Postal Riders and Raiders

by W. H. Gantz

This is wholly an “aside.” How it may apply to Mr. Hitchcock must be left to readers who have a more intimate personal acquaintance with him than have I.

At any rate, he came to his present official job, it appears from most dependable information, with a “deficit”—the postal service deficit, of course—in his mind, and he immediately began in his vigorous, though somewhat peculiar, way to work it off. Whether his dominating intent was to work that deficit off the department books or merely work it off his mind, has not thus far appeared, save, of course, to the coterie in the circle of Mr. Hitchcock’s intimates and a somewhat numerous body of periodical and newspaper reporters on the job in Washington.

The latter, of course, know everything. And what they don’t know they go to all extremes to find out. It was, therefore, a hopeless attempt of Mr. Hitchcock’s (though he yet seems scarcely able to understand how so much information got to the public), to keep his scheme to remove the Postoffice Department’s deficit by shunting the whole of it onto some twenty or thirty periodicals—it was, I say, a hopeless task for him to keep that scheme safely within the periphery of the corral where herded the “influenced” and the “influencing.”

But why go on? Mr. Blythe in his article tells some things I want to say and he says them so much better than I can tell them that I will give the reader the benefit of that difference and quote him on a number of points. As showing the studied attempt at snap legislation in the very closing hours of Congress, Mr. Blythe says:

The Sixty-first Congress expired by constitutional limitation at noon on March 4th, last. On Friday afternoon, March 3, the postoffice appropriation bill was up for consideration in the Senate. It was being read for committee amendments. At half past 4 page 21 of the bill was reached, and with it the amendment proposed by the Senate Committee on Postoffices and Postroads to increase the rate of second-class postage in certain specified cases and in certain contingencies. Second-class postage is the postage paid by newspapers, magazines and periodicals.

There had been several speeches. Senator Carter spoke for the amendment, and Senators Bristow, Cummins and Owen against it. Senator Jones, of Washington, had a few observations in favor of the amendment also. At 5 o’clock Senator Boies Penrose, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Postoffices and Postroads and in charge of the bill, rose in his place, withdrew the amendment increasing second-class postage, and submitted in its stead an amendment providing for a commission to investigate the question of fact concerning the cost to the Postoffice Department for transportation of second-class mail matter. This amendment was unanimously adopted and the Senate proceeded to the consideration of other sections of the bill.

Postmaster-General Hitchcock sat immediately behind Senator Penrose when this happened. He had been on the floor of the Senate most of that afternoon, and a great portion of the time for several days previous when the discussion of the postoffice bill seemed imminent. When Senator Penrose withdrew the amendment, the Postmaster General’s strenuously urged plan to use the taxing power of the government to make himself a censor, with almost unlimited power to declare what magazine and what periodical should be taxed and what magazine and what periodical should not be taxed; to give himself the sole determining power to decide what is a newspaper and what is a periodical—his long conceived plan, perfected quietly, put into preliminary execution without warning to those concerned, to be jammed through if possible, failed and failed utterly.

Mr. Blythe also refers to the fight Postmaster General Hitchcock put up against investigation. Here I desire to quote him at some length:

The Postmaster General had enlisted the President. He had put it up to the Republicans on the Senate Postoffice committee as an Administration measure to be supported by administration men. He got the President to use the same argument. He contrived an amendment, after much labor, so drawn as to give him the greatest powers of discretion in the application of the increase in second-class postage. He had the regulation of the magazine and periodical press of this country in his own hands, he thought; and he was preparing to regulate it according to his ideas—when he met with a sudden check. It was a good scheme, a far-reaching scheme, but it didn’t go through. The Postmaster General, being a small-bore politician, took a small-bore view of the situation. He underestimated the force of public opinion.