Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

The people of this country are “up against” a postal service proposition—a proposition so stupendous in import, so far-reaching in its application, so crucial in its effects upon us and the children who follow us, and involving service so incompetent, so wasteful, so corrupt in its management and operation as to have appalled those of us who have watched and studied its practices, and to have become a joke, provoking a smile or laugh among postal officials of other nations who render a service that serves.

For upward of forty years—a few bright spots excepted—our Postoffice Department has shown itself not only incompetent in the matter of business management, but disregardful in serving the people who pay for the service. I am aware this is a bald statement, a “mere assertion,” some postoffice official or sinecure postal “servant” may say, but it will have to be said more often, more carefully and studiedly and far more eloquently, in order to have it believed outside the family circle than it ever has heretofore been said to get the people of this country to stand for it.

In the “write-up” annexed to Postmaster General Hitchcock’s few paragraphs of interview, the “space” artist gives us, in epitome, the biography of the men Mr. Hitchcock promotes and demotes in that “round dozen” of changes. Some of my readers may have scanned the “booster” newspaper stuff of which I am writing. If so, much of what I have here said may be bricks or straw, just as it may happen that they know or do not know the true “innards” of the service status of this Postoffice Department of ours. I will not do more here than to point to the epitome biographical sketches of the promotes and demotes in the friendly “write-up.”

In substance it says that Mr. Ingalls “is a highly trained postal official” and “entirely familiar with the railway mail system, having begun his postal work in that service.”

Now, we all sincerely hope that is true. I once ran a sawmill, but, candidly, I do not believe that any sensible business man would hire me today to run his saws in any mill turning out mixed cuts. It may be that Mr. Ingalls has accumulated just the proper, and the proper amount of, information in superintending “rurals” to enable—to qualify—him to manage and direct that case-hardened, looting division known as the Railway Mail Service. Let us hope that he knows how to do it.

In the past twenty-five or thirty years it has been conclusively shown that the postoffice department, en tout, knows about as much concerning the railroad end of the railway mail service as a mongrel spitz poodle knows of astronomy.

So I might comment on other names mentioned in the write-up of this “shake-up” of our Postmaster General. They have all been good men. Possibly they each and all are good men yet—for the jobs to which the Postmaster General has promoted or demoted them. The people may appreciate and even honor Jim Jones because he “worked his way up” from mail carrier on a rural route at Rabbit Hash, Mississippi, to Superintendent of the Cincinnati Division or the St. Paul Division of the railway mail service, and even more so, if he got stilted to the position of “Superintendent of the Railway Mail Service.” Still, listen. While we, the people, at Rabbit Hash, Mississippi, may be entirely satisfied to see our boy, Jim Jones, move up the ladder to official honor and salary, how about you other 93,760,000 people? You want prompt, cheap service in the railway mail and our Jim Jones fails to give it to you,—fails when you know the conditions and the facilities are at call and command to give it to you.

What is the answer? Simply that you 93,760,000 other folks may not think so well of our Jim Jones’ railway mail service ability—or business ability—as we of Rabbit Hash may think.

Now I have said enough about Postmaster General Hitchcock’s “shake-up.” What I have not said the intelligent reader will readily infer—and there is a whole lot to be inferred.