Daniel Carpenter: evaluation

Transcript context

…In the 19th century, how is the Postal Service central to the Progressive Reform Movement? I think it was seen as both the exemplar of what a potentially open-access public service could be in a way that nobody had really thought about any other function of the federal government being so universal. Even consider the army, which we would today say is, “Okay, how can you define a state without its military and its army?” But as we know, not really until the Progressive Era was the United States Army unified. The Civil War was fought through militias. Any number of other services were, of course, decentralized to the state level, sometimes to the local, so Progressives saw at one moment in the Postal Service, well, here’s actually something that the national government can do, and it can provide this platform for democratic republic, open deliberation, markets, and a much more universalized cultural dialogue. I don’t want to say singular cultural dialogue — pluralism was there — but a much more globalized dialogue. That said, the other thing they saw in the Postal Service — and this is something that Theodore Roosevelt saw in the Postal Service — was something that was being eaten from within by the patronage system. It was, in part, the folks in the Pendleton Act, but I would argue even more the presidents who really pushed civil service reform forward with their administrative decisions, who said, “If it’s going to happen anywhere, it has to happen in the Postal Service, in part because there’s a big part of our economy, as well as our society, that depends upon it. ” Roosevelt, before and after he made these very controversial moves to cover in, as it’s said, thousands of postmaster positions under the merit system, actually received a lot of support from shipping industries and medium-size, smaller-size retailers. If we just outright privatize the entire postal system in America today, what is the most significant change that would result?…

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