Winifred Gallagher

Of course, most newspapers then had no way to distribute themselves widely other than the mail.

I mean, if you had a newspaper, you could sell whatever you could sell on the street corner, but

You wanted to have like a more wide distribution.

You depended on the post office.

Part of the mandate to create an informed electorate also led the post to have very low prices for mailing books and magazines, which still exist today.

If you're mailing somebody a book, always write book right on the front.

You pay like less than half.

And in a country, a lot of which was agrarian for, you know, well, well, well into the 20th century,

This business of sending magazines and books, very cheap throughout the country, really amounted to what was for a lot of people an informal educational system, sort of like a secondary educational system, where people really learned about what was they got the National Geographic and they got, you know, ladies home journal to learn about health.

And this was really the way people kept themselves informed and educated.

I think just that the post office did arguably create the country and create our political culture.

There are good days and bad days, but we do have this extraordinary freedom of information and communications that's kind of made us who we are.

It's hard to overstate the value of a delivery system that can reach every house with potentially urgently needed materials.

So I think it is an excellent time for people to think about the value of this system.