Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

So far we have touched upon only the elements of production. While the people employed in the several divisions of the pulp-wood industry may run, numerically, into many tens of thousands, in the great division of the printing trades, they run into the hundreds of thousands. I refer to the great printing and publishing trades—the trades which turn the pulp paper into periodicals and books—the trades whose work directly educates us.

Before attempting to designate the various divisions of this class, or to indicate the vast multitude—both men and women—to whom they give employment, I desire to present a few quotations, showing that these trades and these hundreds of thousands of employes are, in the slang language of the street, “onto” not only the controlling—the ulterior—motives of Mr. Hitchcock but also that they know and understand and feel something of the far-reaching wreck and ruin to homes and to lives which legislation of the nature he proposed must bring to this industrial division of our general citizenship.

Under date of May 20, 1911, Mr. M. H. Madden wrote me the following letter. While Mr. Madden may not be as widely known as is Postmaster General Hitchcock, he not having had the advantage of a federal cabinet position to broadcast his fame, there are few men better known among the personnel of the printing trades than is Mr. Madden, and equally few men there are who are better informed on the cost of carriage, handling and distribution of second-class mail.

In this letter Mr. Madden speaks particularly of the alleged Postoffice Department “deficit.” While this much-talked of “deficit” is made the subject of a short subsequent chapter, Mr. Madden’s letter presents several other points trenchantly pertinent to the subject we are now considering, to-wit: that the printing trades—all branches and classes of it, from the pressfeeder and bindery girl to the shop superintendent and publisher—are alive to the dangers with which legislation of the “rider” character is fraught:

Chicago, May 20, 1911.

My Dear Mr. Gantz—For a considerable time President Taft has directed attention to a supposed deficit in the Postoffice Department revenues, he accepting the figures of his Postmaster General that the amount of the shortage for 1909 was above $17,000,000, while that for 1910 was cut down to less than $6,000,000.

An authorized statement by Mr. Hitchcock, sent out on May 27, 1911, declares that for the six months of 1911 there is a surplus in postal receipts ranging from $1,000,000 to $3,000,000. With the fact kept in view that there have been increases in expenses in many directions and the further fact that second-class mail tonnage, on which great losses occur—according to the Hitchcock plan of keeping books—has increased, the manifest inconsistency involved in Mr. Hitchcock’s discovery is too transparent to permit of discussion.

Factors which have been left out of the reckoning, among others might be mentioned the progressive increased amount of business of the postal department, with but slight advance in the percentage of cost for transacting the same; a general agitation for better service on the part of the public which awakened the authorities to a fuller responsibility of their duty, and the important circumstance that there has been a new alignment of the House and Senate Committees on Postoffices and Postroads, has caused a moving-up process, we might say shaking-up process, in methods that sadly needed furbishing and of ideas that required practical demonstration. The effect of improving the system of transmitting the postal funds promptly to the national treasury instead of leaving the same to accumulate in the common centers, where they were earned, is seen by the immediate wiping out of the need for a balance of $10,000,000 with which to do business. Such an ancient method of conducting postal business would probably do in the period when the pyramids were built, but that system had finally to surrender, it being too archaic for even the Postoffice Department to adopt.

In a communication to me under date of August 9th, 1911, Mr. Madden gives expression to the following very informative statements:

In connection with the Hughes postal inquiry I would like to inform you of the total addition to the expense of conducting the Postoffice Department which became effective July 1, 1911. You may avail yourself of these facts in your argument, as they are official, orders having been issued by Postmaster General Hitchcock for these additional expenditures.