The Abiding Significance of Race

“It is surprising how little scholarship has been generated on black postal workers” (p. 5). To paraphrase George Orwell, there are some claims that only an academic could make. There are some reasons why black postal employment might make a good book topic, but Philip Rubio fails to provide most of them. The Post Office is among the few federal departments explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. It was by far the largest federal employer in the nineteenth century. Yet today it is on the verge of extinction. On this subject, many readers will recall Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s recommendation that the federal government return to twice-daily mail delivery in order to reduce black unemployment: “We get a man who can take pride in being a uniformed officer of the United States Government, who raises a family, pays taxes, votes Democratic and delivers the mail. That’s quite a bargain.”¹ Notably, this episode is not recounted in the book. And today the republic’s first African American president has called for the reduction of mail delivery to five days a week.

In addition to obvious technological innovations like e-mail, American postal service is being curtailed, rather than expanded, largely because the Post Office has long been a synonym for governmental waste and incompetence. In an unguarded moment, President Obama explained that private health-insurance companies would prosper alongside his proposed new government providers. “U.P.S. and FedEx are doing just fine, right,” the President noted. “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.”² What an interesting contrast to the postal service’s eighteenth-century origins. Daniel Defoe observed that it “is come also into so exquisite a management, that nothing can be more exact, and ‘tis with the utmost safety and dispatch, that letters are delivered at the remotest corners of that town, almost as soon as they could be sent by a messenger, and that from four, five, six, to eight times a day.”³ By 1976, a New Yorker cartoon rewrote the Post Office’s motto: “Neither lethargy, indifference, nor the general collapse of standards will prevent these couriers from eventually delivering some of your mail.”⁴

Rubio presents an interesting paradox. The Post Office was at once the “graveyard of Negro talent” and “vital to black community development” (pp. 1, 4). For many years, the Post Office, like the Pullman porter service, provided blacks with secure jobs. Unfortunately, highly educated blacks were overqualified for them, and talent that might have gone elsewhere was underutilized in these places.

A similar problem marked other unionized public utilities. When unions and politicians provided wages and benefits far above those for similarly skilled workers in the private-sector labor market, they attracted overqualified workers, who were more likely to be white. If a job that required an eighth-grade education became attractive to high-school graduates—and whites were more likely to be high-school graduates—blacks would be excluded from jobs for which they were perfectly qualified.⁵ This was an interesting inversion of the well-known “mismatch” phenomenon, in which affirmative action pulls blacks out of second-tier colleges, where they could have succeeded, into Ivy League ones from which they are more likely to drop out.⁶

“For postal workers generally and blacks especially, work at the Post Office was simultaneously available, attractive, and oppressive” (p. 209). Yet Rubio gives almost no description of either the attractions or the oppressions. This is particularly surprising since the author tells us that he had been a postal worker himself for twenty years (p. xii).

This book principally tells the history of two black postal unions, the National Alliance (N.A.) and the National Postal Union (N.P.U.). By 1960, blacks were a majority of postal workers in Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and New Orleans; and...