The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia - Smithsonian ...

4 • s m i t h s o n i a n c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o h i s t o ry a n d t e c h n o l o g yrationale? What were their consequences for public andprivate life? These are large questions, and ones that thisessay cannot possibly answer in a definitive way. Yet theyare worth posing, since their answers provide a context forunderstanding later innovations in communications thatranged from the rise of commercial broadcasting to thecommercialization of the internet.The most tireless promoter of cheap postage in GreatBritain was the educational reformer Rowland Hill (Figure1). Beginning in the mid- 1830s, Hill lobbied energeticallyto convince his countrymen of the benefits of aradical decrease in the basic letter rate. The British governmentat this time regarded its postal system as a branch ofthe treasury and postage as a tax. The British post officewas expected to generate a large annual surplus—which,invariably, it did—which the treasury used to cover thecosts of running the government. In fact, the British postFigure 1. Postal reformer Rowland Hill.office would not run its first annual deficit until 1955. 2 Bylinking the actual cost of mail delivery to the price a postalpatron paid to send a letter, Hill reasoned, the treasurycould simultaneously lower postal rates and increase thetotal revenue it obtained.Cheap postage had the further benefit of curtailing thespecial privileges that the British government lavished onthe well- to- do. High letter postage was not only inept fiscalpolicy, but also a regressive tax that fell most heavilyon the middle class and the poor. Rich aristocrats had littletrouble obtaining free passes, known as “franks,” thatpermitted them to mail letters at no cost to themselves.Franks were harder to obtain by the middle class and unknownto the poor. Cheap postage would, as it were, levelthe playing field by providing the many with facilities thathad formerly been a perquisite of the few.The principal features of Hill’s reform—mandatoryprepayment, the rollout of the now- ubiquitous postagestamp, and the reduction in the basic letter rate to apenny—might seem prosaic enough. Yet in the years followingtheir introduction in 1840, many well- informedcontemporaries hailed them as a triumph of civilization,an assessment that would be seconded by influential historiansfor over one hundred years.The campaign for cheap letter postage in Great Britaincoincided with a parallel campaign to reduce the taxesthat the government charged on newspapers. Taxed newspaperspaid fees that permitted them to be circulated inthe mail; the rest of the newspaper press, in contrast, hadto rely on other, non- postal means of conveyance. Thesefees often took the form of non- adhesive labels called“stamps”—a confusing term, in retrospect, since these labelswere very different from the adhesive stamps that Hilladvocated, and that the British post office began to issuein 1840. The proprietors of the unstamped newspapersresented their exclusion from the mail and lobbied Parliamentto change the law. The “war of the unstamped,” asthe resulting political contest has come to be known, istypically studied in isolation from the campaign for cheappostage. As a consequence, many questions remain. Didthe war of the unstamped antedate the campaign for cheappostage and, thus, serve as a precedent for reformers likeHill? Or was it the other way around? Or were the twomovements fundamentally distinct? Whatever the answersto these questions turn out to be, it remains suggestivethat the two reform movements shared a common grievance—thatis, that the cost of circulating information wastoo high—as well as a common remedy—that the price ofmailing a posted item should bear a discernible relationshipto the cost of its circulation.