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Crossed Wires
Crossed Wires
The Conflicted History of US
Telecommunications, from the Post Office
to the Internet
DA N S C H I L L E R
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197639238.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
To My Marvelous Family
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
PA RT I . A N T I M O N O P O LY
PA RT I I . P U B L IC U T I L I T Y
PA RT I I I . D IG I TA L C A P I TA L I SM
Notes 611
Index 789
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the people who have helped me with the thinking and
writing that have gone into this book, which I have worked on by fits and starts
throughout most of my academic life.
As a complement to my PhD studies in Communications at the University
of Pennsylvania, I enrolled in several graduate History seminars, out of which
came a lifelong engagement with radical history. Frequent and often intense
conversations with classmates, above all, with Marcus Rediker and Nancy
Hewitt, were formative. Power was not unconditional: While contradictory so-
cial relations remained dominative, they were also far from one-dimensional.
The views, beliefs, and actions of the dispossessed would be matters of enduring
consequence for my research in communications history.
Across town at Temple University, beginning in 1979 I became one of a group
of faculty members focusing on the political economy of communications. In
addition to her research on “movies and money,” Janet Wasko knew the realities
of working for a big media corporation at first-hand. Vincent Mosco had studied
broadcasting and was researching new media; he also brought a fresh experi-
ence of Washington, DC, telecommunications policymaking. Dallas Smythe’s
engagement with telecommunications—and radical politics—stretched back to
the 1930s, and his bibliographic reach was remarkable. In this energizing milieu,
I originated my first courses on telecommunications history and began to super-
vise talented doctoral students.
After reading a draft of my book, Telematics and Government (1982), Vinny
urged me to undertake a full-blown revision of US telecommunications his-
tory. Our conversations about this topic were many, and fruitful. How, though,
might I develop a second book about telecommunications—a subject universally
written about from the top down, including by me in my earlier work—while
fulfilling my goal of writing radical social history? Between visits to the National
Archives I pondered this question.
In 1986–1987, Everette E. Dennis arranged for me to enjoy a year-long fel-
lowship at Columbia’s University’s then Gannett Center for Media Studies.
A tributary of the research I pursued there streamed into this book, from days
spent in the AT&T archives—then located at 195 Broadway in New York City.
The talented research assistant David Stebenne, now a senior historian and legal
scholar, performed invaluable research at Columbia’s libraries.
x Acknowledgments
Susan Davis has lived with this project from beginning to end, a witness to
the delight of archival discovery and the agony of authorial expression. She has
listened to my thoughts as they sought to form, and read and criticized long
sections of this book—sometimes to my consternation, always to my benefit. No
less, through the years she has greatly deepened my awareness of the historical
importance of traditions of vernacular dissent and popular cultural expression.
Lucy and Ethan Schiller have never been too busy to ask about “the book” and to
offer advice when I requested it. My brother Zach has been a stalwart: being able
to rely on him has made a material difference to my ability to complete this work.
I am grateful to Nico Pfund for keeping faith. During a virulent season my
acquisitions editor, James Cook, managed to find exceptional readers for this
manuscript: their learned, detailed, and critical reviews were inestimably valu-
able for my revision. And, always good-spiritedly, Kaya Learnard met every dead-
line as she read and formatted the text—a daunting and much-appreciated labor.
Modified excerpts from the following works by me have been used in
Crossed Wires:
Networks and the Age of Nixon. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2018 (Chinese print
edition).
“ ‘Let Them Move the Mail with Transistors Instead of Brains’: Labour Convergence in
Posts and Telecommunications, 1972–3” (coauthored with Caroline Nappo), Work
Organisation, Labour and Globalisation 4, 2 (2010). https://www.scienceopen.com/hos
ted-document?doi=10.13169/workorgalaboglob.4.2.0010 License at: https://creative
commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
“The Hidden History of U.S. Public Service Telecommunications, 1919–1956,” Info Vol. 9
Nos. 2/3, March 2007: 17–28. Emerald.
“Social Movement in U.S. Telecommunications: Rethinking the Rise of the Public Service
Principle, 1894–1919,” Telecommunications Policy 22 (4), 1998. Emerald.
Introduction
A Missing History
The infamous Chicago Democratic convention of 1968 nearly didn’t happen, be-
cause of a telephone strike.
Illinois Bell Telephone Company was to wire up Chicago’s International
Amphitheater, the city’s major hotels, and other downtown locations with
extra telephone lines and a variety of specialized circuits. News agencies, na-
tional newspapers, and regional and network TV broadcasters would flood into
Chicago for the media-rich confab, which was scheduled to begin on August
26th. The complex wiring process would require five weeks to be completed, be-
fore the convention could begin.
Nearly 12,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers (IBEW) walked out at Illinois Bell on May 8, seeking wage gains to
make up for high inflation. (1968 saw the greatest strike wave since 1959, and
most of the strikes were significantly motivated by economic factors.) By early
summer, as the strike grew prolonged, Democratic officials began to worry.
Rumors circulated that Miami was being considered as an alternative site. On
July 15, the New York Times reported that an IBEW leader hoped “to avoid the
embarrassment of Chicago losing the convention because of our dispute.”1
At the last minute—July 23—an extraordinary fix was arranged by Democratic
Mayor Richard Daley, the Chicago Federation of Labor, and IBEW officials.
Albeit with some reported “dissension,” the city’s own labor movement author-
ized 300 IBEW members to install much of the needed wiring on a “voluntary
basis”—that is, to undercut the strike. Labor leaders vowed to step up their
support for the continuing IBEW walkout in other ways, and restrictions were
imposed on the volunteers: no work would be supervised by Bell managers; and
no circuits would be installed outside the Amphitheater. The convention could
proceed, and Democrats breathed sighs of relief.2
This did not end the matter. Descending on Chicago to greet the official gath-
ering were thousands of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. They were met by
12,000 Chicago police in riot gear, and an additional 15,000 Army and National
Guard troops. As the convention got underway, demonstrators and journalists
were tear-gassed and clubbed; many demonstrators were dragged off to jail amid
a bloody police riot.3
Crossed Wires. Dan Schiller, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197639238.003.0001
2 Introduction
Yet breaking news of the protest and its repression did not reach the conven-
tion floor. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite recalled, that “delegates had no idea
what was happening.” The reason? IBEW volunteers had not installed microwave
circuits needed to broadcast live TV outside the Amphitheater, so that videotape
needed to be hand-delivered from Lincoln and Grant parks, where much of the
violence was occurring, to the Amphitheater miles away. There, it was processed
and broadcast. This arrangement caused delays of an hour or more. When the
video was belatedly aired, so that both delegates and tens of millions of other
Americans witnessed the events taking place on the streets, uproar ensued. On
live television, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff called out Mayor Daley’s
“Gestapo tactics” to his face. The existing division between pro- and antiwar
factions of the Democratic Party widened into a chasm in real time. The conven-
tion, a scholar writes, “suffered a political crisis of epic proportions.”4
The IBEW walkout continued until September 21, so that it lasted 137 days
all told. Many union members found other jobs as the economic pressures of
being without work became acute. Though IBEW officials urged members to re-
ject Bell’s final contract offer, in the end they voted to return to work by a nearly
two-to-one margin.5
This story reveals that telecommunications may claim an unexpected signif-
icance on the historical stage. It also shows that decisions about networking—
in this case, about providing microwave circuits for live coverage—may be a
function not of engineering but of power relations and political horse-trading.
Crossed Wires unearths many such stories. They illuminate a history that
has evolved through contention and struggle. If we would understand these
moments of conflict and change, we need to connect them to prevailing social
and political power relations. Thus, the approach adopted here is not to appeal
to an overarching economic theory, a managerial vision, a legal concept, a tech-
nological necessity, or a civic consensus. My aims are two: to restore the contour
lines left by a divided and dominative society upon network development; and to
emphasize how recurrent struggles by workers, consumers, and political radicals
have also shaped them. The narrative arc of this book is formed by the marks
made on telecommunications, again and again, not only by social and political
pressures, but by counter-pressures from below and from the sides—as with the
Chicago Convention of 1968.
*
How may we open the study of telecommunications in this way, across the span of
US history? I have adhered to two chief guidelines in developing my arguments.
First, my account places networks within a broad historical sweep, and therefore
I have needed to consult an extensive secondary scholarship.
Introduction 3
*
After decades of neglect, historians have recaptured for the US Post Office some
of its former stature. As Richard R. John demonstrates, this longtime govern-
ment department both interacted with major political and cultural movements
of the early-to-mid nineteenth century and provided institutional foundations
for state-building and industrialization. This recognition, vital in itself, does not
complete the task of revaluation.
4 Introduction
We will see in Chapter 1 that the government Post Office and, subsequently,
the corporate telegraph shared two shaping features. First and foremost, both
served a voracious territorial imperialism. Posts and telegraphs were parts of
the process of military conquest and settlement, to the west and to the south of
North America. Imperialism was, from the outset, a defining historical feature of
the US political economy—and telecommunications networks were bound up
in it. Second, these two networks catered for business users; telegraph service in
particular placed the communicative needs of the general population distinctly
second.
There were also divergences. Entangled in party politics, during the second
half of the 19th century the Post Office provided an increasingly cheap, efficient,
and universal service. For many contemporaries, therefore, it came to exemplify
the best side of the postbellum state. The telegraph, by contrast, was a paragon
of modern corporate corruption, the center of a web of monopoly predation, fi-
nancial machinations, and political influence-mongering. The government Post
Office and the corporate telegraph thus presented contemporary Americans—
who tended to take for granted, even to naturalize, their common imperial
role—with a sharply polarized model of network system development.
There was no question as to which system enjoyed greater esteem, as Chapter 2
emphasizes. Uniting under a credo of “antimonopoly,” reform movements aimed
to “postalize” the country’s now swiftly evolving telecommunications in their
entirety. Negatively, antimonopolists sought to eliminate powerful corpo-
rate monopolies, including those of the Western Union Telegraph Company
and, slightly later, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T).
Positively, they hoped to expand access to telegraphs and telephones; to ration-
alize rates; and, for some of the workers who campaigned under their banner, to
improve labor conditions. This movement carried forward for several decades
and it increasingly targeted the wondrous third network system that was being
established around the telephone.
Not surprisingly, the postalization scheme and its proponents drew obdu-
rate opposition. AT&T was surpassing Western Union, and AT&T’s executives
attempted energetically to disarm the antimonopolists. Municipal, state, and
federal authorities were all drawn in, and played disparate roles. Episodically,
and through moments freighted with contingency, Chapter 3 shows, during the
first two decades of the twentieth century the postalization movement splintered.
Key groups of participants—big business users of networks and independent
suppliers of telephone service, thousands of which had rushed in to provide tel-
ephone service—unevenly reached a separate peace with the giant telephone
company. Many telecommunications workers nevertheless continued to struggle
for postalization, out of a conviction that the state would be a less onerous em-
ployer than a private corporation.
Introduction 5
companies. While these competitors battered one another, and as Western and
Postal supplicated their corporate customers with discounts and rebates, already
straitened telegraph workers began to protest their pitiful wages and miserable
working conditions.
The experimental genius of the Roosevelt government was to establish
what was, for a few years, an unusually robust and interventionist Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC investigated and rescued the
telecommunications system from what it identified as twin evils: monopoly in
a telephone industry dominated by AT&T, and competition in a telegraph in-
dustry spinning out of control around multiple suppliers. The New Deal also
renovated and modernized the Post Office.
The centerpiece of its stabilization program was a freshly creative concep-
tion of public utility. Rather than continuing merely to anchor legal doctrines
for negotiating the terms of trade via state commissions and courts, in the New
Deal years the public utility framework was rejuvenated, opened to far-reaching
reform initiatives. It became a domain of political ferment; and an unfinished
vessel, to be filled in ways not yet wholly evident.
At its outset, the FCC gained authority to undertake an unprecedented crit-
ical investigation of the nation’s telephone industry. Drawing on a special con-
gressional appropriation, the inquiry combed through AT&T’s corporate
records and compiled documentary findings that proved essential to antitrust
prosecutions of the giant company over the succeeding forty years. In the im-
mediate context, nevertheless, AT&T managed to neuter the FCC’s most radical
policy prescriptions.
As big business’s credibility had been badly wounded by the Depression,
organized labor began to make its own inroads in claiming a public mandate.
Chapters 5 and 6 detail how telegraph and telephone workers established indus-
trial unions and how these organizations in turn intervened in telecommunica-
tions policymaking—at some points working closely with members and staff at
the FCC.
Independent telegraph unions made their voices heard from the start of
President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and their critique of the industry’s
problems differed sharply from that offered by telegraph company management.
Amid an upswell of radical militancy in the working class, an upstart union of
left-wing radio telegraphers renamed itself the American Communications
Association (ACA). The ACA emerged just as a great new industrial labor
federation—the Congress of Industrial Organizations—was rapidly organizing
US heavy industry and pushing forward an often-radical social unionism. The
CIO awarded ACA a charter which conferred upon the small union jurisdiction
to organize the entire electrical and electronic telecommunications services in-
dustry. (Telecommunications equipment manufacturing was reserved by a far
Introduction 7
larger, also Communist-led, CIO affiliate, the United Electrical Workers.) The
ACA threw itself into industrial and political action. From its base in a failing
rival of Western Union—Postal Telegraph—ACA attempted to enlarge its mem-
bership at other carriers. Above all, however, it struggled to stave off a merger
between Postal and Western Union. Wall Street had aimed for such a combi-
nation since the early years of the Depression, and it was expected to result in
widespread layoffs—especially among the ACA members who worked dispro-
portionately at Postal Telegraph. With its allies in the CIO and the New Deal ad-
ministration, ACA’s militant social unionism succeeded in forestalling a merger
until the middle of World War II.
Again backed by the CIO, ACA organizers also spread out across the far-flung
telephone subsidiaries of AT&T. Here they made more limited progress. Their
difficulties were initially a function of AT&T’s strength as a bastion of “employee
representation plans”—company unions—and an unrelenting foe of the CIO’s
social unionism. As the war period continued, however, ACA’s lackluster suc-
cess in AT&T reflected a different development: self-organization by telephone
workers. Telephone workers were haltingly transforming dozens of AT&T com-
pany unions into independent unions and beginning to unite these organiza-
tions, separate from either the CIO or the AFL. Composed nearly entirely of
white women and men, and fragmented by gender, craft and region, this vast
employee group had deemed itself as privileged. However, spurred by lagging
pay and the nationwide unionization movement, AT&T employees undertook
an uphill climb to establish a genuine industrial organization of their own. After
two strikes—one an epic triumph, the next a near-catastrophic rout—telephone
workers united in 1947 within a new international union, the Communications
Workers of America.
This arduous process reflected not only internal workplace factors but also
convulsions in US politics and foreign policy. As World War II ended, business
leaders and right-wing politicians mobilized in a bid to arrest the process of do-
mestic New Deal reform, and to contain the reach and power of unions—above
all, CIO unions. A great international initiative fed into and strengthened this
domestic reversal, as US leaders seized the leadership of global capitalism while,
simultaneously, they moved to combat Soviet socialism and to coopt and can-
alize the revolutionary nationalism that was erupting in the colonial world. The
Democratic coalition around Harry Truman (who fell into the presidency at the
death of Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945) threw itself into this fraught and com-
plex mission; and the US lurched into a global cold war. Facing intense pres-
sure from within and without, the CIO responded by realigning itself to comport
with this cold war policy. This wrenching transition left claw-marks across US
society, including on telephone unionism. The CIO stripped the Communist-
led ACA of its jurisdiction and pushed it aside, in order to bring an initially
8 Introduction
fragile and lastingly mainstream CWA into the federation as an affiliate union.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, CWA won successive wage and benefits gains
for its increasing membership while becoming one of the nation’s largest indus-
trial unions.
Chapter 7 switches perspective to focus on the sharply changing domain of
consumption. The three major services followed distinct paths here. Despite
the Western Union-Postal Telegraph merger, telegraph service was still used
by only a small fraction of Americans and continued to cater to business users;
starting in the late 1950s it became additionally marginalized by a new product-
substitute: computer communications. Despite management rescue schemes,
throughout the next decades it became moribund. By contrast, the Post Office
lost none of its general popularity. It did, however, become more commercial. It
had acted as a formal channel for the marketing and distribution of commodities
since the late nineteenth century, and these functions were massively expanded
during the decades after World War II. Commercial mailings, circulars, and
catalogs flooded the mails. Likewise, the telephone network was substantially
repurposed to accelerate commodity circulation. Telephone instruments had
previously been both beautifully designed and built to last—but on a standard
pattern. In the 1960s a widening array of models and styles were introduced, as
handsets were turned into objects of consumer desire. Meanwhile, new services,
notably outward and inward wide-area telecommunications (800 numbers),
breached the defenses of household castles, which again became sites of com-
mercial invasion.
Throughout the first two postwar decades, therefore, the public utility frame-
work itself was modified. On one side, completing a process that had originated
decades earlier in urban movements for cheap telephone access, a multifarious
regulatory program for lowering residential rates at last succeeded, and house-
hold telephone service became relatively universal. However, this tremendous
achievement was far from an unmixed blessing. It contributed to making endless
private commodity consumption, and all that followed from it, a necessity for
economic growth. Simultaneously, as Chapter 8 demonstrates, a second muta-
tion also perverted the public utility conception. During the first postwar decade
policymakers used this model to inject an urgent priority to US corporate-
military technological innovation in and around networking.
Throughout prior decades AT&T had built up the world’s preeminent corpo-
rate research and development facilities. During the 1930s and 1940s, the patent
policies that AT&T affixed to its process of corporate invention drew intense crit-
ical scrutiny. Chicago Federation of Labor representative Edward Nockels and
a variety of New Deal officials charged that AT&T’s patents constituted an eco-
nomic affliction, that the company’s patent monopoly collided with the govern-
ment efforts to kickstart the economy and reduce mass unemployment. Labor
Introduction 9
tens of thousands of miserably paid postal workers, federal employees who were
not legally allowed to strike, staged an unauthorized walkout: a wildcat. The strike
started in New York City and spread outward from there, across the country and
across the different postal crafts. While calling out the National Guard to restore
mail service—a largely symbolic move—the President began to negotiate be-
hind the scenes, through his trusted aide Charles Colson. Colson importuned
James Rademacher, the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers,
who had backed Nixon in 1968. Working closely with Rademacher, and offering
pay raises and government recognition of collective bargaining rights for the
postal unions—though not a right to strike—the administration induced the
wildcatters to return to work and gained the unions’ acquiescence to postal re-
form. Nixon’s postal reorganization plan thereupon sailed through Congress,
with bipartisan support: the United States Postal Service was established. This
profound institutional alteration was brokered through compromise with the
postal labor force—opposed by many rank-and-file postal workers—whose
labor rights were strengthened in the process.
In telephony, meanwhile, the late 1960s and early 1970s again saw a labor
upsurge. Groups of militant CWA telephone workers—mainly but not only in
heavily unionized New York—demonstrated both antagonism toward their em-
ployer and hardening unwillingness to abide by edicts issued by their own union
officials. Their actions portended that business-as-usual within a bureaucratic
union, content to operate within the state’s canalized labor relations machinery,
could no longer be taken for granted. A national CWA strike in 1971 became an
occasion for dissenting rank-and-file telephone workers to exhibit considerable
strength and staying power. Some of them displayed a new social unionism, one
that opposed CWA’s official alignment with US foreign policy as well as AT&T’s
racist and sexist employment policies.
Social movement activists—some working within AT&T and others outside
it—were concurrently allying with sympathetic lawyers and a maverick member
of the FCC to use the telecommunications industry’s legal status as a public utility
to try to force an end to employment discrimination. Black, Mexican American,
and women workers all contributed. Gay rights activists also demonstrated for
employment rights at the telephone company, slightly later. During the Nixon
years, their joint endeavors succeeded. The nation’s largest corporate employer
was compelled, through a consent decree signed with the Justice Department,
to institute affirmative action programs. These spelled out dramatic change even
beyond AT&T. They established a template for curtailing employment discrim-
ination across the face of corporate America. Revived by workers’ movements
to mesh labor and civil rights, and brought home by federal intervention, public
utility principles became a springboard to greater social justice and seemed
about to open outward on even greater possibilities.
Introduction 11
Where might such disruptions to the status quo end? How might they be
arrested and, if possible, reversed? Business and political elites persuaded them-
selves that the political and social problems of the early 1970s lay in too much
“entitlement,” too much democracy. The initiatives being undertaken by con-
temporary rank-and-file workers and activists, many if not most of them women
and minorities, did not attest the existence of a unitary movement, indeed, their
varied movements betrayed substantial centrifugal force. However disparate,
they nevertheless reinforced a conviction among elites that too much power had
been amassed—was being exercised—from below. In the view from above, it
was the whole messy combination of dissident rank-and-file insurgency, social
movement activism, and organized labor’s institutional strength that needed to
be contained and countered.
The Nixon Administration engaged this critical problem by redirecting
the course of electronic telecommunications through regressive policy
interventions. As with postal reorganization, Nixon’s entry point was already es-
tablished: an Executive Branch proceeding on communication policy conducted
by the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson during its final tumul-
tuous year. Chapter 10 unravels the hidden backstory of this proceeding, which
was supervised by Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow, exposing sharp in-
ternecine conflicts within the undertaking as it progressed. The Rostow Report
endorsed the introduction of competition into a limited set of advanced tele-
communications services, but expressly retained the public utility framework.
The President, however, handed off the unpublished Report to his successor’s
transition team, with no recommendation.
During the first postwar decades, right-wing businessmen had sponsored
a recrudescence of free-market economic ideas and policies as an antidote to
what they deemed intolerable government regulation. Liberals, by contrast,
were becoming persuaded that government had lost an effective purchase on the
regulated industries: that regulators had been coopted by the interests they were
supposed to oversee. The result was an increasing convergence in mainstream
political opinion. While Democrats endorsed limited competition to restrain a
hidebound telephone monopoly, Republicans demanded to pare back regulation
on new network industries and markets. It was the Nixon Administration that
brought this advancing synthesis to bear upon telecommunications.
Nixon’s men published the Rostow Report, after determining that it could be
used to justify their own much more radical policy program. Nixon’s point-man,
a young MIT PhD named Clay T. Whitehead, worked directly with some of the
incoming President’s closest advisors, including especially Peter M. Flanigan, an
investment banker serving as a top economic aide. Together they set in motion
a great lurch in policymaking for advanced networks, initiating an era of digital
capitalism.
12 Introduction
Only in 2013 did it become generally known that the global internet was being
systematically exploited by interlocking US intelligence agencies and globally
commanding US tech companies. After this, some of the same centrifugal forces
that had hit earlier against the Intelsat system again showed themselves with re-
spect to the internet. Economic competitors, above all China, seized internet
markets for non-US equipment and service suppliers, while geopolitical rivals—
China again in the lead—began to chip away at US organizational dominance.
From the Post Office of the early republic to the internet of the present day,
networks figured throughout US imperialism as the American empire itself was
resisted and reorganized. Crossed Wires concludes by sketching how the long and
jagged line of political conflict and social struggle likewise continued to mark US
telecommunications during the 21st century.
PART I
A N T I MONOP OLY
1
Paths into an Imperial Republic
Posts and Telegraphs
Crossed Wires. Dan Schiller, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197639238.003.0002
20 Antimonopoly
Duly impressed by how the mails operated to “enlarge the common life” a mid-
twentieth century historian also asserts that, in the early republic, “[n]o neces-
sity . . . existed” for using the postal system “to advance the country’s economic
interests in foreign lands.” This second claim is fundamentally mistaken. During
the early years of US nationhood foreign lands lay just west of the Appalachians.
This territory was inhabited and organized by native peoples “as nations, tribes,
confederacies, and other durable polities.”4
Even before the formation of the United States, indeed, from the beginning of
settlement, colonists were invading others’ lands and, thereafter, pushing west
beyond hazy legal boundaries. During the Republic’s first decades, furthermore,
Paths into an Imperial Republic 21
political elites’ “carefully drawn plans . . . for the orderly surveying and settlement
of the West were simply overwhelmed by the massive and chaotic movement of
people”: in just one generation, Americans occupied more territory than they
had taken over during the entire 150-year-span of the colonial era. Historian
Steven Hahn specifies that, from the outset, “power in the Pacific had been cen-
tral to the continental ambitions of American leaders and policy makers.” The
west coast offered both a launch-point for ventures seeking economic riches in
east and south Asia, and a line of opposition against the designs of competing
powers active in different parts of North America: Britain, France, Spain, Russia,
and Mexico (after it won independence in 1821). Thomas Jefferson, who as pres-
ident engineered the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, wanted ports on
the Gulf of Mexico for an “empire of liberty” which, he hoped, would ultimately
also encompass Florida, Cuba, Mexico, and Canada. The year before he actually
sent out Lewis and Clark in 1804, Jefferson already planned “an ostensibly scien-
tific but also a covert military and commercial expedition into the Spanish-held
trans-Mississippi West”—whose real destination was the Pacific coast. Between
1801 and 1817 Jefferson and his successor as president, James Madison, over-
laid a veneer of comity on the killing or displacement of tens of thousands of
Indians by negotiating fifty-three treaties of cession with Native American
groups. Jefferson’s powerful Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, insisted that
only “by opening speedy and easy communication through all its parts” could
“the inconveniences, complaints, and perhaps dangers” of so “vast [an] extent of
territory be radically removed or prevented.” Virtually every successive admin-
istration asserted this same dictum; and the settlers themselves wanted river ac-
cess and roads, to help them market some of what they produced. The Post Office
figured as an essential component in this program, a vital participant in “a vio-
lently expansive empire of settlers, feeding on land and displacing everything in
its path.” Wars to dispossess and expel Native Americans, settler occupation, and
westward postal expansion were intertwined features of a century-long process.5
Even before 1800, American merchants and manufacturers were reaching
into regional markets; their need to exchange bills, checks, receipts, bank notes,
credit reports, specie, and commodity price information increased with every
rise in shipments of cotton, iron, grain, lumber, and consumer goods. To facili-
tate these information flows among dispersed and typically small units of capital,
a postal infrastructure linking city centers with distant markets was successively
extended, sometimes even in advance of any direct commercial imperative. Thus
the Post Office functioned as a two-stroke engine, firing on behalf of both terri-
torial conquest and market intensification. “(N)o inconsiderable amount of the
active capital of the country, in some form or other, passes through the mail,”
reported the capable Postmaster General John McLean in 1828—as much as
$100 million annually by 1855, in one estimate, or nearly twice the total federal
22 Antimonopoly
budget. Not by accident did Congress provide for the death penalty in instances
of mail robbery, which remained a capital crime until 1872. The young nation’s
postal telecommunications provided an indispensable platform for the cir-
culation of capital; and business and commercial users delimited its primary
functions. Looking back from the vantage point of 1866, Postmaster General
Alexander Randall boasted with considerable justification that the Post Office
“has done more to aid in developing the resources of the country than anything
else except the cultivation of the soil.”6
Political considerations also were bound up in this. With the election of
president Andrew Jackson in 1828, the benefits that the robustly expanding
postal establishment stood to confer proved irresistible. New post offices, mail
contracts for postriders, stagecoach, steamship, and subsequently railroad
companies, not to mention an expanded and improved postal service, were
all but guaranteed to enhance the popularity of legislators who, assembled in
Congress, held the power to authorize new postal routes. During and after the
1820s, postmasterships became a primary site of political patronage by the gov-
erning party. A franking privilege, finally, enabled incumbent legislators to enjoy
a direct, publicly-sponsored, link to prospective voters. By the early 1840s, in one
estimate, members of Congress would bestow their franks on 300,000 letters and
4.3 million documents per year.7
Its political charter positioned the Post Office to pursue a program of prodi-
gious expansion. An enabling Act of 1792 recreated the primitive US mail service
that had been established by the British. Mostly but not entirely supplanting less
comprehensive systems of informal and private carriage, the Post Office became
the principal means of written message exchange in the young United States.
“Though in 1789 postal operations barely scratched the eastern seaboard, by
1800 service was provided to the farthest reaches of the western and southern
frontiers,” writes Richard John. The postal mechanism operated through what
historian Cameron Blevins terms an “agency model,” in which as they estab-
lished a local community, settlers would write and sign petitions for new mail
service to Washington. Congress would then “rubberstamp” as many as some
thousands of new mail routes annually, and pass them on to the Post Office
Department—which likewise “rarely rejected” such requests. In addition, there
existed scant administrative oversight of this increasingly expansive territorial
system. If, however, as Blevins argues, “the periphery, rather than the center,
drove the western postal network’s growth and managed its on-the-ground op-
erations,” then both the periphery and the center were committed to the overall
project of territorial occupation.8
Relying on this agency model and the private contractors and political pa-
tronage which honeycombed it, within a few decades the United States brought
forward a more far-flung national postal service than existed either in Britain
Paths into an Imperial Republic 23
or in France—and, “the envy of Europe,” as a historian calls it, the Post Office
only continued to grow. By 1861, a few years after the status of this government
service was reaffirmed by Congress, there were 28,586 operating post offices
staffed by 30,000-odd postmasters, carriers, and clerks, the nation’s largest single
workforce. Not even the rapidly growing railroads yet approached the Post
Office in its operational scope. Postal expenditures, which had accounted for a
scant 1.1 percent of federal outlays in 1792, totaled nearly one-fourth of the na-
tional government’s spending by 1860. Over these years, the number of letters
transmitted annually increased from 300,000 into the hundreds of millions.9
Until 1845–1850, however, licit use of the mails was confined to a fraction
of the population. Business messages accounted for the lion’s share of corre-
spondence; businessmen are said to have produced an average of between 100
and 1,000 letters per year. More widespread social access was restricted, in an
era when the average one-page letter cost 14.5 cents to send through the mail,
meaning that—as the New York Tribune and other newspapers exclaimed in the
1840s—it cost more to send a one-page letter down the Hudson River from Troy
to New York City than to ship a 200-pound barrel of flour over the same route.
High letter rates sustained a policy of network expansion and provided subsidies,
both to specific categories of mail and—not least—to the private contractors who
transported them.10
Networks accrue value in proportion to the quantity and quality of connections
that they enable between users; and increasing the number of such connections
generally requires substantial capital investment and clear-eyed strategy. High
letter rates paid by New England and Mid-Atlantic merchants—between six and
twenty-five cents, depending on distance sent—not only enabled the Post Office
to extend to the South and the West but also underpinned a growing distribu-
tion of public rather than only private information. During the Republic’s first
several decades, newspapers, reprints of congressional speeches, and govern-
ment reports and documents accounted for a significant fraction of the country’s
overall publication and a large portion of its mail.11
The newspaper press generated by far the largest class of material sent through
the mails. In this pretelegraphic era, as participants in a “culture of reprinting,”
editors relied on exchanges of newspapers from other towns and cities for the
bulk of their nonlocal reports. By the 1840s, indeed, “every newspaper published
in the United States received free of charge an average of 4,300 different exchange
newspapers every year.” They also utilized the posts to send newspapers to
subscribers. During the 1830s, the newspaper press was institutionally redefined,
as the elite sixpenny journals of the nation’s early decades began to be supplanted
by penny newspapers aimed at urban tradespeople, and newspaper circulation
began to soar. By 1845, in turn, nine-tenths of the mail by weight was composed
of printed materials—paying “about one-nineth of the expense,” in the words of
24 Antimonopoly
the Postmaster General. Acting in concert, the newspaper and the Post Office
embodied a workaday system for circulating public information throughout an
otherwise fragmented republic. By underwriting these postal news flows, how-
ever, these great subsidies satisfied an emerging third purpose, beyond com-
mercial expansion and a (highly restricted) democratic franchise. By the 1820s
and 1830s, newspaper subsidies also functioned as incentives to lure the nation’s
editorial corps into the service of whichever of the two major political parties
happened to be in office. In this way they sustained postaldom’s potent patronage
function, welding the mails to the administration of political power.12
High letter rates, though subsidizing both network growth and public in-
formation, were far from popular. Indeed, dissatisfaction with price levels was
channeled into political and market support for Post Office competitors. The re-
sult was to destabilize the foremost agency of the state.
During the 1820s and 1830s, while Northern merchants as a group profited dis-
proportionately from the expanding postal network, individual businessmen
nevertheless often were pointedly dissatisfied with Post Office practice. Seeking
to penetrate into the hinterlands, merchants were on the watch for information
concerning distant markets and trading conditions; fortunes could be made by
knowing before others did when to buy cheap and to sell dear. Some businessmen
turned, accordingly, to emerging “private express” companies, which employed
horses, steamships, and, later, railroads, along heavily trafficked commer-
cial routes to race ahead of the general mails. Owing to the speculative profits
that might be obtained, especially as the cotton trade ascended, businessmen
in Northern cities developed keen incentives to circumvent the Post Office in
favor of these interurban expresses. Business users of these expresses could steal
a march on rivals by gaining private information advantages; prominent among
these users, however, were also newspaper enterprises keen to publish this news
ahead of competitors.13
Beginning around the same time, local “letter expresses” also proliferated.
Postal services relied upon central collection and pick-up offices; users had to
visit these sites to send and receive mail. Taking advantage of a legislative loop-
hole that allowed private operators into this field, in growing conurbations com-
mercial pick-up and delivery services carried mail between central city Post
Offices and merchant-class businesses and households. Established in New York,
Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago, city delivery
firms also emerged in some smaller towns—Easton, Pennsylvania, for example.
Paths into an Imperial Republic 25
“During their heyday, in the three decades before the Civil War, these firms
introduced many of the innovations associated with the modern postal system,
including mailboxes and postage stamps,” writes Richard John. All of this en-
trepreneurial initiative rested on Congress’s refusal, from 1792 all the way to
1845, to make private mail carriage flatly illegal—as Great Britain and France
had done.14
Both kinds of expresses charged rates substantially lower than those of the
Post Office and, therefore, these rivals soon handled what one observer called
“the greatest portion” of the nation’s correspondence. The chairman of the
Senate Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads declared in 1844 that “not
more than, if as much as one-half the correspondence of the country passes
through the mails.” Low rates were feasible because the private expresses were
neither compelled nor disposed to adopt the Post Office’s mission: pursuing
encompassing system development while also carrying political information on
behalf of the citizenry.15
In interurban markets, private expresses attacked the Post Office at its most
vulnerable points, those created by its subsidies. They transported letters,
parcels, specie, gold, and light freight, leaving to the Post Office unprofitable
mail such as newspapers, franked matter, and periodicals. In addition, they also
competed principally on “the great and profitable thoroughfares,” so that, as one
Postmaster General conceded in the 1840s, “between New York and Boston, be-
tween Philadelphia and Baltimore, between New York and Buffalo, individual
enterprise might supply the wants of the community in the rapid and cheap
transportation of letters and packets.” But, he added, “Will the same enterprise
penetrate the savannas and swamps of the South, or the wilds of the West, and
daily or weekly convey to the door of the planter and the husbandman the letter
of business or friendship, the intelligence of commerce and politics?” The Post
Office did; and so, by 1840, it was transferring to postal operations in the South
Atlantic, the Northwest, and the Southwest 12 cents of each dollar in revenue
generated in New England—and nearly half of each dollar coming from the Mid-
Atlantic states.16
Although, during the early republic’s first several decades, the Post Office was
required to be self-supporting, policymakers rejected the tenet that each indi-
vidual postal route should recover its full financial costs. “By withdrawing mail
communication from all unproductive regions,” explained Postmaster General
John McLean in 1828, “and substituting a horse for a stage transportation on
many others, a very large surplus of funds would accumulate, but the public con-
venience would be greatly lessened. To connect important places by frequent
lines of intercourse, combine speed with all the security possible and to extend
the mail wherever it may be wanted constitute the objects which have influenced
our policy.” Here surfaced two essential precepts, combining the properties of
26 Antimonopoly
networks with the social mandate given to the government posts. To spearhead
and to sustain continuing rapid expansion of the imperial republic, rates had to
be set to support the overall network rather than discrete individual routes. I will
further clarify this approach to rate-making shortly.17
For the moment, the essential point is that, as long as letter rates seriously in-
hibited access by those of modest means, the Postmaster General could not look
for popular support to cohere behind his policy. Efforts to ward off the threat
of competition by private expresses thus were stymied because the benefits of
postal service were too narrowly enjoyed. Stoking additional disaffection were
the notoriety of partisanship in postal appointments and percolating corruption
in commercial contracting practices.18
Nevertheless, popular antimonopolism was a blade that cut two ways.
Advocates of private information advantage via freedom to enter postal service
markets also had to contend with it. Adherents of what historians call an “equal
rights” political tradition, including both farmers and city-based artisans, decried
undue concentrations (“monopolies”) of property, power, and—for our purposes
most salient—knowledge. Private expresses and, prior to the mid-1830s, prohib-
itively expensive newspapers together acted to prevent these “producers,” pro-
ductive laborers as opposed to “parasites,” from claiming what they deemed
their rightful republican inheritance. These special-purpose systems prevented
commercial and political information from circulating outside a narrow en-
tourage of speculative merchants, bankers, and lawyers: parasites. Political sup-
port for the Post Office’s efforts to ward off private competitors initially sprang
from the commodity-producing regions. Should buyers be permitted to use
advance knowledge of markets to take advantage of sellers’ ignorance? Should
the government intervene to equalize the nation’s informational condition—to
neutralize one class’s capacity to create systemic informational advantages for
its members—by extending its role in telecommunications provision? A North
Carolina newspaper in 1825 urged that postal expresses be adopted in order “to
put a stop to the system of speculation which has lately been so extensively prac-
ticed by individuals of one commercial town on those of another who were not
possessed of the same means of information.” Two Senators from western states
testified a few years later that the “whole Western country” actively supported
such a postal express route from New York to New Orleans, “without which
they might be exposed to the dangers of sacrificing the products of their labor
without obtaining a fair equivalent.” Southern and Western interests joined with
Northeastern antimonopolist artisans, in efforts to check the systematic discrim-
ination that piggybacked upon private expresses. Here, in a forerunner of later
developments, the threat was posed not by the state but by unaccountable private
actors. In the 1820s, the capable Postmaster General McLean responded by vig-
orously asserting federal power.19
Paths into an Imperial Republic 27
Following the lines laid down by McLean, during the next decade a nationwide
postal express service was indeed established on strategic routes. This comprised
a deliberate attempt to target what two Senate allies of President Andrew Jackson
termed “that advantage which those acting with a knowledge of the state of the
market in other parts of the world always have over those who do not possess
similar information.” In a strategic concession to one institutional user postal
expresses were even authorized to carry newspaper dispatches for free. The hope
was that cooperation between public post riders and private publishers keen to
proffer readers the latest market news would curtail speculative profiteering and
private information systems, by encouraging timely publication of what was
deemed should be public information—and, perhaps, to diminish the sway of
anti-Jacksonian Eastern newspapers in the hinterlands.20
Postal expresses, however, proved insufficient to quell the competition be-
cause rates remained high and were still pegged to the distance that a letter trav-
eled. Between 1839 and 1845, both local mail delivery companies and interurban
express companies flourished. A campaign to supplant the Post Office with for-
profit business gained ideological legitimacy and political traction.21
Pointing to unassailable evidence of financial mismanagement and corrup-
tion, the influential editor William Leggett and the Speaker of the House John
Bell of Tennessee were among those who, during the 1830s, urged that the Post
Office function be privatized. “[W]e might easily imagine [the post office] to be
carried on by a private association, without its changing in any degree its essen-
tial character,” agreed the German-born political economist Francis Lieber in
1841. A year or so later, Henry Wells, a pioneering expressman who would go
on to head a major bank, reportedly proposed to take over the agency. In 1843
the Postmaster General himself acknowledged that the view “that the Post Office
system is an odious monopoly, and ought to be abolished” had become a threat
to the agency’s existence—even if, he suggested, this view was chiefly “sustained
by the influence of those whose interests are involved.” Would this admixture
of political purpose, ideological alignment, and commercial self-interest over-
whelm the institution?22
During the mid-1840s, the issue came to a boil. Of hundreds of petitions
on postal topics conveyed to Congress at the peak of the privatization drive,
Richard John finds that “none called for the outright abolition of the Post Office
Department. . . . Postal improvements, in short, were popular, while private
mail delivery was not.” In keeping with this sentiment was Congress’s move to
strengthen the Post Office’s prerogative.23
Although they still permitted private carriers in adjacent and some
overlapping services, legislative reforms of 1845 granted the Post Office exclusive
responsibility for carrying letters and packets. Hereby the Department gained
what would prove an enduring federally sanctioned monopoly over first-class
28 Antimonopoly
mail. At the same time, Congress initiated a series of laws which progressively
reduced postage rates while concurrently eliminating distance as a factor in rate-
setting. These rate measures culminated in 1863, explains Cameron Blevins,
“when Congress instituted a universal postage rate of three cents for all letters,
regardless of their origin or destination.” Declining rates threw open the mails
to huge increases in popular usage, as the Postmaster General had predicted in
1844. In 1851, the Post Office was granted a right to declare city streets as well as
interurban routes post roads under its aegis. And, crucially, the straitjacketing
policy of “requiring the department to sustain its own expenses,” as Postmaster
General Cave Johnson phrased it in 1844—self-support through full cost-
recovery—was finally jettisoned. Post Office historians have termed this new
mandate “service first.” Section 7 of the Act of March 3, 1851 decreed that “No
post office now in existence shall be discontinued, nor shall the mail service on
any mail route in any of the states and territories, be discontinued or diminished
in consequence of any diminution of the revenues that may result from this Act.”
As a matter of political decision, when the postal system could not cover its costs,
henceforward an appropriation was to be made by the Treasury Department.
Richard John underscores the profound significance of this change, adding that
“the presumption that the postal system should not be obliged to ‘pay for it-
self ’ . . . would remain a pillar of postal policy from 1851 until 1970.”24
Why, confronted by repeated and seemingly successful demonstrations of en-
trepreneurial initiative, did Congress enact these far-reaching countermeasures?
Why, within an avowedly capitalist economy, was it the Post Office and not its
commercial rivals that triumphed? Did the rejection of privatization signify a
commitment to renew democratic ideals?
It would be tempting to believe so. A racially defined democratic current in-
deed had strengthened throughout the late 1820s and 1830s. Reviewing postal
practices in 1835, a Senate Committee related how the agency had responded
when the sixpenny New York Journal of Commerce had established an express
between Philadelphia and New York to obtain news ahead of the mail, thereby
gaining a beat on the paper’s competitors. “As was to be expected, this produced
dissatisfaction, that a private individual could obtain intelligence for himself
and patrons before the Government furnished it to the citizens generally,” the
Committee explained, adding that the Postmaster General had “deemed it his
duty” to respond by instituting a postal express to beat back the private com-
petitor. The Committee was emphatic that “It should not be permitted that an
individual should establish a mode of communication and continue it by which
intelligence should be received and acted upon by him before the community at
large can have the benefit of it through the medium of the Government mails.”
Its reasoning bears emphasis: “If such a measure on the part of an individual
cannot be corrected by law, then Government should not hesitate to adopt
Paths into an Imperial Republic 29
Ever since the 1792 Act, the Post Office had been bound up in this process
of westward and southward expropriation; and it possessed an irreplaceable
importance in the Republic’s sustained program of territorial imperialism.
A study heralding postal progress from the vantage of the 1920s simply took it
for granted that “Postal communication was a vital necessity for without it the
great West could never be held within a nation administered from Washington.”
Nineteenth-century defenders of a government-run mail service were prone to
tie their support expressly to the agency’s function as the spearhead of settlement
for, in truth, no other organization of sufficient scale was available. Were the Post
Office to be jettisoned, its operations left to the whims of smaller market agents,
then a foundation-stone of settler-colonialism stood to be relinquished. “How
are we to develop, cherish, and protect our immense interests and possessions
on the Pacific, with a vast wilderness fifteen hundred miles in breadth, filled
with hostile savages, and cutting off all direct communication?” asked Senator
Stephen Douglas in 1854. All the way down to the present, we will see, US leaders
have remained determined to fold telecommunications into the projection of
imperial power beyond existing borders.30
In 1825, attempting to tie in frontier settlements as quickly as possible to gov-
ernmental authority, Congress had permitted the Postmaster General, in ad-
vance of legislative authorization, to establish a post road to the courthouse of any
newly established county seat. Two decades later, President James K. Polk—an
ardent annexationist—underlined the role of the Post Office by telling Congress
how the “extension of the mail service . . . will be demanded by the rapid ex-
tension and increase of population on our western frontier.” Mail facilities, Polk
insisted in another message to Congress the following year, “should be afforded
to our citizens west of the Rocky Mountains.” Throughout the antebellum pe-
riod, congressional hearings and debates are chockablock with discussions of
postal services and mail subsidies.31
Promoted for fifteen years prior to the Civil War, the transcontinental rail
network that was completed in 1869 likewise depended on huge government
subsidies to railroads, mostly in the form of hundreds of millions of acres’ worth
of land grants. It is not sufficiently appreciated, however, that these subsidies were
based upon Congress’s postal power. Members of both leading parties argued for
federal support of a transcontinental railroad because it would comingle mili-
tary and postal functions. Southern slaveholders were determined, though, to
ensure that their United States of America would become a coast-to-coast em-
pire built on unfree labor and, concomitantly, that both a transcontinental mail
service and a transcontinental railroad therefore would be established along a far
southern route.32
Northerners would have none of it. The transcontinental railroad proved a
lightning rod for political conflict between free labor and slave states so that,
32 Antimonopoly
before the Civil War, Congress never approved it. However, as Kevin Waite details,
in the run-up to the war Postmaster General Aaron V. Brown, earlier a Tennessee
governor and US congressman and a law partner of former President James Polk,
did manage to transform the Post Office into “a southern-oriented, continental
system.” His administration underwrote a costly new mail service between St.
Louis and Memphis in the east and San Francisco in the West—which traversed
Little Rock, Arkansas, El Paso, Southern New Mexico, Yuma, and Los Angeles
en route. This service was expressly intended to lay the basis for a railroad and to
provide a highway for troops; and, as operated by the contractor—the Butterfield
Overland Mail—to make post offices double as fortresses “manned by four to five
soldiers equipped with Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers.” Between 1858 and 1861,
Waite shows, the Overland attested that “western infrastructure and American
imperialism fit hand-in-glove.”33
This linkage between infrastructure and empire, however, was more expan-
sive than the designs harbored by the Slave South. California and the Oregon
Territory also were joined to the burgeoning postal network and, moreover,
during the 1840s postal service figured “in drawing into the American orbit
the islands that would become the nation’s possessions and protectorates by
1898”: Cuba and Hawaii. Supporters of postal expansion could be remarkably
forthright. Hoping to secure the Post Office’s role in a regular overland mail route
from the Mississippi Valley to his own state, in the mid-1850s California Senator
Weller expressed the relationship like this:
I believe, by the establishment of a mail route with little posts every ten miles
you will have in fact military posts all along that road. In this way you will give
protection to your emigrants. That is what I am after . . . This I regard as vastly
important to the future interest of your possession on the Pacific.
“queath
aken out by
March in the year”
“Well, how’s that?” said Leyland. “I don’t think we shall differ
much over the reading of it.”
“No. It’s really rather disappointing, when you are supposed to be
a detective, for a document to come to hand in such excellent
condition—what there is of it. There aren’t two words in the English
language that end with the syllable ‘queath,’ and unless I am
mistaken—no, as you were—the word in the next line might be either
‘taken’ or ‘mistaken.’ And of course there’s Interlaken, when one
comes to think of it, and weaken, and shaken, and oaken, and all
sorts of words. But, as you say, or rather imply, ‘taken out by’ makes
the best sense. And I shall hardly be communicating new
impressions to you if I suggest that one speaks of ‘taking out’
insurance policies. Do you happen to know when Mottram took out
his Euthanasia? I believe I’ve got the record upstairs.”
“He took it out in March. There isn’t a bit of doubt about this
document as it stands. It’s the copy of a will, made out by Mottram,
having reference to the Euthanasia policy. Now, unless this was a
new will altogether—which is possible—that means that this was a
copy of his second will, or rather of the codicil which referred to the
policy. For in the will, if you remember, there was no allusion to the
Euthanasia at all.”
“I suppose that it is absolutely certain that this scrap of paper
belonged to Mottram?”
“Quite certain—that’s the extraordinary thing, the way I found it.
The undertaker came round this morning to make—well, certain
arrangements. As you know, I had taken command of the key of
Mottram’s room; it’s been locked by my orders ever since you and I
had that look round—except yesterday, when I took the Coroner in.
The undertaker came to me for the key this morning, and I went into
the room with him; and, just mooning about there aimlessly, I saw
something that you and I had failed to see when we were searching
the room—this bit of paper. We were not much to blame, for it was
rather hidden away, behind the writing-table; that is, between the
writing-table and the window. To do us justice, I don’t know how we
came to overlook it. Considering it was in Mottram’s room, I don’t
think it is a very wild speculation to suppose that it was a part of
Mottram’s will.”
“No, that seems reasonable. And how does it fit into your view of
the case? I mean”——
“Oh, of course, it’s conceivable that Mottram burned the thing
himself. But it doesn’t really make very much sense when you come
to think of it. We know, and Mottram knew, that it was only a spare
copy of the will which the solicitors had got up in London. It wasn’t a
very important document, therefore, one way or the other. And I’m
sure it hasn’t escaped your observation that whereas burning papers
is a natural way to get rid of them in winter, when there’s a fire in the
grate, one doesn’t do it in summer unless one’s absolutely put to it.
Nothing burns more ill-temperedly than a piece of paper when you
have to set light to it with a match. You can’t even burn it whole,
without great difficulty, for you must either keep hold of it, and so
leave a corner unburnt, or else leave it lying about in a grate or
somewhere, and then the flame generally dies down before it is
finished. In this case, it is pretty clear that somebody must have held
it in his hand, or it probably wouldn’t be a corner that remained
unburnt. I can find no finger-marks.”
“Wouldn’t a man who was destroying an important document be
apt to take care he didn’t leave any of it lying about?”
“Certainly, if he’d plenty of time to do it in. If it had been Mottram,
for example, burning his own will. It seems to me more like the action
of a man in a hurry; and I suspect that the man who burned this
document was in a hurry. Or at least he was flustered; for he had
been committing a murder, and so few people can keep their heads
altogether in that position.”
“It’s Simmonds, then, by your way of it?”
“Who else? You see, at first I was in rather a difficulty. We had
assumed, what it was natural to assume, that this codicil which
Mottram added to his will was kept a secret—that Simmonds didn’t
know about it, and that he’d murdered Mottram under the mistaken
idea that he would inherit the Euthanasia benefits as the next of kin.
Now, if that had been his intention, it would have been rather a
coincidence his happening to light on the will and be able to burn it.
But you tell me that Simmonds did know about the codicil; very well,
that solves the difficulty. It was a double crime not only in fact but in
intention. You thought that Simmonds’s knowledge of the codicil
gave him a sort of moral alibi. On the contrary, it only fastens the
halter round his neck. He determined to destroy Mottram and the will
together, and so inherit. The motive is more obvious than ever. The
only thing which he unfortunately hadn’t taken into account was the
fact that the copy of the codicil which he destroyed was a duplicate,
and the original was up in London.”
“But isn’t it rather a big supposition, that Simmonds not only knew
the codicil was in existence but knew that it was in Mottram’s
possession when he came down here, and that it would be lying
about in Mottram’s room, quite easy for him to find?”
“You forget Mottram’s psychology. When Simmonds offended
him, he wasn’t content that Simmonds should be cut out of his will;
he wanted him to know that he’d been cut out of the will—directed
the lawyers to inform him of the fact. When he added that codicil
about the Euthanasia, although he made such a secret of it all round,
he was careful, as we know, to inform Simmonds that it had been
done. Don’t you think it’s likely that he wrote to Simmonds and said,
‘I have willed the Euthanasia policy away to strangers, so as to
prevent it coming to you; you can look in on me when I’m at
Chilthorpe, and I’ll shew you the document’? And Simmonds, not
understanding the pernicketiness of lawyers, imagined that it would
be the original of the will, not a copy, that Mottram had by him. So,
when he came round here on his midnight visit, or rather on his early
morning visit, he turned off the gas, flung the window open,
ransacked the despatch-box which he found lying on the table, found
the will, and burnt it hastily at the open window. Probably he thought
the unburnt fragment had fallen out of the window; actually it had
fallen under the table, and here we are!”
“It was Angela, I suppose, who told you that Simmonds knew he
had been cut out of the will?”
“With the best intentions. Mrs. Bredon thought, of course, that my
suspicion of Simmonds could not survive the revelation. As a matter
of fact, it all fitted in nicely. Well, it just shews that one should never
waste time trying to puzzle out a problem until one’s sure that all the
relevant facts have been collated. Here were you and I worrying our
lives out over the difficulty, and all because we had never noticed
that bit of paper lying on the floor—and might never have noticed it, if
I hadn’t happened to go in with the undertaker. Now, there’s only
Brinkman’s part of the business to settle. Apart from that, it’s as clear
as daylight.”
“You think so? Well, you must think me a frightful Sadducee, but
even now I don’t mind doubling that bet again.”
“Forty pounds! Good Lord, man, the Indescribable must pay you
well! Or do they insure you against losing bets? Well, it would eat a
big hole in my salary. But if you want to throw your money away, I
don’t mind.”
“Good! Forty quid. We’d best keep it dark from Angela, though. I
say, when ‘Raight-ho’ makes that horrible noise on the tom-tom
inside, it generally means that Mrs. Davis has finished blowing the
dust off the cold ham. What’s wrong with going in and seeing about a
little lunch?”
Chapter XVI.
A Visitor from Pullford
When they came into the coffee room, Bredon had the
instantaneous impression we all get occasionally that the room was
too full. Then, on disentangling his sensations, he was delighted to
find that the newcomer was Mr. Eames, who was exchanging a word
or two with Brinkman, though he seemed not to have been
introduced to the others. “Good man!” said Bredon. “I don’t think you
met my wife, did you? This is Mr. Pulteney . . . it was very good of
you to keep your promise.”
“As it turned out, I should have had to come in any case. The
Bishop had to go off to a confirmation, so, when he heard the funeral
was down here, he sent me to represent him. You see, we heard
from the solicitors about our windfall—I suspect you were keeping
that dark, Mr. Bredon—and he was very much touched by Mr.
Mottram’s kindness. He wished he could have come, Mr. Brinkman,
but of course a confirmation is a difficult engagement to get out of.”
“I really knew nothing about the will when I came over to
Pullford,” protested Bredon. “I’ve heard about it since, of course. Can
I offer my congratulations to the diocese, or would it look too much
like gifts from the Greeks?”
“Nonsense; you serve your company, Mr. Bredon, and none of us
bears you any ill-will for it. I hope, by the way, I have not been
indiscreet in mentioning the subject?” he glanced for a moment at
the old gentleman. “The Bishop, of course, has not mentioned the
matter except to me, because he quite realizes there may be legal
difficulties.”
“I can keep a secret as well as most men,” explained Pulteney.
“That is to say, I have the common human vanity which makes every
man like to be in possession of a secret; and perhaps less than my
share of the vulgar itch for imparting information. But you know
Chilthorpe little, sir, if you speak of discretion in the same four walls
with Mrs. Davis. I assure you that the testamentary dispositions of
the late Mr. Mottram are seldom off her lips.”
There was a fractional pause, while everybody tried to think how
Mrs. Davis knew. Then they remembered that the matter had been
mentioned, though only incidentally, at the inquest.
“To be sure,” said Eames. “I have met Mrs. Davis before. If it is
true that confession lightens our burdens, the Load of Mischief must
sit easily on her.”
“I’m so glad they haven’t changed the name of the inn,” observed
Angela. “These old-fashioned names are getting so rare. And the
Load of Mischief is hardly an encouraging title.”
“There used,” said Eames, “to be an inn in my old—in the parish
where I lived—which was called ‘The Labour in Vain.’ I sometimes
thought of it as an omen.”
“Are you of the funeral party, Mr. Pulteney?” asked Leyland,
seeing the old gentleman dressed in deep black.
“There is no hiding anything from you detectives. Yes, I have
promised myself the rustic treat of a funeral. In the scholastic
profession such thrills are rare; they make us retire at sixty
nowadays. My lot is cast amidst the young; I see ever fresh
generations succeeding to the old, filling up the gaps in the ranks of
humanity; and I confess that when one sees the specimens one
sometimes doubts whether the process is worth while. But do not let
me cast a gloom over our convivialities. Let us eat and drink, Mrs.
Davis’s ‘shape’ seems to say to us, for to-morrow we die.”
“I hope I oughtn’t to have gone,” said Angela. “I’d have brought
my blacks if I’d thought of it.”
“Without them, you would be a glaring offence against village
etiquette. No, Mrs. Bredon, your presence would not be expected.
The company needs no representatives at the funeral; more
practical, it sheds golden tears over the coffin. For the rest of us it is
different. Mr. Eames pays a last tribute to his diocesan benefactor.
Mr. Brinkman, like a good secretary, must despatch the material
envelope to its permanent address. For myself, what am I? A fellow