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

5 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 yhe wrote in February 1919, “and I do not mean the useof the highway in the form in which it is now or has beenused.” 29In some respects, Blakslee may have been too farsightedat the expense of shorter- term practical considerations. Heunquestionably overreached, for example, when trying tosustain those motor truck routes after the outbreak of peacedried up demand for them. He was also more quixoticthan pragmatic in attempting to sell his dream of a nationwideweb of those routes to a skeptical Congress. Overall,though, Blakslee foresaw more than many of his contemporariesthe potential of roads and surface transportation.“Motor truck postal service will ultimately be one of thebiggest things in the history of the Post Office Department,”he proclaimed a few weeks after that one truck’s historicrun between Lancaster and New York City. 30Blakslee, while a fierce champion of deploying automotivemeans for postal ends, was hardly its originator.The Post Office Department, for example, experimentedwith automobiles for mail collection within cities as farback as 1899. Moreover, Frank H. Hitchcock—as firstassistant postmaster general under President TheodoreRoosevelt and then Taft’s postmaster general—deservescredit for pioneering everything from the first actual contractsfor mail collection by automobile to usage of motortrucks in postal operations. 31 Blakslee, however, playedthe critical role in building on those seminal developmentswith his larger- scale, longer- haul approach. More thananyone else, he fulfilled the promise behind those earlierinnovations and also the establishment of the Post OfficeDepartment’s Motor Vehicle Service in 1915.All of this happened because Blakslee, while low inpolitical savvy, had an unmatched single- mindednessabout the role of trucks in the postal universe. Blakslee,through his stubborn and outspoken advocacy of motortrucks in mail delivery and the vigorous use of those vehiclesin his farm- to- table program, helped foster a momentumin transportation technology that could not beerased or even reduced. In that respect, he went the extramile in ensuring that the Post Office Department mirroredthe nation as a whole in optimizing an increasingly prominentand popular means of transport. “Few people realizeas yet the great possibilities of motor trucking,” intoned aNew York Times article in January 1918 while World WarI was still very much under way. 32 That article highlightedthe Post Office Department as one entity “fully awake tothe possibilities of the motor truck.” 33Consequently, any assessment of Blakslee’s transportationendeavors cannot be limited to the comparativelyshort- lived farm- to- table experiment. A broader, morereliable appraisal involves the extent to which the use oftrucks steadily became an integral part of that agency’slifeblood and everyday culture during his tenure and immediatelythereafter. One measure of this can be seen inthe basic inventory of those vehicles: as of 1915, the PostOffice Department owned only 32 trucks; by 1918, thatnumber mushroomed to 560; and in 1924—about fouryears after Blakslee stepped down as fourth assistant postmastergeneral and two years before he died—the postalfleet included 5,290 trucks. 34 While a combination ofcircumstances and factors led to that explosive growthin mail trucks, a strong case can be made that the highrankingBlakslee was the right person at the right timeduring that process in terms of both his words and actions.An even more telling and compelling measure of Blakslee’sinfluence can be seen in how trucks were subsequentlyand similarly put to practical use in long- distance and bulkmail delivery. Those applications would range from thecreation of an extensive star route system with motorizedtruck service starting in the 1920s to the widespread adoptionof the tractor- trailer during the 1950s to haul mailbetween large postal facilities. Blakslee and his farm- totableefforts also set the stage for the Highway Post OfficeService and its big road- based vehicles that transportedmail between 1941 and 1974 to far- flung communitiesno longer served by railroads. 35 By the mid- twentieth century,trucks had taken an honored place alongside theirairborne counterparts in the carriage of mail. Accordingto the 1951 postmaster general’s annual report, “Of relativelyrecent years the truck and the airplane have enteredthe field which formerly belonged almost entirely to therailroad and the boat.” 36That general use of mail trucks was a technologicalbreakthrough that would have inevitably taken place withor without Blakslee pressing for it. He was the pivotalforce, however, in accelerating the evolution and expansionof that transportation mode as a mail- delivery optionand helping to guarantee that the Post Office Departmentexploited its possibilities early on and fully. This, in thefinal analysis, helps define not only his legacy but also theenduring lessons of both the farm- to- table experiment andthe war in which that program’s motor trucks thrived.NOTES1. “Postal Truck Brings Produce 180 Miles,” The New YorkTimes, 21 March 1918.2. “Postal Truck Brings Produce,” NYT; “Farm- to- TableParcel Post,” The New York Times, 14 April 1918.