Elon = Jim Farley

Listening to old and new podcasts on the Post Office, I’m somewhat immersed in postal lore. The immersion led to a connection.

Elon’s role as chief campaigner for Trump is NOT new. More broadly, the Tech Tyrants have replaced the Postmaster General, formerly a ‘patronage’ office. Presidents appointed their chief campaigner as Postmaster. The most famous was Jim Farley, who ran FDR’s campaign then served as Postmaster. LBJ appointed Larry O’Brien. Ike had Arthur Summerfield, who turned out to be an effective postmaster. He started the project to mechanize and computerize sorting. Harding had Will Hays, head of RNC but much more famous for the Hays Office attempting to ban “obscenity” in publications and movies. Others filled the same pair of roles with less fanfare.

There was an excellent reason for the connection. Before radio and TV and the web, the mail carried campaign material and communications between politicians and public. If you wanted your representative to hear a complaint, you mailed it.

When Bezos’s grandpa founded DARPA in 1958, the role of the real PO was diminished but not gone. The Tech Tyrants have replaced the letter side of the PO. Amazon has NOT replaced the parcel side, and in fact Amazon is one of the PO’s biggest customers and income sources. Amazon has its own delivery service in big cities, but still relies on the PO for smaller items and rural areas, just as Sears did for a differently shaped mail order and a differently shaped phone order.

So it makes perfect sense for the Tech Tyrants, the letter side, to be on the platform with a president’s inauguration. Farley and O’Brien and Summerfield played the same role in previous administrations.

Now the PO itself is more separate from partisan politics, so it’s a better vehicle for free thought.