Randa Abdelfattah and Ramteen Arablui

Industries were booming.

Life was changing fast.

And so if, say, you had a stock trade you wanted to make, it went through the mail.

Needed to pay your rent or water bill?

Mail.

We're waiting on a big shipment of rugs?

You get the idea.

So it was important that the government made sure that that agency was free as much as possible of fraud, waste, and abuse.

That's where Elmer cut his teeth.

He was a humble guy, worked hard, and he became a very good investigator and well-respected.

And he might have spent his career in the Postal Service had things not taken an unexpected turn.

World War I was brewing, and the U.S.

had just ratified the 16th Amendment, which restored the income tax.

It's viewed as a way to make the tax system more fair.

The income tax had only been used a couple times before, mainly during the Civil War, to fund the Union's war effort.

When that war ended, so did the income tax.

But some Democratic and Republican congressmen had been pushing ever since to bring it back.

They didn't think we should be relying so much on tariffs, which at the time were the main way the government got its money.

They thought tariffs put too much of the burden on consumers and farmers, led to unstable trade relationships with other countries, and unfairly favored industrialists and the wealthy.

And once the U.S.