The need for any kind of social communication dictates its terms.  A contingent of soldiers is in a combat zone.  They have to turn a blind corner.  They look to their leader to give them a hand signal to move.  Verbal communication might be inaudible, misunderstood, or might give away their position to the enemy.  The impetus for these soldiers’ communication is information and coordination thus they use the best means for achieving their ends.  Often we don’t think about the very first time we communicate with someone we have just met.  We might ask them, “How do you do?” never expecting a reply, and in fact to respond “I do fine,” would be very strange.  The impetus for this communication is not information at all, since we are not really asking how the other person is doing.  Instead, the impetus is recognition that we are being introduced to someone and greeting them with a response which both polite and ritualistic. 

Norwegian scholar Bjarne Rogan illustrates communication theory with binary construct.  He draws a distinction between linear and circular communication.  Linear communication seeks to disseminate information from a sender to a recipient, such as in the case of soldiers.  Circular communication however, is an activity in itself, which seeks to consolidate and acknowledge existing social relationships.  In this essay both of these types of communication will be explored through analyzing the main means of communication at the institutional and commercial level in New Yorkaround 1909.  First we will look at the history of the New York postal system, and, second, at the postcard craze of the late eighteen and early nineteen hundreds.  While the former illustrates linear communication, the latter illustrates circular communication.  Both reflect the values of an increasingly consumerist society, concerned with both the global dissemination of information, and the importance of maintaining social and personal relationships.  Those who witnessed the events of the Hudson-Fulton celebration employed the postal system and postcards to propagate its memory and its message to loved ones and acquaintances.     

The New York Postal System:
A History of Efficient Communication

The first semblances of a postal system appeared with the Dutch colonization of the newly discovered continent in 1660.^[1]  Previously, mail had been delivered directly from the merchants arriving in the New York harbor.^[2]  According to legend, letters were left on the mantel of a tavern on Broad Street to be claimed by their recipients.  By the time the English gained control of the area, colonists had a route from New York to Boston, as well as a colonial postmaster.  The more sociable, though not more organized, method of leaving mail in coffee houses in boxes became popular.  While the very first postmaster is unknown, the earliest record of holding the position is attributed to a Thomas Neale, appointed in 1692^[3].  He was followed by Richard Nichol in 1732. 

It was not until 1753 that Benjamin Franklin was appointed Deputy Postmaster-General for the colonies, responsible to the post office headquarters in London.^[4]  Alexander Colden served as postmaster for New York under Franklin up until a year before the revolution.  While the revolution was in progress, Dobb’s Ferry served as a temporary center of operations.  Delivery of mail was haphazard throughout the war period.  In 1786, after the United States had finally won its independence, the Post Office of New York was created.^[5]  When yellow fever raged in 1822, the post office moved from it’s location at William Street to Greenwich Village as a means of escaping the epidemic. 

During the next few years it moved several more times and was eventually located on Chambers Street up until 1835, when it was burned in the great fire of that year.  A second office was then established in the vicinity of Wall Street.^[6]  A decade later the central branch was relocated at the former Middle Dutch Church on Nassau Street.  The government paid three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the land, and resold it for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars in 1875.^[7]  The secondary branch found its new home at Chatham Square.^[8]  It was in 1875 that the building in City Hall Park was created by architect Alfred Mullet.  It cost approximately ten million dollars and the land on which it was built was again bought from the city by the federal government, though it was eventually demolished.^[9]  During the Hudson-Fulton Celebration this post office still stood, employing around four thousand people. 

The New York Post Office had to be both efficient and in a constant state of growth.  As E. Idell Zeisloft, writing in 1899 stated:

London is vast and its General Post Office Colossal, Paris and Berlin have mighty postal centers within them, but none of these cities have the foreign mail of their countries dumped upon them.  There is little that goes to the Continent in the way of postal matter that does not pass through New York, and the old gray post offices here stands the shock of added tons a week without a tremor, without disturbance of her splendid routine.^[10] 

The intense and complicated system of the postal service increased its valuable contribution to developing New York as a metropolis at the turn of the century.  Nearly a billion letters passed through the post office of 1909, only half of which were to be delivered in the city itself.  In addition to this the post office sold forty thousand tons of newspapers and three quarters of a million dollars in stamps in one month at this time.^[11]  The revenue afforded the government by the workings of the post office, in addition to its function as an invaluable social service, were quite profitable, and upwards of six million dollars a year.  The amount of commerce and business mail that passed daily through the hands of postal workers was often greater than the amounts of personal correspondence. 

The postal service was an integral part of New York City during the era of Hudson-Fulton for two reasons.  The first was the service it provided not only to city dwellers, but citizens across the nation to have their mail delivered efficiently.  The association between the development of communication and world peace was strong at the time of Hudson-Fulton and the progressivism movement.  Therefore the post office was seen as an instrument of communication, progress and peace (much in the same way as Robert Fulton’s Clermont). 

After all, if steamships were a faster means of transporting information between nations, certainly the post office was the fastest means of transporting information within a nation.  If the rapid exchange of information inevitably leads to less misunderstandings, than the conclusion that both the Clermont and the postal system contribute to world peace would be correct.  However, as the events of the early and mid twentieth century show, technological and industrial progress does not necessarily lead to any such thing.  The advantages of such retrospective analysis are a privilege unavailable to the organizers and participants of the Hudson-Fulton celebration.  Therefore, what might seem to us to be a faulty and ridiculous premise, for them embodied the greatest hope the modern world had ever known.  

The post office also served as a means of linear communication.  People wanted the most accurate and the quickest way to send messages:  “. . . this. . . to a New Yorker, is all-important.  It is because of its speedy delivery to him that he takes such pride in his huge gray Post Office.”^[12]  The hustle and bustle of city life was translated into a demand for a postal system capable of handling the influx of mail due to its function as a commercial center and main seaport of the nation.  In striking contrast to this very practical institution developed the phenomena of the postcard, it all its superfluous glory. 

The Postcard Craze: 
A Golden Age of Collectible and Collective 

The postcard phenomena took place approximately between the years 1895 and 1920.  However, as is usually the case, the markers that line the road of popular culture are not exact.  The Golden Age of the picture postcard produced some where from two hundred to three hundred billion postcards.^[13]  Nearly half of these were never mailed, often functioning as collectibles and memorabilia of certain events and travels.  The age of consumerism was rapidly approaching while modern industrialism was just spreading its wings. 

Rogan divides the popularity of the picture postcard into four distinct categories:  the aesthetic properties of the card, its souvenir status, its function as a collectible, and as a means of communication.  The collectible stamp, the precursor to the collectible postcard, was on a much smaller sale.   In the age before film and mass media, visual images were hard to acquire.  The practice of keeping postcards and arranging them in albums, often using them as “coffee table books” became commonplace.^[14]  The fact that the postcard usually depicted “world” subject matter made it all the more desirable as an object representing progress and the modern age. 

The postcard craze was first started by women of every age.  All-female clubs for collecting emerged, soon followed by men who proceeded to dominate the postcard scene from 1905 onwards.^[15]  In 1900, most collectors were women, while only five years later most collectors were men.  The gender divide extended to the types of cards which were collected.  As Rogan states: 

Women collected motifs like views, landscapes, portraits, and works of art, but men started when more modern motifs appeared, like humorous cards, actresses, and ‘posed beauties,’ ships, locomotives, and other tourist and transport topic.^[16]

As a result, women’s’ collecting was looked down upon as frivolous and disorganized.  The “art of postcard collecting” was becoming the newest craze in an already newly established trend. 

Postcards also served more utilitarian functions besides being objects of aesthetic beauty and collectible “value.”  Postcards were inexpensive, and ideal for sending brief messages for ordinary occasions and between ordinary people.  The telegraph had similar qualities, but was far too costly for the average person until the time of the First World War.^[17]  Germany led the world in postcard production until 1910.  Most postcards sold in America were produced in German factories.  Companies often had secret methods of production and color techniques that they kept as careful secrets from their competitors.  The influx of printers trained in Germany who immigrated to America led to the uncovering of German manufacturing secrets.  However, the approach of the war and the decline in tourism contributed to the end of the postcard craze soon after.  Luxury items became rare and the useof mediums such as the telegraph and the telephone became increasingly common.^[18] 

The purchase of postcards at shops, railway stations, and on sidewalk corners became a ritualistic activity which the average tourist engaged in.  Once a ship would come into the harbor port tourists would rush to mail the cards which they had bought on board or had written upon their arrival.^[19]  The number of postcards sent from any one traveler might be upwards of fifty cards.  The practice of gaining cancellation marks from a post office where the card was purchased became a way for collectors to authenticate the card and the journey itself. 

The style of the postcard went through a series of progressions.  The standard postcard (with an image on the front and a space for a message and address on the back) we know today was once quite different.  Before the 1890s postcards often did not have a visual at all.  The first kind of postcard had no picture and was offered beginning in 1870.  Holiday cards or congratulatory cards were put in envelopes.  Both of these cards were issued by postal authorities.^[20]  It was not until around 1880 that these authorities let private cards without images be sent as long as they had a postage stamp.  Near the end of the decade a small picture in a corner was allowed, and eventually it expanded to the whole side of the card, pushing back the message area even further.  A picture on one side of the postcard appeared, however, the other side merely consisted of the address of the recipient.  Therefore, any messages had to be written next to, or on top of, the picture. Around the turn of the century postcards began to appear with a divided back side for both the address and the message, reversing the orientation of the original postcard.^[21]  By the late 1890s the increased importance of the visual to the postcard defined it less as a means of simply sending a message through words, but also through pictures. 

Often postcards merely acknowledged the relationship between the sender and the recipient, rather than trying to communicate any particular piece of information.  The reasons for this are many, among them, the sense of intimacy established between by the briefest of communications, sometimes merely consisting of a signature.  As the importance of networking tactics loom over the modern social landscape, so did the importance of reciprocal contact made easy by a cheap and simple medium like the postcard.^[23] 

But the influence of the postcard was not circumscribed to the realm of personal communication.  Naomie Schor’s “Cartes Postales:  Representing Paris 1900” is a discussion of what she names “. . . the discourse of metropolis.”^[24]  She highlights the centrality of constructed national image for the benefit of the public at large.  She writes:

. . . We will have to adopt a curious recursive perspective where what is plundered in the colonies is transformed into a glorifying attribute of metropolitan commerce, and the colonized returns in the guise of a satisfied customer, a self-consuming consumer.^[25]

How was the postcard “glorifying” the metropolis of New York in 1909?  The abundance of postcards is in itself an answer, as the few dominating the many is always seen as contrary to democratic values.  Instead, by focusing attention on what could be acquired abundantly and produced at low unit cost democratic values could be reoriented to play out in the social not from the political as much as from the economic sphere. 

On average, 11,500,000 postcards were mailed in the United States each year from 1900 to 1920.  Internationally that number could be doubled bringing the total for this twenty year span to over two hundred and fifty billion cards.  However, this is only in reference to cards that were actually mailed.  A quarter of all cards were un-mailed, which brings the number of postcards produced during this Golden Age to a staggering three hundred billion.^[26]  It at first seems highly unusual that such a high number of cards were never exchanged.  However, upon considering the alternative functions of the postcard, the fact that many were kept in personal collections is not altogether bizarre. 

Postcards were often purchased as souvenirs, serving to remind those who visited places, or attended events, of their journey.  In a sense, they served a function similar to that of photographs.  They were kept both for their pleasing visual aspects, as well as their sentimental value to the owner.  Many had no intention, even at the time of purchase, to ever send their postcards.  This was especially true for those who collected postcards and kept them in albums.  The existence of journals for postcard collectors in nearly every European country is evidence for the popularity of collecting.   

Celebrations like Hudson-Fulton were yet another arena for specialized postcards.  Cards with images of the parade, and the figures to which it was dedicated served both as collectibles and witnesses to the experiences of those who were present at the event.  Postcards from the celebration were often portraits of Hudson, Fulton, images of the Clermont, the Half-moon, or illustrations of various floats in the parade.  Pictures of floats depicting Native Americans and literary themes were popular for their fantastical appeal.  Often Hudson and Fulton were shown in a small bust portrait next to a picture of one of their vessels on the water. 

Postcards from Hudson-Fulton were colorful and contained imagery both patriotic and reminiscent of the Dutch past of New York City.  Both historical events and more inventive scenes were depicted in postcards.  Dutch shoes, or a little Dutch girl, appear next to Uncle Sam in some postcards, while others show Henry Hudson approaching the Native Americans for the very first time after disembarking from the Half-Moon.  Postcards from 1909 were full of imagination and brightly colored busy scenes.  Often patriotic colors such as red, white, and blue were used.  Most postcards sought to be as eye-catching as possible, and such themes were popular with tourists looking to send something exciting back to their loved ones which would commemorate the event and show how the parade actually looked.  

More importantly, whether in a time of celebration or on any ordinary day, postcards were an extremely popular way to express an interest and desire to communicate with those in one’s social circular.  Social services like the New York postal system may not seem on to have much connection to celebrations, but certainly public events had a dramatic effect on the amount of mail that would pass through the grey doors of the old post office in City Hall Park.  The desire to communicate effectively, cheaply, and meaningfully made people utilize both the postcard and the post office at an increasing rate throughout the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth century, and beyond. 

Endnotes