The Case for a Raise

Despite the ire that it regularly arouses in its 166 million clients, the U.S. Post Office Department in recent years has been a surprisingly well-run organization. Harry Truman's last Postmaster General, Careerman Jesse Donaldson, did his best to cut the department's traditional deficits by adopting the most drastic possible economy measure--abolition of twice-a-day mail delivery in residential districts. Under Eisenhower's Postmaster General, Michigan Chevrolet Dealer Arthur Summerfield, the volume of mail handled by the department has jumped from 52 billion to 56 billion pieces a year, while the annual deficit has been chopped from a record $727 million in fiscal 1952 to an estimated $467 million for fiscal 1957.

In their efforts to make the Post Office Department pay its own way (the books have balanced only 13 times in the last 100 years), both Donaldson and Summerfield came up against one insurmountable obstacle. Postal rates today are substantially the same as they were in 1932. Meantime, the cost of everything else, including Post Office operations, has more than doubled. Result: a built-in Post Office Department deficit that, given present rates, promises to run at least $500 million a year, and could well reach a billion dollars if volume and population continue to expand.

To rid the Post Office of this incubus, Summerfield last week asked Congress for a raise in postal rates calculated to add more than $400 million to Post Office income next year. He was backed foursquare by President Eisenhower, who told his press conference that "self-respect demands a raise in postal rates."

Overhauled Books. Summerfield was in a strong position to make the request. Soon after he was sworn in as Postmaster General in January 1953, Summerfield discovered that the Post Office Department's 509,000 employees did not include a single certified public accountant and that the most up-to-date financial report on departmental operations month by month was a year and a half old. To remedy this state of affairs, he called in topflight Chicago Accountant Maurice Stans, who overhauled post-office accounting procedures from top to bottom.

Along with an improved accounting system, Summerfield adopted a variety of moneysaving devices ranging from elimination of 3,000 small post offices to use of production-line delivery trucks instead of expensive, specially built models. (Some noteworthy Summerfield innovations: abolition of the silly regulation that prohibited enclosure of letters in packages; installation of "snorkel" mailboxes that can be reached from automobiles; distribution of bright, new ballpoints to replace that traditional bane of U.S. life, the scratchy, ink-spitting post-office pen.)

Clear Choice. Most impressive of all, Summerfield managed to combine a sharp cut in Post Office Department costs with a long-overdue salary raise for postal employees and improved service to the public.

Summerfield's specific proposals for new rates--first-class mail to 4-c- an ounce, air mail to 7-c-, and a 30% increase in second-and third-class mail-- were open to argument on detail. But there could be no doubt that some increase was necessary in all three classes of mail. Congress--which last year denied a similar Summerfield request--was faced with a clear choice: higher postal rates or indefinite continuance of the built-in Post Office deficit.

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