In 1938, when artist Ben Shahn and his wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, were at work on a sprawling egg-tempera mural inside the Bronx General Post Office, she said thatthey joked, “We raised the price on all the eggs in New York.” It was, indeed, a hulking commission—13 panels inspired byWalt Whitman lines about laborers—and it was just one of more than 1,200 pieces that artists completed for post offices throughout the United States in the 1930s and ’40s through the New Deal.
As the U.S. Postal Service comes under attack fromPresident Donald Trumpand faces cuts from thenewly installed postmaster general, its vast cultural legacy has never been more important. The agency has not only provided affordable communication for centuries, it facilitated elections and offered fairly paid employment for millions, particularly forBlack Americans.
The USPS has helped shape our national identity by bringing art and architecture to every part of the country. Its vast art holdings exemplify the vitality of public goods and spaces.
Pursuing programs to employ artists, President Franklin Roosevelt spoke of creating art that would be “native, human, eager and alive,” Winifred Gallagher writes in his 2016 history,How the Post Office Created America. Among the hundreds that took up that cause were now-canonical figures like Philip Guston (in Commerce, Georgia), Milton Avery (Rockville, Indiana), and Archibald Motley (Wood River, Illinois).
The murals amount to a “historical record of a national experiment that was partly meant to reassert ideal regional values being threatened by the despair brought on by the Great Depression,” said Phil Parisi, a retired journal editor in Logan, Utah, who wrote a book onTexas’s post-office murals.
In many cases, the artists in the ’30s and ’40s were delivering work to places that were far from any art museum. “The only trouble with the pictures is that they are so good they call for more of the same,” a local paper in Marlinton, West Virginia, bemoaned of freshly unveiled murals, as Devin Leonard notes in his 2016 history of the USPS,Neither Snow Nor Rain.