US POSTAL HISTORY BLOG

As much as bullets and boots, letters to the ‘boys in the uniform’…and today, the girls in uniform…have been a part of every armed conflict since the War Between the States. So have United States patriotic postal covers. Patriotic covers were first used during the Civil War era and immediately became prized collectibles. World War I patriotic covers also became highly collectible and valuable. It should come as no surprise that the combined popularity of Civil War and World War I covers was the catalyst for the ready availability of patriotic covers during World War II.
In many ways, the covers serve as a measure of the level of patriotism in the United States during World War II. Uncle Sam called on everyday citizens to marshal their forces as energetically as the GIs who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Americans responded with gusto. They agreed to rationing. They collected rubber for the war effort. They shaped their fingers into V’s when newsreel cameras whirred at wartime production plants.

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Printer, inventor, and one of the best-loved figures of the Revolutionary War period, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father AND the future ‘father’ of the U.S. postal system.  Even before the states were united, Franklin was named postmaster of the American colonies, as much for his reputation for frugality as his interest in mail.

Franklin was known as a penny-pincher when it came to running the mail system, but he was not above using his status to send his own mail for free.  Frugal Franklin treated himself to what was known at the time as a “franking privilege.” 

Franking privileges—the ability to send mail with a signature rather than with postage—date back to the seventeenth-century English House of Commons. America’s Continental Congress adopted the practice in 1775 and voted it into law in 1789.  It was intended to improve the flow of information across a vast nation.

To send his missives on their way, all Franklin had to do was sign his name on an envelope and write the word “free.”  No fuss…no muss…and no pesky stamp either!  And so the term ‘Franklin Privilege’ was coined.

Even after the introduction of postage stamps in the U.S., their use was not mandatory for eight more years. One famous consequence of this was that in 1848, Zachary Taylor did not know he had been nominated for President for several weeks after the nomination took place, until someone arrived to tell him in person - he had refused several letters conveying the news, because he did not care to pay the postage due!

This seems incredible in these days of instant world- wide communication, but demonstrates not only the disadvantage of the postage rules in effect at the time, but the different attitude of those times - people valued their privacy. It must be said as well in the famous man’s defense that he had been forced to instruct his postmaster to reject all unpaid mail. Taylor was receiving so much from admirers that the cost of the postage due was more than he could afford to pay! Moreover, he had not sought the nomination, and was not expecting it.