Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Five years after the Chicago crisis of 1966, the old Post Office Department was reorganized as the United States Postal Service, a federally owned “corporation” over which Congress and the President had oversight but no direct control. The Kappel Commission had concluded that only by operating as a self-supporting business could the Post Office become flexible enough to survive in the modern world. Congress and the President lost the power of political patronage at the post office, but they also shed the burden of running it and covering its deficits. Instead of taking the heat when the public complained about rates or service, they could join in the criticism.

The Chicago postal crisis of 1994 shows the results of this policy. The inhabitants of large cities are now, more than ever, second-class citizens. It’s poignant to see an old Congressman like Sidney Yates, who worked in Washington with Truman, shake his head with nostalgia for the days of patronage. The Postmaster Generalship used to be the plum awarded to the national chairman of the President’s party, and until 1971 all big-city postmasters were political appointees. If your mail service was bad, you could phone your ward boss and get action. By the early nineties, as Yates discovered, you could phone the Postmaster General himself and get nothing. With fifteen thousand employees, the Chicago post office was still a political power base, handing out applications for jobs the way precinct captains once handed out pounds of bacon; but it served no master except itself. The same reorganization that protected postmasters from political harassment, and allowed craft employees to aspire to high postal office, now effectively isolated a city post office from its constituents.

In Chicago, machine politics has given way to racial politics. It escapes public comment but not private observation that unrest among white North Side postal customers began not long after Chicago got its first black postmaster, and that black postmasters have presided over increasingly strident complaints ever since. Earlier in the century, postal work was one of the few respectable careers open to educated African-Americans (Cross Damon, the main character in Richard Wright’s The Outsider , has Sartrean dialogues with three coworkers from 433 West Van Buren Street), and it remains a primary way out for poor inner-city blacks. By the late seventies, when much of the white middle class had withdrawn to the suburbs, the Chicago post office was predominantly black. The figure today is nearly ninety percent.

Many of the problems at a station like Uptown — rampant absenteeism, rapid turnover of employees, poor morale — are aggravated by its distance from the black South Side neighborhoods where most postal workers live. Workers with tenure quickly transfer to more convenient neighborhoods. The same is true of supervisors and managers, who have been known to refer to Uptown as Siberia. The result is a perpetually inexperienced North Side workforce.

Race shaped the crisis in more fundamental ways as well. The north-lakefront stations were perceived as “troubled” because the volume of complaints was so high. In fact, other stations in Chicago were equally badly managed, but residents in poor neighborhoods either worked all day or received little in the mail besides welfare or Social Security checks. On the North Side, there were self-employed people and people of leisure who noticed when the mail came late and when they missed a week of Wall Street Journals . The North Side had expectations. It had learned, in the decades of the Daley machine, how to organize and how to complain. But now the rules had changed. The post office, though it looked like a city service and had once behaved like a city service, was not accountable.

In May, after the transfer of Mason, Rogers, and Green — all of them African-American — the Chicago chapter of the NAACP, noting that two of the three replacements were white and that Thomas Ranft, Green’s white boss, had survived the shakeup, denounced the moves as racist. The denunciation was specious in its implication that the thousands of dedicated black postal workers in Chicago owed their jobs to skin color rather than to competence. But it illuminated, behind the post office’s long reluctance to admit its shortcomings, the fear of losing black control. Gayle Campbell says that what made her a “traitor” was less her public betrayal of the postal family than the fact that she had, in the words of one manager, “brought the white man in.” The white men she brought in were not only William Good and David Fields, who replaced Rogers and Green, and white politicians like Simon and Smith and Yates, but the white media establishment, which many American blacks and almost all Chicago postal workers believe to be biased against them.

In his first months in office, Rufus F. Porter, the new postmaster, has eschewed the rhetoric of family, preferring the corporate vocabulary of “initiative” and “communication” and “the entrepreneurial spirit.” Porter, forty-six, is a native Californian, a onetime mail handler who earned a master’s degree at night school. Visiting him on the fourth floor of the Central Post Office, I see why Celestine Green, whose bureaucratic rank was equivalent to Jimmie Mason’s, had felt the need to redecorate. The Chicago postmaster’s office is a sprawling plain of deep-pile carpeting with scattered settlements of heavy, carved furniture. Porter, a stocky man with strikingly erect posture, sits on the edge of a chair with his hands folded on an enormous boardroom table. He answers my questions in the clipped, forceful cadences of a cadet being drilled. “You can’t teach initiative,” he says. “But what you can do is create an atmosphere, an environment, where people can feel empowered. And that’s what we’re attempting to do. We’re trying to create that atmosphere.”

By most accounts, Porter is succeeding. He has removed precisely the faulty managers whom Campbell targeted in her reports, reinstituted disciplinary suspensions, and shown a willingness to spend whatever it takes to improve service in Chicago. Postal executives frustrated by their superiors may stick pins in straw dolls; but the transfer of a nonperforming administrator probably owes less to the power of voodoo than to Porter’s determination as a reformer. Even the uncompromising Campbell is a convert. “He’s the one that Chicago’s been waiting for,” she says. “We won’t be the last for long.”

SIMPLY NOT TO BE THE WORST anymore: it’s an aspiration whose modesty must temper the optimism that Porter’s efforts inspire. When I ask Frank Brennan, a national Postal Service spokesman, why cities like Chicago have been neglected for so long, he speaks of his organization’s historical association with “small-town America,” where a community’s identity and connection to the republic were wrapped up in its little post office. Big cities, Brennan says, are part of an “evolving America,” where the daily personal connections that define the postal mission are far less workable. Viewed in this way, the neglect of the Chicago post office shows itself to be part of a larger pattern of federal frustration with cities. William Henderson, the Postal Service’s new chief operating officer, says, “There’s no subject in a major American city that’s not difficult to tackle, and the post office is one of them.” Henderson believes that high population densities, in the form of traffic jams and high-rises, inevitably impede the flow of surface mail. “It’s just a fact we face. Everybody is annoyed with cities, and we’re annoyed, too.”

The urban impediments aren’t only logistical. In the early eighties, when a long-repressed urban minority gained control of the post office, many of its members were understandably less interested in attacking the deep structural problems they had inherited than in acquiring (like Celestine Green) the trappings of power long enjoyed by the old ruling faction. At the root of the troubles of the Chicago post office is the gap between the two tiers of American society, which is nowhere more visible than in big cities and which is bridged, nowadays, by little but the universal Postal Service. Maximal wealth and cutting-edge technology exist side by side with a second-and third-generation urban underclass for which employment at the post office may seem less a responsibility than an extension of its federally funded entitlements. Angry as Campbell was at postal management’s betrayal of the public, she was no less angry at the betrayal of the city’s entry-level workers. “They want instruction,” she says. “They want guidance. But if you’ve got somebody who’s back there in the office sucking on a cup of coffee and talking on the phone to Janie in the next station, you’re not going to get that production.”