individual employees who provide superior service for their customers. The stamps issued by the new postal corporation featured an ever more socially diverse cast of characters, but they pictured diversity

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fleetingly—in an iconography of celebrity, not historic distinction—and they relegated it to rapidly changing commemorative issues. The ideal of a “workhorse” series of definitive stamps featuring an enduring canon of national heroes and designed to remain in use for many years became increasingly untenable because the original criteria for election to the pantheon—that one be an elite, property-owning, nonlaboring white man—proved both impossible to maintain and impossible to dislodge. In place of such a canon, the USPS began issuing definitive series that featured not people but objects: symbols of democracy such as a ballot box, icons of popular culture and natural beauty, and, above all, flags, both the Stars and Stripes and the flags of states and territories.6 We thus found that the period between 1866, when the conventional rule that only the dead could appear on U.S. coins and currency was debated and codified into law, and 1971, when the Post Office Department was transformed into the United States Postal Service, frames the historical arc of our narrative from the time of the first stamps to the end of the twentieth century. The story we tell includes the stories that U.S. postage stamps tell between 1847 and the end of the twentieth century as well as the stories that stamp collectors have also tried to tell in their interactions with postal authorities and with the machinery of the post office as they went about procuring the objects that would constitute their collections.

POSTAL CIRCULATION, ECONOMIC PROGRESS, AND NATIONAL COHESION

The modern system of postal communication grew out of earlier postal systems that carried messages for rulers, not for society at large: the “Royal Mail” of Great Britain, for example.7 As the subjects of feudal realms became the citizens of democratic nation-states and as economic activity became in principle free instead of bound to a fixed social hierarchy, postal systems—still controlled by the state—were gradually expanded to carry messages for people other than rulers. Postage stamps,

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the material objects invented to facilitate the circulation of such missives, played a crucial role in this transformation. Writing in the 1830s, the decade before the invention of the postage stamp, Alexis de Tocqueville explained that the emergent mass societies of the egalitarian modern age—“democracies,” he called them— required social inventions such as the newspaper and the postal service to forge sociality among individuals no longer enmeshed in the hierarchical relationships of obligation that had defined the feudal order. The demise of the old order had freed “men,” Tocqueville thought, to a singleminded pursuit of self-interest, which in the United States had led to an endless circulation of people across a vast geographic space. New infrastructures of mass communication and transportation were necessary to connect those rapidly circulating social atoms as part of one coherent society. Journeying in 1831 on “the frontiers of the United States in a kind of uncovered cart that was called the mail coach,” which delivered letters and newspapers, Tocqueville was astonished to see “how incredibly rapidly thought circulates within this wilderness.” The post and the press, he concluded, made the North American frontier a more prototypically modern place than “the most enlightened . . . cantons of France.”8 Yet without the postage stamp, the cost of mailing a letter in Tocqueville’s North America of the early 1830s was prohibitively expensive for most persons. The mid-nineteenth-century reform of the British and U.S. postal systems—which entailed both sharply reduced postal rates to bring the service within the means of the masses and prepayment by means of the postage stamp to make the collection of postal fees much more efficient than it had been—was based on the assumption that universal access to postal communication would knit together, first, national societies and markets and, then, the global society of nations. In his influential tract on British postal reform in 1837, Sir Rowland Hill—to whom is attributed the invention of the postage stamp—described the postal service as “a powerful engine of civilization.” He justified his arguments for what was considered at the time a drastic reduction in the tax on (or postage paid for) the “transmission” of mail by proclaiming “how much the religious, moral and intellectual progress of the people . . .

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would be accelerated by the unobstructed circulation of letters and of the many cheap and excellent non-political publications of the present day.”9 The U.S. political theorist Francis Lieber, reporting in 1841 on the profound effects of Hill’s work in Great Britain, waxed more eloquent still on the question of the importance of the post to the progress of civilization and the stability of democratic nation-states. In two breathless paragraphs, he described the post as “striking evidence of growing mutual good-will among nations.” He praised “the incalculable assistance it renders to commerce, the multiplied power and utility it gives to capital, the rapid exchange and consequent increase of knowledge, the immense effect, for weal or wo [sic], which it lends to the press, and the fact, that by the assistance of a general post-system alone, free governments, over large countries, can be made durable.”10 Hill spoke of “unobstructed circulation”; Lieber of “the division and union of labor” resulting in a postal “chain of trust and confidence.” Two generations before Hill and Lieber, the prophetic Benjamin Rush had described the post office as the “true non-electric wire of government,” “conveying light and heat to every individual in the federal commonwealth.” Others imagined the postal system invigorating social life the way the circulatory system of the human body made life possible. Messages and parcels would flow through the postal system the way blood flowed through the body’s arteries and veins.11 Yet such metaphors were inexact (as metaphors must be). Electricity in the electric grid and the blood in the body are undifferentiated streams. At least in commonsense terms, the electricity that sparks in one wall outlet is the same electricity that sparks in another, and the blood that emerges when one pricks a finger is the same blood that emerges when one scrapes a knee. When we think of the post office as a system of mass communication, letters and parcels circulating in the mail can be envisioned as a seamless stream. Nonetheless, each item of mail is a unique object, having been sent by one singular person or organization to another—each person or organization having a unique postal address in a system that comprehends millions of such addresses. Moreover, the social organization that moves the mail—the post office—is not a living

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organism. It is a profoundly complicated assemblage of bureaucratic definitions and procedures, mechanical devices, administrators, managers, laborers, and users.12 To make the mail circulate as a stream, as the blood circulates in a living creature, requires endless processes of rationalization, mechanization, and bureaucratization that facilitate sociality by organizing communication as fragments tiny enough to be in-gathered, handled, scanned, weighed, sorted, bundled, boxed, bagged, transported, and finally delivered. Hill, who proposed many devices for better sorting and handling mail, certainly knew this, as did Lieber, who, as indicated in the passage just quoted, understood that the “union” of labor resulted from its previous “division.” In their plans, these postal reformers and their allies “interwove the strengths of organization and organic strength,” as Kate Thomas puts it.13 At least, that is what they attempted. But in their enthusiasm for reform, they did not foresee the difficulties that would be created—especially in the United States—by the contradiction of a system designed to serve a democratic public while also serving free enterprise. For example, in Lieber’s catalogue of the socially beneficial effects of a modern postal system, there is one dissonant note: the system’s potential to be used by a politicized fourth estate to disrupt the unity of the nation-state. At the same time, however, Lieber saw no contradiction between democratic governance and the growing importance of commerce and capital, both of which, he argued, would be well served by an expanded, efficient post office. Lieber never imagined that in the second half of the nineteenth century the post office would become a staging ground for debating a central tension inherent within modern democratic governance: between creating conditions favorable to free enterprise and emphasizing those conditions favorable to democratic participation. In the United States, the POD was conceived as an organization that would support private industry—as Lieber expected—but not one that  would compete with it. Indeed, as the U.S. postal system took shape, it was used to shore up losses in the private sector to keep the economy moving and at the same time to deliver information to an

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expanding population, even when such activities proved costly. Postal revenues subsidized stagecoach and railroad lines, thereby helping to create a transportation infrastructure where none existed earlier. Even so, unscrupulous contractors gouged postal administrators or refused to carry the mails unless they were paid exorbitant fees, which led detractors of the POD to argue that the business of carrying  letters and parcels was just that—a business—and would be best left to profitmaking ventures that could raise revenues through means other than taxes. In response, some government officials and political commentators lauded the post office’s beneficial effects as a reason to nationalize transportation networks, including eventually the railroads, as we discuss in chapter 1.14 Lieber was writing at the dawn of the modern postal era; over time, different countries would situate the post office in their national political economies in different ways. After Great Britain inaugurated the modern postal era (1840), postage stamps were issued in Brazil (1843), the United States (1847), and then Bavaria, Belgium, and France (1849). In the next decade, two dozen more political entities followed suit, and so on it went. With the emergence of the late nineteenth-century world order of nation-states, empires, and colonies, most political entities larger than cities and subnational regions or states organized modern postal services based on the postage stamp. In polity after polity, place after place, the postage stamp was the device introduced to transform the postal system from one that was too costly for most people to use to one that quickly became and has remained the most important publicly owned system of mass communication for almost two centuries. Yet the iconographic, representational work that stamps do is not functionally necessary to the work of moving the mail. As stamps became consumer goods in addition to receipts for postal service, they came to instantiate as material objects the ideological tensions between democratic participation and consumerism—tensions that we can see represented in postal iconography. In this book, we narrate how that iconography and the changes to postal delivery emergent from our national political economy tell a story of the increasing imbrication of democratic participation and consumerism.

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CHAPTER OVERVIEW

This book is divided into three parts punctuated by crises of circulation and democracy. In part I, “Mailing, Collecting, Cataloguing,” we explicate how stamps work. In chapter 1, we connect the simple act of mailing a letter to the container and its two-dimensional relative, the grid. A sheet of stamps is a paper rectangle overlain by a grid of serrations, from which a user of the post detaches a single stamp and affixes it to a container—an envelope or a package—so that this container can be entered into a vast system of other containers—boxes, bags, motorized vehicles—that will deliver the mailed item to a unique address. That address is a sociogeographical point on a map that the postal system has superimposed onto previous maps of the national territory, maps that were often created by the imposition of the surveyor’s grid. The units of that grid are imagined to “contain” such-and-such an amount of land. And each unique stamp that a nation’s post office produces— mechanically reproduced in perforated sheets of identical examples of that stamp—is part of an unending series of unique stamps that issues forth from the post office, each one containing such-and-such amount of national-cultural content. Stamp collecting is the topic of chapter 2, where we examine the semiotic functioning of stamps in the mail system, which creates the distinction between new and used stamps, both of which collectors collect. Collectors who both withdraw new stamps from postal circulation and transform canceled or “killed” stamps into commodities are operating at the intersection of the political and economic domains, valuing stamps as both government messages and consumer goods. That distinction maps onto the two basic collecting strategies of the hobby: one guided by the ordering of stamps based on the postal authority’s serial issuance of them, the other based on the collector’s individual interest in types of stamps defined by topic, shape, color, and so on. Ultimately, the two strategies reflect two different totalities: the democratic polity as represented by the postal authority and the unique individual as represented by a series of consumer choices.

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Chapter 3 begins with the political geography of stamp collecting as revealed in the way the stamp-collecting hobby catalogues postage stamps by reference to political units that are represented by a working postal system. We then turn to the stamps of the political unit of primary concern to us—first, with a thumbnail history of the changing content of U.S. postage stamps from Franklin and Washington to Bugs Bunny and Cabbage Patch dolls. Next, we sketch the criteria codified beginning in the 1950s to guide U.S. postal authorities in their choice of subject matter for stamps. This topic leads us to one of the central ideas of the book: the significance of the “dead head,” the rule specifying that living persons cannot be depicted on a U.S. postage stamp. In part II, “Storied Ancestors,” chapter 4 presents a historical interlude we never expected to write about, a threat to the young nation’s sustainability—the Civil War—that continues to reverberate in the present. Curiosity about the origins of the prohibition of living persons on stamps landed us in 1866, the moment when Congress found it necessary to give legal sanction to a custom that went back to the country’s revolutionary period. The intensity of congressional debate about the proposed law reflected a series of scandals that swirled around a man named Spencer Clark, the superintendent of the National Currency Bureau in the U.S. Treasury Department during President Abraham Lincoln’s administration, when he put his own picture on a five-cent banknote in 1864. He was also accused of preying sexually on some of the many women workers employed by the Treasury in the absence of male workers because of the war, overstating his professional qualifications as an engineer, and overbilling the government for technical innovations in printing that ultimately didn’t work. We treat the Clark affair as a Civil War Rorschach test that brings to the surface deeply held convictions about personhood and citizenship at the very moment when the country was engaged in a deadly struggle to define what kinds of people would be allowed to circulate in the economy and polity as autonomous individuals. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the imagery that U.S. stamps have contained and circulated from the end of the Civil War to the end of the twentieth century. Chapter  5 relates the creation of the first U.S.

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commemorative stamps to advertise and celebrate the turn-of-thecentury world’s fairs. With scenes from nationalized historical stories such as those associated with Columbus, commemorative stamps revealed the storytelling possibility of stamp series. They also introduced iconographic variety into the POD’s inventory of stamps so that postal patrons could begin to exercise consumer choice, like customers in a store selecting items to purchase. As we detail in chapter 6, after the Columbians, postal officials began to realize that a definitive-stamp series could be more than a gallery of loosely related portraits; like a commemorative series, the definitive series, too, could be used to tell a story about representative citizenship in relation both to timeless national principles and to national progress. Over the course of the twentieth century, changing ideas about what kinds of people could represent the nation led to an increasingly diverse set of portraits in the postal gallery—which resulted by the end of the century in the attenuation of the idea, hegemonic since 1847, that it was possible to determine a stable gallery of exemplary citizens who could stand for U.S. democracy. In part III, “The Stamp of Neoliberalism,” chapter 7, like chapter 4, is a historical interlude, taking off from the Postal People issue of 1973 that was created in the wake of a postal crisis “solved” by reorganizing the Post Office Department into a government corporation, the United States Postal Service. Appearing at the outset of the neoliberal era, these stamps elicited some unusually vitriolic criticisms from the philatelic community. At stake was the very nature of the nation’s post office as the provider of a public service at a moment when the government’s ability to function efficiently in that capacity was being increasingly challenged by free-market ideology. The iconographic consequences of that neoliberal takeover of the post office are our focus in chapter 8. We argue that starting in the 1980s the depiction of exemplary citizenship in definitive-stamp series gave way to the evanescent celebrity of an apparently endless series of commemorative stamps. Those commemoratives have become the favored site for the depiction of a diverse population, which can be celebrated in all its diversity without any individual member’s being canonized as a “definitive” version of U.S. citizenship and personhood. Yet the definitive

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version of citizenship, embodied in an adult white man, nevertheless continues to lurk in the background, a haunting figure who refuses to depart. In chapters 9 and 10, we turn from people on stamps to people doing things with stamps—in particular, collectors and postal officials working symbiotically to use the machinery of the postal service to expand the universe of postal collectibles and enhance their value. In chapter 9, we focus on “first-day covers,” envelopes bearing a newly issued stamp postmarked on the date of its issue and at the place of its issue. The firstday-of-issue cancellation provides an index that connects the envelope to the place and moment of a stamp’s birth. As collectors came to value such items, they developed new ways to interact with the post office to procure them. Moving from collectors to the agency that produces the objects they collect, we examine in chapter 10 the way the post office used stamps to connect its citizens to the space race, with its promise of new territorial conquests and discoveries. We show that the philatelic manipulation of objects and events related to various space missions dovetailed with the public-relations orchestration of the space race. With both first-day covers and space-related philatelic collectibles, government officials, stamps collectors, and the wider public have manipulated the act of canceling a stamp to create a message-bearing artifact with an indexical connection to an important event, to the post office, and, through the latter, to the ultimate source of political authority, the state. The postage stamp is the material device that channels all this symbolic work connecting the state and its citizens—work in which both postal authorities and citizens can play active roles. In our conclusion, we link the entanglement of patriotic and pecuniary motivations that we found in the philatelic collectibles of the space race to the conflicted relationship of citizenship and consumerism. Such concerns proved particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were completing this book. COVID-19 led to a crisis of circulation that became a democratic crisis in which autocracy and radical-right populism—both drawing on Lost Cause Confederate nationalism— threatened to undermine the presidential election process. For us, this period sometimes felt like a return to the days of Spencer Clark.

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OF TERMINOLOGY, ACRONYMS, AND ARBITRARY ENDINGS

The postal historian Carl Scheele remarked in 1970 that “the precise legal nature of the postal organization was rather unclear during the first years under the Constitution.” At that time, the postmaster general (PMG) reported directly to the president, and “the establishment itself was referred to as the ‘General Post Office.’ ” During the 1820s, the name “Post Office Department” came into play, and in 1829 the PMG became a member of the president’s cabinet.15 In the twentieth century, the acronyms POD and USPOD were commonly used until 1971, when the United States Postal Service was created, and the acronym USPS became ubiquitous. In this book, we use these acronyms or, as noted earlier, the simple phrases “post office” and “postal service,” depending on context. It is important to understand that the stamps we consider in this book are those used to move the letters, bills, postcards, and “junk” mail that people received routinely throughout the twentieth century. In the Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps & Covers produced by the Scott Publishing Company, such stamps are listed under the simple term postage. Postage is distinguished from various special-use stamps, such as “air post” and “special-delivery” stamps, which have also been used to move items through the U.S. mail.16 Postage, air post, and specialdelivery stamps are distinguished from still other kinds of stamps of interest to collectors, such as “revenue” stamps, which are “used as evidence that taxes have been paid.”17 In this book, we focus almost solely on “postage,” with only an occasional example drawn from other categories of stamps. Between 1847 and the time we completed this book, the U.S. post office (the USPOD and USPS together) produced more than six thousand different postage stamps (as catalogued by Scott). Our study concludes at the end of the second millennium and thus at Scott number 3465—which means that we excluded more than 40 percent of the total from our analysis. The sheer number of images to be examined as well as the post office’s constant production of new images required us to choose an

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arbitrary cut-off date. The year 2000 presented us with a date that is obvious and highly marked in a calendar constructed from a base-ten counting system. Between 1998 and 2000, the post office marked and marketed that date conspicuously with its Celebrate the Century issue of 150 stamps summarizing what it considered to be the principal people and events of each decade of the twentieth century.18 More important, the major transformations in the postal iconography of exemplary citizenship that our study analyzes had been accomplished by the year 2000. There is much to be said about twenty-first-century U.S. stamps, but at the time we were writing this book, those stamps had not yet established new precedents for the representation of democratic citizenship.

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1 THE POSTAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP

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he paradigmatic material format of the postage stamp available to the postal customer is a “pane” of multiple examples of the same stamp, such as a five-cent stamp bearing an image of Benjamin Franklin (one hundred Franklins to the pane, in this example).1 As such, a pane of stamps illustrates one of the most basic cultural principles underlying a Tocquevillian democracy: that the society or nationstate is made up of a mass of individuals conceived as being both politically equal (one person, one vote) and socially alike (all have the same opportunities to succeed).2 Yet to represent the nation on a stamp, not just any individual will do, as we saw in the introduction. The postal authorities’ choice of noteworthy individuals for their stamps also illustrated fundamental democratic principles, articulated in opposition to the imagery of the stamps of monarchical Great Britain. The dead men depicted on early U.S. stamps exemplified the democratic belief that unique individuals, starting from a baseline of social equality, can accomplish great things for the nation-state if they have sufficient talent and devotion to public service. The pane of Franklins thus illustrates both egalitarian similarity (one hundred faces, each one like all the others) and individual uniqueness (it is, after all, Ben Franklin, not Joe Everyman).

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At first, the U.S. post office issued different stamps to correspond to differential postal rates: in 1847, the five-cent Franklin paid for the conveyance of a half-ounce letter traveling less than three hundred miles, whereas the ten-cent Washington paid for half an ounce traveling more than three hundred miles. As postal rates changed and the rate structure became more complicated, new stamps bearing an enlarged cast of representative great men were issued. The availability of these different stamps—all issued in panes consisting of multiple examples of the same image—spoke to postal rates, not to a desire for variety on the part of individual users of postal services. In those early decades of U.S. postal issues, the public was treated as an equal mass, all of whom were subject to the same postal rates and thus would use the same stamps. That began to change with the Columbians in 1893, which, as we saw, were issued alongside and did not replace the regular issues with their galleries of great men. Here was the beginning of a different principle in postal iconography that flowered fully in the second half of the twentieth century. Whereas a postage stamp with its dead head represented democratic individualism, the simultaneous issuance of multiple stamps having the same monetary denomination but bearing a different illustration spoke to the uniqueness of the individuals who made up the mass of postal users. Their uniqueness, however, was understood not as a function of outstanding accomplishments, as it was for the men represented on stamps, but of individual consumer preferences—different postal customers desiring different varieties of functionally identical items. Despite these developments of the relationship between postage stamps and a democratic citizenry, stamps as material objects continued to be delivered to the public in the same format as panes with multiple examples of the same image. Until the 1960s, when new printing technologies made it viable to produce panes of stamps that included different individual stamps, sheets and panes contained between a few and several dozen individual stamps, all bearing identical imagery and information, all separated one from the others by perforations. The first stamps were not perforated but were cut apart with scissors. The industrial process of perforating paper was not perfected until 1848, after which stamps were sold as perforated sheets of identical items that

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were at once linked but ready to be detached by individual users for each instance of use.3 The material format of a pane of stamps, made up of multiple examples of the same image, thus reproduced the social formation of mass democracy, made up of equal and identical citizens who can individualize themselves through their particular actions and choices. A pane of stamps is also a grid—a plane consisting of squares or rectangles that are delineated, detachable, contiguous, and connected. As such, stamp panes recall the grids used repeatedly in the mapping and “settling” of the United States over several centuries. Moreover, stamps allow citizens to communicate across the entire spatial grid of the nationstate: by detaching a stamp from a pane and affixing it to an envelope, a postal patron can mail a letter from any point in the United States to any other point. Thus, a pane of stamps materializes a cluster of key symbols of a democracy; while in use, individual stamps facilitate the workings of a vast information infrastructure that is, in principle, equally available to all citizens regardless of status.4 In this chapter, we examine several features of the postal infrastructure that are particularly revelatory of its relationship to democratic circulation and citizenship: the stamped letter as a container that both reveals and conceals features of personal identity; the material—indeed, bodily—limits on what can be conveyed by post; and the system of postal addresses that locates individuals precisely on a national grid while still protecting their privacy. Throughout the analysis, we keep in mind the relationship of the stamps—with their democratic iconography of framed pictures of nationally representative individuals—to the system of communication they power.

PRIVATE LIVES: MAILING A LETTER

Consider a postal patron buying a pane or partial pane of first-class stamps at the post office. This person uses first-class stamps to mail personal letters and to conduct business transactions through the mail,

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such as paying bills. The material to be mailed—which may include confidential information about the patron’s private life or financial affairs—will be enclosed in a container, an envelope or wrapper of some kind, and entrusted to the postal service with the assumption that it will be transported to its destination without being opened or tampered with, such that only the addressee will have access to the contents of the letter. The envelope or wrapper will be inscribed with personal information: the name and address of both the mailer and the recipient. It will also bear a postage stamp. Upon entrance into the mail stream, the envelope will be canceled, either mechanically or manually; the postmark portion of the cancellation will record the date, time, and location of entrance, and it, or the wavy lines that accompany it, will mark or “kill” the stamp so that it cannot be used again. In using the stamp, the postal patron has detached a mass-produced piece of printed paper from what was originally a sheet of identical items to mail a unique and personal message. That message will be concealed within an envelope as it travels along the mail stream. We can think of this process of message transmission in terms of several overlapping dichotomies: container/contents, outer/inner, public/ private, anonymous/individuated, impersonal/personal, general/ particular. A letter is a container with its contents—the envelope containing (enveloping) the letter. The envelope is the outside, the letter the inside. The information conveyed by the envelope is open to public scrutiny, that of the letter is private, closed to all but the addressee who will “open” the envelope, unseal the container. An individual letter among thousands of similar objects brings the remaining dichotomies into play and allows us to situate postal communication in the context of the mass public of a democratic nation-state. That context was important to mid-nineteenth-century postal reformers and theorists. Consider, as one example, the introduction to James Holbrook’s treatise Ten Years Among the Mail Bags (1855), where the anonymity afforded by the postal system is praised as indicative of democratic practices and culture. The book is a selection of anecdotes drawn from the author’s career as a postal inspector, working to catch postal

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personnel engaged in rifling the mail to steal items of value—which is to say, opening items of mail that were not addressed to them.5 Holbrook begins with a striking conceit: the mail bag as a democratic mass public. In his description, the mail bag is a container in which anonymous individuals, represented by sealed letters, are thrown together as a jumbled, unknowing, and unknowable mass. The mass contains individuals of vastly different social stations, but in this arena, within this container, social distinctions are invisible. “The mail bag is as great a leveler as the grave,” Holbrook tells us in his introduction, because items mailed by both high and low mix indiscriminately within “its leathern walls.”6 When the mail bag is opened, its contents will speak of the full range of particular human situations, but within the mail bag and more generally within “the Post-Office system at large,” they are voiceless: “Until they are released from their temporary captivity, the letters guard in grim silence their varied contents.” Crucially, Holbrook identifies this silence as a citizen-writer’s right, as important as the right of speech: The laws of the land are intended not only to preserve the person and material property of every citizen sacred from intrusion, but to secure the privacy of his thoughts, so far as he sees fit to withhold them from others. Silence is as great a privilege as speech, and it is as important that everyone should be able to maintain it whenever he pleases, as that he should be at liberty to utter his thoughts without restraint. Now the postoffice undertakes to maintain this principle with regard to written communications as they are conveyed from one person to another through the mails. However unimportant the contents of a letter may be, the violation of its secrecy while it is in charge of the Post-Office Department . . . becomes an offence of serious magnitude in the eye of the law.7

Here Holbrook includes alongside the citizen’s right to the preservation of his “person and material property” a right to “the privacy of his thoughts.” The post office explicitly “undertakes to maintain” the latter right by transporting people’s thoughts (in the form of written messages) without intruding on them (because, after all, they are private property).

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The envelope, bearing a visible address, a postage stamp, and a cancellation mark but hiding its contents, is the material assemblage that enables the state to carry out its function. To do so, the state need not open an envelope to give its internal contents a stamp of approval, as must be done with other documents, such as passports—little booklets that are opened and whose pages are stamped at the moment their possessors cross national borders. In the case of the mail, the state cares only to cancel the postage stamp so that it cannot be reused to pay for the postal carriage of another item. The historian Richard John has argued that the citizen’s right to silence was a central feature of the U.S. Post Office Act of 1792, which “prohibited public officers from using their control over the means of communication as a surveillance technique.” In this extension of the rights of private property to the citizens’ written thoughts as conveyed by post, the emergent U.S. post office differed from that of most European countries of the time. And this extension, secured by recognition of the postal correspondent’s right to privacy, has remained in force by law and as part of U.S. postal culture (as understood by both postal officials and the citizens who use the mail) from that day to this, as the history of postal censorship shows. Despite the many instances of government censorship in relation to the U.S. mail—to protect the public from fraudulent business schemes, lotteries, pornography, and political propaganda deemed dangerous to the government—congressional acts and postal regulations have always upheld the sanctity of the sealed letter. As laws and regulations were written and rewritten, postal officials were given authority to refuse to deliver certain items but not to open first-class letters. When legal authorities violated this cardinal stricture, as the CIA and FBI did during the Cold War, “Post Office officials asserted they had had nothing to do with it.”8 And yet, as already noted, each item of mail bears on its outside basic personal information, the addresses—which Holbrook termed “the superscription”9—that almost always uniquely identify both the sender of the item and its intended recipient. If the mail bag is mass democracy in miniature, as Holbrook imagined it, then each citizen therein wears an identification card in plain view.

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This contradiction between a postal system committed to the privacy of its patrons yet reliant upon the open display of an official version of their identities became only more obvious with the U.S. debut of penny postal cards in 1873: post office–produced mailable items with no distinction between an inside and an outside. Perhaps most writers do not commit intimate thoughts to postal cards or to commercially produced “picture postcards,” but their presumption nonetheless is that postal officials will read the addresses of the intended recipients but not the messages intended for them—if only because the Taylorized processing of innumerable pieces of mail requires the postal worker to attend exclusively to addresses.10 Letters and even postal cards and postcards thus travel both personally and impersonally through the mail. As a material object, a letter is a container with contents, having an impersonal outside and a personal inside. Each letter travels as part of an anonymous mass, yet each is individuated by the address it bears and by the information recorded in the postmark, both of which are open to public view. Each piece of mail instantiates a unique communicative act, but each such act is put together out of mass-produced materials (paper, writing and printing devices, and postage stamps) and sustained by industrial processes (sorting and transporting the mail) overseen by a vast bureaucracy that is almost entirely invisible to users of the post.

CONTAINERIZATION

Despite the centrality of containers to postal circulation, it is crucial to recognize that human communication is not inherently a matter of containers and contents but that in modern culture the idea of the container and its contents supplies a basic metaphor for communication. Human communication occurs in space but is not a spatial phenomenon. Meaning does not reside “in” words; words do not “contain” meanings. Rather, meanings emerge from language activities that happen between people, who utilize a more or less common code to

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derive meanings that must always be to some extent idiosyncratic, dependent both on the people talking and on the unique situation of their interaction. But as the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf pointed out long ago, it is almost impossible to speak or write in English (and, indeed, in any of what Whorf called the Standard Average European languages) without objectifying and spatializing nonobjective and nonspatial phenomena. We turn linguistic interactions and the meanings of words into things, which we imagine as arriving in fixed containers and as having fixed values.11 Given these ways of talking and thinking about the world, it is no wonder that physical containers—indeed, containers inside containers inside containers—are central to our systems of mass communication, especially those we categorize as transportation systems, of which the railroad is the archetypical nineteenth-century example. Transportation and communication are united in the postal system, but, unlike telegraphs, telephones, radios, television, and the internet, the postal system conveys material objects without first encoding or “dematerializing” them—as electronic pulses, radio waves, and so on—and then decoding or rematerializing them at the end of the communicative path.12 The post office delivers material objects that postal patrons send to one another. As Francis Lieber put it, handling the mail can be defined as “the mechanical transportation of letters and papers,” and “paper” is the foremost “substance sent by mail.” Since the last third of the nineteenth century, people in the United States have taken it for granted that industrially produced paper can be used to make all sorts of containers to be sent in the mail. Yet at the moment of early postal reform, such paper containers were all but unknown. Indeed, in one of his briefs for postal reform in 1838 Sir Rowland Hill wrote of “the little bags called envelopes,” suggesting that the public was unfamiliar with the word envelopes and that those paper items were indeed to be conceptualized as containers (“bags”).13 The letter carrier’s sack or pouch and the mailbox or letter box are the two items other than postage stamps and letters (envelopes and their contents) that are most commonly associated with the post office. But they are only two of the many containers that come into play in postal

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communication. In 1968, the USPOD’s Interdepartmental Container Advisory Board was working on a project to design a better mail bag, as the board explained in an in-house publication for employees: “The board has already traced ‘containerization,’ as it calls its new science, back to 1835 when postal employees at Baltimore nailed a box onto a railway car and shipped mail 40 miles south to Washington.” But the writer noted that despite the many technological advances since that time, “the bag is still the post office’s primary container.” As the Wall Street Journal had reported ten years earlier, “federal engineers” considering changes to “the trusty, age-old mail pouch” decided “they cannot improve on its efficient, collapsible features.”14 The container–content duality entails exteriority and interiority, as Holbrook’s discussion of the mail bag made clear. The term mail—in such phrases as “Has the mail arrived?”—is probably more closely associated with a paper object we call a “letter,” which comes folded inside a stamped envelope, than with all the other types of objects conveyed through the post. Several literary scholars and cultural historians have provided excellent accounts of the way mid-nineteenth-century postal reforms, including the invention of the postage stamp and significantly lowered postal rates, led to an efflorescence of letter writing among the broader public.15 The Victorian post office created a kind of private public sphere, a vast communication system, democratically available to almost the entire population, by means of which people could send each other private messages with some confidence that their privacy would not be violated. Billions of letters were entrusted to the developing postal systems of more and more polities in envelopes to be handled and processed by postal workers, who in normal circumstances had no reason to know or even to be curious about the contents of the containers passing through their hands. Within those containers were the letters by means of which individuals exteriorized their interior thoughts in order to share them privately with specific addressed interlocutors. In this cultural system, just as a mail bag contains envelopes that contain letters, so the letter is imagined as the container of a person’s words, which are imagined to contain that individual’s thoughts, which, as Whorf suggested, Standard Average European speakers imagine to

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originate (before being “communicated”) “inside” a person’s head—the ultimate container!16

THE LIMITS OF POSTAL CIRCULATION IN THE UNITED STATES: LETTERS, PACKAGES, FREIGHT, AND PEOPLE

As we noted in the previous section, postal systems, in carrying “mail” or written messages that one person sends another, combine transportation and communication. And as we noted in the introduction, midnineteenth-century postal reformers envisioned a revitalized post office as a central institution of a free-market society because it would (they thought) exponentially increase the circulation of information, which in turn would facilitate the circulation of goods and persons. But what is the difference, we can ask, between transporting messages materialized in writing and transporting other kinds of material objects? In particular, why cannot postal systems, which transport a person’s messages, transport a person?17 To answer such questions, it is useful to recall that one backdrop to mid-nineteenth-century postal reform in Britain and the United States was a fierce debate over slavery—the very opposite of the free circulation of persons. Reforming the post office, finding ways to make the circulation of goods and persons ever more efficient, and ending the slave trade and slavery—all these programs went together for many Victorian social reformers. We find a paradigmatic example of their imbrication in Eleanor Smyth’s biography of her father, Sir Rowland Hill, where she noted that Richard Cobden, one of the founders of the Anti–Corn Law League and a celebrated free-trade advocate, was one of Hill’s “earliest and heartiest . . . supporters.” Upon repeal of the corn laws—tariffs on imported grain that had protected British farmers while penalizing consumers—Cobden wrote Hill to say that with its success the league “will be virtually dissolved” and that in consequence “I shall feel like an emancipated negro—having fulfilled my seven years’ apprenticeship to

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an agitation which has known no respite. I feel that you have done not a little to strike the fetters from my limbs, for without the penny postage we might have had more years of agitation and anxiety.”18 Here, Cobden equates the freedom of people to circulate in the labor market (neither enslaved nor interminably apprenticed), the freedom of goods to circulate untaxed, and the free circulation of political intelligence via the reformed postal service powered by the postage stamp. In the United States, where slavery remained legal in many states for several years after midcentury postal reform (in contrast to Great Britain, where slavery was abolished in 1833 and thus before postal reform), some of the important proponents of postal reform were ardent abolitionists.19 As they saw it, cheap postage would make it easier to disseminate their political message. Indeed, their use of the post office to send abolitionist tracts to the South sparked an important antebellum crisis when Southern postmasters, who were, after all, federal employees, refused (either of their own volition or under threats of violence from local postal patrons) to deliver such mail. If, for Cobden, the free circulation of messages by post led to the free circulation of goods, the U.S. abolitionists hoped that unfettered postal circulation of information would lead to the unfettered circulation of persons as laborers and citizens. Democratic citizenship in a free-market society, as they saw it, required both.20 In both countries, the midcentury postal reforms led some people to dream bigger, imagining a unified system of postal communications and mass transportation, as in the musings of the New York Times’ London correspondent, who in 1869 proposed a combined postal, telegraph, and railroad system. Arguing that the people “in their organic capacity—that is, through the Government,” should be responsible for “the circulation of the body politic,” he suggested that in such a unified system “let a man put a shilling stamp on his hat” to travel by rail from London to Edinburg, “like a letter with its penny stamp.” “A man would have only to keep his pocket full of stamps,” he added, to “circulate.” Even so, this writer distinguished between the circulation of messages and the transportation of freight and persons: in “the circulation of the body politic,” he explained, “the post and telegraph” corresponded to “the

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nervous circulation,” while “the passenger and goods traffic” corresponded to “that of the chyle and blood.”21 In the United States, as turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressives and populists inveighed against the power of the railroad trusts, reformers advocated for a parcel post—that is, for the post office to be able to deliver packages larger than the four-pound weight limit of earlier postal legislation. The United States was the last “major industrialized nation” to establish its parcel-post service (in 1912), which, although limited to parcels of no more than eleven pounds, nonetheless quickly reached 20 million people outside the range of private transportation companies, drawing those people into the ambit of the growing mail-order retail trade.22 Some advocates of parcel post dreamed bigger. Like the Times correspondent in 1869, the U.S. postal reformer (and implacable foe of the railroads) James Cowles asked, “Why confine the business of the Post-office to the mere handling of letters, newspapers, and small parcels of merchandise? Why cannot we have ‘A General Freight and Passenger Post,’ as well as a ‘Letter and Parcels Post’? Is there any essential difference between the transportation of ordinary postal matter and of other freight and of passengers?”23 To answer Cowles’s last question, we should note that both he and the Times correspondent were advocating for the transcendence of an existing cultural dichotomy: between messages and information, on the one hand, and material objects and human bodies, on the other. That dichotomy makes sense to people acclimated to print culture and to the container–content model of communication we sketched earlier. Although printed matter can become quite bulky, the underlying model is that print, as a physical arrangement, carries messages, which are derived from ideas emanating from people’s minds. The presupposed distinction between “nervous circulation” and the circulation “of the chyle and blood” or between “ordinary postal matter” and “freight and . . . passengers” is, ultimately, a mind–body distinction mediated by printed matter (which Cowles used the word mere to describe). “Mere” printed matter, in this model, seems to be more mind than body; thus, it is not surprising that, despite its bulk, transporting it seemed to postal

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authorities and postal reformers alike to differ from the transportation of freight and (embodied) passengers.24 Yet we should remember that print culture is historically specific and that human communication is only contingently related to print. Walter Ong once noted that in the oral culture of Homeric Greece, “if an official wanted to get a substantial message from Ithaca to Argos, he would have to cast it up in some mnemonic form or an illiterate messenger would never be able to deliver it.”25 Although a few histories of the modern post office take note of such embodied messages,26 most of them open with brief sections on literate societies of the ancient world (the Persians and Romans especially), describing the way they organized messenger services and built roads to facilitate the transmission of written messages for political and commercial purposes. “The story of the post is as old as the art of writing,” avers one historian of the post.27 Although that may be true if one defines “the post” in a way to make it true, such an approach can make it difficult to ask questions about the distinctions modern post offices have made concerning what they will and will not carry: written materials and parcels but not freight and persons. Writing in 1841 on postal reform, Lieber thought of mail primarily as newspapers and letters—paper items. But beginning in 1845 in the United States, as postal reforms established weight—not the number of sheets of paper making up a letter—as the standard by which to assess postal fees, people began to use the post office to deliver all kinds of items, not just those made of paper. As the historian David Henkin explains, after 1845 “mail was defined . . . as a package of objects—potentially different in kind but measurable on a uniform scale—which one person selects, prepares, and pays to send to another.” Henkin details the remarkable array of items that were sent as the post office became a parcel service (but restricted to relatively small parcels, as we noted earlier) as well as a vehicle for the conveyance of letters: agricultural samples (especially seeds and small “lives,” or living creatures such as chicks, queen bees, and baby alligators), clothing, jewelry, and, in general, “all sorts of goods and chattels.”28

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Henkin notes that money was one of the most important items conveyed by post in the mid–nineteenth century, often enclosed with a personal letter. Moreover, the fact that personal letters were handwritten—in a geographically vast country in which people often traveled far from family and friends—was interpreted in terms of a personal connection between sender and recipient. As Henkin puts it, “Handwritten letters bore the trace of physical contact,” as did photographic portraits when they became popular enclosures in letters by midcentury.29 Letters and photographs connected people who were not physically copresent, but the post was not designed to literally overcome that final barrier, physical absence. With rare exceptions, it has never been possible to ship living people by mail, although to do so has been a persistent fantasy in the postal age.30 (We return to this issue at the end of chapter 4.) Regarding nonliving human bodies, current U.S. postal regulations prohibit the shipment of corpses in the mail, although they allow for the mailing of the much less weighty residue of human bodies in the form of cremated remains. Whether cremated remains are understood to represent spirit rather than body is a question we will not attempt to answer.31

THE GRID AND THE ADDRESS

We noted earlier that the envelope, a container that contains a private, personal communication, bears on its outer surface the unique, individualized addresses of sender and recipient. Postal addresses, as formulated and managed by the post office and other government offices, identify a unique sociogeographic location for every citizen of a nation-state who wishes to receive mail. But a nationally encompassing system of unique addresses had to be produced in a process that took many decades in the wake of the geographic expansion of the U.S. nation-state. The grid, the spatial formation central both to the production of postage stamps and, as we shall see in the next chapter, to stamp collecting, has been a key cultural form used to map territory in modern

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nation-states. Indeed, the media historian Bernhard Siegert has suggested that “the expansion of Western culture from the sixteenth to the twentieth century [can] be described in terms of a growing totalitarianism of the grid.” With respect to the United States, the literary critic Philip Fisher has written incisively about the role of Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785 in the creation of a new form of “democratic social space.” Fisher argues that unlike in emergent European nationstates, which constructed national identities out of historical, cultural, or geographic particularities, nation building in the United States depended on the creation of homogeneous, empty space—“identical from point to point and potentially unlimited in extent”—that could be filled in by settlement and then by economic and social development. In this process, writes Fisher, “the diversity of geography underwent abstraction” as the work of surveying and platting territory stipulated by the Land Ordinance “set down a mechanical grid over the surface of America that would have as one result that the United States was the first nation with property lines that could be read easily from an airplane at thirty thousand feet.”32 Fisher writes that the surveyor’s work in this system “divided the geography . . . with no regard whatsoever for terrain.” To be sure, the Land Ordinance of 1785 instructed surveyors to note “all mines, saltsprings, salt-licks, and mill-seats . . . and all water-courses, mountains and other remarkable and permanent things, over which and near which such lines [of the survey] shall pass.” But such particularities were nonetheless not permitted to alter the lines of the “mechanical grid” being imposed on the terrain by the surveyor.33 As the postal system took shape in the first half of the nineteenth century, its system of rationalization moved in the opposite direction from that of the surveyors. The postal system had to reparticularize, as it were, that which had been generalized; to put it another way, as (white) settlement “filled in” the empty squares of the land plats, a new social life emerged, one understood to begin with the individual, or at least the  white, male, property-owning individual and the members of his family. All such individuals were understood to have a particular address at which mail could reach them. Henkin argues that by midcentury

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the mail system had become “a popular, participatory network” that at “its conceptual core” was producing “a radical innovation in the mapping of the United States that was at once abstractly ubiquitous in its reach and tethered, albeit imperfectly, to the personal identities of its users.” The “Cartesian” system of the Land Ordinance “had defined geographical space as a set of repeatable and interchangeable rectilinear units,” but, in contrast, “the world of the post was oddly nonspatial”: “By 1851 the nation as a whole constituted a single postal zone within which individual post offices and mail routes formed the only significant spatial coordinates. There was no uniform field of spatial reference; names of persons and localities were special entities produced by contingent historical circumstances.”34 Historians and advocates of the postal system have often written of the prodigious amount of local knowledge required of mail clerks before the age of machine sorting to sort the mail both quickly and accurately so that it could be delivered in a timely manner to the correct addresses. In the last third of the nineteenth century, with the completion and elaboration of the nation’s transcontinental rail network, the Railway Mail Service—which, according to Winifred Gallagher, “allowed most of the nation’s mail to be sorted as well as transported aboard moving trains”— became the site of the most remarkable deployment of such local knowledge. Gallagher details how the railway post office clerks were the “elite corps” of postal clerks: “They had to be much faster and more accurate sorters than average, and to prove it by earning at least 97 percent on a test of their home state’s hundreds of routes.” To aid them in their work, as Mathew Bowyer explains, the Rand-McNally company published “a little book” that “fitted into the hip pocket” of the railway postal clerk and listed “every town, village, hamlet and crossroads through which their [train] lines passed” as well as “every possible way of getting a shipment to any town.” Informed by “the Rand,” these clerks were able to deliver service “considered the acme of postal perfection.”35 Another site for the deployment of such local knowledge was the Dead Letter Office in Washington, DC. Henkin writes that the nineteenthcentury public was fascinated by this office because the apparently undeliverable items—often called “nixies”—sent there to “die” represented the ultimate challenge to the “collective, connective, and mass”

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postal system that knit the nation together as “a network of countless users who were at the same time unprecedentedly accessible and potentially out of reach.” If the clerks of the Dead Letter Office could not solve the mystery posed by nixies bearing illegible or incomprehensible addresses, they could not release them from the anonymous mass of Holbrook’s mailbag and deliver them to the particular people for whom they were intended. An article in the Ladies Home Journal in 1893 featured “the presiding genius” of the Dead Letter Office at that time, Mrs. Patti Lyle Collins, known for “her wonderful ability in deciphering unintelligible addresses and localizing miscalled places.” Collins was said to possess “the knowledge of the city locality of almost every street in this and most other countries. One has but to mention a street to her, with the exception . . . of those named Broad, High and Market, to have her, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, tell at once the city in which it is.”36 Henkin notes the similarity of “decoders” such as Collins to “the heroes of early detective fiction.” Both mobilized knowledge grounded in “contingent historical circumstances” to pinpoint unique individuals within an anonymous mass—in other words, to move from the identical and potentially infinite spaces of the national grid to particular addresses.37 The cultural pattern is thus reproduced again and again— general grid, individual address; sheet of stamps (one of millions of identical mass-printed sheets), detached individual stamp affixed to a mailed item that will be merged with millions of other such items to be processed through the postal system and ultimately delivered to a unique address.

THE GRID AND THE CONTAINER

The grid can be considered an arrangement of two-dimensional containers. In surveying, when the grid is overlain on terrain and then depicted on a map, each square in the grid represents a unit of territory “containing” a given amount of space. When in the history of colonial expansion such chunks of territory were considered to be “empty” of

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prior possessors, the preliminary processes of surveying and mapping made them available to be “opened up” for “settlement.” Settlement was then imagined as “filling” the “empty” land of the territory with civilization. In the initial moment of surveying, an unbounded natural world—wilderness, terrain, land—is divided up into container-contained chunks: “an acre (or square mile) of land.” In the next moment, that of settlement, the land chunk is considered to be empty, a container ready to be filled with people and their way of life. If we think of the way the grid form is used in the production of postage stamps, we can see analogous processes. Once the production of sheets of adhesive postage stamps had become technically feasible with the Penny Black, the form became astonishingly hegemonic, spreading rapidly from country to country. Nation-states, through their postal administrations, then had to “fill in” the grids they were producing with national content. The tiny, identical paper rectangles of the sheets that they printed were spaces for the depiction of the messages necessary for postal functioning—the name of the nation-state and the monetary denomination of the stamp. But tiny as these paper objects were, there was space enough left over for other messaging to flesh out, as it were, the named national identity and even, as postal officials discovered by the end of the nineteenth century, to tell stories about it. The postage stamp thus came into being not only to move containers through the mail but also as a container in its own right, able to carry communicative content. In terms of shape and design features, postage stamps are culturally akin to framed pictures or miniature billboards, dotting the postal landscape by the billions.38 Moreover, stamps, especially the U.S. stamps from the mid–nineteenth to the mid–twentieth century that we consider closely in some of the following chapters, often depict actual frames as well as contents. In other words, these stamps are not simply pictures of an object—a bust, a scene—but also pictures of a picture of the object; they depict the object as well as the frame that sets the object apart as worthy of notice. In this way, stamps convey both national messages and a metamessage about the relationship between a container and its contents. They suggest the duality of container–contents as a central cultural form in the world the postal system helped create.

2 CREATING POST- POSTAL VALUE Stamp Collecting

I

t is but a small step from Holbrook’s designation of citizens’ thoughts and words transmitted by the post as private property and from the early U.S. post office’s codification of this cultural precedent into a regulation against opening citizens’ mail to the consideration of the postage stamp as private property in the form of a collectible item. With the advent of the modern postal system based on the postage stamp, almost every item of mail a citizen received came inside a wrapper of some sort (usually an envelope) with a canceled stamp affixed to it. Once the wrapper had been opened and its contents extracted, it and its stamp remained as a by-product of the postal process: material waste. Yet canceled stamps almost immediately caught the public’s attention, and why not? They were tiny documents multiply infused with messages of the  state—printed with images conveying state ideology and with inscriptions conveying postal information and overprinted (in use) with cancellations designed to facilitate the post office’s work delivering the mail. To understand how collectors’ revaluation and recirculation of these seemingly worthless scraps of paper transformed the material by-product of a government service into a commodity with its own specialized market, it is first necessary to examine the way stamps work in the mail as they sacrifice their own value to allow other objects of value to circulate.

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POSTAGE STAMPS AND THE SEMIOTICS OF POSTAL CIRCULATION

We begin with a comparison of the material properties of stamps to the properties of another type of government-produced and controlled paper item, paper money (“notes,” “banknotes,” or “bills”). The stamps and bills we know share key features: both are flat, rectangular paper objects bearing written information and pictorial iconography; both are massproduced by the billions; and both are central to the circulation of capital, goods, information, and people in contemporary societies. Yet the material differences between stamps and bills are perhaps more instructive. Paper money bears printing on both sides, whereas stamps bear printing on only one side and an adhesive on the other. Paper money is designed to circulate. In contrast, stamps are designed to stick to certain kinds of objects (letters and packages) to allow them to circulate.1 People carry paper money with them, usually in containers called wallets, so that it is immediately available to them when they transact business. People sometimes say that paper money feels “greasy.” This is because bills have been designed not to stick to one another in a wallet, cash drawer, or one’s hands; in transactions, people need to be able to separate bills easily to count them, one by one. In contrast, because stamps have on their reverse side an adhesive (which, until recently, has been a water-activated substance), they must be kept dry in storage.2 People buy stamps at the post office or associated retail outlets and keep them in offices at home or work and within those offices in containers called drawers within desks. They often prepare items to be mailed in their offices before transacting postal business. In the terms of C. S. Peirce’s venerable theory of signs, which has been important in the emergent academic literature on stamps, the functioning of paper money and stamps as signs in the commercial and postal systems, respectively, depends on the different ways their indexical potential is deployed in transactions. Like a label, all bills and stamps are indexical signs: they bear letters and numbers (which are “symbols”

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in Peirce’s system) that connect them directly (this is the crucial feature: contiguity) to the government that produced them and endow them with a specific monetary value. A bill or a stamp says, in effect, “This, the very piece of paper you are holding in your hand, has been produced by the U.S. government, which guarantees it to be worth x cents/dollars.” (In contrast, when we write “U.S. government” in this book, our words on the page are not connected indexically to the object to which they refer symbolically—the U.S. government.)3 To buy an item in a store without using a credit card, a customer exchanges a banknote for a consumer good; at that moment, both customer and clerk must read the note to understand its value. That value is expressed symbolically (in Peirce’s terms) in numbers and letters. Moreover, the clerk (at least, if not also the customer) has to be convinced that the note bearing that information is genuine, not counterfeit, which is to say the clerk must be convinced that the indexical connection of government to banknote is real—authorized by the state, not mimicked by a counterfeiter. As the transaction concludes, the customer takes the purchased item, which has often been enveloped by the clerk in a bag, and the clerk places the banknote in another kind of container, the cash drawer. The bag may or may not be recycled, but the banknote will be recirculated countless times to facilitate other such transactions. As for the item, once purchased, it becomes “used” or no longer “new,” and in many cases the customer will go on to consume it or “use it up.” In such transactions, the banknote symbolically contains and expresses what Karl Marx called “exchange value,” which allows it to be commensurate with the different “use values” of the goods available in the market, thereby making it possible for people to trade goods easily according to assigned monetary values and in the absence of any knowledge of the particularities of production of specific items.4 Whereas the use value of the purchased item will be exhausted by the purchaser, the exchange value of the bill is not exhausted in the transaction; it is merely transferred to the next user. In contrast, stamps as material objects are not designed for endless circulation. They are manufactured and purchased in order to be used up in the exchanges in which they participate. The crucial design feature

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of modern postage stamps, usually attributed to Rowland Hill, is the reverse-side adhesive—in Hill’s famous words, a moisture-activated “glutinous wash”—which allows postal patrons to index their prepayment of postal service by affixing a stamp to the object they wish to mail.5 At the beginning of a postal transaction, a stamp functions indexically as a banknote does. Postal patrons and postal workers (or machines) must accept it as a genuine index of the relevant government and the correct monetary value.6 As the postal transaction continues, the stamp’s physical presence on the item while it circulates conveys the same message: “The postal services required to circulate the item to which this stamp is affixed have been prepaid.” Or, as Hill put it in his tract on postal reform in 1837, “the index of the tell-tale stamp would at all times exhibit the exact amount of postage received.”7 Another indexical sign is central in the postal process. Once customers have indexed prepayment by affixing a stamp to the item they wish to mail, a postal clerk or machine indexes receipt of that payment by defacing or canceling the stamp; the cancellation marks on the stamp say, “The post office acknowledges that this stamp has been used to pay the postage for the item to which it is affixed and asserts that it cannot be so used again.” Were a used stamp to be detached from an envelope or package (by a stamp collector, for example), the cancellation markings would ensure that it cannot thenceforth be used for postage. Its government-assigned monetary value has been exhausted—and marked as such by another governmentally produced sign, the cancellation—to allow other items to circulate.8 To summarize the contrast between the two types of paper currency: Paper money can be used to buy many kinds of goods and services; as a material object, paper money is exchanged for something else, the two passing in opposite directions (the money moving from buyer to seller, the sold object or service moving from seller to buyer). Postage stamps are designed for one particular type of transaction: to purchase a service from the post office. That service is the “carriage” of particular types of objects, primarily printed matter, but also smaller packages—objects that are to be conveyed between physically distant senders and recipients. The postage stamp accompanies those traveling objects throughout

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their journey, functioning all along the route as an index of payment proffered and received. When the object arrives at its destination, the postage stamp is used up, unavailable for further postal business, unlike paper money, which can circulate through countless business transactions. Also unlike paper money, used stamps bear state markings (postal cancellations) that testify to their having been used, but, as we shall see, those markings give used stamps new value in a different market: stamp collecting.

ACCUMULATING STAMPS

The first records we have of people collecting stamps are two advertisements, each of which appeared in varying versions in multiple British newspapers in 1842, on behalf of women seeking large quantities of used stamps. Neither advertisement described stamp collecting as the term would come to be understood in the 1860s, but both are instructive. By far the more famous of the two ads in the philatelic literature described “a young lady in London” who, “being desirous of covering her Dressingroom with cancelled Postage Stamps,” asked “good-natured persons who may have these (otherwise useless) little articles” to send them to her to “assist in her whimsical project.”9 The project sketched in the second advertisement is decidedly less familiar to us and rarely mentioned in the philatelic literature:10 it concerns a woman attempting to amass used stamps to exchange for a dowry that her uncle will provide for her upon her marriage. There are two versions of the story. In the more benign, we are told that a suitor is in the picture and that the uncle approves of the suitor’s addresses.11 In the more sinister, there is no mention of a suitor, the uncle is said to be “unwilling to part” with his niece, and his offer of a dowry “was evidently made on the supposition that” it would be “impracticable” to collect such a quantity of stamps.12 Taken together, these examples suggest that at the dawn of the modern postal age, people could not quite believe that obliterated stamps were without value because, “useless” though these stamps were for

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further postal purposes, they were nonetheless miniature pieces of paper intricately inscribed by the state and bearing some similarities to banknotes and coins. Seeking to revalue them, people imagined the afterlife of stamps in two diametrically opposing ways: first, as tokens to facilitate other forms of social circulation—especially circulation that would liberate people—in a way analogous to their intended postal function, or, second, as objects with sufficient inherent value to be circulated as commodities in a specialized market where their final destination would be a privately owned stamp collection. The idea of exchanging large quantities of used postage stamps to facilitate social circulation is related to the proposals to allow postage stamps to be used as tokens for passenger traffic, noted in chapter 1. Although those proposals might have been viewed as impractical or even utopian, the stories found frequently in British newspapers in the 1840s of women seeking used stamps to facilitate social circulation—often in the form of an escape from a distressed situation—were at first reported as factual. By the 1850s, however, such stories were being debunked by those same newspapers. For example, the case of a young woman whose father, newly converted from “the Church of England to the Church of Rome,” threatened to place her in a “nunnery” unless she could procure 180,000 used stamps in ten days was reported as an amusing rumor rather than a factual account. In another example, a young woman’s notion that “the possession of a million cancelled postage stamps” would enable her to win the “release from military life” of a soldier she loved was presented as a symptom of her mental illness.13 In contrast to fanciful stories of used stamps capable of liberating confined persons, their more prosaic use as raw material for arts-and-crafts projects has remained culturally salient to the present day. The young London lady who intended to paper her dressing room with stamps may have been “whimsical,” but there are many nineteenth-century examples of men as well as women papering rooms with used postage stamps, and stamps’ use in collage artworks extends from the 1840s to the present.14 It would seem, then, that in the early days of the postage stamp, people could imagine but not realize projects in which used stamps facilitated social relations between persons; but the future belonged to those who fetishized stamps (as Marx would have it) as commodities—that is, as

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things to be owned, consumed, and exchanged with no thought for the social relations that had led to their creation.

FROM TIMBROMANIA TO STAMP COLLECTING

Stamp collecting as we know it today began in the 1850s in France, Belgium, and Great Britain and was picked up a few years later in North America. Dealers in recognized collectibles such as coins and “curios” began circulating “handwritten lists” of stamps for sale; schoolboys began collecting and exchanging them; and open-air stamp markets sprang up in London, Paris, and elsewhere, at which men and women, youngsters and adults across social classes began to exchange and sell their wares.15 Of decisive importance, stamp dealers began regularly publishing both price lists and periodicals, all of which circulated by mail (of course!).16 These lists and periodicals became the authoritative sources for up-to-date price information and an ongoing cataloguing of the everexpanding universe of collectible items—both of which were necessary for the market to exist at all. It is crucial to recognize that the governments and postal authorities that produced stamps did not catalogue them in ways that provided information for a collector market to develop. After all, postage stamps did not originate as collectible consumer goods but as tokens of payment for mail service. Early postal authorities—in particular Roland Hill— were concerned with used stamps only insofar as they feared the canceled stamps might be illegally reused by people who could devise means to erase the signs of cancellation.17 Stamp collecting seems to have sprung up quickly in a few short years, and, significantly, it was at first considered to be a “mania” or “timbromania,” after the French word for “postage stamp,” timbre-poste.18 The aptness of the term mania is suggested by a contemporary newspaper account: The Postage-Stamp Mania.—The scenes in Birchin-lane last year, where  crowds congregated nightly, to the exceeding annoyance and

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wonderment of Policeman X—, where ladies and gentlemen of all ages and all ranks, from cabinet-ministers to crossing-sweepers, were busy, with album or portfolio in hand, buying, selling, or exchanging, are now known to have been the beginnings of what may almost be termed a new trade. Postage-stamp exchanges are now common enough. . . . Looking the other day in the advertisement pages of a monthly magazine, we counted no fewer than sixty different dealers in postage-stamps there advertising their wares. Twelve months ago there was no regular mart in London at which foreign stamps might be bought; now there are a dozen regular dealers . . . doing a profitable trade. . . . England is not the only country interested in stampcollecting. As might be expected, the custom originated in France. . . . In the gardens of the Tuileries . . . crowds still gather, principally on Sunday afternoons, and may be seen sitting under the trees, sometimes in a state of great excitement, as they busily sell or exchange any of their surplus stock for some of which they may have been in search.19

In this account, people in heterogeneous “crowds” exchanging stamps “in a state of great excitement” indeed seem to be afflicted by a mania, understood as “madness, particularly of a kind characterized by uncontrolled, excited, or aggressive behavior,” and especially as “an obsessive enthusiasm for a particular thing.”20 In a similar vein, another newspaper described “the inexplicable industry of stamp, or crest, or carte de visite collecting” as “purposeless manias . . . not to be reasoned about” that afflicted women who had been denied by men the benefits of a rational education.21 In addition, however, the stamp exchange, maniacal though it seemed to mid-Victorian social commentators, had given rise, we are told, to “a new trade,” one not useless but “profitable”—and therefore rational, at least in terms of the world of markets and commodities. How are we to understand the convergence in one phenomenon, stamp collecting, of activities deemed to be both maniacal and rational? As we noted earlier, the first attention paid to used postage stamps came from people who envisioned procuring them (for reuse) as an undifferentiated mass of valueless waste. Proto–stamp collectors,

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however, viewed this waste matter in a different way—through a “singularizing” lens.22 In this view, the Penny Black, for example, was neither a vast, unnumbered quantity of identical, mass-produced scraps of paper nor any one of the individual stamps within it; it was instead a unique kind of stamp, the first British postage stamp. In Peirce’s terminology, the “type” was the design (or model) of the Penny Black, and each manufactured example was a “token” of the same type.23 Stamp collectors were interested primarily in collecting not multiple tokens of the same type but one token of each type of stamp produced by any postal authority. Sorting and cataloguing a mass of used stamp tokens meant discovering how many different types of stamps it contained. To do this, the proto-collectors needed experts who possessed authoritative knowledge of all existent types. Such experts need not be dealers, but in practice they were. In principle and in law, dealers could not manufacture their own stock of postage stamps for sale. Nor could they join forces with for-profit manufacturers to produce them because stamps were by definition not a consumer good to be sold in a market—where demand for ever-expanding lines of new products could be stimulated through advertising—but a by-product of a government department performing a public service not for customers but for inhabitants of the nation and the nation itself. Despite the almost instant emergence of a “profitable” trade in stamps, stamp collecting could never be fully commoditized because collectors could not control production; thus, it came to be defined not as work or business but as a hobby or leisure-time activity.24 When some of the first collectors became the first dealers, they in effect catalyzed both the market in collectible stamps and the leisuretime hobby of stamp collecting. Crucially, from the beginning dealers trafficked in new as well as used—“immaculate” and “maculate”25— stamps, thereby doubling in one fell swoop the total number of collectible types. Those who dealt in new stamps bought them, sometimes in quantity, from post offices at home and abroad. Early stamp publications contain ongoing debates about whether dealers were rendering some stamps difficult to obtain (hence rare and expensive) by buying them new in large quantities from the post office and not marketing them until they were no longer available due to changing postal issues and rates.26

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Whether dealing in new or used stamps, dealers succeeded in creating a marketable collectible out of items that had never been intended to circulate as consumer goods. They were capitalizing on an apparently spontaneously generated “mania” on the part of people collecting tiny government tokens of payment used to facilitate the circulation of mail at the dawn of the postal age.

COUNTERFEITS, REPRINTS, AND THE POST OFFICE AS STAMP RETAILER

We noted in the previous section that in principle and by law dealers could not manufacture their own stock of stamps for sale. In practice, however, early dealers did just that. The knowledge and expertise required to print illustrated catalogues of stamps for sale could also be used to produce copies of the stamps, and some dealers took to selling copies of stamps that their customers could otherwise have acquired only with difficulty or at great expense. At the time, this production of copies was not always understood as illegal or unethical. Writing about “the history of philatelic forgery,” W. J. Eckhardt notes that “it was the regular thing for dealers during the 1860s and 1870s to sell facsimiles” that helped collectors “to fill the book” or album; indeed, in the early decades of stamp collecting, responding to collectors who complained that there were too few stamps to collect, some dealers made space in their catalogues and albums for stamps they knew to be counterfeits.27 The legendary dealer and cataloguer J. B. Moens issued many “reprints” and “reimpressions” of valuable stamps.28 Counterfeiters who were not also dealers got into the act; for example, beginning in 1874 “the Spiro brothers of Hamburg . . . flooded the market with lithographed forgeries in great variety.” Others printed “fictitious, or bogus stamps,” some of which were then counterfeited by yet still others.29 It took several decades for collectors, dealers, and cataloguers to acquire and publish the information that made it possible to distinguish between “genuine” and reprinted, reissued, forged, or counterfeited

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stamps.30 This complex subject is beyond the scope of our analysis except for one strand in the story: as early as the 1870s, postal authorities in several countries had already taken account of collectors’ interest in stamps and, in response, began reprinting superseded issues and reissuing current issues for the collector market. For example, in an “official circular” dated March 27, 1875, the USPOD announced that it was “prepared to furnish upon application, at face value, specimens” of various past and present issues.31 According to two of the earliest and most important experts on U.S. stamps, John Tiffany and John Luff, it was “generally understood” that the post office reissued the stamps in order to “display a full set of our postal issues, as part of its exhibit at the International Exposition of 1876” in Philadelphia. In a sense, the POD reissued the stamps to commemorate or “museumify” itself for a major exposition marking the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation. Because its own “collection” was “incomplete, and the missing stamps [were not] obtainable, except by purchase at a considerable advance over their face value,” the POD made new impressions “from the old plates.”32 To this account, Tiffany added a second reason for the reissue: “The Department having been solicited to furnish collectors with specimens of its old issues, took this opportunity to provide itself to satisfy these demands.”33 The post office made the reissued stamps available to the public at their face value. Nonetheless, Tiffany deemed this “a mistaken kindness” because “unused originals were not unattainable” and, as he and subsequent students of these reprints and reissues have made clear, philatelists have had great difficulty deciding how to categorize and catalogue the reissued stamps.34 For example, the new printings of the 1861 and 1869 issues are usually deemed reissues because the original issues had never been demonetized and were thus still good (and in some local post offices still available) to be used as postage. By contrast, the issues of 1847, 1851, and 1857 had been demonetized at the outset of the Civil War to prevent their use by postal patrons in the Confederacy. Experts therefore considered the 1875 versions of these issues to be reprints. Moreover, as Tiffany pointed out, the reprints of the 1847 issue were made not from “the original dies, but from newly engraved dies, and hence

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are absolutely worthless as representing the originals.” Indeed, writing in 1893, one of the editors of the American Philatelist went so far as to call the reprints “government counterfeits.”35 The phrase is striking. By definition, anyone other than duly authorized state officials who produces the stamps of a modern postal system is counterfeiting them. But can the state be said to counterfeit its own stamps? Tiffany averred that the U.S. PMG had the legal authority to print stamps as he saw fit, but Tiffany also saw the reprints of the 1847 issue to be “worthless” to collectors because they were not indexically connected through the printing process to the dies that had produced the originals. They were not, in short, the real thing; they were imitations, counterfeits, albeit ones that had been created by the state. Even more important for us is the fact that the USPOD (and postal authorities elsewhere) produced the reprints not to do postal duty but in recognition of and response to the fact that its postage stamps—which were designed to be canceled (obliterated or killed) in use—had become consumer objects in their own right: collectibles for a growing segment of the public, those afflicted with the “mania” of stamp collecting, who would save instead of use them. There is no evidence that this first nod to the collector market on the part of the USPOD was intended to supplement the department’s revenues, as happened two decades later with the issue of the first commemorative stamps (see chapter 5). For one thing, these stamps were produced in small quantities (a few thousands instead of the millions required for postal usage).36 Moreover, the primary “customer” the post office seems to have had in mind was the post office itself in an effort to complete its own collection. But at the same time it made its reprints available at face value to collectors who could order them by mail from “the Third Assistant Postmaster General, Washington, D.C.” Not surprisingly, dealers, more attentive than ordinary collectors to post office announcements, “took advantage” of this possibility and “bought largely of the lower values of some series.”37 Thus did the USPOD become a manufacturer selling its wares directly to both collectors and wholesalers, who in turn would sell them to retail customers; thus did the post office take its first steps to engage with the marketplace of consumer capitalism in a role quite different from the role

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that midcentury postal reformers had imagined for the post office as a circulator, not a producer, of goods.

COLLECTING A TOTALITY OF STAMPS

Stamp collecting achieved its basic form almost at the outset, between the 1840s and the 1860s. Collectors clipped stamps at home and at work (where they might fish them out of wastebaskets), bought new stamps from the post office for their collections, or bought both new and used stamps from dealers. As we noted, through their catalogues, dealers provided the indispensable knowledge of the universe of items to be collected. They also designed and sold stamp albums, which quickly became the standard containers of stamp collections. The philatelic writer Mauritz Hallgren suggested in 1940 that the “tintype albums” to be found “on countless parlor tables” provided a model for stamp albums.38 The popular periodical Once a Week noted in 1863 that “albums to contain [stamps] are got up in every style; from plain cloth, at one shilling, to ‘best Morocco reliefs, with clasps,’ at one pound five.”39 Albums and the catalogues upon which they were based instructed people as they transitioned from accumulating randomly acquired stamps to organizing a collection based on the best philatelic knowledge available. The line between accumulating and collecting has always been a difficult one to draw for stamp collectors, who can easily accumulate far more stamps than they can organize. Stamp collectors press into service all sorts of containers—often ones that once held other consumer products, such as cigarettes and shoes—to sort and store their collections. They also use file cabinets, desk drawers, closets, basements, and attics for storage, so that the hobby exists in space as containers inside containers, much as the post office itself does. A well-organized and engaged collector knows what is inside every album, box, and drawer, whether they are labeled or not. But it is easier to accumulate than to collect, and many stamp collectors will admit that their philatelic holdings are less organized than they should be.

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As we saw in chapter 1, the person who mails a letter detaches a single stamp from a prior totality, a pane of stamps, then affixes it to an envelope and thereby consumes it or uses it up. The prototypical stamp collector works in the opposite direction, rescuing used stamps and preserving unused stamps to reconstitute a totality by placing them in a collection meant to be permanent. But the totalities in the two cases differ. The stamp collector’s totality is not a complete pane of stamps (although there are genres of collecting focused on the complete pane) but rather the total “catalogue” of the stamps of a country—that is, one example of each stamp issued by that country’s postal service. Between 1847, when the first U.S. postage stamp was issued, and 2020, more than 5,400 unique stamps were issued by the nation’s post office for use as regular postage. Exactly what constitutes a unique stamp emerges from the interaction between the stamp-issuing post office, stamp collectors, and the commercial dealers and firms that catalogue stamps for the purposes of the collector market. Tiffany began his important early reference work History of the Postage Stamps of the United States of America (1887) by remarking that the USPOD’s records concerning its postal issues were not as detailed as were those of “other countries”: “[In the United States] there is no ‘stamp office’ to authenticate each [printing] plate, and register the number of sheets made from it, and no edict, proclamation or law informs the public of the values authorized for use, or of the designs, or other peculiarities of the stamps to be employed. . . . In a word, no record is preserved of how many stamps of any particular design, paper, water-mark, perforation or other peculiarity, are made, or of the date of the adoption of any of these things.”40 Tiffany averred that “many of these details might be gathered . . . from the very voluminous correspondence” between the POD and the printing firms it used, but he also thought it likely that “many interesting changes,” having been “made upon mere verbal instructions,” were lost to history. Thus, it was necessary, he went on, “to rely upon quite different sources for our information.” Those sources were expert collectors, whose enterprising work, he felt sure, had “probably discovered all the varieties of the stamps themselves.” A “careful study” of those

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stamps, the ones in his own collection and others made available to him by other collectors, was the primary source of his information, which he combined with details found in the PMG’s annual reports, in accounts of new stamp issues published in “daily papers” and in “the Philatelical Press,” and in other collectors’ published research.41 Although cataloguing the post office’s offerings would seem to be a simple matter, there are many cases in which “the same” stamp is produced by means of different printing and formatting processes, such that two stamps that appear identical at first glance differ in the eyes of the collector and the catalogue editors who assign them different numbers. A simple example is the fourteen-cent American Indian stamp: issued in 1923 as one of a new series of stamps that appeared between 1922 and 1925 (to be discussed in chapter 6), it was reissued in slightly different form in 1931 (figures 2.1a and 2.1b). The two stamps were printed on different presses that used different kinds of paper and different perforation schemes. In the authoritative Scott catalogue, the 1923 version is number 565, and the 1931 version is number 695. These two stamps might have appeared identical to the postal patrons of the time or may appear

FIGURE  2.1 “American Indian” (Hollow Horn Bear) stamp: (a) Scott no.  565 (1923); (b) Scott no. 695 (1931).

Source: Handler’s collection.

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so even now to a noncollector, but it is easy to see (even with the unaided eye) differences in the paper quality, perforations, and coloring if one is instructed about what to look for. The USPOD does not catalogue its stamp issues for the collector market; commercial firms do that.42 Although in most cases catalogue editors and postal officials agree as to what constitutes a unique stamp, the more closely collectors and catalogue editors look for production varieties, especially those that were not intended but result from the wear and tear of the printing process, the more items for which they find it necessary to assign unique catalogue numbers—if only by adding “a small-letter suffix,” as in “554a.” 43 Indeed, in the early decades of stamp collecting, from the 1840s to the 1860s, the number of collectible items grew rapidly not only because more and more governments adopted the British postage stamp system but also because collectors and dealers refined their definitions of what constituted unique collectible entities. Applied to a newly discovered and rapidly proliferating material-cultural phenomenon, the postage stamp, stamp enthusiasts’ increasingly discriminating definitions resulted in ever greater numbers of classifiable types.44 Moreover, due to the popularity of stamp collecting in the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, several companies have produced stamp catalogues and other collector supplies. All of these catalogues do not follow the same system for enumerating the post office’s issues. Currently in the United States, the Scott catalogue is hegemonic, but at times in the past the existence of viable competitors meant there were alternative versions of how the totality of U.S. stamps was configured, enumerated, and understood. The same is true for other countries’ stamps. The totality of all U.S. postage stamps is a numbered series that begins with numbers 1 and 2, the five-cent Franklin and ten-cent Washington, and continues theoretically forever. (The way in which this totality is enumerated depends, as noted, on the catalogue one uses.) A collector can easily acquire 90 percent of all U.S. stamps ever issued in used condition at very little cost, although the remaining 10 percent may be too pricey for many people to afford. Collecting unused stamps can be more expensive, but, even so, perhaps 80 percent of all U.S. postage stamps

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can be acquired in unused condition at or for not much more than their face value, between a half cent and a dollar. In the late nineteenth century, the USPOD, like postal services around the world, began issuing commemorative stamps to mark historical anniversaries, to advertise world’s fairs, and to take note of important current events. These stamps were offered to postal customers in addition to the regularly issued, or definitive, stamps. Definitives are the post office’s workhorse stamps, produced in numbers sufficient to handle the bulk of mail and intended to remain in use for many years. In contrast, commemorative stamps are placed on sale for a limited time (a few months or a year) and then withdrawn to make way for more commemorative issues. We consider the politics of commemoration in later chapters, but for present purposes the salient point is that postal officials realized early on that the existence of a large population of stamp collectors meant there was a market to be catered to and tapped: people who wanted new stamps to collect and who would buy them at the post office and never redeem them for the postal services for which they paid.45 Although collectors—many of whom seek, let us recall, to reconstitute the totality of a country’s stamp issues—have often complained that the post office exploits them by issuing more and more stamps, the  trend has continued from the first commemorative issue (the Columbians, issued in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893) to the present. To put this trend in perspective, from 1847 to 1893 the USPOD issued a little more than 200 different postage stamps; from 1893 to 1945, about 700; but from 1946 to 2020, more than 4,500. The companies that produced stamp catalogues also produced stamp albums, or books in which collectors could store, arrange, and display their stamps. The prototypical stamp album is organized alphabetically by country (although sometimes the nation-state of the primary market comes first, as in U.S.-produced albums that begin with the section for U.S. stamps), and within each country’s section it is organized chronologically by the date of each stamp’s issue. The pages for each country contain spaces—squares or rectangles—for each stamp issued. The collector is to secure a copy of each stamp and affix it (by various means more or less destructive to the stamp itself!) in the space designated for

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it.46 Some squares contain only photographs (of various degrees of legibility) of the designated stamp; others are blank spaces that the collector hopes to fill in. Many albums label each square with its intended occupant’s catalogue number. In general, the album is designed to aid the collector “so far as the identification of specimens is concerned, and the allocation and symmetrical distribution of them upon the pages.”47 The collector’s task is “the eternal quest to fill the blank space” with the correct stamp, as one philatelic writer put it48—and thus to reconstitute the totality of a country’s stamp issue. Both a pane of stamps and a page of a stamp album appear as a grid, an organization of connected squares and rectangles; the individual stamps of a pane are identical, but the stamps meant to fill in the grid of an album page will be different. Until recently, a paradigmatic activity of stamp collecting was to go to the post office to buy one example of each newly available stamp.49 This practice gave rise to endless discussions in the philatelic press concerning the helpfulness or rudeness of postal clerks. Symmetrically, there were regular articles in POD publications about the need to be helpful to stamp collectors, despite their occasionally unreasonable demands. Rarely mentioned was a basic similarity between the work of a clerk and the work of a collector: the collector’s acts of detaching a single stamp from an identical mass and then putting it into its correct space or container echo the activity of the postal clerk, who takes mail from one container, such as a mailbag, and sorts it into another container, such as the correct box according to the mail’s destination.

USED OR NEW? AND WHAT CONSTITUTES USE?

We noted earlier that at the beginning of an item’s journey through the mail, the stamp indexes prepayment of postal fees. The stamp is then obliterated or killed when the mailed item is canceled. Killing the stamp nullifies its exchange value (it can no longer be used to purchase postal services), but the stamp continues to function as an index, indicating payment and receipt of postage, until the postal transaction is completed

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with the arrival of the item at its destination. At that point, the stamp’s value in relation to postal transactions has been exhausted. The hobby of stamp collecting brings dead stamps back to life, instilling them with new exchange value as collectibles. But as we saw, even in the earliest years of the hobby dealers and collectors were also purchasing new stamps from the post office to conserve in their collections. Just as salvaging used stamps for a collection transformed valueless wastepaper into a consumer commodity with an assigned catalogue value, so purchasing new stamps for collections instead of for postal use transformed them from indexical receipts for postal services into collectibles whose value was more often than not greater than the stamp’s face value. The collecting of new as well as used stamps doubled the universe of collectible objects available to the hobby. It also raised what has proven to be a perennial question among stamp collectors seeking to re-create the totality of a country’s postal issues: whether to aim for completeness with either new or used stamps or with a combination of the two.50 Although used stamps are generally less expensive than new ones, sometimes used copies are harder to find than new ones. This occurs with high-value stamps (such as U.S. “express mail” stamps with denominations higher than ten dollars by the end of the twentieth century), which are used far less frequently than the stamps used to mail first-class letters and junk mail. It can also occur with first-class commemorative stamps that, for various reasons, were collected new but were not used with great frequency in the mail. The difficulty of reconstituting the totality of a country’s stamp issue in used form is compounded by the distinction collectors make between stamps that were canceled during the course of their travel through the mail system and ones canceled specifically so that stamp collectors can obtain copies with special cancellations. There is an industry within stamp collecting that produces canceled “covers” (envelopes) associated with ceremonial events and illustrated by a design, called a “cachet,” that refers to the event or the stamp or both. The most common of these covers is the “first-day cover” (FDC), an envelope bearing a stamp canceled on the date of its issue and at the place of its issue—for example, a twentynine-cent Thomas Jefferson stamp canceled on its first day of issue,

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FIGURE 2.2

Thomas Jefferson stamp (Scott no. 2185), first-day cover. Source: Handler’s collection.

April 13, 1993, in Charlottesville, Virginia (figure 2.2). Both the post office and private companies sell these FDCs by the thousands, such that it is sometimes easier to find an example of a particular stamp canceled ceremonially than it is to find one that was canceled as it made its way unceremoniously through the mail. The distinction between a stamp canceled in the mail and one canceled ceremonially is important if collectors value the postal system as an entity in the world that exists apart from them and is uninfluenced by them. That postal system has its own authenticity as a functioning organization that does serious work in the world.51 Some collectors insist on the distinction between an object such as an FDC, in which the postal system is manipulated by collectors and the post office for the purpose of creating a collectible item, and the emergence of collectible items through the “use of stamps” in the “working of a postal system.”52 Yet since the time of the Penny Black, stamp collectors have interacted with postal systems in transactions that are not available to collectors of coins and banknotes. In the case of stamps infrequently used by the public for postal business, collectors can procure used versions by

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buying them new at the post office, affixing them to envelopes, and sending the envelopes to themselves; such tactics were reported as early as 1863.53 One early twentieth-century philatelic writer borrowed a term from German collectors to describe the objects thus produced, Spielerei, or “playthings,” which captures the opposition between a working postal system and the play of collectors.54 Finally, collectors can manipulate the postal system to create envelopes to be indexically connected to ceremonial events by means of special cancellations—events that collectors may even have had a hand in producing. In sum, collectors can use the vast mechanical and bureaucratic assemblage of the post office to create the very collectibles they covet and the value of which—as collectors understand it—derives from their production by that assemblage, which is imagined to exist as a system apart from collectors.55 Moreover, by the 1870s, as we saw, post offices had begun producing reissues and reprints of prior postal issues with an eye to satisfying collector demand and in some cases to bring in supplemental revenues. By the end of the nineteenth century, post offices realized that they need not confine such productions to reissues but could create new issues aiming to attract both customers and the broader public. A variation on these products is the “canceled-to-order” (CTO) stamp. In various times and places, post offices have produced used copies of new stamps by canceling them and then releasing them on the collector market. Fred Melville defined CTOs in 1911 as “stamps which, though postmarked or otherwise obliterated, have not done postal or fiscal duty.”56 Melville’s privileging of a stamp that has done its proper “duty” suggests why most collectors hold CTO stamps in contempt—even though they will on occasion make use of similar tactics to procure a used copy of a stamp. The idea of a stamp’s duty suggests that postal circulation has a moral dimension that, as we shall see in chapter  4, has been historically significant. In stamp collecting, a used stamp is defined in functional and historical terms as one that was used to pay the postal rate for which it was produced during the time of its currency—what the Scott catalogue calls a “contemporaneous cancellation.”57 Because most used stamps come to the collector market defaced by wavy lines (the postmark bearing the

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date and place of cancellation having been applied to the envelope but not to the stamp), there is usually no way to know whether such stamps were canceled “contemporaneously.” Their status as historical documents is thus “forever in question,” as one writer put it.58 Nonetheless, because most of these stamps are common and easily obtainable, collectors ignore this technicality.

THE COLLECTOR AS TOTALITY

To collect the totality of a country’s stamp issues is the generic form of stamp collecting, but it is not the only way to collect stamps, perhaps not even the most common. As stamp collectors and writers never tire of saying, all people are at liberty to focus their collecting interests and to organize their collections as they see fit. The universe of collectible philatelic items is practically infinite: not only have hundreds of governments issued thousands of stamps since the mid–nineteenth century, but if one considers used stamps in relation to the situation of their use (as evidenced by covers and cancellations), the possibilities for discovering and classifying collectible items are endless. Topical collecting, or “collecting according to pictorial subject matter” rather than to national origin and the chronological sequence of stamp issuing, became well established within the stamp-collecting hobby in the early twentieth century.59 As Steven Gelber notes, the distinction between geographic-national-chronological collecting and topical collecting mapped onto the emergent gender structure of Victorian, middle-class consumer culture and carried with it moral values protecting women from the marketplace and encouraging industriousness in boys and men.60 As noted earlier, much writing about stamp collecting repeats (usually with a note of condescending humor) the story of the woman who in 1842 sought used postage stamps to reuse them as wallpaper. Such an interest in the aesthetic possibilities of stamp collecting prefigured topical collecting, which emphasizes the collector’s personal

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fancy for the pictorial and aesthetic aspects of stamps, aspects that can become criteria by which to organize a collection. Gelber charts the rise of stamp collecting as a late nineteenth-century hobby that claimed respectability in masculine terms by becoming more like work: that is, a hobby boasting educational, scientific, and economic benefits.61 Stamp collectors, it was asserted by those seeking to legitimize the hobby, learned history and geography by studying their stamps, practiced scientific methods in examining, classifying, and arranging them, and could derive financial benefits from those efforts by using their knowledge of stamp varieties to invest in stamps that might rise dramatically in value over time. Philatelists could thereby become “experts,” Gelber notes, not unlike the experts emerging with the rise of the professions during this period. History, science, and economics were masculine domains in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the economic value of stamps in particular—both as government-issued certificates with a monetized face value and as collectibles that might become scarce and hence more valuable over time—inflected the gender dynamics of the hobby. Gelber argues that in the emergent mass-consumer society of the Victorian era, men were defined as producers and women as consumers; stamp collecting, especially its economic aspects, mimicked the productive activities of the marketplace, such that men could justify their pursuit of the hobby as something like a serious business. Meanwhile, “women were pioneers in topical collecting,” which was grounded in aesthetics instead of in science and economics. Further, this distinction protected women from the potentially corrupting influence of the market and safeguarded their moral virtue by preventing them from investing in stamps as a source of profit.62 Yet men were “playing” with stamps as much as the wallpaper woman was. By the end of the nineteenth century, with the increasing number of stamps available to collect and the increasing knowledge of stamps and their varieties that the hobby itself was generating, the idea that a collection could be something other than a complete set of all of one or more countries’ stamps became commonplace. Indeed, it was recognized that a complete collection (a reconstituted totality, in our terms) might

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be almost impossible to attain. For example, in Chats on Postage Stamps (1911), Melville included a chapter titled “On Limiting a Collection,” in which he noted, “To attempt the whole wide world . . . is a task which can scarcely attain even approximately to completion in these days.” He advised collectors to specialize, or narrow their collecting focus, by heeding “the trend of [their] inclinations” as revealed in the course of their initial forays in general collecting.63 Such has been the standard advice ever since: “Every individual is the king of his own collection,” and “No one can or should . . . tell you how or what to collect . . . it’s your own fulfillment you are seeking not someone else’s.” 64 A topical collection might focus, for example, on animals on stamps or a particular animal on stamps; even more singularizing would be a collection of used postcards depicting animals franked with stamps depicting animals or postcards of giraffes franked with stamps depicting giraffes. People collect postcards, covers, or stamps canceled on their birthday or at the post office of the town where they were born. They collect stamps from countries that no longer exist or stamps that have been flown aboard spacecraft or stamps of a particular color, shape, or size. Such collections are often by definition impossible to complete. It would be better to say that for such collections there is no collectible totality; they are defined instead by the individual collector’s whim, and thus the collector as a unique person is the only relevant totality by which the collection can be defined. Thus, Ada Prill, writing in the American Philatelist in 2010, advises hobbyists that in the building of a “me” collection “there are no guidelines to observe” because “it is a subject where you are the world’s expert.” Prill goes on to list the kinds of items that make sense for such a collection, which may be based on one’s name (a person named James might collect items postmarked in Jamestown), significant dates in one’s life, educational institutions attended, occupation, hobbies, travel, the “challenges” one has overcome, and one’s “favorite things.” “The ultimate item” for such a collection, she concludes, “is a stamp with your own picture on it.”65 Such a stamp—or, at least, a stamplike object—had become easily attainable by the early twenty-first century from private companies affiliated with the USPS that enable

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FIGURE 2.3

Handmade cameo stamp, 1925. Source: Handler’s collection.

businesses and households to illustrate and print their own postagepaid mailing labels.66 The paradigmatic stamp design, featuring a unique person’s portrait, had been established at the outset of the postagestamp era with the Penny Black. Thus, it is no wonder that long before digital technologies allowed for custom-printed mailing labels, people not only could easily imagine their portrait on a stamp but might playfully produce such an object (figure 2.3).

3 U.S. STAMPS Cataloguing Polities and Framing National Culture

I

n our commonsense understanding, postage stamps map neatly onto nation-states or “countries.” This understanding is by and large correct. There are 193 member states of the United Nations, 189 of which are stamp-issuing governments (the other four—Andorra, Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau—have their mail delivered by other countries). The vast majority of the more than ten thousand pages of the contemporary six-volume Scott catalogue is devoted to the stamps of those 189 nation-states. But the catalogue also lists the postage stamps of scores of other political units, in most cases units that were colonies, territories, or protectorates of other countries but that no longer exist as stamp-issuing entities.1 As we will see, contested political relationships as well as competing notions of national identity can sometimes be inferred from the way in which stamp catalogues are organized. As we have insisted from the outset, postage stamps have provided a unique venue for the governments that issue them to disseminate what Jack Child calls “miniature messages,”2 images and words packaged in tiny pieces of paper that very quickly after the birth of the Penny Black in 1840 became a key source of imagery to teach citizens about the history and culture of their nation. Focusing on the stamps of one nation, a reader of the catalogue can study how such imagery changed over the decades.

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But the editors of a worldwide stamp catalogue also provide a prior lesson concerning geopolitical relationships. To categorize all postage stamps ever issued with respect to the postal authorities that issued them, it is necessary to construct genealogies relating nationstates and their political dependencies. Indeed, it might be said that a contemporary stamp catalogue is a palimpsest in which histories of colonization and decolonization as well as the birth and death of nations can be read from the way the editors have chosen to categorize stamps in relation to polities. Such genealogical work is required to catalogue stamps because, as we shall see, the editors have to make decisions about continuous and discontinuous numerical sequences. For example, in the case of a colony that has become a nation-state, should the stamps of the colony—which were issued and controlled by the metropolitan power—and the stamps of the new nation be numbered in one continuous sequence, or should the colonial sequence be terminated and a new sequence begun to mark the birth of the new nation? The editors of stamp catalogues, not postal authorities, catalogue stamps for the collector market. In most cases, postal authorities and their governments ignore stamp catalogues. But at moments of disputed sovereignty, cataloguers’ decisions can become politically contentious. For example, when Bangladesh broke away from Pakistan, it mattered a great to deal to politicians on both sides when stamp cataloguers chose to recognize Bangladesh as a legitimate postal authority and its stamps as authentic postage stamps, not propaganda labels. Moreover, cataloguers’ decisions in such matters often remain frozen in successive issues of the catalogue over decades and, as such, can indicate the endurance of hegemonic historical narratives—as we shall see in the case of the stamps of the Confederate States of America.

CATALOGUING NATIONS AND THEIR COLONIES

In their framing, stamp catalogues purport merely to document all the stamps issued in connection to sovereign nations and distinguish

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between their different varieties. To wit, since its first issue in 1897, the most hegemonic of these catalogues in the United States, the Scott catalogue, bore the title Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue Giving Date of Issue, Color, Shape, and Value of Every Postage Stamp That Has Ever Been Issued by Any Government in the World. That title remained substantially the same until the 109th edition of 1953, when the long phrase beginning with “Giving” was dropped. The fundamental criterion of inclusion used by the editors of the twenty-first-century Scott catalogue, whose “intent” is “to list all postage stamps of the world,” is “that stamps be decreed legal for postage by the issuing country and that the issuing country actually have an operating postal system.” The editors also spell out principles of exclusion, several of which concern items produced by postal authorities but not intended to be released, issues confined to local (not national) use, and “stamps ‘issued’ by non-existent postal entities or fantasy countries, such as Nagaland, Occusi-Ambeno, Staffa, Sedang, Torres Straits and others.”3 Given that such named sociopolitical entities may be the sites of struggles for political recognition, independence, or statehood, the dismissal of them as “fantasy countries” might be insulting to some. Nonetheless, to the bewilderingly complex question as to what counts as a nation-state or an internationally recognized political entity (such as a colony, protectorate, or territory), the criterion of a functioning postal authority would seem to provide as clear-cut (if arbitrary) an answer as any. For example, in the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue published in 2016, a Scott publication that catalogues stamp issues from around the world rather than just in the United States, the stamps issued for the area of the Horn of Africa currently occupied by the nation of Djibouti include those of the French colonies of Obock as well as the French Somali Coast and its successive incarnation as the French Territory of the Afars and Issas. The stamps of the French Somali Coast are enumerated from number 1 (issued in 1894) to number 309 (issued in 1967). Those of Afars and Issas begin with number 310 (1967) and end with number 438 (1977). Djibouti stamps begin with number 439 (1977) and remain an open-ended sequence to be

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updated with each new edition of the catalogue. Because Djibouti’s territory is not isomorphic with that of Obock, Obock’s stamps run from number 1 to number 64, after which listing we find the following note: “Stamps of Obock were replaced in 1901 by those of Somali Coast.” 4 The sequence that starts with the French Somali Coast and continues through Djibouti maps onto a territory but not exclusively onto a nation-state because the Scott catalogue includes the independent republic of Djibouti and some (but not all) of its colonial predecessors in the same numerical sequence. In this case, then, the birth of the nation is not marked in the catalogue by the beginning of a new numerical sequence for philatelic reference. The same is true of many but not all postcolonial nation-states. For a new nation that was born from a merging of several colonies, the catalogue starts a new sequence; for example, Morocco became a stamp-issuing independent nation in 1956, and its stamps begin at number 1, while the stamps of each of the stampissuing entities of French Morocco, Spanish Morocco, and Tangier have their own sequences of numbers, which are now closed, apparently never to be added to.5 Similarly, some stamp-issuing entities once considered nation-states ceased to exist at a particular historical moment. For stamp collectors, the death of a nation is also the death of a distinctive sequence of stamps. As the American Philatelist put it in 1922, commenting on the absorption of Montenegro by Yugoslavia, “[Montenegro’s] catalogue numbers have reached their total, and the Album page is complete!”6 And yet political entities can be reborn. Viewed after the moment of rebirth by stamp cataloguers, the situation is one of interrupted existence, as in the case of Latvia, which, according to the Scott catalogue, became a “sovereign state” in 1918, joined the Soviet Union in 1940, and then became an independent nation again in 1991. The catalogue listing for the stamps of Latvia begins in 1918 with number 1 and by 1940 reaches number 229; the next Latvian issues, as listed in the catalogue, appear in 1991 with number 230. But between 1940 and 1991, Latvia as an independent, stamp-issuing political entity did not exist, and the catalogue shows that.7

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SITING THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA IN THE CATALOGUE

Stamp catalogues are used almost exclusively by stamp collectors, and catalogue classification schemes rarely lead to discussion and dispute among government officials, although sometimes, as in the case of Bangladesh, noted earlier, they can.8 Moreover, most of the millions of stamp collectors worldwide are not deeply enough immersed in the hobby to care about disputed political entities and their postage stamps. But among serious collectors of stamps related to once-disputed political entities, questions of present-day philatelic classification can become contentious. For example, what should be the relationship between stamps issued by the United States and those issued by the Confederate states during the Civil War? Recent editions of the Scott Specialized Catalogue of United States Stamps & Covers group U.S. stamps together with those of other political units relevant to the United States in terms of postal history. In the catalogue, the sections listing some or all of the stamps of Canal Zone, Cuba, Danish West Indies (which became the U.S. Virgin Islands), Guam, Hawai‘i, Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Ryukyu Islands follow the U.S. section, either instead of or in addition to appearing in the sixvolume general world-stamp Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, in alphabetical order among the sections of other stamp-issuing political units. The stamps listed in these sections were issued during periods when the U.S. government controlled these geopolitical entities under various colonial arrangements. Listed in the U.S. catalogue before any of these U.S. colonies and protectorates but after the stamps of the United States are stamps of the Confederate States of America.9 From the late nineteenth century on, Scott listed Confederate stamps immediately following those of the United States, with little explanation, as if these stamps both were but were not U.S. stamps. When in 1972 the USPS began publishing its own catalogue using Scott’s numbering scheme, it included Confederate stamps among its listings. It dropped Confederate listings from its

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fourteenth edition in 1987, only to resume listing them in its thirtythird edition in 2006. Collectors of Confederate stamps exhibit similar ambivalences. One of the founders of Confederate stamp collecting, August Dietz, complained in 1948 that Confederate stamps, which he referred to as “American stamps,” had “been grudgingly accorded space and given but superficial treatment in the catalogs.” And yet, according to Dietz, “the stamps of the Southern Confederacy are definitely an integral part of a United States collection, and not until this fact is recognized will American Philately [sic] attain to her full stature and achieve her highest goals.”10 Similar sentiments were displayed half a century later in a dispute that erupted in the mid-1990s between the Confederate Stamp Alliance, founded in 1935, and the United States Philatelic Classics Society, founded in 1948. According to Brian Green, the editor of the Confederate Philatelist in 1995, the Classics Society decided “that Confederates should be excluded from the scope of material covered in their journal.” Green objected to the society’s “revisionist policy” on the grounds that Confederate material is in fact of the “classic era” of U.S. stamps and that U.S. postage was used by the states that formed the Confederacy until its own postal system took over on June 1, 1861. The dispute was settled, as Green reported soon after his initial complaint, when a member of the Confederate Stamp Alliance became president of the Classics Society and persuaded it to rescind the decision. “Revisionism has no place in philately,” Green concluded.11 Despite their expressed desire for the inclusion of Confederate stamps in “American” or “United States” philately, twentieth-century Confederate collectors reveled in the national symbols of the political entity that broke away from the Union, members of the Confederate Stamp Alliance assigned honorary titles such as colonel and general to leading collectors, and the imagery of their journal was replete with Confederate flags. Notably lacking was any critical discussion of slavery. Even at the turn of the millennium, philatelic writing on the postal history of the Confederacy continued to echo Dietz, who, writing in 1944 to a national (U.S.) audience, had described the graciousness of the antebellum “way of life” of the South, assuring his readers that “inhuman treatment” of

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slaves “was chiefly at the hands of hired Northern overseers.”12 (It is worth nothing, however, that in 2020 the Confederate Stamp Alliance changed its name to the Civil War Philatelic Society and now describes itself as “nonsectional”).13 U.S. postal authorities have faced related dilemmas. If U.S. postage stamps are designed to deliver messages with nationalist content, what should or can they say about those among their states and citizens who were once part of the Confederate States of America? When, for example, the post office released its ten-stamp Army Navy issue (Scott nos. 785–94) between December 1936 and May 1937, it included among the depicted military heroes Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had requested the issue to promote public understanding of “the traditions of the armed service.”14 Given the dependence of the Democratic Party on southern votes, it is not surprising that Lee and Jackson were included, although spokespersons for various northern constituencies protested, just as southerners protested the inclusion of General William Sherman even while defending the inclusion of Lee.15 Similar disputes attended the release in 1949 and 1951 of stamps marking the final reunions of Union and Confederate veterans.16 Lee was featured again in the Liberty issue of the 1950s (which we consider in chapter 6), among such ancestors as Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Lee and Jackson were again featured in the Civil War issue of 1995 (Scott nos. 2975a–t). A final example: among the many U.S. stamps that feature flags, seven depict a version of the Confederate flag. They appeared in an American Bicentennial issue in 1976 depicting the flags of all fifty states (Scott nos. 1633–82) and again in a 2008–2012 series of state flags (Scott nos. 4273– 332). It would seem that when U.S. postal authorities choose to represent the nation as a union of its states and political units by flags, they are stuck with flags from a few southern states that incorporate versions of a flag representing dissent, rebellion, and even treason on the part of those whose descendants are nonetheless citizens of the contemporary nation-state. This extended example concerning the relationship of U.S. and Confederate stamps suggests that the ambiguities built into the catalogue’s

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apparently clear-cut criteria for which items to include and where to include them can be mapped onto the often complex politics underlying a government’s decisions concerning who and what to depict on stamps.

FRAMING U.S. CULTURE ON STAMPS

Cataloguing stamps, work done by private companies, occurs after stamps have been issued. Choosing the subject matter of stamps and then designing them are the work of nation-states’ post offices and the political entities that control them. As we noted at the outset, to do their work, stamps must indicate their denomination and issuing country, but beyond that they are not required to include the iconic and symbolic features that have made them so fascinating to collectors. By law, the PMG has always had “full and final authority to determine which postage stamps [are to] be issued.”17 From 1847 until the end of the nineteenth century, the paradigmatic U.S. stamp featured a bust or portrait of a deceased national hero. The Penny Black had established the model for what a postage stamp should include,18 but in place of a living ruler U.S. stamps honored national ancestors, a point of utmost importance that we take up in the next section. The cast of characters of these nineteenth-century stamps was small. As the historian Steven Boyd has noted, it began with heroes of the American Revolution: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. After the Civil War, it expanded to include those who had built the new nation and then defended the union: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Edwin Stanton, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Winfield Scott, Alexander Hamilton, Oliver Perry, Zachary Taylor, James Garfield, Ulysses Grant, and William Sherman. But the model—the nation represented by a white male hero—remained the same.19 Change came with the advent of commemorative stamps at the end of the nineteenth century. The first U.S. commemoratives were the Columbian Exposition issue of 1893 (discussed in chapter  5). In the

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following decades, many of the great world’s fairs managed to garner their own commemorative stamps as regional elites and their elected representatives learned to lobby the USPOD for stamps in their interests. At the same time, patriotic and ethnic groups began lobbying for commemorative stamps to honor their contributions to U.S. history.20 When Franklin D. Roosevelt (celebrated to this day among philatelists as a great stamp collector) became president, he expanded the range of commemorative-stamp topics to celebrate the achievements of the federal government during the New Deal.21 During World War II, U.S. stamps concentrated on war messages,22 but the decade after the war saw the issuing of more and more commemorative stamps as well as a kind of frenzied lobbying that stamp collectors of the era decried. As they saw it, there was no rationale for many of the new commemorative issues—no rationally planned U.S. stamp program that, they imagined, other countries had. Many of the issued commemorative stamps, the critics thought, were either ludicrous, such as the stamp depicting a Light Brahma Rooster (Scott no. 968) to honor the poultry industry in 1948, or arbitrary, such as the stamp honoring the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of Washington and Lee University (Scott no. 982) in 1949 (“Why that institution and not others?,” the critics asked).23 Mounting criticism from collectors, the press, and politicians (either tired of being lobbied for commemorative issues or distressed at the irrationality of the process) led to the creation of the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) in 1957, which from that day to this has advised the post office on its choice of new issues and, importantly, shielded it from random political pressures on behalf of individual topics for commemoration. Originally a seven-member committee, by 2019 the CSAC had twelve members; from the start, it was intended to include people knowledgeable about stamps, art, and design as well as about U.S. history and culture.24 Its meetings are “closed and confidential,” and the minutes of those meetings are not available for public or scholarly inspection.25 In 1959, the CSAC listed the seven criteria it used for the selection of commemorative-stamp subjects. The first two specified that “no living person” be “honored” by a stamp and that an “American citizen” will

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not be considered for a stamp “until at least 25 years after death.” Two more criteria established temporal guidelines for commemoration, specifying that anniversaries for commemoration be counted in fifty-year intervals and that stamps honoring persons be released on anniversaries of their birth. Finally, the other criteria specified that topics to be commemorated had to have “widespread national appeal and significance,” that commemorative stamps would not be issued to honor “a fraternal, political or religious organization, a commercial enterprise or a specific product,” or organizations devoted to charitable fund-raising. A criterion that was not listed, presumably because it was well established, is that U.S. presidents are eligible to be honored by a stamp a year after their death; this condition was spelled out in later iterations of the text.26 Although these criteria have remained in place since the founding of the CSAC in 1957, some of the details have changed over time. By the early 1980s, the period following the death of a citizen proposed for commemoration had decreased to ten years.27 In 2007, it was reset to five years,28 and since 2018 it has been set at three years.29 The prohibition against honoring a living person was almost done away with in 2011, when PMG Patrick Donahoe announced that as part of an effort to get younger people more engaged with postage stamps, the USPS would begin issuing stamps featuring living persons. But the idea did not sit well with the USPS board of governors and was quietly tabled.30 Moreover, the most recent statements take pains to spell out what the phrase “national appeal and significance” might mean. The first criterion of the list revised in 2019 specifies that U.S. stamps are to feature “American or American-related subjects” or subjects having had “significant impact on American history, culture or environment.” The second expands on the first: “The Postal Service will honor extraordinary and enduring contributions to American society, history, culture or environment.” And the ninth specifies that only “positive contributions” will be recognized: “Negative occurrences and disasters will not be commemorated.”31 The redundancy of the first two criteria suggests sensitivity on the part of the CSAC and the USPS to an ongoing public debate concerning

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what we might call “classic” versus “contemporary” stamp subjects. With the proliferation of commemorative stamps after World War II came complaints about the trivialization of U.S. stamps: in the past, critics said, stamps honored genuinely patriotic heroes and topics, but since the war they too often featured subjects of popular culture not worthy of commemoration. Defenders of the new trend countered that postage stamps should represent the entire range of a nation’s culture and historical experience; as times changed, they argued, the nation’s stamps needed to reflect newer realities.32 The CSAC criteria seem to split the difference between the two camps, insisting redundantly on Americanism but at the same time using the words culture and environment to expand the domains in which national identity can be understood to manifest. It would require a long book to analyze the main topics of all U.S. stamps from 1945 to the present (that kind of comprehensiveness is not our aim in this book), but a quick sketch will give the general trends. First, patriotic heroes such as Franklin and Washington continued to appear regularly on U.S. stamps. Second, the bicentennial era, roughly 1972–1990, generated a glut of stamps dedicated to the historical period of the American Revolution.33 Third, space exploration figured prominently, especially from the moon landing in 1969 to the end of the millennium. Fourth, related to the space theme is that of transportation, past, present, and future, and technological progress more generally, and related to these topics is that of progress in postal service, especially progress seen as dependent on technology, as we discuss in chapter 7. Fifth, historical commemoration has always been a continuing theme, with emphasis on all periods (not simply the late eighteenth through the mid–nineteenth centuries). Especially prominent is the commemoration of wars from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, of statehood (fiftyyear anniversaries of the admission of states to the union), and of the territorial expansion of the United States. Sixth, the natural environment and its conservation have figured ever more prominently. Seventh, holiday stamps were put out beginning in 1962 with what became an ongoing issue of Christmas stamps and expanding in 1973 to include “love” stamps for Valentine’s Day and then stamps for the holidays of various

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“minority” ethnic and religious groups.34 Finally, famous persons continued to be celebrated, but the domains and populations from which they were drawn expanded dramatically compared to those for stamps of the era before World War II. Indeed, the cast of characters of U.S. stamps expanded to include fictional personages, from Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny to Harry Potter and Yoda. The inclusion of such copyrighted materials could be considered to violate the CSAC’s banning of “specific products” from stamps in 1959, but the committee’s more recent reliance on the word culture in its anthropological sense allows such products to be included as public property, part of “heritage.”35 Whether the creation of the CSAC has led to a more rational or logical national stamp program is debatable. What is not debatable, however, is that the USPOD and then the USPS continued to issue relatively high numbers of new stamps. During World War II, the post office issued 28 new stamps; by the end of 1957, 166 more new stamps had been issued; the period between 1957 and the end of the century saw the issuing of close to 2,500 new stamps; and then between 2000 and 2020, almost 2,000 new stamps were issued.36 Despite this plethora of stamps, one rule has remained constant: living persons are not to be featured on U.S. stamps.

HEADS, DEAD AND ALIVE

In his important book on the semiotics of stamp design, David Scott suggests how the basic information of denomination and national identity have been used to create the borders or outer frames of the tiny rectangles that will feature pictorial icons and/or texts in their centers. Scott highlights the indexical aspect of this basic information, but he also points out that stamp designers in many countries “iconise indexical elements” as they transform the necessary postal information about country and denomination into a logo or brand for the country: “The pattern—format, iconic content, textual message—was established conclusively in 1840 with Sir Rowland Hill’s famous Penny Black stamp

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Early British stamps with the profi le of Queen Victoria from (a) 1840 (Scott no. 1), (b) 1883 (Scott no. 96), (c) 1887 (Scott no. 120), and (d ) 1900 (Scott no. 125).

FIGURE  3.1

Source: Handler’s collection.

which showed the profile of Queen Victoria, the device ‘Postage’ and the face value of one penny” (figures 3.1a–3.1d).37 As Scott notes, the Penny Black became the prototype in terms of design and function for all postage stamps that followed it. All stamps bore national symbolism and postal information; all were small paper rectangles (or, rarely, triangles and circles) designed to take up only a fraction of the surface space of a mailed item; all were backed with an adhesive allowing postal patrons to affix them to the objects to be mailed; and all were used to prepay postal fees, an apparently trivial feature that increased the efficiency of postal systems and helped transform them from a service for the elite to a service for the masses.38 The Penny Black pictured a bust of Queen Victoria; the first U.S. stamps, released in 1847, pictured Franklin and Washington. This was the pattern of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stamps: a head stood for the nation-state. Such heads might belong to human persons or to allegorical figures (as in the first stamps of France in 1849, featuring Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility). If human persons were featured, they might be people who were alive during the time the stamps were in use, as with the Penny Black, or they might be historical figures, human ancestors, as Franklin and Washington were. British postal reformers took readily to the idea that the queen’s bust would grace their first postage stamp.39 In contrast, in the United States custom dictated that no living person would appear on any type of government token, whether metal or paper. This prohibition came into being

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negatively in 1792, when Congress, in debates leading to the establishment of the U.S. Mint, declined to prescribe that a bust of the still living George Washington (d. 1799) be put on U.S. coins. A story circulates among coin experts that Washington “was mortified at the thought of having his visage memorialized upon American coins, and strongly denounced the idea as a relic of monarchical practices,” but the story has never been documented.40 Whatever Washington’s thoughts may have been, such ideas were expressed during the congressional debate over the Mint and its coinage. One proposal called for coins bearing “the head of the President of the United States for the time being, with an inscription which shall express the initial or first letter of his Christian or first name, and his surname at length, the succession of his presidency numerically, and the year of the coinage.”41 Opponents of such a measure objected “that it savors too much of monarchy, and would ill become the majority of an independent people enjoying a free republican government, thus to idolize the features of an individual.” Moreover, they pointed out that although the current president may well have merited such an honor, there was no way to know whether future presidents would. Had the bill proposed to retain Washington’s image “forever” upon the coinage, its opponents could have accepted it; but it proposed instead “that his head should, in the common course of events, make room in a short time, for that of— nobody knows who—a Nero perhaps, a Caligula, or a Heliogabulus.”42 As an alternative to the presidential head, several lawmakers proposed “a design emblematic of liberty,” which was ultimately agreed to. An image of Liberty, like that of Ceres on the French stamps, is an allegory, something above, beyond, or removed from historical time.43 The relationship of the polity to historical time was central to the distinction being drawn between a monarchy and a republic. In the second part of Rights of Man, published a year before the coinage debate began, Thomas Paine argued that “man has no authority over posterity . . . and therefore no man, or body of men, had, or can have, a right to set up hereditary government.” Such a government, he added, is “in its nature tyranny” because it deprives future generations of their right to govern themselves—in other words, to make their own history.44

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The proposal in favor of the presidents’ heads referred to the presidency as an institution representing the nation-state, just as British coins of the time referred to the monarchy as an institution heading the body politic. The two institutions were similar in that each was configured (and thus could easily be figured iconographically) as a succession of heads of state, unending, into the future. In this sense, both systems played history forward—they knew in advance “who” (which social person) the nation’s leader would be. But they differed in the principles used to determine which unique individual or biographical person would ascend to the highest position of the polity in the course of historical time. A king or queen ascended to the throne based on hereditary succession, whereas presidents were chosen by a citizen electorate. As Paine saw it, the choice of the head of state had to be left to the citizenry, not determined in advance by heredity—although he was apparently not worried that one generation’s establishment of a system for choosing leaders might tyrannize over future generations.45 Opponents of the principle of successive presidents’ heads on the coinage proposed a different approach to history; they wanted to play history backward, not forward. Washington’s worthiness to appear on a coin (or, in 1847, on a stamp) derived from an evaluation of Washington’s place in history: his deeds and conduct merited the honor. But there was no way to know whether future presidents would be similarly worthy or decidedly unworthy: “a Nero perhaps.” The evaluation of merit worthy of enshrinement on public tokens such as coins and stamps could thus be carried out only at some future moment via a review that entailed looking backward to evaluate a person’s actions in the light of history. With respect to the creation of the first postage stamps in the 1840s, the head of the living Queen Victoria and the heads of the deceased Franklin and Washington represent different national iconographies. The queen’s image was taken from a celebrated medal of the young Victoria used to commemorate her visit to the City of London in 1837.46 As the reformation of the British post office gathered momentum, leading to the “penny post” instituted in 1840, Queen Victoria was persuaded not only to sanction her image on the first stamp but also to renounce her franking privilege.47 With this act and in the transfer of her image from a medal produced in limited numbers for dignitaries only to a

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mass-produced postage stamp, she became the patroness of the penny post and of a new kind of equality born of low-cost mass communication. As Kate Thomas remarks, the queen’s “signature disappeared [once she had renounced franking] from its place on the back of the royal envelope but was replaced by her head and shoulders on the postage stamp on the front of each and every envelope that passed through the postal system. Her mail thus traveled alongside [that of] all of her subjects and she traveled with each . . . of their letters, her head forming an imprimatur of their importance and a guarantee of equality.” 48 In contrast, in the United States functional reform of the postal system along the lines pioneered in Great Britain did not entail a trade-off between the symbolism of monarchical privilege and that of mass equality. If in 1847 Franklin and Washington were to travel with ordinary citizens’ mail, it was not as living benefactors but as historical heroes. And they had no say in the matter, as the queen did; the state, through its post office, would decide who or what was historically suitable in the iconographic role.49 The historicity of Franklin and Washington on the first U.S. postage stamps seems to be enhanced by the way the portraits are framed. Again, a comparison to the Penny Black is useful. As David Scott notes, on the Penny Black (figure 3.1a) the words “POSTAGE” and “ONE PENNY” were used to frame the icon of the queen’s head, which by itself, without inscription, denoted “Great Britain.” (British stamps are unique to this day in using an image of the monarch without further inscription to identify the nation; such are the prerogatives of priority.) Hill and his colleagues chose the “white and black engine-turned work” of the background to take advantage of technological developments in papermaking in order to foil counterfeiters.50 To the right and left of the queen’s head, a more pronounced engine-turned design appears almost as columns, but, all in all, the centering of the queen is not done graphically in such a way as to emphasize the idea of a picture frame. To the contrary, it almost seems as if she is available to escape the stamp’s frame to travel alongside her subjects, as Thomas put it. The stamps of Franklin and Washington (figure 3.2a) are different. Their heads—not in profile, as the queen was depicted, but in threequarter poses—are framed by graphically prominent oval lines, which

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are set well within the outer edges of the stamp. The devices—“U” and “S,” “POST OFFICE,” “FIVE CENTS,” “5,” and so on—conform to the contours of the oval frame instead of serving as a primary graphical framing element, as they do in the Penny Black. At the edges of each stamp, lines frame the inner oval frames. The space between the square and oval frames, filled in with “foliations,” takes up more of the surface area of the stamp than the portrait does.51 As a design feature, this framing apparatus resembles a decorated picture frame. The overall effect is to distance Franklin and Washington from the viewer and thus to emphasize their status as historically worthy ancestors, not living patrons. Public criticism of a stamp featuring a portrait of Andrew Jackson in 1863 (figure 3.2b) suggests how quickly the paradigmatic design of early

Early U.S. stamps: (a) George Washington, 1847 (Scott no. 2; (b) Andrew Jackson, 1863 (Scott no. 73); (c) Abraham Lincoln, 1890 (Scott no. 222); (d) Ben Franklin, 1900 (Scott no. 300).

FIGURE  3.2

Source: Handler’s collection.

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U.S. postage stamps—a head balanced by elaborate framing—had become established. In the Jackson stamp, the portrait takes up almost the entire surface area of the stamp, dwarfing the frame into insignificance. In its time, it was known as “big-head” and castigated for the ugliness of its design, as described by a later commentator: “The portrait is, in proportion to the size of the stamp, the largest on any postage stamp issued anywhere at the time. . . . The frame is insignificant and entirely too small and repudiates every canon of balance.”52 In successive issues into the early twentieth century, U.S. stamp designers came up with ever more elaborate frames to set off the iconic ancestors (in addition to the Washington and Jackson stamps, see, for example, the Lincoln and Franklin stamps, figures 3.2c and 3.2d). In all these stamps, numbered and lettered inscriptions were integrated into the aesthetic patterns of the framing, which seems to have been as important to the designers as the identification of nation and denomination. British stamp designers of this period also experimented with different frames in successive issues from 1840 to 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death (figures 3.1a–d). But in their stamps, as compared to those of their U.S. counterparts, the inscriptions are much plainer, using a sans serif typeface that is in conformity with the much simpler framing elements, and the frames seem less important in themselves than as simple design elements conveying the necessary indexical information in letters and numbers. During this period, all British stamps featured the same image of the youthful Queen Victoria that had graced the Penny Black. Commenting on this phenomenon—on “the Queen who never ages”—Catherine Golden notes that some Victorians questioned the postal authorities’ decision to maintain a static and hence increasingly unrealistic version of Victoria, especially considering that during her “beneficent” reign she had overseen so much progressive historical change. Others, however, praised the decision because it celebrated the stability of the monarchy and created over time an increasingly distinctive “icon of national identity.”53 Either way, the contrast to U.S. stamps is striking. Beyond highlighting specific ancestors, the iconography of a succession of elaborately

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framed “dead heads” on U.S. stamps suggested two metanarratives: first, that the United States indeed “had” a history that justified its claims to national identity separate from that of the monarchical mother country, and, second, that the state through its post office and other agencies had the right and power to determine what that history was.54 In the British case, Victoria’s image could remain timeless because for the British government and the British people, the monarchy itself—not any particular monarch—represented the nation as embodied in a living history, a continuous tradition. We return in chapter 5 to the question of the U.S. government’s ability to use postage stamps to construct a national past. But first we need to examine the dramatic circumstances in which what began as a custom—no living persons on coins and stamps—became codified into law.

II STO RIE D ANC ESTORS

F

4 FIXING THE ICONOGRAPHY OF NATIONAL ANCESTRY Dead Heads and Moving Bodies During the U.S. Civil War

D

uring the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury Department violated the custom prohibiting the portrait of living people on public tokens. The incident was so fraught that Congress reacted by enshrining custom in law. In 1863, a man named Spencer Clark, who was the superintendent of the National Currency Bureau in the Treasury Department charged with overseeing the printing of banknotes, put his own portrait on a five-cent paper bill, one of the denominations of newly created “fractional currencies” (several of which featured portraits of other living people) to be used at a time when metal for coinage was in short supply (figure 4.1). Perhaps in normal times such an impropriety would have been overlooked, but those were not normal times. Moreover, Clark was a polarizing character accused but not convicted of scamming the government out of large sums of money by experimenting with new printing techniques from which he and an associate profited and of preying sexually on women workers at the Treasury. These alleged crimes made him a lightning rod for deep divisions in Congress during a time when the United States was in the profound crisis of a civil war. The proposed law became contentious on March 15, 1866, when the Senate Finance Committee took up discussion of a House appropriations bill that included a proviso that codified the custom. It read: “That

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Fractional currency note bearing the likeness of Spencer Clark, superintendent of the National Currency Bureau, 1863.

FIGURE  4.1

Source: National Museum of American History, Washington, DC.

hereafter no portrait or likeness of any living person shall be engraved or placed upon any of the bonds, securities, notes or postal currency of the United States.”1 With little discussion, the Senate voted to amend the House bill by striking the proviso after Senator William Fessenden, Republican of Maine, explained the Treasury Department’s opposition to it: “I am informed that it is regarded at the Treasury as a security against counterfeiting to put the likenesses of living persons on some of these notes.”2 The discussion was renewed the next day; Fessenden, questioned about his opposition to the proviso, explained that it “was put in as a personal matter, aimed at a particular individual” (e.g., Clark).3 He reiterated his support for Treasury’s desire to strike the proviso, professing his trust in its officials’ expertise. But Senator Lyman Trumbull, Republican of Illinois, pursued the matter, and the brief but epistemologically dense discussion that followed moved from the question of likenesses

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and counterfeiting—Why, Trumbull asked in disbelief, should it be easier to counterfeit the image of a dead person than that of a living one?—to the more foundational question that had been debated in 1792 concerning history and republican memorialization. As before, these debates concerned questions of democratic representation and its relationship to citizenship, in particular the state’s ability to empower and protect its constituents. Like the opponents of the idea of putting successive presidents on coins in 1792, Trumbull argued against playing history forward. “What may be the consequences,” he asked, of putting living people on coins, notes, and stamps? Then he answered his own question: “We have had a rebellion in this country within a few years; before it there were persons at the head of this Government whose faces are obnoxious to the great mass of the loyal people of this country, and whose portraits we should not like to have upon the currency of the country. So far as it is aimed at any particular person I am opposed to it . . . but it strikes me the proviso is a very proper one.”4 The logic is clear: if the custom had not been enshrined as law, it would have been possible before the Civil War to issue government tokens bearing the images of living people who after their deaths and in hindsight would be seen to have been leaders of a rebellion against the very government that had issued those tokens. But Spencer Clark was loyal to the Union, and Trumbull professed to bear him no animus. Why, then, did the issue coalesce around Clark? The codification into law of the custom of featuring only portraits of people who had already died on coins, banknotes, bonds, and stamps brings into view the moral dimensions of postal circulation, which thus far we have analyzed mainly in terms of the semiotics of communication. In addition to the more famous emancipation of the enslaved, the Civil War period saw a surge of women into the public sphere. At the same moment when the United States formally declared slavery— the trafficking in or circulation of human bodies as property owned by others— to be inconsistent with democracy, it also saw women circulating economically in the labor market and through their role in the abolitionist and nascent feminist movements demanding a voice in politics. In addition, during the Civil War the Union government

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enacted the conscription of free men to be circulated as soldiers on a scale far exceeding anything that had occurred in past wars, which in turn meant that both state and society had to deal with the circulation of wounded soldiers and dead bodies—again, on a vast scale. In sum, this was a moment when a nation-state at once emergent and threatened was forced to debate its fundamental principles of citizenship and personhood: What kinds of people—alive or dead, free and property owning or enslaved as the property of others—could circulate throughout the social body and in what ways? How should the state facilitate that circulation through its laws and its management of various infrastructures, including currencies? And which images—images that would circulate wherever the mechanics of social circulation required currency to facilitate it—should those currencies bear?

RISKY BUSINESS: CIVIL WAR CURRENCY AND FEARS OF FEDERAL OVERREACH

After the South seceded, fears about the U.S. government’s ability to fund the war and an eventual popular shift against private banks, which Republican statesmen characterized as war profiteers, led to the development of the first fiat currency in the nation’s history. The process leading to this outcome suggests that more than what we think of as finances was at stake: the pecuniary realm was an area of profound moral concern for the United States from its founding. Securitizing that realm against the risks that threatened it—counterfeiting, illegitimate uses of currency, undemocratic fiscal policies, and, most generally, the moral corruption of social circulation—foregrounded those threats in the public debates that attempted to resolve them. The ban against portraits of living people on currency developed during a particularly volatile period in the history of U.S. monetary policy. For nearly the first century of its existence, the nation allowed more than one currency to be accepted as legal tender, a system that Michael Caires argues was a constitutive element of the early republic that made the

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transition to fiat currency during the Civil War all the more striking. Though the federal government issued coins at the U.S. Mint, local and private banks also issued their own specie, often in the guise of paper monies that functioned as notes of indebtedness on the part of the issuing banks. For those in favor of this system, restricting the federal government’s control over currency served as an important hedge against tyranny. During periods of turmoil, such as the War of 1812, the federal government briefly issued its own paper notes of debt, but such actions did not lead to widespread support for federal legal tender. The decentralized banking system instead matched the patriotism of the times, in which the United States was conceived as a confederation of local entities rather than as an overarching polity with a unified national culture and iconography.5 Lack of trust in the Treasury in the period before Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration made compromises at the outset of the war—with the federal government borrowing from private lenders to fund it— untenable. In 1861, Illinois banks failed, sparking a series of bank failures across the region and instability throughout the Union given the fact that nearly all citizens relied on banknotes for their transactions. At the same time, European lenders refused to provide funds to the Union. But the fiscal crisis was also a crisis of leadership: many citizens complained that the Union government had not done enough to halt secession, an event that they claimed exacerbated an already difficult fiscal situation and limited solutions to it. As an attempt to assuage lenders that the federal government could make good on its debts, the newly appointed secretary of the Treasury, John A. Dix, proposed that the government sell bonds to private banks securitized by the reserves held in individual states. Although this plan failed, it nonetheless indicated the dire nature of the fiscal crisis and the widespread lack of trust in the federal government on the eve of the Civil War.6 This lack of trust imperiled Lincoln’s reelection in the period before the election of 1864, a potential change in power that was abetted by the complex and shifting political allegiances of the period. As members of a big-tent party based on a common opposition to the extension of slavery to new territories, Civil War Republicans found little else to unite

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them. Their possible antipathy to one another was matched only by the antipathy they felt toward (and felt in return from) Democrats in Northern states. Given the obsession with corruption in the government during the Civil War, an obsession that Michael T. Smith argues shows the persistence of classical republican fears about the ways the pecuniary realm threatens political virtue, political scandals became a tool that different factions wielded against one another in an attempt to gain political ground.7 In part as a result of the bank failures in the Midwest, public sentiment began to shift. In a Jeffersonian turn, newspapers and authors of editorials began to distrust the private banks, arguing that in withholding money from the Union, the banks were on the one hand acting as war profiteers and on the other tacitly expressing pro-Southern sentiments.8 Alongside this growing distaste for the effects of decentralized currency and the increasing hostility toward the entities facilitating commerce was the emergence of Union nationalism following Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861. Rather than identifying as citizens of individual states, members of the body politic increasingly saw those states as embedded within a national fabric and as participants in a mass national culture that extended beyond or was an umbrella for state identity and sovereignty.9 Within this new context, public officials and the public increasingly came to see federal legal tender as a matter of national security and concern. As Caires puts it, “When the financial crisis emerged in December 1861, the press and public quickly linked legal tender and Union survival . . . with little concern for its constitutional and economic effects.”10 Rather than viewing a centralized legal tender as an example of federal overreach or an indicator of potential tyranny, the press and public linked it to the central state’s ability to preserve rights—freedom, above all—and to guarantee its own continuity. As a response to these pressures, the House and then the Senate passed the first legal-tender bill. Lincoln signed the bill into law in late February  1862. It was quickly followed by several other legal-tender acts. Though these legislative measures sparked some debate, the fear of financial collapse led even fiscal conservatives initially opposed to a federal currency to favor the bill. Newspapers across the Union praised the move

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as evidence of the nation’s strength and described fiat currency as worthy of patriotic support.11 Nevertheless, detractors continued to accuse Treasury Secretary Dix’s successor, Salmon P. Chase, of violating custom, if not law, in issuing greenbacks for the first time.12 Some lawmakers insisted that the solution to the nation’s woes was to limit circulation by restricting the production of paper money and bringing it to the specie standard. When the issuance of greenbacks led to inflation, the Republican banker Hugh McCulloch argued in a speech in his home state of Indiana that the “excessive circulation” facilitated by greenbacks was “corrupting the public morals.”13 As we will see, public misgivings about the moral implications of a federal currency, necessary and patriotic as it may have seemed, continued to dog the Treasury, eventually contributing to the law passed in 1866.

WHITE WOMEN WORKING

No group embodied concerns over the moral valence of fiscal policies— and of monetary remuneration in particular—than the white women who joined the workforce, particularly in the Treasury, in the wake of labor shortages caused by the Civil War. As young, able-bodied men in the North went to fight for democracy, their former positions were left vacant. In addition, their patriotic service left many women without a means of support because they had been widowed or had no eligible men left to marry or had welcomed home a husband maimed in the conflict. These women needed paid work, just as employers needed workers. Though women (Black women in particular) had always worked, even in government positions, regulations sought to obfuscate this fact by making the world of commerce an all-male institution. Before 1862, all positions in the Treasury Department were reserved for men. Indeed, married women were informally barred from government employment altogether, given the expectation that women would stop working once married.14 But the labor shortage during the war changed the nature if

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not the spirit of these regulations, and women entered the Treasury as clerks in 1862.15 Their responsibilities soon grew to include cutting and counting Treasury notes, among other duties.16 Indeed, in part due to a shortage of male labor and in part given the fact that female workers were paid far less than their male counterparts, the Treasury eventually employed more female workers than any other branch of government.17 To preserve their respectability, applicants to such positions had to demonstrate that they were “wholly without a protector.” Nonetheless, upon the assumption of a position, that respectability was cast into doubt due to nineteenth-century gender norms that insisted that the only respectable work for a woman was within the home. Newspapers and public officials who raised concerns about women in the federal workforce often did so in an ostensible defense of women’s virtue. Such critics argued that though women were morally superior to their male counterparts, in going to work they overstepped boundaries of “propriety and morality” and rendered themselves vulnerable to unscrupulous male colleagues.18 In other words, women’s moral purity combined with their lack of experience meant that male coworkers might convince them they should sell sex as well as labor. Would such women be capable of safeguarding their virtue when they were mixing freely with men and might be tempted to trade illegitimate labor (sexual favors) for a better position at work? Such questions about women’s weaknesses and vulnerability made the circulation of female labor morally suspect. These concerns were widespread, even among top government officials; Secretary Chase worried that female employees would “ ‘demoralize’ the department in the literal sense that it would become less ‘moral.’ ”19 Indeed, so potent was the fear of female clerks—and later currency cutters—in the Treasury that politicians argued that the very potential for immoral behavior introduced by employing women made corruption and immorality contagious. This contagion was doubly dangerous in the Treasury, which depended on the public’s trust: there, threats to private virtue became threats to public virtue as well. Anxieties about the effect that paid labor outside the domestic sphere had on female virtue were not regionally limited. As able-bodied men left to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War, women in the South

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had to take up many of the tasks formerly carried out by men, both on plantations and beyond them. According to Drew Gilpin Faust, as women across the region engaged in what previously had been defined as men’s work, “long-cherished understandings of womanhood began necessarily to be redefined.” Although some women found their new responsibilities to be liberating, Faust tracks a widespread concern that the presence of women in the formal sphere of waged labor threatened to “unsex” them.20 Given the significance of vulnerability and weakness to  the cult of Southern womanhood, Faust argues that the wartime onus to work and assert one’s authority—to be autocratic and strong— gave the lie to these “inherent” female characteristics such that the war was profoundly destabilizing to gender relations. The Civil War rapidly and irrevocably challenged fundamental and long-standing notions of Southern womanhood and domesticity. Unaccustomed to having urgent responsibilities due to the presence of enslaved laborers, aristocratic women were suddenly called upon to support the nation, their families, and the war effort. Though this class began their entry to the working world with tasks that seemed continuous with the domestic sphere—such as sewing or putting on plays and tableaux to raise money for the war effort and to amuse soldiers—their very presence in public as laborers was seen as potentially damaging to their womanhood. Such activities not only risked making them immodest but also exposed them to jeering and whistling men, treatment that threatened women’s ability to serve as the guardians of moral virtue for both genders.21 For this more privileged class, the requirement to manage plantations—and enslaved laborers—proved particularly challenging. According to Faust, prior to the Civil War the plantation “embodied the hierarchical structures of southern paternalism,” in which the white master was master over the entire “family white and black.”22 The departure of a white labor class—used to control and discipline slaves— provoked fears about how women would manage an incarcerated (enslaved) labor force that was becoming increasingly restive as word spread of the Northern promise of emancipation. In a system that depended on the use of force to maintain productivity and order, women

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who had been raised to believe that violence and authority were antithetical to womanhood became desperate. As Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers has contended, much of the moral handwringing for this class was due to the ways that the exigencies of slave management for white women during the war materialized the centrality of white female ownership to the U.S. slave system. In giving the lie to the idea that white women’s ownership was entirely subsumed by their husbands, a system called “couverture,” white women’s control over slaves when white men exited the plantation for the arena of war forced white Southern women so see themselves as active participants in the economic sphere.23 Thus, some women petitioned politicians to release otherwise robust white men from military work to remain on plantations to control their enslaved laborers. Moreover, slaveholding women during the Civil War were seen as particularly vulnerable to sexual violence on the part of their enslaved laborers, the enemies within. This imbroglio became so pressing that some aristocratic women became disenchanted with the South’s peculiar institution, fantasizing in letters about leaving their responsibilities (and ostensibly the plantation) behind.24 As in the North, the economic dislocations caused by war led many women in the South—including those who owned enslaved laborers—to leave home in search of paid labor. According to Faust, this assertive act “posed serious challenges to existing assumptions about behavior appropriate to women of the South’s ruling class.” Even well-remunerated office work did not quell such fears. Like their Northern counterparts, Southern women petitioned Confederate officials to help them secure government clerkships. Further, as in the North, the Confederate States’ Treasury Department became one of the largest employers of female workers. Yet the opportunity for a stable salary—one that far exceeded soldiers’ pay—for many women was also a degrading source of embarrassment.25 Across the divide the Civil War created, both genders fretted about the consequences as white women stepped into roles formerly and in principle occupied by men and out of the garb of traditional femininity, thus also disposing of the (supposed) pleasures and protections it provided.

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FEMINISM, DEMOCRACY, AND FREE LABOR

In addition to the world of work, women’s virtue and bondage were linked politically. Decades before the Civil War brought genteel women into the labor market, first-wave U.S. feminism emerged from the abolitionist movement. The comparisons of the marriage market to the slave market and of the husband to the slave master are explicit within that intellectual and political genealogy, and both traditions use the moral valence of liberty and justice to argue their case. Further, as Kathryn Kish Sklar notes, the confluence of these two movements was not inevitable: similar antislavery movements in Britain, for instance, did not generate a parallel women’s rights movement. William Leach argues that attacks against (though not wholesale rejections of) possessive individualism united these two movements in the U.S. context.26 The first woman to speak in public on the question of women’s rights was a Black Bostonian, Maria Stewart, who in 1833 railed against both marriage and slavery as economic discrimination, a criticism she lobbed even at her white female compatriots in the North who employed underpaid albeit free Black labor in their homes. Although white female abolitionist leaders had begun with a sole focus on slavery, by the late 1830s they followed Stewart and others to see women’s rights as part of the antislavery movement. Early feminists and abolitionists were particularly concerned about the legality of property, focusing on the marriage contract, which dictated that women’s property become their husbands’ dominion upon marriage.27 This correlation between marriage and slavery raised additional charged moral issues in the slaveholding South. According to Tera Hunter, although some masters granted their enslaved laborers the right to marry, such marriages could be abolished or violated at any time through sale or the desire to increase the enslaved population by forcing women or men to sleep with people other than their spouses. Further, given that all enslaved women were by custom and possibly by law married to their male masters—who exerted total control over them, much as they did over their white wives—all Southern male

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slaveholders engaged in plural marriage. Moreover, because marriage was seen as a civilizing mechanism along the frontier, the question of whether to make new territories slave or free also had a bearing on the nature and virtues of marriage and thus on the type of civilization that colonial expansion would establish.28 Indeed, in their critique of even the most genteel of marriages, the feminist abolitionists saw marriage as a potentially uncivilizing force because the marital contract required women to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands. For example, the famed abolitionist Sarah Grimké wrote that although marriage was a “state . . . designed by God to increase the happiness of woman as well as man,” it “often proves the means of lessening her comfort and degrading her into the mere machine of another’s convenience and pleasure.” Indeed, as she saw it, through the institution of marriage “man has exercised the most unlimited and brutal power over woman, in the peculiar character of husband . . . a word in most countries synonymous with tyrant.” In referring to husbands as tyrants and slave masters, these women alluded to one of the many horrors of slavery: the routine and legally protected rape of enslaved women. These rapes, of course, were central to capitalist structures, as Daina Ramey Berry has shown, given that the offspring of these violations of enslaved women served to further enrich the master. Given the imbrication of sex with both freedom and economic profit, it should not be surprising that women’s right to refuse their husbands’ sexual advances—to be self-determined economically and physically— eventually became a core part of feminist ideology, a form of selfdetermination that definitively distinguished the condition of free women from that of the enslaved.29 Leach argues that despite these nascent anticapitalist critiques, feminists of this period were never able to dispense with the notion of possessive individualism because they dreamed of an egalitarian society where women could be productive members of that society. As such, women’s circulation in the formal labor market was a key part of this vision, one that came to fruition in the Treasury and other government departments during the Civil War. Women thus needed to own themselves, to see themselves as a kind of property, so that they could sell their

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services on the labor market, a realm distinguished from that of the home. Leach calls this theory the “heart” of nineteenth-century U.S. feminism and claims that early feminists felt that allowing women to be productive individuals in a formal sense would “end the battle between the sexes,” thereby restoring order and, importantly, union to the marriage contract.30 Within this framework, the abolition of slavery, then, serves as a precondition for equality and democracy as well as for the harmonious union of states within the nation. Only without slavery—in its real and metaphorical forms—could people own themselves and become civilized members of a democratic nation-state, able to circulate freely in its many marketplaces.

THE SPENCER CLARK SCANDAL AS CIVIL WAR RORSCHACH

The rapidly changing dynamics of social circulation during the Civil War go far toward explaining the scandals that engulfed Spencer Clark in 1864, a set of scandals that ultimately coalesced around a portrait on a banknote. Clark, the first superintendent of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP), formed in 1862, broke with custom by putting his own portrait on a banknote and was accused of turning the Treasury building into “a house of orgies and bacchanals.”31 At this historical distance and in the absence of definitive documentation, the truth of the accusations leveled against Clark seems impossible to determine. Contemporaneous congressional reports concerning various Clark scandals advanced or dismissed accusations and evidence depending on the political faction that controlled the writing of the report. More recent historical accounts of Clark similarly tend to adopt one or the other position. For example, a history of the BEP’s first hundred years, published by the Treasury Department in 1963, attributes the very existence of the bureau to the “self-confidence, courage, ingenuity, and patriotism of one man, Spencer Morton Clark.” At the same time, it dismisses the tales of Clark’s immoral behavior as “character

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assassination.” At the other end of the spectrum, in a history of the “greenback” published in 2003 Jason Goodwin summarily dismisses Clark as “a bankrupt sex pest under investigation for embezzlement and fraud.”32 In one of the most even-handed treatments of Clark we have found, published in the numismatic literature in 1995, Brent Hughes sketches Clark’s “working career” as “a succession of trial and error experiments” on the part of a man who was never trained as an engineer but was gifted with an “ability to devise machinery for specific purposes.” Hughes notes that Clark started businesses that failed in 1841 (in Brattleboro, Vermont) and 1855 (in New York City) and that with the second failure he “reneged” on his debt and “skipped town.” He landed at the Treasury in 1856, where Secretary Chase was convinced that private companies that printed banknotes for the government “were grossly overcharging” for their product, prompting him to enlist Clark to bring the work in-house, which resulted in the creation of the BEP. This decision incurred the enmity of those private companies, which, perhaps joining forces with Clark’s past creditors, were eager to manufacture the sexual scandal that engulfed him. Hughes suggests that most of the allegations against Clark were false but notes also that he was “a very poor administrator” who kept shoddy records and blundered badly when he put his own picture on a banknote.33 For our purposes, it seems less important to know the truth of Clark’s story than to treat it as a Rorschach test for politicians, moralists, and the newspapers that allowed them to voice the deepest fears regarding the cultural imagination of the nation at the time of its greatest historical test. Late in April 1864, Representative James Brooks, Democrat of New York, charged on the floor of the House of Representatives that Clark had been abusing his position by engaging in “disreputable [and] immoral conduct” with the women employed in the Treasury Department. In response, future president James A. Garfield, Republican of Ohio, introduced a resolution seeking an investigation of the matter. When the investigation began the following week, it focused on two issues: “the printing of public money in Washington, and the alleged immoralities of employees in the Treasury Department.”34

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Clark’s accusers claimed that he and an associate, Dr. Stuart Gwynn, had “defrauded” the Treasury by overbilling it for failed attempts to improve printing processes, work for which neither possessed the requisite technical expertise. They connected this fiscal fraud to Clark’s prior history of bankruptcy. But they more spectacularly and salaciously alleged that Clark had bribed female employees to provide him with sexual favors. They noted that Clark hired these women only after testing the waters to see if they would be amenable to his overtures. In some cases, he provided them with men’s clothing (ostensibly as a disguise) and arranged to meet them in hotel rooms to spend the night together. In others, Clark was accused of luring women to his home while his wife was away. One witness for the accusers reported that Mrs. Clark told her “that the Treasury Department was nothing more or less than a whorehouse.” In all cases, Clark’s purported crimes included the “sacrifice” of public monies because it was alleged he stole greenbacks to fund these affairs. Indeed, the sexual scandal was at times indistinguishable from the fiscal scandal. Those who believed Clark guilty felt that his illicit behaviors meant he needed money beyond what his salary provided and considered this as evidence that he could not be trusted to print the nation’s currency.35 Though the investigation’s majority report concluded that Clark was  innocent, this finding did little to quell the controversy. When Lincoln declined to fire Clark, Lincoln’s close friend Ward H. Lamon wrote him that retaining Clark meant “ensuring both the loss of public confidence in the national currency, and, even more importantly, the ‘defeat and ruin [of] the Republican party.’ ”36 Even those who accepted the investigation’s report turned their ire against the chief investigator— who, it was said, had unscrupulously pursued women’s testimony in ways that violated the women’s right to preserve their honor and dignity—and used the closed investigation as a way to defend the Treasury. They insisted that the private banknote companies were the bad actors, seeking to earn a profit from greenbacks by bribing Clark to cut them a better deal. When he refused, some of Clark’s defenders alleged, those companies cooked up the scandal as retribution.37 Though this defense took the side of the federal government, it nonetheless saw the pecuniary realm as inherently suspect and corrupting.

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Part of that opinion has to do with the financial realm’s apparent vulnerability to attack and misuse. The investigating committee’s official report, insistent on Clark’s guilt, quoted the chief investigator, Colonel Lafayette Baker, who referred to what he saw as past indiscretions as evidence that “Clark has not the public interest and welfare as his first object, in view of these facts.”38 The “facts” in question were discrepancies between Clark’s actual credentials and qualifications and his (apparently false) description of himself as an engineer when he testified before Congress. Further, as the minority saw it, Clark’s history of failed businesses and bad debts made him not just someone who was unsuitable for his position but also someone whose moral character made it all but inevitable that he should have sought to defraud the government and misuse public monies for his own gain. Indeed, the report emphasized that the Congressional Globe accurately quoted Brooks as saying in congressional debate that the printing “led to the peril of the sacrifice of millions and millions of the public money.” In using the word peril, Brooks and after him the report anthropomorphized money by suggesting that it is vulnerable, much, in the end, like women. Perhaps because of this particular vulnerability, the report cautioned: “The coinage of the country, and the superintendence of that coinage, is the highest trust which can be given to mortal man.”39 Money, in other words, must be safeguarded as the repository of national virtue.

COUNTERFEITING VIRTUE

But sexual impropriety was not Clark’s only sin. Following the passing of the act that allowed the U.S. government to print fractional currency in 1863, Spencer Clark put his own likeness on the five-cent note (figure 4.1). Clark was not the only living person featured on currency at this time (others were President Lincoln; Secretaries of the Treasury Robert Walker, Salmon Chase, and William Fessenden; Treasurer of the United

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States Francis E. Spinner; and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton), but perhaps due to the sexual scandal Clark alone was singled out for opprobrium. When pressed, he presented several justifications for his decision to use his own portrait on a banknote. First, he stated that he was under immense time pressure and so used whatever portraits were readily available to him, his own included. Second, he averred that the use of his likeness was an error: the intention had been to feature the explorer William Clark, but Spencer Clark had been confused, assuming that the name “Clark” in reference to the banknote’s image referred to himself. Last, Clark reminded his detractors of his attempts to improve printing processes and to centralize federal printing operations under the banner of a single department. For this reason, he felt it only right that he be honored on paper currency that his office printed.40 Clark registered such defenses not in 1864 when accused of indecency but in 1866 in response to congressional debate over the use of the portraits of living people on currency. During that debate, Russell Thayer, Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and a member of the Committee on Appropriations, made a joke about Clark’s value relative to that of other public officials appearing on fractional notes (“two Clarks equal one Washington”) but then struck at the heart of the matter. “The only excuse given in the Senate” for allowing living people to be depicted on government paper, Thayer argued, was that the practice “is necessary as a preventative of counterfeiting.” This he found “too transparently absurd to be believed. . . . A picture is a picture, and it as easy to counterfeit one of pictures of living personages as it would be to counterfeit the resemblances of the departed heroes and sages of the United States whose images should adorn the currency of the United States if we are to have these embellishments upon it.” 41 In his remarks, Thayer dramatized the connections among iconography, security, democracy, and currency that were central to political debate during the Civil War era. First, his comments comparing Clark to the value of other U.S. political figures paralleled discussions of the slave trade and the value placed on human life in slavery. That this discussion occurred in relationship to questions of currency only highlights the intersection of the circulation of currency with the circulation of

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bodies. Indeed, given congressional questions during and after the war about how to deal with emancipated laborers and their former masters and especially given moderate Republicans’ suggestion that former owners be compensated for their lost property, Thayer’s testimony indicates the degree to which questions of value regarding currency were inseparable from the adjudication of the value of human life. In castigating arguments about counterfeiting as being particularly suspect, Thayer suggested that such tortured reasoning functioned as a kind of euphemism for the deeper, more complex issues at hand. Though he did not reference the sexual scandal explicitly, his comments immediately led Garfield to defend Clark’s honor.42 Garfield further worried that passing the law prohibiting the use of images of living people on currency would cast opprobrium upon all prior and future secretaries of the Treasury. Because Secretary Chase had at least tacitly authorized Clark’s use of his own portrait, passage of the law would make the Treasury itself suspect. Just as the presence of women in the workplace threatened to transform the office into a den of immorality, so did the censure of one official, in Garfield’s logic, threaten the virtue of the Treasury as a whole. Here, too, immorality was contagious. Garfield went on to argue that Clark deserved praise, not censure and, indeed, that in Clark was united a valuable combination of virtues— mechanical genius and business acumen in the service of patriotism: I do not hesitate to declare it as my opinion that when the history of our financial struggles during the late war shall have been written; when all passion and prejudice shall have died away; when the events of the present shall be seen in the clear light of veritable history, this man, so little known to fame, and so unfavorably spoken of among many members of this House, will stand out in that history as a man most remarkable for genius and ability, for having accomplished a work which will take its place among the wonders of mechanism and useful invention, and for having saved to the Treasury, by his skill and fidelity, millions of money.43

Thus, Garfield praised Clark as an innovator and particularly as a man whose innovations had saved the nation money at a time of great

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financial peril. Moreover, by using the word fidelity and by refusing to countenance assertions concerning Clark’s sexual infidelities, Garfield depicted Clark as a virtuous national patriot worthy of history’s esteem. But rather than convincing his colleagues, Garfield’s plea quickly became the subject of derision. Representative Brooks declared himself moved to speak after hearing Garfield’s remarks: “What a eulogy he has pronounced upon a great hero of this war! When the name of Grant shall have faded away; when the magnificent victories of Sherman . . . shall have been forgotten; when the name of Thomas shall have sunk into oblivion; when even Lincoln shall have been buried with Julius and Augustus Caesar, there will arise one remarkable man, high on the horizon, on [sic] Orion among the Pleiades; and that is Clark, the printer of the public money!”44 Brooks’s words were apparently met with uproarious laughter. Comparing Clark, the mere “printer of the public money,” to such figures as Grant and Lincoln, he mocked Garfield’s attempt to portray Clark as an important innovator in the story of U.S. technological progress. More importantly, his satirical account of Garfield’s logic placed both the Civil War and classical republics at the heart of the debate and so emphasized democracy and republican values as central to the iconography of federal currency. In addition to the ridicule Brooks and Thayer cast on Garfield’s estimation of Clark’s feats, Thayer’s insistence that he would vote for the bill prohibiting the presence of living people on federal currency picked up on the historical register that both Brooks and Garfield had used. But Thayer turned the question of history against Garfield, arguing that Congress should vote for the new rules for a reason other than counterfeiting or innovation: “No man should be immortalized upon the public money of the country until the verdict of posterity has been pronounced upon his name, and it can go down upon that record sanctioned by the voices of men of all parties, of all politics, and of all religions.”45 For Thayer, history thus serves as a unifier and leveler, an aspirational rendering of democratic potential that again links the iconography on federal currency to foundational national values. By referring to men of

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“all parties, of all politics, and of all religions,” he hearkened back to documents such as the Declaration of Independence and, in doing so, suggested that democratic principles are and should be immortal and that placing the “wrong” figures on federal currency endangers those very principles. History allows for a rational weighing of merits and demerits in a process guaranteeing that national iconography will include only those figures worthy of the honor. At the heart of the currency debate, then, is also a debate over national narratives, one that we have seen is also central to postal iconography. Ironically, Clark had made similar arguments earlier. In 1864, he proposed to Secretary Chase his own solution to counterfeiting. First, he suggested using intricate images that only the most advanced printing devices could reproduce. Second, he responded to the implicit counterargument that intricate drawings would foil counterfeiters only if all citizens could recognize what was on government currency. Recognizing the validity of such a position, Clark argued that Treasury officials should select a single image for each denomination and then stick with that image for the foreseeable future. Through this measure, even those at the farthest reaches of U.S. territory would eventually recognize what did and did not belong on every banknote.46 But more than security against counterfeiting was at stake; before closing his report to Chase, Clark noted that his plan had additional benefits: A lesser but not unimportant advantage of such a currency would be, that a series properly selected, with their subject titles imprinted on the notes, would tend to teach the masses the prominent periods in our country’s history. The laboring man, who should receive every Saturday night a copy of the “Surrender of Burgoyne” for his weekly wages, would soon inquire who General Burgoyne was, and to whom he surrendered. His curiosity would be aroused, and he would learn the facts from a fellow-laborer or from his employer. The same would be true of other national pictures, and in time many would be taught leading incidents in our country’s history; so that they would soon be familiar to those who would never read them in books, teaching them history, and

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imbuing them with a national feeling. Thus a series of pictures of full note size might be selected, beginning with the earliest scenes of savage life, and terminating in the advanced stages of civilization, which would be an illuminated history of the country’s progress; or a series beginning at bow and arrow warfare, and terminating in a perfected iron-clad; or a series beginning at the earliest modes of journeying in the birch-bark canoe, and terminating in the present perfection of steam craft; or a series illustrating methods of payment, beginning at exchanges of values by shells and wampum in uncivilized tribes, and terminating in Coupon and Registered Bonds and Treasury Notes, as dealt from a modern banking-house.47

Like his detractors, Clark noted that images, especially widely circulating images such as those on currency, have the potential to instruct the masses in the historical growth of a civilized democracy. Crucially, in his telling, the growth of civilization is closely linked to inventions that facilitate different kinds of circulation: tools of travel, warfare, and commerce. These stories about progress could be told by means of a series of images matched to a series of banknotes of different denominations, which would be released together as one issue and kept in circulation for an extended period.

THE SOC IAL CIRCULATION OF CURRENCY AND THE MORAL CURRENCY OF CIRCULATION

As we noted at the outset of this chapter, the proposed law banning the images of living people from government tokens specified “any of the bonds, securities, notes or postal currency of the United States.” As it turned out, postage stamps rather than banknotes became the medium of choice among government tokens for the kind of complex storytelling Clark envisioned. It seems likely that this focus on stamps resulted from the different ways these tokens circulate. As we explained in the chapter 2, banknotes are slippery, whereas stamps are sticky. Banknotes

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are used in transactions where people may have to handle, separate, examine, and sort them rapidly. In such transactions, the concurrent use of notes of the same denomination bearing different images might be confusing. Stamps are not counted and sorted in the same way by postal patrons in routine transactions. Moreover, because stamps are consumed upon first use, any particular issue will disappear from public view after its print run is exhausted. Banknotes, however, circulate transaction after transaction, so that withdrawing them from circulation and releasing a new issue constitute a more complicated process. Postage stamps functioned as money for a time during the Civil War,48 and they have been used officially or unofficially as money ever since— for example, in early twentieth-century mail-order business transactions in which refunds were sent in the form of postage stamps. In the terms of the proposed law, banknotes, postage stamps, bonds, and securities were currency. They were paper objects that represented economic value, were grounded in private property, and were guaranteed to retain their value by an authorizing entity, whether a private bank or the federal government. Those paper objects also circulated precisely to make possible other kinds of circulation—of people and their messages, parcels, and freight. Indeed, the uses of postage as currency and the ways that people of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood the role of the mails further connect infrastructures of payment and infrastructures of human circulation. Not only did the American Anti-Slavery Society engage in several postal campaigns, mass-mailing abolitionist literature, but the postal system was also used at least once in a more embodied way as a tool of abolitionism. On March 29, 1844, Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved laborer, packed himself into a wooden crate and mailed himself to freedom, arriving in Philadelphia on March 30. While Brown’s journey was spectacular, well into the twentieth century users of the mails in Europe and the United States fantasized about mailing humans (often themselves or their children) or having the opportunity to travel under the banner of postal currencies (as we saw in chapter 1). Stamps apparently were used to circulate Chinese children in a different way. At the end of the nineteenth century, indigent people in the United States

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were soaking stamps off envelopes to be sold to Christian churches that were also saving used stamps. The stamps were then sent to missionaries in China to be exchanged for Chinese children, whom the missionaries adopted and raised as Christians. According to the New York Times, “The many-colored stamps are used for the decoration of walls, etc., by the ingenious Orientals, and are valued so highly that 100 of them will buy a baby whose parents have doomed it to death.”49 These many instances of the relationship of postage stamps to money and of both stamps and money to social circulation in its most elemental form—the circulation of embodied persons—suggest why the debate in the House about the representation of living people on federal monies was so impassioned. The congressional antagonists knew and felt that safeguarding the national currency is about more than counterfeiting. Garfield’s, Thayer’s, Brooks’s, and even Clark’s remarks show how profoundly questions of currency and the images they bear are related to issues of morality, circulation, democracy, and history. In discussing how to securitize the federal currency, the House also took up the very issues at the heart of the Civil War and reconciliation: What kind of nation is this, who or what should represent it, and who should be allowed to circulate freely within it?

5 MINING HISTORY AND MARKETING STAMPS AT THE WORLD’S FAIRS

T

he federal government emerged from the Civil War both stronger and weaker than it had been at the outset of the war— stronger due to the centralization of power that the war had made possible, especially with respect to the banking system, but weaker due to its massive war debt and, even more serious, the daunting problems of Southern reconstruction and national reconciliation the government faced. In this situation, the nation’s post office was an important resource. Since the early years of the republic, people had accepted the idea that the post office should be a centrally controlled organization in the service of citizens everywhere in the expanding national territory.1 People in the South as well as the North wanted a well-functioning national postal system. The country’s adoption of the adhesive stamp in 1847 as the key to postal circulation gave the post office and the central government an iconographic space to communicate with all citizens who would notice the stamps passing through their fingers and under their eyes. As we have seen, the first U.S. stamps depicting dead heads were based on the model of the Penny Black but were distinguished from it as well: whereas early British stamps featured a portrait of the living monarch, U.S. stamps featured deceased national heroes. These U.S. stamps made two claims, one historiographical and the other political. The postal

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gallery of national heroes announced that the United States was a republic rooted in its own unique history and represented by leaders from crucial social domains (politics and war) who had made their mark at unique historical moments. At the same time, the stamps demonstrated that the federal government had the authority through its post office to decide the contents of national history. Beyond those claims, however, early U.S. stamps told no stories. With its issue of 1869, the post office experimented with a more ambitious form of postal storytelling, but the issue was met with a cold reception from the public. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did the post office come up with a model for postal commemoration that caught on with its release of the Columbian Exposition series, which advertised the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and commemorated the story of Columbus, whose “discovery of America” was the ostensible reason for the fair. Linking postal commemoration and world’s fairs subsequently became standard practice, but, beyond that, the way the Columbians (as stamp collectors call them) depicted history by means of a series of images became paradigmatic for U.S. postal design well into the next century.2

ISSUES AND SERIES: CHRONOLOGICAL, DENOMINATIONAL, HISTORICAL

Both the commercial catalogues and those published by the post office express the idea that the cataloguers consider a group of stamps to go together by referring to them as a “series” or an “issue” or, without a collective noun, merely by linking them to a year (“series of 1847,” “issue of  1870,” “ordinary postage stamps—1894”).3 There is no standardized use of these terms within or across catalogues, but the terms nonetheless recognize the stamp’s capacity as a medium to narrate a nation’s history and frame its culture. Two of the definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary for the word series can help to make sense of stamp series:

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2. A number of discrete things of one kind (esp. events or actions) following one another in succession over time, or in order of appearance or presentation. . . . 4. A number or set of physical objects of one kind ranged in a line, usually either contiguously or at more or less regular intervals; a row or continued spatial succession of similar objects.4

In a comprehensive stamp catalogue, the stamps of each recognized postal service are presented in a numerical sequence that refers first of all to the date of issue of postal objects. There is a sense in which the totality of stamps issued by an extant postal authority over time is an open-ended series, but the cataloguers often attend to two different objects: (1) individual stamps and (2) sets of stamps grouped together either as a discrete “issue” (often with reference to new postal rates) or on the basis of a commemorative or topical theme.5 In the many cases in which the stamps of two chronologically successive sets are released one by one over many months or even years, it often happens that some of the first stamps from the later set are issued prior to some of the last stamps from the earlier set. In this situation, if cataloguers privilege the set over a chronology based solely on the date of issue of each stamp, they can assign lower catalogue numbers to stamps issued after stamps produced chronologically earlier, which are given higher numbers. In a rough-and-ready way, then, the catalogue is organized chronologically, but there is a sense in which the ordering system—built as it is from clashing principles—refers to nothing but itself. Indeed, it is clear from the way collectors write and talk about stamps that they routinely experience the cataloguing system they use as self-referential.6 Thus, for example, a well-recognized system for a collection is to attempt to obtain the “number ones” of all the world’s postal systems; in such a collection, it is not date of issue or historical chronology that defines a collectible object but its placement in a numerical cataloguing system. The sequential denominations (or “face value”) of stamps within an issue or series is another feature of stamp design that can disrupt a pure

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chronological listing of individual stamps. Postal authorities design stamp issues with some attention to prevailing postal rates. The catalogues usually list a discrete issue of several stamps in ascending order of the denominations. If an arrangement based on date of issue conflicts with an arrangement based on denomination, the latter often prevails—so that, for example, a five-cent stamp issued prior to a onecent stamp of the same series may nonetheless be assigned a higher (later) number than its chronological successor. Finally, in the commemorative series that most interest us, a set of stamps can be designed to tell a historical story. That story is understood to have a chronologically ordered plot. But the stamps of the set—in something like the sense of series given in the second definition, as a set of physical objects that can be ranged by catalogue number or by denomination in a line—do not necessarily replicate, when so arranged, the chronological order of the plot. As we will see with the paradigmatic commemorative series, the Columbians, the stamps with the lowest catalogue numbers and denominations are not always those that depict the first scenes of the story. In our discussion, we use the term series to refer to a set of stamps that tells a story. The arcane details of stamp-cataloguing systems—with their simultaneous reliance on and manipulation of chronology—will be important to keep in mind as we sketch the rise to prominence of commemorative stamps in close association with world’s fairs. Before we provide this sketch, however, we turn to the post office’s first attempt—a failed one—to use a set of stamps to tell a historical story.

THE PICTORIAL ISSUE OF 1869

One regular-issue stamp series prior to the Columbians featured something other than busts: the stamps of 1869, sometimes called a “pictorial” issue.7 Of the eleven stamps (Scott nos. 112–22), three were busts of Franklin (figure 5.1a), Washington, and Lincoln; three featured modes

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Issue of 1869: (a) Benjamin Franklin (Scott no. 112); (b) train (Scott no. 114), (c) Declaration of Independence (Scott no. 120), (d) national icons (Scott no. 121).

FIGURE 5.1

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

of transportation used to carry mail: a post rider, a train (figure 5.1b), and a steamship; three depicted historical scenes: the landing of Columbus (two slightly different versions based on a painting that would be reproduced again in the Columbian series) and the signing of the Declaration of Independence (figure 5.1c); and two depicted national icons: eagle, shield, and flags (figure 5.1d). Following John Tiffany, we can infer that the postal authorities were trying to use this series of stamps to tell multiple stories. “It was announced,” he wrote, “that the series was intended . . . to portray the history of the Post Office in the United States, beginning with Franklin . . . and the post rider of the early days, followed by the locomotive of a later day, and the Ocean Steamer carrying the mails which has become so important a branch of the postal service.” But the announcement

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also listed other topics depicted by the series: “the most important scenes in the early history of the country, its triumphant arms, and Washington its first and Lincoln its last president.”8 Moreover, the denominational sequencing of the stamps jumbled historical chronology by interrupting the story of postal progress with Washington’s stamp, which was followed by one of the icon stamps before the sequence returned to postal history with the steamship. Then came Columbus, followed by the second icon stamp, the Declaration of Independence stamp, and finally the Lincoln stamp. In sum, the series seems to have been grasping for multiple narratives: the history of the post office in and of itself and as part of a larger national history that in the United States is both a political history and a history of technological progress.9 Although collectors have come to treasure this series, the public at the time of issue was not happy with the new stamps. People complained about their gum, the quality of the engraving, and their size and shape (they were smaller than past issues and square instead of verticalrectangular).10 Many were also not receptive to the new, expanded iconography. A critic writing in the New York Evening Mail in August 1869 praised the stamps issued before this series as “neat and pleasing,” noting: “They were National and American, as they ought to have been. The head of Washington was venerable . . . [and] the head of Franklin was equally appropriate.” But several of the new stamps, the critic continued, had no significance specific to the United States; many other countries, he pointed out as an example, had trains such as the one depicted on the three-cent stamp.11 In the face of such complaints, the post office withdrew the issue (although, as noted in chapter  2, it reissued the stamps in 1875). The issue of 1870 that replaced it returned to the pattern of busts of great men. But it is worth pausing on the critic’s claim that there was nothing distinctively American or national in the 1869 stamps. It is difficult to disentangle complaints about the quality of the execution of these stamps from complaints about their iconography, but the critic’s disgust with an image that did not transparently represent the nation

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suggests that this one person at least was not able to interpret the stamps’ imagery in terms of a recognizable national identity. In the period from the failure of the 1869 issue to the release of the Columbians in 1893, the world’s fair or exposition became an important genre in the United States, linking historical commemoration and the celebration of industrial progress. When the department store magnate John Wanamaker became PMG in 1889, he brought his merchandising genius to the POD. Wanamaker had been one of the main organizers of the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.12 In 1890, when the federal government announced its support for a Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Wanamaker saw the event as an opportunity to promote both the post office and stamp collecting, not only by mounting an exhibit illustrating postal operations but also by issuing a special set of stamps that would tell the story of Columbus and advertise the fair to be held in his honor.

THE POST OFFICE GOES TO THE FAIR

Long before the scholarly interest in world’s fairs that has grown since the 1970s,13 collectors of U.S. stamps had taken an interest in them because many of the fairs and expositions from 1893 to 1915—Chicago (1893), Omaha (1898), Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), Jamestown (1907), Seattle (1909), and San Francisco (1915)—were accompanied by a series of stamps issued in its honor. Thus, world’s fairs came to figure in the philatelic imagination as the occasion for a series of series: a succession of commemorative-stamp series that collectors have prized ever since their release. The fairs’ organizers, usually businessmen who were civic boosters, were interested in promoting the modernity of their cities and regions, especially in comparison to competing civic and industrial centers. Historical commemoration provided the narrative resources to do so because the celebration of a founding moment also allowed organizers to use their fairs to tell a linear story of progress that sited their own

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cities at the apex of socioevolutionary development. Thus, despite their commemorative themes, the major world’s fairs of the period “tended to celebrate the present at the expense of the past,” as Michael Kammen puts it.14 The fairs exhibited the story of the rise of civilization, understood as the rise of capitalist nation-states, regions, and cities that competed to be preeminent in science, technology, agriculture, and the industrial and fine arts. Moreover, the very idea of progress was underpinned by nineteenth-century racialist social theory. At a time when the United States had fulfilled its manifest destiny and was taking on imperial adventures overseas, the fairs not only showcased industrial products but also used museum exhibits and living tableaux to depict the “lower” races. The contrast between those exotic but inferior peoples and Western industrial culture was intended to demonstrate the imposed racial hierarchy as a natural order. Such demonstrations were necessary to maintain a preferred image of the nation. Even as U.S. power waxed abroad and its internal Indian Wars came to a close, the end of the nineteenth century was a time of intense social strife: the emancipation of enslaved African Americans had led quickly to the suppression of their civil rights by Jim Crow; a growing wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Asia was frightening proponents of the nation’s Anglo-Saxon racial identity; labor was becoming increasingly militant; and women were agitating for the vote. In these troubled times, the fairs, according to Robert Rydell, were sites for mass cultural indoctrination, where tens of millions of U.S. citizens were exposed to educational exhibits and midway shows that validated the social position of the white elites: “The emphasis on white supremacy as a social agency . . . muted class divisions among whites, providing them with a sense of shared national purpose.” In sum, the fairs combined nationalism, racism, and belief in progress to propagate the elites’ understanding of “the proper organization of American society.”15 Stamp series created for these events helped to promote such narratives and to propagate them beyond those who had opportunity to visit the fairs. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the Act Creating the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which awarded the fair to

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Chicago from among the cities that were competing to host it. The envisioned “exhibition of arts, industries, manufactures and products of the soil, mine and sea” would celebrate “the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.” The federal government would not only support the fair financially but also be a major exhibitor there. Its “Executive Departments, the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Fish Commission and the National Museum” were to provide “such articles and materials as illustrate the function and administrative faculty of the Government . . . [and] tending to demonstrate the nature of our institutions and their adaptation to the wants of the people.”16 From his experiences in Philadelphia, PMG Wanamaker understood that merchandising techniques used in stores could be used in fairs and vice versa. During the Centennial Exposition of 1876, he had converted a freight depot into the Grand Depot, a proto–department store larger than any store in the United States until then, to which fair visitors flocked. A pioneer in advertising, he had experimented with balloons, children’s “slates and pencils and tracing books,” calendars, and postcards, the latter having been “used with great effect at the Centennial Exhibition.” He had obtained “the great eagle” from the St. Louis world’s fair for display in his Philadelphia store in response to a New York competitor who had installed a copy of a statue from the Chicago fair. These publicity stunts were, according to the historian Miles Orvell, “crowning manifestations of a longstanding continuity between our officially certified national purpose and merchandising.”17 In line with Wanamaker’s agenda, A. D. Hazen, third assistant PMG (the official in charge of stamp issues), announced in November  1892 the  POD’s plan “to issue, during the progress of the Columbian Exposition . . . , a special series of adhesive postage stamps . . . to signalize the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus.” Hazen continued: “This course was in accordance with the practice of other great postal administrations on occasions of national rejoicing, and it was consistent with the idea of a display at the Exposition of such articles as would illustrate the history, progress and administrative

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functions of the Post-Office Department, which Congress, by statute, has directed to be made part of a general governmental exhibit.” Hazen explained that the series of stamps would be available throughout 1893 and that the “estimated quantity” to be produced was 3 billion. “The principal feature” of the stamps, he continued, “is the delineation of some scene in the life of Columbus associated with the discovery of America.” He noted also that this special issue would not replace the regular-issue stamps then in use, so that “anyone needing postage stamps will be able to procure either or both kinds.”18 Hazen pointed out that the new issue would encourage “the collecting of stamps,” an activity conducive to “the cultivation of artistic tastes and the study of history and geography, especially on the part of the young.” Moreover, sales to collectors were highly profitable because collected stamps, never “being presented in payment of postage,” required no further servicing from the post office. Finally, Hazen noted that the stamps would directly benefit the Columbian Exposition by advertising it, “constantly drawing it to public attention.”19 In his annual report dated two weeks after Hazen’s announcement, Wanamaker estimated that the stamps would generate $2,500,000 in “net profits.” These profits would come both from increased use of postal services stimulated by public interest in the new stamps and from the collector market. He also noted two different aspects of the collector market that made it lucrative for the post office. First, “the ‘mania,’ as it is called, for collecting postage stamps . . . is universal throughout the world” among “every class and condition of people.” Collectors had already put away “many millions of dollars” in stamps that would never be redeemed for postal services. Second, stamp collecting fueled a speculative market, one that would be especially active in relation to commemorative stamps available only for a “limited time,” during which the stamps would be “accumulated in great quantities by dealers . . . to meet future demands.”20 Moreover, Wanamaker imagined another market for his stamps: the general population of fairgoers, many of whom would not be stamp collectors but who nonetheless would want souvenirs of the fair. He noted

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that the federal government was preparing “one hundred thousand commemorative diplomas and bronze medals, and the issue of five million silver souvenir coins.” It was thus appropriate, he continued, for the POD to issue “a series of souvenir postage stamps.”21 In sum, under Wanamaker’s tutelage and in the context of a world’s fair promoting industrial  progress and consumer capitalism, the post office transformed a government token that conveyed national symbolism into a consumer item in the form of a personal keepsake. Stamp collectors might pay close attention to postal iconography, but fairgoers who were not collectors would purchase the Columbians as inexpensive souvenirs to remind them of their uniquely personal experiences at the fair.22

THE TIMES OF THE COLUMBIANS AND SUCCESSIVE COMMEMORATIVE SERIES

In commemorating Columbus at the Chicago exposition, the post office was marking past time; in advertising the fair, it was making a contemporary announcement; and in selling souvenirs, it was projecting a future time when its customers would look back to Chicago and remember their visit to the fair. The Columbian stamps (Scott nos. 230–45) were among the world’s first commemorative stamps, having been preceded only by an issue in New South Wales in 1888–1889.23 The United States had created commemorative stamped envelopes (U288, U299, and U221 in the Scott numbering system) in 1876 for the U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, but at that time the third assistant PMG had announced that “the Department will not issue Centennial adhesive stamps.” His denial shows that even at that early date the idea of the commemorative stamp was in play.24 The 1893 Columbians differed from all previous U.S. stamp issues. They were larger than the regular-issue stamps of the time, and although both the Columbians and the regular-issue stamps were rectangular, the

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Columbians extended horizontally, not vertically. This allowed them to frame expansive scenes (telling the story of Columbus), while the smaller, vertical stamps framed nothing but busts. The Columbian series included more denominations than any prior series, and its highest-value stamp, at five dollars, was more expensive than any previous regular-issue stamp. Moreover, the Columbians severed the relationship between postal rates and the monetary denomination of stamps in that there was no postal need for the highest-valued Columbian stamps.25 Finally, to produce the Columbians, designers and artisans copied images from works of art located in museums and government buildings across the United States and Europe.26 All but one of the sixteen stamps were issued on January 2, 1893; the eight-cent stamp was issued two months later owing to a change in postal rates. The denominational ordering of the series (from one cent to five dollars) did not coincide with the chronological order of the events depicted on each stamp. As Wanamaker put it, “The subjects [of the stamps] do not strictly follow the logical sequence of events.” His explanation of this anomaly was that the lower-denomination stamps, the only ones that most of the public would ever use or see, should carry “the representations of the more important events connected with the discovery.”27 Thus, the one-cent stamp depicted “Columbus in sight of land,” and the two-cent stamp was the “Landing of Columbus,” as the legend of each stamp specified. In response, philatelic writers mused about alternative ordering schemes. In such discussions, we see interested parties reasoning over possible relationships between the postal use of stamps and the messages conveyed by the ordering of individual stamps in a series. The PMG privileged postal use over narrative sequence, and stamp collectors ever since have pointed out the discrepancy.28 In addition to the historical chronology of Columbus’s voyage, the stamps suggest a different kind of time associated with the socioevolutionary ideology that was hegemonic at the fairs. The commemorative stamps issued at the 1893, 1898, 1904, 1907, and 1915 world’s fairs explicitly or implicitly depicted the displacement of American Indians by Euro-American discoverers, conquerors, and settlers. Just barely visible

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on the two-cent Columbian, for example, Indians cower behind trees or prostrate themselves at the sight of Columbus and his men coming ashore. In the Jamestown series of 1907 (Scott nos. 328–30), no Indians are present at the landing scene of the two-cent stamp, but the five-cent stamp, the high value of the series of three, reproduces a portrait of Pocahontas from an engraving made in England in 1616, depicting her as an English gentlewoman and thereby suggesting that the outcome of the English colonization in Virginia was the assimilation (and hence disappearance) of its Indigenous inhabitants. Indians were completely absent from the discovery scene of the stamps for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915. The place of Indians in the history of civilization is most fully suggested in the commemorative stamps issued for Omaha’s TransMississippi Exposition of 1898 (Scott nos. 285–93). The one-cent stamp pictures Father Jacques Marquette preaching to Indians on the Mississippi River. The four-cent stamp uses an image of a mounted Indian hunting buffalo. The eight-cent stamp depicts troops guarding a wagon train, and although no Indians are shown, in 1898 it would have been understood that they were a menacing presence just off-stage. Three other stamps depict the hardships associated with exploring, mining, and farming, while two depict the successful results: industrial agriculture and a bridge across the Mississippi River. Although the denominational sequence of the stamps has no relationship to a historical sequence of events, the socioevolutionary plot is clear: a culture of noble, or at least picturesque, savages must give way to the advance of (superior white) civilization, whether through conversion and assimilation or through annihilation.

MODERN TIMES: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

As noted earlier, the Columbian stamps, with their engraved images of historical scenes, were produced by the billions. Walter Benjamin famously argued that the arts of “mechanical reproduction” displaced the “aura” of the original work of art. But as Orvell has shown, late  nineteenth-century U.S. consumers delighted in mechanically

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reproduced copies of art and cluttered the interiors of their homes with them. At the moment when the anthropological culture concept was being articulated to indicate a temporally and spatially discrete and aesthetically distinctive pattern of human collective life, the manufacturers of consumer goods were mechanically reproducing series, “lines,” or collections of cultural artifacts as styles to decorate middleclass spaces. The times and places of the entire world throughout history were becoming available as consumer choices: Louis XIV, Oriental, American colonial, and so on.29 Already in the 1860s, Wanamaker was using reproductions of famous works of art for advertising books and calendars.30 By the century’s end, the POD was drawing upon canonized national artworks—portraits of Founding Fathers and scenes of their heroic actions—and upon a wider, more popular set of images (reproduced in books and magazines) to illustrate its stamps. The BEP, which in 1894 took over the printing of stamps from private companies, built up a reservoir of images to draw on when it was asked to produce stamps, currencies, and coins. Its engravers often worked at third and fourth remove from the original. The philatelic historian Gary Griffith gives a paradigmatic example. The BEP was asked to produce a ten-dollar bill for the Buffalo exposition of 1901. The “Buffalo Bill” featured an image of a North American bison. The bureau engraver charged with the task tried to make a drawing “from the mounted group at the Smithsonian.” Not satisfied with his result, he engaged an artist to sketch the museum specimens and then made his engraving from the sketch. The same image was used twenty years later for a postage stamp.31 Philatelic historians from Tiffany’s time to today have taken care to document the origins of the images used on stamps. Sometimes considerable detective work is involved to reach an understanding of the succession of copies, reproductions, and substitutions that went into producing a series of stamps that seems to tell a coherent story. To give but one example concerning the commemorative stamps we have been examining: many collectors today consider the one-dollar stamp of the Omaha Trans-Mississippi series, titled “Western cattle in a storm” (figure 5.2), to be one of the most beautiful of all U.S. stamps. It apparently represents the risks—cattle dying in a harsh environment—of ranching

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FIGURE 5.2 Western cattle in a storm, 1898 (Scott no. 292).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

in the West. But these “western” cattle had actually been drawn in Scotland: the image came from an engraving published in a London periodical in 1879 and based on a painting by J. A. MacWhirter, who in 1878 had rented a farmhouse in the West Highlands of Scotland “for the purpose of artistic study.” As in the buffalo example, we see not only mechanical reproduction but also deliberate acts of framing, whether in an artist’s or taxidermist’s studio, to produce apparently objective images of nature and of national territory and history.32 We are not arguing that the stories the commemorative stamps tell are somehow inauthentic, whatever that might mean. The point, rather, is to understand that the processes of artistic framing and mechanical reproduction were thoroughly routinized by the turn of the twentieth century. Moreover, a request to the POD to support a world’s fair by announcing it with a stamp issue was also becoming routine; the Columbians had set the precedent. Thus, when a group of Nebraskan businessmen decided in 1897 to  organize a world’s fair “for the express purpose of furthering the progress and developing the great resources of the region west of the Mississippi River,” the chair of the publicity committee petitioned PMG James Gary for a series of stamps to accompany it. Gary agreed, yet his decision sparked protests from stamp collectors, who complained about the expense of acquiring the previous commemorative series, the  Columbians, with its multiple high-value stamps. Gary defended his decision by saying, “I wanted to help the people of the West,” adding, “No one is compelled to buy the high values unless he wishes to do so.”33

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For subsequent fairs, the series of commemorative stamps were shorter: six for the Buffalo fair, five for St. Louis, three for Jamestown, one for Seattle, and four for San Francisco. Building up to the Jamestown tercentenary, the Virginia Historical Society asked “for a complete set from one cent to one dollar,” but by then the POD, heeding collectors’ concerns about the costs of obtaining long series, was limiting its commemorative series to low values. Nevertheless, the principle that commemorative stamps be issued to accompany world’s fairs had become established. Over time, collectors came to expect and value such stamps, whatever their initial complaints about the expense of acquiring them may have been. Thus, fifty years after the Columbians’ release, the philatelic historian A. A. Lauzon wrote that they marked “the beginning of a new era for stamp collectors. The issuance of this series was the beginning of a vast flood of commemorative stamps which it has been their delight to collect ever since.”34

POSTMARKING NATIONAL SPACE AND TIME, COMMERCIALIZING STAMPS

As we have seen, the POD allowed itself to be used by fair organizers to advertise the fairs, but it also used the fairs to advertise itself in two ways: first, by maintaining a presence in government exhibitions at the fairs and, second, by marketing its commemorative stamps as souvenirs for fairgoers. Not only were the stamps, which were available nationally at post offices, sold on the exposition grounds, but customers could also have them canceled there.35 Stamp cancelers are time–space authentication devices; they create a government-issued marking specifying the moment and the place wherein a document is deposited at a post office. Fairgoers who bought stamps at the Chicago exposition, affixed them to fair postcards or envelopes, and had them postmarked at the fair could  demonstrate to their friends that they had attended the fair. Alternatively, fair-goers could send fair-postmarked mail to themselves to keep as souvenirs. Today, Columbian stamps, postcards, and

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Columbian Exposition cancellation, 1893.

FIGURE 5.3

Source: Handler’s collection.

envelopes bearing fair postmarks command a heft y premium in the philatelic marketplace (figure 5.3). The Philadelphia exposition of 1876 had been the first of the U.S. fairs to have an onsite postal station, which (unlike the Chicago fair’s station) had a special postmark reading “CENTENNIAL PHILA’DA PA.” This was the “first U.S. advertising postmark” or “slogan cancel,” although postmarks and cancellations had been used at fairs as early as 1862 at  the London International Exhibition.36 In the United States, fairs subsequent to the ones in Philadelphia and Chicago had their own postal stations offering on-grounds cancellations. Moreover, with the National Export Exposition of 1899 in Philadelphia and the Buffalo exposition of 1901, the POD began advertising such fairs with slogan cancels used at local post offices not specifically connected to a fair (figure  5.4).37 As the name suggests, in a slogan cancel the words of an informational or exhortatory message are part of a postal cancellation, usually placed to the right (from the reader’s perspective) of the circular date-and-place postmark. With this device, the cancel itself became a mobile advertising medium detached in space and time from the fairs to be publicized. Collecting such cancels has become a philatelic subspecialty. Further impetus for this kind of collecting was given in 1922, when (as we discuss in chapter 9) the POD began holding “first-day-ofissue” ceremonies for its stamps, where collectors could obtain an envelope affi xed with the newly issued stamp that was postmarked with the date and place of its release to the public. All these devices or gimmicks draw on principles that link time, governmental authority, and market speculation. The introduction of

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FIGURE 5.4

Slogan cancel for Panama-Pacific Exposition, 1915. Source: Handler’s collection.

commemorative stamps as conceived by Wanamaker—not merely to commemorate the past but also to celebrate and advertise a presentday  event and to create marketable collectibles with a future— fundamentally changed the relationship between postage stamps, the people their iconography depicted, and the ways postal patrons could use them. Before that moment, the iconography of U.S. postage stamps made use of history (in the form of images of governmentally canonized ancestors) to contrast democratic citizenship to monarchical principles of rule. Wanamaker’s commemoratives used national history differently: they mined the territory and history of the nation-state to discover new topics to be depicted on stamps, which were now treated as commercial products (for both postal patrons and stamp collectors) that also advertised other commercial enterprises, such as the world’s fairs that were showcases for U.S. businesses. From then on, what came to be called “definitive” or “regular-issue” stamps would no longer be the only game in town. They were now to be  paired with commemorative stamps, which, by bolstering the post office’s most tangible, most material offerings—precisely at the point of sale, we might say—began the process (which would be fully consummated after World War II) of transforming its stamp-purchasing patrons into consumers who had a choice of products with different design qualities but the same functional postal value. As we noted in the introduction, with stamps the USPOD had a monopoly: although it had to

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compete with service providers such as the railroads, private delivery companies, and eventually the telegraph and telephone, only the post office could make and distribute official government tokens as part of regular postal workings. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that stamp production succumbed to increasing commercialization—the democratic service of delivering the mails had from the beginning been imbricated with the commercialized services of a free-market economy. Extolling the virtues of the Columbian stamps, Wanamaker argued that not only would they serve to advertise the fair, but they would also advertise the post office and its services: “The issue of a new series of stamps,” he averred, “stimulates correspondence by mail,” especially on the part of businesses that would use the stamps “to get out new advertisements and circulars, to which more attention is drawn when the new stamps are first seen on the envelopes.”38 Thus, for Wanamaker— celebrated to this day as a seminal figure in the history of U.S. advertising—postage stamps were not just receipts indexing the payment of a tax (as they had been for Sir Rowland Hill) but also products that would both satisfy a consumer demand and stimulate more demand for similar products—new stamps. They were, in a sense, advertisements for themselves even as they served to facilitate the circulation of other merchants’ advertisements throughout the body politic by means of the largest mass-communication system of the time.

STORYTELLING WITH STAMPS

At the birth of the new nation, the principle of the dead head had restricted the use of people in the national iconography of government tokens to people from the past. The genre of the commemorative stamp expanded the possibilities for governmental history making because commemoratives referred to and depicted not just people but also scenes and events—which included people, to be sure, but also groups of people and their specific actions in specific places. As with the dead heads, national history was to be determined by present-day political actors, but a much more expansive past was now available to those actors.

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Moreover, the people deciding the iconography of stamps and other government tokens were not constrained by chronology or geography. They could “move” backward and forward in past time and anywhere they wished across the national geographic space as they decided who and what to commemorate. To be sure, their decisions emerged from and were constrained by present-day political bargaining and, once made, were subject to public criticism. In principle, though, any point of the national time–space matrix could be mined for commemorative purposes. These first series of commemorative stamps—with their elaborately framed images of a sequence of discrete moments and personages, all understood to be part of one grand historical event—are reminiscent of the historical pageantry of the civic parades that were popular at the turn of the twentieth century. Each stamp of a series was like a float in a parade of such floats, presenting a static tableau or scene that was part of the story the parade was telling.39 At a parade, the spectator stood still as the scenes passed by in sequence. In contrast, stamp collectors had to play a more active role, obtaining one of each stamp in the sequence of a series and then arranging them in order in their stamp albums. But that order had been fixed in advance by either the POD storytellers or the editors of stamp albums. Although postal officials and philatelists might disagree about the proper ordering of stamps within a series, they did not contest the idea that a series represented a sequence reflecting historical, philatelic, and/or ideological order. In the next two chapters, we examine how the scene-by-scene narrative method of the early commemorative stamps was transformed in series of definitive stamps that attempted over the course of the twentieth century to tell a story about the progress of U.S. democracy by grouping together increasingly diverse representative individuals. Moreover, by the last third of the twentieth century, new printing technologies able to produce panes containing different stamps made it possible to use commemorative stamps to depict historical sequences as unified events made up of discrete moments. As we shall see, grouping those moments within a single stamp pane transformed a temporal sequence into a spatial configuration, implicitly timeless and, as such, disconnected from—and therefore irrelevant to—the present.

6 THE PEOPLE IN THE POSTAL POLITY Twentieth-Century Definitive Stamps and the Iconography of Democratic Inclusion

T

he Columbians and the world’s fair series that followed them were designed to tell stories. In this aspect, they differed markedly from nineteenth-century definitive stamps, which were intended to portray a distinctive national identity—as represented by worthy dead heads—but were not conceived as series in which each individual stamp conveyed a moment in a unified narrative. That changed at the end of the nineteenth century, when U.S. definitive issues began to replicate features of the Columbian commemoratives: these included more stamps per issue than prior definitive issues; the stamps were organized by a denominational sequence that was not tightly tied to postal rates; and they featured a larger cast of characters and an expanded iconography, all of which, taken together, suggested a historical narrative. In this chapter, we consider the six definitive series issued by the post office during the twentieth century as well as two commemorative series issued during the Franklin  D. Roosevelt (FDR) administration that shared design features with (and have been mistaken for) definitive series. Definitive or regular-issue stamps were intended to serve as the post office’s workhorse issues for periods of a decade and even more. Before the explosion of commemorative issues at the mid–twentieth century, definitives were the stamps that most people used and saw. As the post office of FDR’s administration considered a new iconography for

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definitive stamps, it also reconsidered the relationship between definitive series and commemorative series. The two landmark commemorative series it issued—Famous Americans and National Parks—opened up new possibilities for definitive-stamp iconography and paved the way for the many commemorative series that would appear after World War II. We focus on the four aspects of these definitive and commemorative series that are central to the development of U.S. postal iconography and marketing in the twentieth century. 1. Changing frames: We noted at the end of chapter 3 that the frames enclosing the portraiture on early U.S. stamps were far more elaborate than those used on British stamps of the period. We interpreted this elaboration as an insistence both on the deadness of the depicted persons and on their historical (as opposed to hereditary) validation. As we shall see, the first three definitive series of the twentieth century repeated and even further elaborated these framing conventions, but stamp designers thereafter began to experiment with frame designs, even to the point of doing away with the frame altogether. This, we argue, suggests that the conventions of deadness and historical merit had been so well established by the 1930s that stamp designers no longer felt the need to emphasize them through nineteenth-century iconographic conventions. 2. Narrative capacity: As in past definitive issues, the “dead head” provided the basic message-bearing unit of twentieth-century definitive issues. But the cast of characters grew—or, to put this more precisely, there was a gradual expansion of the number of categories of personhood from which historically important individuals could be chosen to be honored on U.S. postage stamps. In addition, as in the abortive series of 1869, nonhuman iconic images began to be included with the dead heads, suggesting that the citizens chosen to appear on stamps were to be seen not solely as biographically important persons but also as the equivalents of nonhuman icons that represented the nation-state, which itself transcended and gave meaning to the persons, places, scenes, sites, and events that constituted the national heritage. If nineteenth-century definitive stamps said, in effect, “Unlike in a hereditary monarchy, in a democratic republic history determines the men who will be chosen to

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represent the polity,” their twentieth-century successors told a more expansive story. The growing cast of characters showed that as a democracy progresses, more and different categories of personhood are interpolated as citizens. This wider cast in turn suggested that thanks to the democratic principle of equality, different kinds of people will be recognized as equally valuable to the nation-state and the individual humans who occupy each category will have an equal chance to achieve greatness. Finally, the juxtaposition of dead heads and nonhuman icons conveyed national self-assurance: the United States was noteworthy not solely in contrast to Great Britain but also as a global actor in possession of a unique heritage. 3. Increased inclusion but without allusion to prior exclusion: What remained unsaid by twentieth-century definitive series was as important as what they said. Left out of the story was explicit reference to the history of political struggle that had led to the expanded cast of postal characters in the first place. Left out as well were the ways in which those struggles had failed to lead to equality and the fact that the equality of newly recognized categories was still being contested. 4 Consumer choice as an implicit principle of stamp-topic selection: Omitting controversial histories was one way to depoliticize the process of expanding the cast of characters of twentieth-century U.S. stamps. This made it easier to interpret that expansion as what in one sense it was intended to be: an expanded stock of merchandise available to citizen-customers. This interpretation allowed the federal government to dissociate itself from its role in (not) elaborating a principled politics of inclusion and to emphasize instead that all citizens of a consumer democracy had the right to choose their own heroes and the ideologies for which those heroes stood. By century’s end, however, these design changes proved unable to sustain the viability and saliency of definitive stamps, which, as we shall see, were gradually overwhelmed by floods of commemorative stamps appealing to a great variety of consumer-citizen interests and politics. Thus, it is not surprising that by the end of the century postal authorities had almost completely abandoned definitive stamps as a site to

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present a stable gallery of canonized citizens. In place of dead heads, they turned to anodyne objects such as flora, fauna, and, above all, the U.S. flag.

WOMAN ACHIEVES A STAMP: THE SERIES OF 1902

In 1902, the USPOD began releasing stamps of the first definitive series to be designed, engraved, and printed by the BEP. According to Max Johl, writing in reference to the official in charge of postage stamps (the third assistant PMG), “The thought was that an entirely new issue would give the Department publicity and tend to make the public ‘Post Office conscious’ and thus increase the use of the mails.” Such an approach continued Wanamaker’s marketing tactics, treating postage stamps as commodities and positioning the postal service to compete for business as if it were a for-profit enterprise.1 The newspapers of the time commented extensively on the new issue. Several articles reviewed the entire corpus of U.S. definitive stamps, from 1847 onward, evaluating the “progress” to be seen in “the engraver’s art” and taking stock of the gradually changing cast of characters. Especially noteworthy were announcements to the effect that “Woman at Last to Be Honored with a Place” and “Martha Washington Stamp: First to be Issued in This Country Bearing Portrait of a Woman” (figure 6.1a).2 This last statement was not correct because the four-dollar Columbian had featured a portrait of Queen Isabella of Spain, although it was paired with a portrait of Columbus. The queen was also depicted in the scenes of several other stamps of the series, and an Indigenous woman had appeared—defeated and dejected, to be sure, but prominently positioned—in the heavily used one-cent Columbian. For the newspaper commentators, the new Martha Washington stamp honored “woman” as such and her historical ascent: “Woman continues to break away barriers. Her latest achievement is to induce the Post Office . . . to put Martha Washington’s face” on the new eight-cent stamp.3

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Series of 1902: (a) Martha Washington (Scott no. 306); (b) George Washington (Scott no. 301); (c) replacement George Washington two-cent (Scott no. 319).

FIGURE  6.1

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

According to Johl, “When the Third Assistant PMG announced that the portrait of a woman would adorn one of the new stamps, many women’s clubs sent numerous suggestions” to the post office. Martha Washington was chosen as a kind of least-common denominator, “there being less antagonism against using her portrait than any other acceptable one.” This is one of the first examples of the organization of public opinion through what Tocqueville called “associations,” or interest groups, to influence the iconography of postage stamps—a process that came to a crescendo, as we saw in chapter 3, in the 1950s. More generally, the newspaper discussion of the new stamps shows that commentators and readers had learned to see the country’s postal issues as a site of national iconography and history making, both of which were deemed important not only to U.S. citizens but also to people of other countries who would learn about the United States through its stamps.4 In addition to reviews of the cast of characters of the new stamps, there was much commentary on the designs of the frames. For one thing, each stamp of the new series had a unique frame, in contrast to the prior definitive series (Scott nos. 219–29 and their various subsequent iterations), in which all the portraits were framed in the same way. More important, for the first time U.S. definitive stamps included the names and dates of birth and death of the person depicted.5 Finally, each stamp

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bore the legend “Series 1902,” thereby objectifying the postal issue itself as part of an ongoing succession—by implication, both historical and progressive—of such issues. Newspaper debate over the merits of the new issue became focused on the two-cent stamp bearing a portrait of George Washington (figure 6.1b), which critics thought was a poor choice for reproduction with a poorly designed frame. So vociferous were complaints that the POD issued a new two-cent George Washington stamp (figure 6.1c) only ten months later.6 Beyond the specific details of the two-cent stamp, the debate crystalized (and opposed) two standard nationalist themes, the nostalgic and the progressive. On one side were those who yearned for the “beauty and simplicity of line and harmony of design” that had characterized (in their opinion) nineteenth-century U.S. stamps. On the other side were those who saw the design innovations of the new series as an example of artistic and national progress. Writing to the New York Times, “a lover of art” claimed that the new stamps were finding favor among “those who understand what art is, and are eager to promote a desire in the American people to combine the artistic with the practical.” For “lover,” the “old stereotyped form” of prior stamps had long since ceased to interest the public, whereas the new series showed “artistic progress.” “Lover” and others also argued that naming and dating the portraits made U.S. history available to “foreigners who know not our history.” In this way, the new stamps would promote “American” identity on the world stage as well as to the millions of immigrants entering the United States at the turn of the century. Crucially, with this series the inclusion of women in the body politic had become part of that national narrative.7

WASHINGTON, FRANKLIN, AND HOLLOW HORN BEAR (“AMERICAN INDIAN”)

The next definitive series, the Washington-Franklins of 1908–1921 (Scott nos. 331–66, 374–96, 405–536, 538–47), seemed aimed to please both

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camps. It featured only two images, busts of Washington and Franklin. The twenty-eight different stamps that the series grew to include were issued in fifteen different denominations (from one cent to five dollars); differences among the visually similar or identical stamps were conveyed by printed numerals but also and more strikingly by differences of color—including the use of such colors as “apple green,” “claret brown,” and “copper red” (figures 6.2a and 6.2b). According to Johl, postal officials designed this issue “with the object of obtaining the greatest simplicity commensurate with artistic result,” a formula carrying both nostalgic and progressive overtones.8 “Simplicity” also implied that the Washington-Franklin series told no stories other than reasserting that the post office’s two most important Founding Fathers were adequate for the purpose of national postal identification. But when the Harding administration took over the POD after the elections of 1920, postal officials set to work designing a new definitive issue that, we can see in retrospect, capitalized on the narrative resources that had been developed through commemorative-stamp issues. The definitive series of 1922–1925 (Scott nos. 551–73) ascended from a one-cent to a five-dollar stamp, with subjects ranging from the standard portraits to natural and historic images of national significance.9 The

FIGURE 6.2

Colorful Washington-Franklins, 1909 (Scott no. 365) and 1914 (Scott no. 419). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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initial thirteen stamps feature portraits of human persons, all framed identically. The first twelve of the thirteen depict named individuals, all but two of whom were U.S. presidents. But they appear in this series not merely as heads of state among a larger, random assortment of national heroes, as had been the case in prior definitive series. The preponderance of presidents among the heroes (e.g., figure 6.3a) suggests instead that the presidency itself as an office occupied by a sequence of citizens can be taken as proxy for a national history. In other words, this series of stamps does more than symbolize the state metonymically through a collection of heads of state; its dead heads gesture metaphorically toward a larger national history in which they played their roles. The American Indian stamp (figure 6.3b) is at once the same as and different from the twelve prior stamps. Like them, its vignette features a portrait of a human person, framed exactly as the others were. But the human subject is identified in writing by an ethnic or racial category rather than by a personal name, which makes him as much a thing as a person and thus likens him to the fifteen-cent Statue of Liberty stamp (figure 6.3c) that follows the American Indian stamp in the series. After these two allegorical figures are three images of natural features of North America, three of national monuments, and, finally, a goddess named “America.” The Indian thus acts as a kind of hinge in this series, effecting a

FIGURE 6.3 Series of 1922–1925: (a) Benjamin Harrison (Scott no. 622); (b) “American Indian” (Hollow Horn Bear) (Scott no. 565); (c) Statue of Liberty (Scott no. 566).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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transition between named historic persons and other symbolic entities the postal service deemed suitable as images of national identity— timeless natural wonders, monumental works of a progressive civilization, and allegories in human form. It is crucial to note that postal authorities knew very well who “American Indian” was: Hollow Horn Bear (1850–1913), a Sicangu (Brulé) Lakota chief who had fought against the U.S. Army and later participated in negotiations with the U.S. government. In the stamp series, however, he was pressed into service to represent not an ongoing Indian history but a dead and vanquished culture to be exhibited as part of U.S. national heritage. An early version of the stamp identified the portrait by name, but “as there was no intent to honor Hollow Horn Bear himself, the caption in the ribbon was changed to ‘American Indian.’ ”10 Hollow Horn Bear’s stamp was not the first U.S. stamp to depict Indians, but it was the first to depict a known male individual who was part of an ongoing history of Indian resistance to U.S. settler colonialism. In 1922, this could be done only by erasing Hollow Horn Bear’s name and transforming him into a symbol of a completed and dead past. That postal officials had some such narrative in mind is suggested by a press release on October 22, 1922, explaining the new issue to the public: The subjects of the designs have not been selected without careful regard to their suitability. . . . The portraits include Washington and Jefferson as fathers of our institutions, Franklin as the first Postmaster General, Martha Washington to commemorate the pioneer womanhood of America, Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley as the “martyr presidents,” Monroe to mark the foreign policy associated with his name, with Grant, Hayes, Cleveland and Roosevelt carrying on the historical line to a recent day. “The devices adopted for the higher denominations,” [Third Assistant PMG W. I.] Glover says, stand in mind for a little story which aided him in selecting them. Together they stand for America as it might be viewed by a newly arriving immigrant. The stranger’s first thought is of the primitive dwellers in the land, the aboriginal Indians, but on  arrival the Statue of Liberty greets him, the symbol of a new

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civilization; the natural wonders opening to his view are represented by . . . Niagara, and its differing forms of life by the Buffalo; from these the alien’s thoughts are supposed to turn to the deeds of men who lived and died to build and preserve the nation, and this idea is marked by Arlington Amphitheater and the Lincoln Memorial; then his mind turns to the Capitol itself as the center of national tradition and Government, and so to his vision of America, the final picture.11

It is impossible to know whether Glover’s “little story” guided his choice of stamps or was concocted later to rationalize it. Either way, the inclusion of Hollow Horn Bear/American Indian is as important an innovation as was the introduction of Martha Washington into the company of white men in the 1902 series. Relabeling Hollow Horn Bear as “American Indian” relegated him to second-class citizenship among the other dead heads, but making his portrait the iconographic equivalent of the others at least suggested that Indians were members of the body politic. Glover’s little story further suggests that this iconographic expansion of the canon of citizenship, which rehearses the same narrative of progress celebrated at the world’s fairs, was a response to another kind of demographic change deemed threatening by those charged with policing the borders of U.S. national identity: immigration. The new stamps were brought into use at a time when anti-immigration sentiment was building to its climax, the restrictive Johnson immigration bill of 1924. Teaching new immigrants to know the true meaning of U.S. citizenship was the USPOD’s contribution to the Harding administration’s repressive response to their troubling presence. Postage stamps reflected and participated in this shift in the makeup of the body politic. As turn-of-the-twentieth-century immigration to the United States from eastern and southern Europe led to increasingly dire warnings about threats to the “Nordic” identity of the nation-state, ethnic groups that considered themselves to be more durably anchored in U.S. history began lobbying the POD for commemorative stamps. Between 1924 and 1931, Norwegian and Polish Americans as well as descendants of the Huguenots and Walloons succeeded in obtaining stamps (Scott nos. 614–16, 620–21, 690). The early twentieth century was

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also a time when New England and the South competed to be recognized as the founding region of the United States. Elites in both regions were successful in pressing their claims through commemorative stamps, the Jamestown Exposition issue of 1907 (Scott nos. 328–30) and the Pilgrim Tercentenary issue of 1920 (Scott nos. 548–50).12 Such issues acknowledged immigration as a core part of national identity, but only for groups from western Europe or, in the case of Polish Americans, groups with a historical connection to the American Revolution. Further, in claiming the East Coast as the foundational staging ground for U.S. democracy and its ideals, such series ignored the West Coast and the groups immigrating there or already present there— problematic from the Nordic perspective—namely, those from East Asia and Mexico. Thus, these issues represent a postal strategy of accumulation as opposed to disavowal. Rather than reject certain groups, the post office responded to pressures from lobbying entities to represent (and perhaps overrepresent) more desirable ethnicities. In doing so, they denied other kinds of immigrant experiences through absence rather than explicit rejection.

SCENES, NOT HEADS: THE NATIONAL PARKS COMMEMORATIVE SERIES

Although POD officials during the Harding administration used new issues to signify their brand of nationalism, they did so within an established iconographic tradition; it was not until the Franklin Roosevelt administration that the post office inaugurated a stylistically more modern and topically more “diversified” national iconography. Stamp collectors were thrilled when a serious philatelist, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was elected to the presidency in 1932. According to Sheila Brennan, FDR “understood that the visual language of stamps . . . could reach large numbers of Americans” and used the stamp program to promote “current government . . . programs that supported economic recovery and national unity.” It was reported in the press that “one of President

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Roosevelt’s earliest philatelic activities . . . was to request a Presidential series” and that a National Parks series was under consideration. It was even said that “some people were advocating that the National Parks series be the regular issue and the ‘Presidentials’ be a commemorative issue.”13 That interested parties were willing to consider stamps picturing parks as definitives (regular issues) and stamps with heads as commemoratives foreshadows an iconographic transformation that will occur at the end of the twentieth century. But it had long been an imaginable option. Max Johl notes that at the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress of 1912, “Lewis Hill, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Great Northern Railroad, suggested that Uncle Sam ought to erase the faces of some of our illustrious dead on public stamps and print thereon the famous scenic spots of the country, as the Government’s first contribution to the ‘See America First’ campaign for which the great railways . . . were spending millions.”14 Begun in 1906 as a “western booster campaign” to promote tourism in the U.S. West, See America First took aim at the 150 million tourist dollars said to have been spent during the prior “touring season” by U.S. travelers in Europe. In 1910, the Great Northern Railroad erected two hundred 20-by-15-feet billboards using the See America First slogan and depicting twenty scenes of the newly opened Glacier National Park in Montana.15 The railroads had since the mid–nineteenth century been packaging the sites to be seen from passenger-car windows into scenic tours. Unlike for civic parades, in which spectators stood still while a series of historic scenes moved past them, in railroad tourism the spectator moved past a stationary landscape, which was packaged into scenes by the framework of the train window, then correlatively by the railroads’ promotional efforts (such as the billboards), and finally through the activities available for the tourist at such scenic destinations. Through this concatenation, private businesses and eventually the federal government (with the creation of the U.S. National Park Service in 1916) commercialized geographic features while at the same time casting them as  the patrimony of all Americans—in effect marketing them to the people who ostensibly owned them.

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According to Johl, in 1925 the director of the National Park Service in the Harding administration advocated for “stamps showing scenes” of national parks, but not until the Roosevelt administration would this vision become a reality, albeit not as a definitive series but as a shorterlived commemorative set. Perhaps the first U.S. postal issue designed in the style of contemporary, modernist advertising, the National Parks stamps of 1934 (Scott nos. 740–49) showcase scenes from ten different parks. Each stamp was based on a National Park Service photograph.16 The framing and text are unobtrusive. Four of the ten are vertical, a format emphasizing ascension, and six are horizontal, emphasizing the breadth of a panorama. In the former (e.g., figure 6.4a), the single-line frame, doubled at the bottom with text, highlights the upward movement of the scenery, as though the sites approach godliness.17 In the latter (e.g., figure  6.4b), the pronounced elements of the side frames promote the sense of depth within the images, as though the parks unfold endlessly into the distance, unpeopled landscapes ripe for exploration. With sites from Maine, North Carolina, and eight western states, the series presents the nation from coast to coast; but in their ascending order of value, from one to ten cents, the stamps do not trace a

FIGURE  6.4 National Parks series, 1934: (a) Yosemite (Scott no. 740); (b) Grand Canyon (Scott no. 741).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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geographically rational tour. Rather, the stamps as a set depict cultural properties that represent the nation and that its citizens own. Moreover, although the parks are presented as rugged and wild in and of themselves, the choice of picturesque scenes, artfully cropped, suggests the work of the government as good steward. Without curation or government intervention, it is implied, these lands would be inaccessible, their beauty hidden from view. Thus, in maintaining these lands and their accessibility, the U.S. government realizes the democratic potential of making the great outdoors available to all citizens, not just the wealthy few. The greatness of the landscape, then, derives as much from the government processes that facilitate and commercialize its use by U.S. citizens as it does from its natural qualities. In these stamps, the sites, which have been given names by their human creators, play the role of the dead heads of the earliest U.S. postal issues. Although the stamps depict no people, the presence of people is implied: they are the citizens who gaze upon the nation’s natural wonders through the windows of the stamps, which encourage them to tour the parks to view these “scenes” in person. Indeed, the two-cent Grand Canyon stamp (figure 6.4b) “pictures the view . . . as seen from the porch of the Grand Canyon Lodge.” Further, in depicting a landscape devoid of people, the stamps continue the tradition of figuring the Americas as a terra nullius, a fecund geography open for the taking because interpreted as unoccupied.18

THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT: PRESIDENTIAL ISSUE (PREXIES) OF 1938

The idea presented in the National Parks series—that stamps commemorate the national import of a topic or image rather than the topic or image itself—was extended in the presidential issue of 1938. Nicknamed the “Prexies” by philatelists, this series celebrated not individual presidents but the office of the presidency—at once a physical location (the  White House) and a metaphorical “site” within a “structure” of

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government. The discussions leading up to the issuance of the Prexies suggest an interplay between past iconographic traditions and the emergence of new principles of postal design. As noted, FDR had early on mooted the idea of a presidential series. Preliminary discussions included the idea that “the most important presidents” would “appear on the denominations used most,” a standard design principle dating back to the earliest U.S. stamp issues. Indeed, some who argued against a series including all presidents reproduced in total the position expressed in 1792, arguing that not all presidents were sufficiently “worthy” to appear on a postage stamp. But only after the reelection of FDR in 1936 did the administration turn seriously to a presidential issue, taking up the president’s suggestion that a design competition be organized and opened to the public. This competition was managed by the Treasury Department, which, “operating independently” of the POD, in 1937 invited artists to submit designs for a series to “commemorate each of the Presidents of the United States to date.”19 As it happened, the POD acceded to the FDR plan, and in a press release on March 8, 1938, it “announced that every deceased President of the United States would appear on a new regular series of 31 stamps.”20 Hewing to precedent, the series (Scott nos. 803–34) was to include two nonpresidents, Benjamin Franklin and Martha Washington. But breaking with precedent, the series would present the presidents in chronological order, with the denomination of each stamp matching each president’s place in that chronology (figures 6.5a–6.5d). Thus, for example, George Washington would occupy the one-cent stamp, and Lincoln the sixteen-cent stamp. The two criteria—denomination and historical chronology—coincided for the stamps featuring the first twenty-two presidents. But Grover Cleveland had held office in nonsequential terms, 1885–1889 and then 1893–1897, with Benjamin Harrison occupying the presidency in the gap, 1889–1893. Harrison therefore became the point at which the coincidence of the two series criteria ended; he was assigned to the twenty-four-cent value, and the final presidents of the series were assigned to higher values normally used in long series. In the case of Franklin and M. Washington, the standard fractional values (half-cent and one-and-a-half-cents) were available. In addition,

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Presidential issue (Prexies) of 1938: (a) George Washington (Scott no. 804); (b) John Tyler (Scott no. 815); (c) James A. Garfield (Scott no. 825); (d) Woodrow Wilson (Scott no. 832); (e) the White House (Scott no. 809).

FIGURE 6.5

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

in its announcement in March 1938 the POD stated it would be assigning the fifth president, James Monroe, to the four-and-a-half-cent stamp, a denomination “included because it could pay a domestic triple third class rate, and users of this rate wanted to be able to pay it with a single stamp.”21 But this assignment would disrupt the coincidence of denomination and historical chronology, and so Monroe was assigned to the five-cent stamp, and the White House was pictured on the four-and-ahalf-cent stamp (figure 6.5e). That final choice—in which denomination and historical chronology coincide—returns us to the debate about coinage in 1792. In one respect, the 1938 series adhered to the 1792 tradition: only the dead were honored. Otherwise, the Prexies embody the model that was rejected in 1792. The series suggests that all presidents are equal in greatness solely by dint of having held the office: no one president is more honorable than another,

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and history’s judgment is irrelevant. To put this differently, unlike earlier issues that cast greatness as a function of individual heroism or ingenuity, the Prexies cast greatness as a product of the office, an institution that represented the nation. Further, the use of historical chronology suggests an endless succession of presidents extending into the future, all equally honorable by dint of the office. American democracy and in particular the nation as represented by the office of the president is portrayed as stable and eternal, a suggestion not unlike the portrayal of the monarch in Europe. In this instance, though, democratic ideals are realized in the number of people who served as president in a 150-year period. Unlike monarchies, whose sovereigns rule until death, democracies, as depicted in the Prexies, empower a multitude of individuals to ascend to a position of greatness, each of whom must relinquish the office to the next duly elected person for the office to maintain its legitimacy and power. The Prexies’ iconography amplifies the notion of the honor and power of the presidency—occupied by a series of persons—in a civilized democracy. Each stamp presents a bust in profile view. Though the background colors change, the presentation is otherwise standardized, a stylistic choice that creates a sense of uniformity. Further, unlike other stamps featuring portraits taken from busts, in which the frame crops out the indications of a stone or marble likeness, the Prexies amplify them. The heads are not just dead; they are decapitated, floating against their colored background without any ornamentation and with the curved bottom of the bust clearly visible. The words “UNITED STATES POSTAGE” are usually presented as a square in the upper right corner of the stamp—rather than as a border across the top or the bottom— and although the value of the stamp still covers the bottom edge of the stamp, that value is presented without a frame. The busts are thus completely ungrounded.22 Past definitive series framed dead heads in ways that suggested framed pictures of known and honored individuals. Indeed, framing them (whether in stamps or in works of art hung in museums and government buildings) bestowed honor on them. The unframed busts of the Prexies, however, are the opposite of an exercise uniting verisimilitude and individual worthiness: they minimize the idea that one is looking at

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known persons and overemphasize the idea that one is looking at a representation of a representation of a person. In objectifying the presidents in this manner, the Prexies cast the role these people played rather than the people themselves as the important content of the stamp. The White House stamp is the sole exception to this presentational style. It is presented realistically, hovering not in space but planted on the ground, surrounded by trees. Though the stamp lacks a frame, the White House boasts its own and is bordered on the top and bottom by text claiming it as U.S. postage and noting its value. In hearkening back to an earlier iconographic tradition of framing, this stamp suggests the continuity of that tradition and the values associated with it. At the same time, the White House, a physical location, anchors the metaphorical location—the office of the president. As the home of the presidents, the White House is the staging ground for national greatness. The remaining low-value stamps lack a frame entirely, but the frame seems to have been irresistible to the designers, who framed the tenthrough nineteen-cent stamps with a single line, the twenty- through fifty-cent stamps with a double line, and the dollar values with columns and text. Thus, for the most heavily used stamps, the Prexies dispensed with the frame as a signifier of deadness, relying instead on other conventions of postal iconography, backed by a law that had by then been in place for three quarters of a century, to convey the notion that only deceased presidents belonged in the series. (Indeed, the Prexies did not include the still living presidents, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, a fact commented on in the philatelic press as one needing little explanation.) At the same time, the use of frames in the higher-value stamps signified that stamp designers could mix and match prior conventions in new combinations.23

DEMOCRATIZING GREATNESS: THE FAMOUS AMERICANS COMMEMORATIVE SERIES

As early as 1935, philatelists and others called for stamps honoring “heroes of peace” in addition to stamps focusing on political and

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military themes/figures as a way to advance U.S. national culture. These discussions coincided with lobbying efforts to honor Mark Twain with a postage stamp, and by 1937 the philatelic press reported on the likelihood of a “heroes of peace” series that would include Twain and other cultural titans. The initiative came to pass in 1939 when the POD was authorized to issue a commemorative series of thirty-five stamps (Scott nos. 859–93) over the course of ten months, beginning with the release of the first of the Famous Americans series in January  1940 (figures 6.6a–6.6c). The series was divided into seven categories, with five individuals featured in each: authors, poets, educators, scientists, composers, artists, inventors. These categories were nearly identical to those proposed by the National Federation of Stamp Clubs based on polls the clubs had organized when the idea for the series was first proposed in 1935. Through this process and the choice of categories to honor, the POD implied that even with war looming, the nation’s greatness lay in its culture and commitment to democratic principles as much as in its military might.24 In his speeches at various first-day-of-issue celebrations, PMG James  A. Farley repeatedly highlighted the role the honored figures played in building an “American” national identity that was both distinctive and worthy of recognition. For example, celebrating the first stamp of the series, he described its subject, Washington Irving, as an

Famous Americans series, 1940: (a) Jane Addams (Scott no.  878); (b) Booker T. Washington (Scott no. 873); (c) Frances E. Willard (Scott no. 872).

FIGURE  6.6

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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artist who had created living people out of folklore” and thereby “made Europe pause to realize the existence and importance of this thriving new land across the Atlantic.” Farley praised Irving in particular for attracting European attention to the United States in a period before it could demonstrate its military prowess on a global stage. Further, in highlighting Irving’s relationship to folklore, Farley suggested a canon for American arts and letters that stretched into the earliest years of  nationhood. In similar remarks on the release of another stamp honoring an author, Farley emphasized the transmutation of Mark Twain’s experiences of westward expansion into a “distinctive American literature . . . expressed . . . in speech that was typically . . . American.” In sum, whether grounded in folklore or in the westward process of settling the land, the literature created by these famous Americans gave voice, according to Farley, to a unique American spirit.25 Farley’s canon building prefigured an emergent cultural politics of the U.S. government. Beginning in World War II, first a civilian effort housed within the military and later in the CIA began sponsoring a wide variety of “artistic” products and activities as part of a policy of “soft diplomacy” to counter fascism and communism both abroad and at home. This project had two related aims: to use artistic and cultural products as evidence of the fruits that freedom and democracy provided and to counter the perception that the United States excelled only in technical and military works. Special publishing ventures brought little-read or forgotten books back into print, while celebratory events such as the issuance of the Famous Americans series promoted American cultural creations as equal in importance to war making. Indeed, the Council of Books in Wartime, a government–private partnership that distributed books to U.S. troops deployed in Europe during the war, announced in its motto that “books are weapons in the war of ideas.” In sum, the 1930s and 1940s saw both the government-sponsored creation of a distinctively U.S. canon and its celebration as an inevitable result of democracy, freedom, and, crucially, a market that made such cultural artifacts available to a broad population.26 The stylistic features of the Famous Americans series heightened the implicit message that the growth of an American national culture was

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and had always been both a democratic and market-dominated process. Each portrait was framed by an oval or square design and set against what the POD described as a “colonial background.” Most of the figures are presented in three-quarter profile, though a few gaze directly out from the stamp. Only Jane Addams is presented in full profile (figure 6.6a). Each stamp bears a closed book, scroll, quill pen, or inkwell at the base of the portrait, an element that provided a key to the subject’s category.27 Each set of five stamps contains one green, one red, one purple, one blue, and one brown stamp, the standard colors at the time for the one-, two-, three-, five-, and ten-cent denominations. As with the Prexies, the iconographic uniformity of the Famous Americans series suggests an equality of treatment in which no one profession or person is treated as more honorable than another. Postal users were presented with a range of choices—all, ostensibly, of equal value to each other, like different brands of the same product at the grocery store. Further, choice itself was portrayed as apolitical rather than the result of historical shifts or struggles. But unlike the Prexies, each stamp in the Famous Americans series features an ornate frame specific to the category honored. This explicit return to earlier framing conventions allows the series to suggest both deadness and a historical process that had democratically determined the greatness of the subjects chosen. Moreover, the heavy frames of the Famous Americans mimic the practices of the great metropolitan and national museums, which since the final third of the nineteenth century had made artistic masterpieces available to a broad public that otherwise would not have had access to them. The frames for each category of Famous American differ in style—some more classical, others more streamlined and modernist—thereby suggesting the museum convention of classification by period, style, geographic region, and so on. It is almost as if the seven sets of Famous Americans present a tiny version of a series of rooms in a museum, organized to instruct the public on the national cultural canon. The series included three women—Louisa May Alcott (author), Frances Willard (educator; figure 6.6c), and Jane Addams (scientist)—and one African American, Booker T. Washington (educator; figure 6.6b).

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Neither the philatelic press nor Farley suggested that these subjects were chosen due to their categorical identity—even though women and African Americans had been lobbying the POD for years for the representation of their group on stamps.28 Rather, their inclusion was credited to their hard work and embodiment of the U.S. ideal through their successes. This ahistorical rendition of societal progress empties inclusion of its political content, implying instead that what we now call “diversity” is an inevitable outcome of the U.S. experience. For instance, Max Johl does not use the word woman to describe either Alcott or Addams. Likewise, in his description of the Booker T. Washington stamp, the sole mention of race comes when Johl calls him a “Negro educator.” The history of racial struggle or the fight for education is nowhere mentioned. Indeed, at the first-day ceremony for the stamp at the Tuskegee Institute, PMG Farley opined that Washington’s example showed that “merit, no matter under what skin[,] was in the long run recognized and rewarded.” But he also shocked his audience by likening Washington’s selfless educational work to that of Robert E. Lee after the Civil War, a federal recuperation of the latter that was to continue postally during the Cold War, as we shall see.29 Gender and race haunt the series in other ways. Writing in the American Philatelist in 1948, George Hahn explicitly mentions Alcott’s gender only once (calling her the first woman honored in the Famous Americans series), despite highlighting her femininity otherwise. He notes that Alcott first tried producing and selling dolls’ clothes to make money, a doubly gendered occupation that obviates the distinctively unfeminine act of earning money. Later, she became a nurse during the Civil War, work typically interpreted as a self-sacrificing gesture in keeping with the idea of women as the bearers of moral virtue. Hahn blames this very tendency for her demise: “Always willing to give herself to her family and friends and complying with every demand made upon her time and effort, finally undermined her health, which never had been any too good since her work as nurse.” Though Alcott was unmarried, Hahn crafts her purported devotion to family as evidence of a maternal instinct, thus enshrining her as a paradigmatic angel of the home. He even narrates Alcott’s political activities as a commitment to helping

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others rather than as a struggle for justice: “Always ready to help, she worked hard for the abolition of slavery and gave much of her time for woman’s suffrage.”30 Hahn likewise treats Jane Addams’s work on behalf of the poor as an index of her charitable spirit. He highlights her “generosity” and efforts for the impoverished as evidence of her kindness and intellectual curiosity, not as engaged political action.31 In this vein, Booker T. Washington is portrayed as a pioneer for deeper and broader education, not as a crusader for justice. Indeed, because the series was designed to honor heroes of peace, there was no rhetorical space to focus on barriers to inclusion and thus on sociopolitical struggles. The gradual addition of categories of personhood from which to draw historical persons for the pantheon of democratic heroes is instead cast as inevitable and ahistorical, as uniform as the colors, poses, and frames that render the series aesthetically coherent.

WARM PORTRAITS AND HOT PROPAGANDA: THE LIBERTY ISSUE

The Prexies were the post office’s workhorse stamps from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, when a new definitive series was released over several years beginning in 1954. This was the Liberty issue (Scott nos. 1030–53), celebrated by philatelists for the technical advances in printing and production that would lead to the multicolor stamps of the following decades (see, for example, figures 6.7a–6.7c). According to Ken Lawrence, “No set of U.S. stamps before or since has brought so many innovations in such a short period of time or has departed from traditional methods of stamp design and production in so many respects.” Lawrence cites among those innovations “the streamlining of graphic design that accompanied the proliferation of multicolor and full-color mass print media” and “a revolution in security printing.”32 In addition to technological innovations, the Liberty series conveyed a different ideological message than that of the Prexies, the National

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FIGURE  6.7 Liberty series, beginning 1954: (a) Statue of Liberty (Scott no.  1041); (b) Abraham Lincoln (Scott no. 1036); (c) Robert E. Lee (Scott no. 1049).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Parks series, and the other stamps of FDR’s administration. FDR had used postage stamps to advertise the accomplishments of the federal government in the face of the Depression; for the incoming Eisenhower administration, the most salient threat to the nation came from the Soviet Union and its atheistic, communist ideology. The Cold Warriors of the new administration entered into an atomic arms race with the Soviets that would terrify people, both throughout the world and at home, but at the same time they engaged in a propaganda war that drew on a variety of cultural genres and media, including postage stamps. Eisenhower’s PMG was Arthur Summerfield, “owner of one of the largest General Motors car dealerships in the Midwest,” who believed that “U.S. stamps should be used to propagandize the American way of life as a counter to Communist ideology.” In Summerfield’s view, stamps were geopolitical actors that would illustrate the benefits of a market democracy. The first stamp of the Liberty issue to be released was the eight-cent Statue of Liberty (figure 6.7a), which bore the motto “In God We Trust” and was celebrated by Summerfield as the first definitive stamp to do so. As Lawrence points out, this stamp met the new rate for sending a letter internationally by surface mail, and thus its ideological purpose “was to carry a religious slogan and a particular image of the United States around the world.” It was released on April 8, 1954, at what

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Lawrence calls “the most impressive [stamp] dedication ceremony in U.S. history, broadcast live on television and radio to a nationwide audience,” with Summerfield presiding as well as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and a host of religious, governmental, and diplomatic dignitaries in attendance.33 The series was planned to include eighteen stamps (although more were eventually issued) divided equally among presidents, “other famous Americans who were outstanding figures in public life and exerted great influence in the affairs of the nation,” and historic shrines that “perpetuate some of our most cherished traditions.”34 With this division of topics, it harkens back to the series of 1922–1925, which had included historic sites alongside presidents and other notables and had expanded the categories of the canon by including an “American Indian” man, Hollow Horn Bear. In touting the Liberty issue, PMG Summerfield explained that he had wanted to replace the “cold sculptured busts” of the Prexie series with “warm portraits.” Lawrence claims that these images “project a less regal impression” than the “ornately framed” portraits of prior definitive issues. In the Liberty issue, the dead heads are framed, but in a simple way, and the historic sites are unframed except for the edges of the images. According to Lawrence, the images of the sites “are stately but inviting. Only Liberty herself is awesome, viewed from a low angle, with her torch held aloft as the visionary beacon of the entire set.” This must have been the effect Summerfield had in mind for his propagandistic intention: to present the United States on the world stage as a political entity both stately and humane.35 Yet the Liberty issue expanded the canon in a way that reflected deep tensions within U.S. society—in particular, the tensions of racial strife and sectional fractioning that the Cold Warriors did not want to advertise. In the category of “other famous Americans” we find Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Paul Revere, John Marshall, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, Robert E. Lee, and Susan B. Anthony. Lee and Anthony had already received commemorative stamps, Anthony in 1936 to mark the sixteenth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment (giving women

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the right to vote) and Lee (paired with Stonewall Jackson) in 1937 as part of a ten-stamp series honoring the U.S. military (Scott nos. 784 and 788). As Sheila Brennan recounts, with these stamps the Roosevelt administration both appeased and antagonized specific constituencies: women’s groups had lobbied for years to have women other than Martha Washington among the U.S. heroes honored on stamps; Lee was a choice favored by southerners but inimical to some northerners and to African Americans, whose lobbying was rewarded shortly thereafter with the B. T. Washington stamp of the Famous Americans series.36 The Liberty series included both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee (figures 6.7b and 6.7c). At the turn of the twentieth century, southern memorialists of the Civil War had excoriated Lincoln and proclaimed the primacy of Lee (over Lincoln) as “a man of honor.” But “those who pleaded for a national culture during the interwar years” promoted the idea of Lee and Lincoln as coequal “national” heroes, not “sectional” but “American.” When private citizens began to organize in the early 1950s to commemorate the looming centennial of the Civil War, the federal government set up the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission “to make the planned commemoration a weapon of the cultural cold war.” For this task, Lee was needed alongside Lincoln, not in opposition to him.37 The Lee stamp caught the attention of the press mainly due to a protest from officials of Alexandria, Virginia, who considered their city to be Lee’s “hometown” and therefore objected to the POD’s selection of Norfolk, Virginia, as the site for the stamp’s first-day-of-issue ceremony. The post office refused to change its plans but arranged for a special firstday cancellation in Alexandria. In August and September  1955, the Washington Post and Times Herald reported the affair in apparently humorous terms with headlines about “rebels” and their plan to carry out a “raid” to secure Lee stamps.38 A more dire view of the choice of Lee for a postage stamp was left to the African American press. Writing in the Pittsburgh Courier in October 1957, J. A. Rogers contextualized the Lee stamp as part of the long history of northern appeasement of violent southern racism that began with the collapse of Reconstruction. As Rogers saw it, Lee was a “traitor, murderer and fighter for slavery,” and eighty years of coddling such

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“evil” and failing to protect “Negroes from lynching, murder and every form of atrocity” had at last necessitated the reoccupation by federal troops of a southern city, Little Rock, Arkansas, in the fight over school desegregation that year, a continued history of violence that the stamps, in their blithe inclusion of Lee, failed to acknowledge.39

FROM THE RECOGNITION OF DIFFERENCE TO THE ACCUMULATION OF DIVERSITY: PROMINENT AMERICANS AND GREAT AMERICANS

By the final decades of the twentieth century, the accumulation of difference had become an important commemorative strategy for the United States Postal Service, as the POD was called after 1971. To the  original category of dead heads—presidents and military leaders, which is to say white male persons who had occupied particularly prestigious occupations in the nation-state—had been added, one by one, women, and a Native American man. Next, the Famous Americans presented a richer set of occupational categories worthy of postal recognition, including still more women as well as the first named Black man. The Liberty issue added even more nonpresidential famous Americans but, other than promoting Lee to that category, did little to change the canon. The Prominent Americans issue (Scott nos. 1278–95), begun in 1965, continued the canon-expanding work of the Famous Americans series of 1940 by adding such figures as Elizabeth Blackwell (figure 6.8a), Frank Lloyd Wright (figure 6.8b), Francis Parkman, Albert Einstein, Frederick Douglass, John Dewey, and Eugene O’Neill. The series is notable for the number of people celebrated for their accomplishments in the arts and sciences, an innovation prefiguring the substitution by the end of the century of an apolitical “diversity” for the political recognition of social difference. But the series, designed by thirteen people, lacked “uniformity of design,” and stamp collectors, having “been spoiled by the

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Prominent Americans series, 1965–1981: (a) Elizabeth Blackwell (Scott no. 1399); (b) Frank Lloyd Wright (Scott no. 1280).

FIGURE  6.8

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

simplicity and uniformity of their definitive stamps,” castigated the issue as the “Ugly Americans.”40 In 1980, the Prominent Americans gave way to the Great Americans, three definitive issues (Scott nos. 1844–69, 2168–97, 2933–43) that continued the work of expanding the number of categories of personhood capable of representing the body politic (see figures 6.9a–6.9c). With its sixty-three stamps, the Great Americans series represented more designs than any previous set of stamps,41 and it used this expansiveness to include multiple women and people of color and a wider range of occupational statuses than prior definitive issues had hosted. Given the use of the definitive issue and the wide variety of identities personified on the stamps, the USPS implied, first, that diversity would continue to be a value of the nation-state into the future; second, that it had, for the moment, created a series depicting the full set of citizenship categories at the time; and, third, that it stood ready to expand that set as future social developments required. In doing so, the USPS presented citizenship as a fixed or unchanging container that can include a potentially unlimited variety of types or persons, all treated in the same way. The stamps’ formal features amplify the idea that citizenship has become a uniform condition for a diverse body politic. Each single-color

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Great Americans series, 1980–1999: (a) Crazy Horse (Scott no.  1855); (b) Sitting Bull (Scott no. 2183); (c) Ruth Benedict (Scott no. 2938).

FIGURE  6.9

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

portrait is presented unframed against a white background, and all are designed as though they are pencil drawings. Although the stamps were printed in several different colors, those colors do not consistently correspond to stereotypical understandings of race, gender, or occupation. For instance, the stamps of Crazy Horse, Sequoya, and Red Cloud are shaded in colors ranging from red to brown, which could suggest an Indian racial identity, but several white heroes are similarly colored, and Sitting Bull is green (as are several whites). In presenting people of different races or backgrounds in the same hue and people of the same race or background in different hues, the series makes multiple forms of personhood and a singular democratic citizenship commensurate with each other. Citizenship therefore supersedes the scopophilic tendency to classify people based on race—Native Americans are red, and Asian Americans are yellow, for instance—or to use color to indicate gender—women and gay men are pink, whereas cis-gendered men are depicted with darker colors. The color choices instead frustrate racial, gender, and  ethnic modes of typification. In this series, color is used to differentiate stamps of different monetary value, not to highlight inherent characteristics of any subgroups to which the persons depicted on the stamps may belong. Further, each stamp receives the same formal treatment. Like the Prexies, the Great Americans series removes the frame, this time for all

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individuals presented. Each figure is centered on the stamp, named, and given a value denomination. The location of the name and the monetary value depends on the stamp, but no portrait is surrounded on more than two sides. The lack of a frame suggests that by 1980 the convention that only dead persons appear on stamps had become naturalized, as had the belief in history as the adjudicator of greatness. Yet historical merit had its own preconditions. Like the Founding Fathers’ vision of who deserved full voting rights, the Great Americans series implicitly celebrated a particular kind of person: the white male property holder. Those among the Great Americans who are not white male property owners can differ from that model of personhood in one dimension only: women, for instance, but not nonwhite women. In other words, definitive series could allow for a limited amount of diversity but could not uproot the foundational idea of the white male property holder as the paradigmatic representative of the nation. In chapter 8, we will see that commemorative series, which are episodic and temporary by design, can break with these structuring conditions. Yet in the Great Americans and other definitive series, this rule still holds fast. History determines merit, but only for a specific kind of person and for those who differ from him in only one respect but not others. How the stamps present phenotypical difference amplifies the sense that they treat white male property-holding citizenship as a universal and fungible category that can contain a variety of persons. In addition to its use of color and lack of frame, the Great Americans series frequently erases or elides visual markers of race or gender. Of the set, only Crazy Horse (figure 6.9a) is recognizably nonwhite given his phenotypically Native American features, long hair, and feather. Otherwise, the portraits of people of color do not highlight physical markers of race: Sequoya, Ralph Bunche, and Charles R. Drew could pass as ambiguously raced or peoples of European descent. In the case of Sequoya, only his name gives away his Indigenous status. Similarly, the four women are depicted in a manner identical to their male peers: the pencil work is no softer for them; they are portrayed in similar poses to the men; and they hold no props that identify them as women. Though diversity was clearly a major factor in the decision about whom to include, the formal uniformity

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of the series casts those identity markers as unimportant or subordinates them to the category of citizenship. Moreover, citizenship itself is portrayed as “white” not only because Sequoya, Bunche, and Drew are pictured that way but also because in the abstract color scheme of the series no white people are depicted in ways that would allow them to seem “colored.” This erasure of nonwhite identities is made possible in part through the erasure of the historical processes and struggles that eventually resulted in greater inclusion. In contrast to the Famous Americans series, the stamps lack a key to suggest why this cast of characters deserves to be honored. In removing occupational or historical classification in this manner, the Great Americans series presents citizenship as the great leveler, a category open to all peoples and one that offers success to any person in any role or realm if they apply themselves to it. Yet the choice not to represent figures in a manner that draws attention to their historical background or the movements with which they are associated casts history as placid rather than tumultuous. Sequoya and Crazy Horse are not presented as warriors. Neither Igor Stravinsky nor Ralph Bunche need fight for recognition: not just their occupations are erased, but the historical conditions that threatened their greatness are erased, too. In the wake of the civil rights movement and at the height of the national bicentennial celebrations, the Great Americans issue catalogues different types of Americans as though they all are the same and occupy the category of citizenship equally. In other words, it presents accumulation or proliferation of diversity as the solution to historical strife, even as the USPS employs a formal strategy that obviates or disallows any recognition of that strife. Here, again, citizenship mirrors commercialism in that the achievement of greater inclusion is cast as apolitical and inevitable and that the choice of subject is devoid of political content. In 1986, the USPS expanded the 1980–1986 series with an additional Great Americans series of twenty-eight stamps (Scott nos. 2168–97), which included a person of Puerto Rican descent (Luis Muñoz Martin), an Irish Catholic (Father Edward J. Flanagan), and a Jew (Bernard Revel), among others. At the end of the millennium (1995–1999), a further addition of nine stamps (Scott nos. 2933–43) brought ten new citizens

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into the fold, including the first heterosexual couple honored by one stamp (Lila and DeWitt Wallace). Though in the final nine stamps the subjects’ field of endeavor is listed (“anthropologist,” “land grant colleges,” etc.), and in five of them the depicted people are set against a hazy, colored background (rather than the colored halo set against a white background of the earlier Great Americans series), these stamps are nonetheless nearly identical in terms of form and logic to the earlier prototype. The canon had continued to expand, but the process that led to expansion is no more visible here than in the 1980–1986 issue. For all iterations of the Great American series, U.S. history is additive and progressive, not violent or harsh. Just as the uniformity of the series means that the form of one stamp predicts the form of the next, so too does the next expansion of the canon in this instance ostensibly predict further expansions in a seamless vision of the future.

BEYOND PORTRAITURE: THE AMERICANA SERIES

At the height of the bicentennial period, and between the issuing of the Prominent Americans series and the Great Americans series, the newly reorganized USPS broke with the tradition of dead-head definitives when it launched its first definitive issue since the reorganization. With this issue, the Americana series (1975–1983; Scott nos. 1581–612), the USPS dispensed entirely with portraits and notable figures, turning instead to  objects (a ballot box, the Statue of Liberty, etc.) and patriotic slogans deemed central to the U.S. democratic project (see, e.g., figures 6.10a–6.10d). In doing so, the USPS declined to represent citizenship in its human form, turning instead to a set of objects ostensibly available to everyone. But as was the case with the conventional definitive issues of portraits, this representational tactic served to obviate both political pressures at the time and the larger history of struggle to which the objects allude.

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Americana issue, 1975–1983: book, inkwell, podium, ballot box (Scott nos. 1581–1584).

FIGURE  6.10

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

In retrospect, the Americana series can be seen as a hinge between the older tradition of dead heads on definitives and the tendency— dominant by the end of the century—to issue definitive series that depict only objects rather than people. But the series failed, as Ken Lawrence notes in the American Philatelist, a failure he attributes to “the Postal Service’s overambitious goals” to combine new design principles and printing technologies, all at a time of rapid inflation that necessitated quickly changing postal rates.42 The Americana series designers divided the stamps into five different categories: Roots of Democracy, Rights and Freedoms of the American People, Symbols of America, Pioneer America, and America’s Light. Each of these categories was populated by four stamps that, together with their

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slogan, emblematized their category’s democratic ethos. The lettered inscriptions, which wrapped around “two adjacent edges of the stamp,” allowed collectors to arrange the four stamps in each category into a rectangle such that “the visual effect of the inscriptions is of a single border with rounded corners surrounding four crisply-executed vignettes.”43 Such stylistic choices portray American democracy as regular and complete. When arranged together, the slogans enclose the otherwise unframed stamps in a manner similar to how dead heads were framed earlier in the century. In this instance, rather than suggesting the death of the subject, the letter frames imply the fixity of democratic history and ideals, which no series of dead heads could ever fully portray given that the contents of citizenship continued to change (and, indeed, the logic of progress undergirding so much of democratic ideology in the United States dictated that it had to change). Rather than serving as a diversion from the tactic of whitewashing history, the Americana series amplified it with a placid, strifeless version of U.S. ideals and processes. This evacuation of struggle is particularly notable given the political context at the time. As Ivan Greenberg notes, the period just prior to the series’ release saw greater racial and economic equality due to the successes of the civil rights movement as well as increased transparency in governmental processes and mass surveillance due to such measures as the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act, both passed in 1974. But, he argues, the use of democratic objects in the Americana series forecloses the questions about democratic processes that were pressing at the time—Who rules? Who decides? Who monitors the government?—rather than addressing them.44 The stamps use nationalist objects to appropriate populist energy—implying that “the people” and the state are one—instead of displaying the electoral activism and political struggle that led to social progress. Even stamp content that seems to acknowledge such political activism treats it as legitimate and therefore readily granted by official seats of power, not a victory of the people against the state. For instance, the Rights and Freedoms of the American People category includes both the Capitol building and a printing press, the former suggesting political demonstrations (as in various marches on Washington) and the latter

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pointing to the free press as a stay to governmental corruption and overreach. By honoring these virtues as monuments to democracy, the Americana series suggests that the government readily embraces populist power rather than resisting it. Here, struggle and activism are treated as official conduits of political agency and authorized civic processes, not as tactics wielded against the government when rights are denied.45 Though Greenberg notes the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of gauging how users of the mails reacted to these stamps, the philatelic press did not generally engage with the political messaging latent in the Americana series. In addition to Lawrence’s and others’ discussion of postal rates, the editorial board for the United States Specialist praised the series for promising “an exciting new concept—objects and places associated with American culture rather than mere portraiture alone.” The mainstream and ethnic press repeated this trend, reporting on the use of color and other printing technologies in the series and warning readers about new postal rates instead of analyzing the vision of democracy and political authority the stamps promoted.46 In doing so, the press aligned the turn away from portraiture in the Americana series with advances in printing technology and other kinds of progress (such as progress in philately), a reading that reinforced rather than interrogated the story the stamps tell.

THE DEMISE OF DEAD- HEAD DEFINITIVES

We began our review of twentieth-century definitive stamp series with the Columbian commemoratives, which established a pattern for more complicated stories articulated by a greater number of message-bearing units (single stamps) than had been the norm for nineteenth-century U.S. stamps. Although commemorative stamps began with two long series (the Columbians with sixteen stamps and the Trans-Mississippi issue with nine), commemorative issues gradually shrank to the point that the norm was an issue of one stamp until the advent of se-tenant printing in the 1960s made it possible to issue panes with multiple different stamps at once.47

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Two of the most important commemorative series, National Parks and Famous Americans, bucked the trend toward single-stamp commemoration, but they were more like definitive issues than commemoratives in their use of galleries of images. The National Parks issue realized an idea that had been in the air since the second decade of the century: that “scenic spots of the country” might replace images of “our illustrious dead” on definitive stamps.48 Although released as a commemorative issue and therefore short-lived, the National Parks issue presented a gallery of scenic wonders that could be seen as representing the nation, just as the portraits of a conventional definitive series did. The Famous Americans looked more like typical definitives than commemorative stamps, which made them a suitable response to pent-up citizen desire for an expanded gallery of national heroes. While the dead head remained the primary message-bearing unit of twentieth-century definitive issues, these series came to include other kinds of images as well: scenes, monuments, patriotic icons. Although commemorative stamps started out depicting historical scenes, it soon became permissible to commemorate individual people with dead-head imagery. Indeed, by the end of the century an important inversion had occurred: definitive stamps primarily featured objects, not persons, whereas commemorative stamps, although depicting a wide variety of topics and scenes, had become the primary locus for commemorating individuals. The last twentieth-century definitive series that featured dead heads was the Great Americans issue of sixty-three portraits (1980–1999).49 The Great Americans, with their minimalist design and white background, seem a washed-out version of the venerable definitive series of the first half of the century. Moreover, they may well have been less visible to postal patrons than the more colorful and larger depictions of celebrated persons conveyed on fin-de-siècle commemorative stamps, often released in se-tenant format, launching multiple figures together in one splashy burst. It is to these stamps that we now turn.

PLATE 1 “American Indian” (Hollow Horn Bear) stamp: (a) Scott no.  565 (1923); (b) Scott no. 695 (1931).

Source: Handler’s collection.

PLATE 2

Handmade cameo stamp, 1925. Source: Handler’s collection.

Issue of 1869: (a) Benjamin Franklin (Scott no. 112); (b) train (Scott no. 114), (c) Declaration of Independence (Scott no. 120), (d) national icons (Scott no. 121).

PLATE 3

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 4

Colorful Washington-Franklins, 1909 (Scott no. 365) and 1914 (Scott no. 419). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Great Americans series, 1980–1999: (a) Crazy Horse (Scott no. 1855); (b) Sitting Bull (Scott no. 2183); (c) Ruth Benedict (Scott no. 2938).

PLATE 5

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

First-day cover with USPS envelope and Scott no. 1396, canceled in Phoenixville, PA, with a Pray for Peace slogan. On the “Pray for Peace” slogan, see Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler, “Pray for Peace but Fight Your Insect Enemies: US Postal Messaging and Cold War Propaganda,” Amerikastudien 65, no. 3 (2020): 255–78.

PLATE 6

Source: Handler’s collection.

Postal People (Scott nos. 1489–98) first-day cover, postmarked April 30, 1973, Brooklyn, NY.

PLATE 7

Source: Handler’s collection.

PLATE 8

Bill of Rights stamp, 1966 (Scott no. 1312). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Cartoon letter carriers, 1989 (Scott no. 2420).

PLATE 9

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 10

Mr. Zip, c. 1966. Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

“It All Depends on Zip,” 1974 (Scott no. 1511).

PLATE 11

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Universal Postal Conference of 1989 commemorated with images of traditional mail delivery (Scott nos. 2438a-d).

PLATE 12

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 13 Black Heritage series, 1978–present: Harriet Tubman (Scott no. 1744).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 14 Black Heritage series, 1978–present: Martin Luther King Jr. (Scott no. 1771).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 15 Black Heritage series, 1978–present: Carter G. Woodson (Scott no. 2073).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Black Heritage series, 1978–present: Ida B. Wells (Scott no. 2442).

PLATE 16

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 17

Chief Joseph, 1968 (Scott no. 1364).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 18

American Folk Art series, 1977–1995: Pueblo pottery (Scott nos. 1706–9). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 19

American Folk Art series, 1977–1995: Pacific Northwest masks (Scott nos.

1834–37). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 20 Legends of American Music series, 1993–1999: John Coltrane (Scott no. 2991).

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 21

Civil War pane, 1995 (Scott nos. 2975a–2975t). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

PLATE 22

Legends of the West pane, 1994 (Scott nos. 2869a–2869t). Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Project Mercury stamp, 1962 (Scott no. 1193).

PLATE 23

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Apollo 11 stamp, 1969 (Scott no. C76).

PLATE 24

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Celebrate the Century stamps, 1998–2000: “Desegregating Public Schools” (Scott no. 3187f).

PLATE 25

Source: National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

III T H E STAMP OF NEO LIBE R ALISM

F

7 POSTAL PEOPLE From Industrial Labor, Black Power, and Social Service to Cartoon Citizenship

J

ust as expanding the canon of representative dead heads beyond those who were white and male at times aroused public criticism, so too did a series of stamps devoted to the gentleman of leisure’s class antithesis: the laborer. The Postal People stamps of 1973 that we consider in this chapter remain the sole example of a series of U.S. stamps that depicts people laboring and thereby celebrates both labor and laborers. It is also a series that elicited unusually caustic criticisms from the collector community. On both counts, the Postal People series made visible the implicit limitations on U.S. stamp iconography that had been in place since the beginning of the postage stamp era: in particular, the exclusion, as a topic to be depicted, of labor power and, as we will show, of Black labor power especially. The Postal People series is a testament to the staying power of the paradigm established by the Penny Black and transmuted in the United States in its first two stamps, in which the image of the white, male landowner, at leisure or, even when active, nonlaboring, became the only suitable subject and pose for a postage stamp. Against that backdrop, the Postal People series was wildly idiosyncratic, and, as such, it established no new precedents. Further, it was printed in the wake of postal reorganization wherein the USPOD became the USPS (a government corporation rather than a federal department), and so we describe it as an

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attempt to pacify and quite literally whitewash a restive labor force led by Black organizers. As we saw in the previous chapter, the expansion of the cast of characters in the nation’s postal portrait gallery—its definitive-stamp series—came at the expense of recognition of the political struggles that had led to that expansion in the first place. Nevertheless, all portraits in the gallery were presented equally seriously. As we shall see in this chapter, in the wake of postal reorganization and the Black-led postal strike of 1970, stamps began to present labor, service, and citizenship as cartoonish—a perspective suitable to neoliberal fantasy but far removed from the prior iconography’s attempt to reckon seriously with democratic history.

INAUGURATING THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE

On July 1, 1971, the United States Postal Service took the place of the United States Post Office Department, an act in which “an old-line cabinet agency” was replaced by “a government corporation.” This change was the culmination of decades of struggle over the finances and organization of the post office, the largest civilian agency in the government, with more than seven hundred thousand employees and forty thousand facilities—an agency caught between its unionized workforce and the differing demands of postal users (especially advertisers and publishers) and at the same time trying to cope with “burgeoning mail volumes” while suffering with outmoded equipment.1 To mark the occasion, an eight-cent regular-issue stamp (Scott no. 1396) depicting the new corporation’s logo was released on that day at sixteen thousand “town and city” post offices, at which postal patrons would receive a “free souvenir memento”: a “four-color cacheted envelope” to be offered “one to a customer.”2 Customers could then buy the stamp, affix it to the envelope, and have it canceled on its first day of issue at any of those post offices. Such coverage was unique in the history of first-day postmarking, which rarely occurs at more than two locations

POSTAL PEOPLE17 1

for any given stamp because the locations are integral to the story of the person, place, or event depicted on the stamp. It would seem obvious that this mass postmarking was intended to symbolize the postal system and hence the nation in its entirety. The cacheted envelope, produced by the USPS (unlike most covers, which are privately produced but “serviced” or postmarked by the postal service), shows the new logo partially overlain on the logo of the defunct Post Office Department (figure 7.1). The new logo features an eagle, suitably stylized to suggest corporate power and efficiency: the red, white, and blue coloring is redolent of the U.S. flag, and the eagle’s outstretched wings suggest the speed of flight. In contrast, the post rider of the POD’s logo suggests a respected but now superseded past. Indeed, the border text that makes explicit the post office’s relationship to the U.S. government as a federal agency (“Post Office Department–U.S. Government”) is overlain and interrupted by the new logo, leaving the red, white, and blue color scheme and the eagle to do the work of indicating U.S. nationalism. The two-dimensional overlay suggests temporality, the

First-day cover with USPS envelope and Scott no. 1396, canceled in Phoenixville, PA, with a Pray for Peace slogan. On the “Pray for Peace” slogan, see Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler, “Pray for Peace but Fight Your Insect Enemies: US Postal Messaging and Cold War Propaganda,” Amerikastudien 65, no. 3 (2020): 255–78.

FIGURE  7.1

Source: Handler’s collection.

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progressive replacement of one system by another—a standard feature of FDC graphics. Such images suggest a trend from a time when the post office was understood to be a government agency central to citizenship, circulation, and communication in the nation-state to a later moment when the institution, burdened with a history and a mission increasingly out of tune with an ascendant neoliberal political economy, struggled to remake itself as an efficient business organization competing successfully with the likes of FedEx and UPS. In this case, as perhaps is true in others, these neoliberal exigencies were also racial ones. In “streamlining” the USPOD into the USPS, the federal government significantly stymied Black federal labor power. Though postal iconography and official postal history have treated this political transition as both inevitable and a matter of technological progress and efficiency, the underlying managerial strategy indicates the degree to which antilabor politics overlap with anti-Blackness. In the process, the history of Black organizing in the post office and, indeed, the important presence of Black postal workers have mostly been effaced both in discussions of postal and labor history and in postal iconography.

POSTAL REORGANIZATION, POSTAL WORKERS, AND THE WILDCAT STRIKE OF 1970

A telling contrast to the USPS’s new logo, exemplifying the smooth ascent of technological determinism to supersede outmoded practices, is the cover of Life magazine for November 28, 1969. It depicted a postman framed by a postage stamp, askew relative to the cover, reaching into his mailbag only to unleash a torrent of letters that spill downward toward the reader, covering the lower half of the page (figure 7.2). The image suggests both excess and decay, a fact highlighted by the use of the wavy lines of a killer cancel across the bottom half of the image. The deluge breaks the frame of the postage stamp, suggesting a problem that exceeds historical boundaries and that cannot be contained within the

FIGURE 7.2

Life magazine, cover, November 28, 1969. Source: Shutterstock.

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current structures of the post office. Life’s postman is depicted as incapable of performing his duties, an impression highlighted by his downward gaze and furrowed brow: a subdued reaction that indicates a kind of resignation to disorder. Inside the magazine, a four-hundred-word synopsis of a “vast postal system” on the verge of “collapse” is paired with a picture of chaos. Using time-lapse photography, Life showed four women bent over another torrent of letters spread out in a sorting tray in front of them, an image illustrating (so its caption said) “the relentless, growing pressure on the U.S. postal system—some 26,000 pieces processed every second” (figure 7.3). The ghostly image of limbs moving frantically across time portrays the work as belated, the workers constantly seeking to catch up. It is as though the letters come from a deity or another realm, rather than fellow citizens. The women are featured without faces—an anonymous, almost indistinguishable group moving mechanically as they work at a task they can never complete. In keeping with these images, Life blamed the coming collapse of the postal service on mismanagement and “hopelessly outdated” work processes and equipment. The postman and mail sorters in these images were beleaguered but helpless against forces over which they had no control. A very different kind of force disrupting the mail had been illustrated a few months earlier in a cartoon on the cover of the March–April 1969 number of Postal Life (figure 7.4). Here a postman with a bulging sack walks from left to right along a sidewalk, while a woman moves toward him from right to left on the opposite side. The woman wears a dress with a full skirt (we see some of the tulle peeking out of the bottom), a double-stranded pearl necklace, gloves, cloche hat with a bow, trench coat, purse, and heels: all markers of gentility. Their progress, however, has been interrupted by a gust of wind, which has vacuumed a stream of letters out of the postman’s bag. With a look of surprise, his mouth open and his eyes wide, he watches helplessly as the letters escape, even as he holds his postman’s hat tightly on his head to avoid losing control of it, too. The woman, meanwhile, who has already lost her hat to the wind and seems about to topple over, nonetheless bends over to hold down her skirt—so concerned is she, apparently, with the risk of exposing her undergarments.

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Disruption due to both human incapacity and natural forces: two different narratives. Yet this fanciful depiction in Postal Life suggests what is at stake in the coming postal system collapse illustrated by Life later that same year. As we saw in chapter 1, in 1855 James Holbrook had upheld the sanctity of the mailbag as a container for the private communications of individuals, defended against violation by the U.S. Constitution. A decade later Spencer Clark had to defend himself repeatedly against allegations that he had sexually violated his women workers at the Treasury Department. As we noted in chapter 4, the Clark affair brought into focus the cultural connection between the moral integrity of a country’s currencies and the purity of its sexual mores. The two magazine covers, read in tandem, suggest a similar nexus: the nation that fails to control its mail risks being overwhelmed, whether by nature, unleashed mechanical forces, or moral decay. Women here stand again for the nation’s vulnerability, and the mishandling of currency once again endangers their chastity Likewise, two dominant narratives, sometimes overlapping and sometimes competing, document the events that led to postal reorganization: one focusing on “natural” technocratic forces, the other on human labor. The technocratic perspective attributes the post office’s failure in keeping pace with private competitors to the nature of its employee pay structure, inability to innovate, and Congress’s insistence on keeping postal rates low. From this vantage point, postal reorganization is seen as a victory for management sciences and business values. By converting the USPOD into a government corporation, reformers liberated it from the political pressures stymieing its advancement and gave it the flexibility to run like a business rather than a legacy agency. The other view takes the position of postal workers, arguing that the wildcat post office strike in 1970 forced the Nixon administration’s hand, leading it to capitulate on an important labor protection: the right to bargain collectively for wages and benefits. This victory, however, is seen as incomplete. Although workers were successful in gaining a status otherwise closed to federal workers, they forfeited their right to strike. At the same time, postal reorganization in general participated in the amplification of neoliberal policies toward the close of the Cold War, a situation largely

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