Post Office Department

The Second Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General on July 26, 1775, and the Constitution gave Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads. The Post Office Act of February 20, 1792, built a national network and protected the privacy of letters, and subsidized newspaper postage helped spread political news across the young country. The Postmaster General joined the cabinet under President Andrew Jackson in 1829, and Congress formally made the Post Office an executive department in 1872.

For most of American history the Post Office was the federal government's largest civilian employer and its most visible presence in daily life, with tens of thousands of local postmasters, many of them chosen as political patronage. It introduced free city delivery in 1863, rural free delivery in 1896, parcel post in 1913, and airmail in 1918, knitting together a vast country and powering the mail-order catalog business. Postmasters General were often the President's chief party organizers.

By the 1960s the department was overwhelmed by rising mail volume, outdated facilities, low wages, and political control of rates and jobs, and in October 1966 the Chicago post office nearly ground to a halt. In March 1970 about 200,000 postal workers staged the largest wildcat strike in the nation's history, and President Richard Nixon signed the Postal Reorganization Act on August 12, 1970, replacing the department with the U.S. Postal Service, an independent establishment of the executive branch that began operating on July 1, 1971. Supporters say the change took politics out of the mail and let the system modernize, while critics point to the Postal Service's chronic financial losses and rising postage rates.