Post Office
In 1889 Wanamaker began the First Penny Savings Bank in order to encourage thrift. That same year he was appointed United States Postmaster General by President Benjamin Harrison. Wanamaker was credited by his friends with introducing the first commemorative stamp, and many efficiencies to the Postal Service. He was the first to make plans for free rural postal service in the United States, although the plan was not implemented until 1897.
In 1890, Wanamaker persuaded Congress to pass an act prohibiting the sale of lottery tickets through the mail, and then he aggressively pursued violators. These actions effectively ended all state lotteries in the U.S. until they reappeared in 1964, partly as an effort to undermine organized crime.
However, Wanamaker's tenure at the Post Office was riddled with controversy, including the firing of some 30,000 postal workers under the then common "spoils system" during his four-year term, which caused severe confusion, inefficiency and a run-in with civil-service crusader Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow Republican. In 1890 he commissioned a series of stamps that were derided in the national media as the poorest quality stamps ever issued, both for printing quality and materials. Then, when his department store ordered advance copies of the newly translated novel The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy, the deadline had been missed and only the regular discount was offered. Wanamaker retaliated by banning the book from the US Mail on grounds of obscenity. This earned him ridicule in many major U.S. newspapers. In 1891 he ordered changes in the uniforms of letter carriers, and was then accused of arranging for all the uniforms to be ordered from a single firm in Baltimore, to which Wanamaker was believed to have financial ties. In 1893 he made a public prediction at the Chicago World's Fair that U.S. mail would still rely on stagecoach and horseback delivery for a century to come, failing to anticipate the impact caused by the coming of the automobile.
During World War I, Wanamaker publicly proposed that the United States buy Belgium from Germany for the sum of one-hundred billion dollars, as an alternative to the continuing carnage of the war.
Read more about this topic: John Wanamaker
Famous quotes related to post office:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, ‘Boy, where’s the post office?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, then, where might the drugstore be?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How about a good cheap hotel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?’
‘No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.’”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)