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292 NATIONAL POLITICS I918-I922
four-year contract awarded to the New York Central Railroad put two boats on twenty-four-hour harbor duty to handle incoming foreign mail starting August i, 1921. New York Central also agreed to operate at cost a third ship turned over by the War Department, a surplus ship which had been laying up at Newark. The harbor-boat service picked up mail from incoming ships before they docked, delivered it directly to rail terminals and to postal stations in Brooklyn and all along the New Jersey shore. Having the mail sorted and placed in labeled sacks on shipboard and having it delivered directly to ports where it could leave for points south and west and north and east cut out as much as two days' delay in nationwide delivery. Sending the mail around the island vicinities saved time and monev and relieved congestion in Manhattan.
Harbor boats provided one way to avoid street congestion. Underground tubes were another means to the same end. Both made for better service in the metropolitan area. Tube service in New York had been discontinued in 191 8 on the plea that it was too expensive to operate. But by 1 92 1 postal facilities were so inadequate that it became necessary to use every device at our disposal. Double tubes numbering 27.8 miles in length and connecting 26 main post office stations could be an invaluable adjunct to the postal service. Three thousand tube carriers were sitting idle, just waiting to make their thirty-mile-an-hour trips once more through these miniature subways eight inches in diameter. In 1 92 1 businessmen and merchants in the metropolitan area were clamoring to have the tube service restored. In August I went to New York to get a bird's-eye view of the situation. The first move was the appointment of a citizen's advisory committee. With them I discussed the wisdom of revamping the City Hall post office or erecting new buildings and enlarging others. This big question was still unsettled when I resigned from the department in 1922. Postmaster General Hubert Work, my successor, recommended in his annual report for 1922 that the Post Office negotiate a purchase of the desired property, which in the long run would actually be cheaper than leasing. In 1921 we were paying annual rental of almost a million dollars for leased property in New York.
The postal business is the public's business, and whether it has its point of contact with a citizens' advisory committee or with the person receiving or sending a letter, the public is always conscious of its national postal communications network— particularly of any irregularities, interruptions, or variations in service. And mail robbery could be more than facetiously labeled an irregularity!
Almost everything common to civilization stages a "comeback"; and Wells-Fargo days were being revived in 1920 and 1921 with as much excitement as when the first stagecoach was robbed out West. A $6,000,