"Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night will keep me from my appointed rounds," proclaims the "Postman's Motto." Yet for much of U.S. history, raw politics in the form of patronage spoils dictated who handled the mail and when. | From Our Past page

Postmasters who found themselves on the losing side of a national election were soon out of a job. Politics, it seemed, was the one obstacle that could prevent a postmaster from his appointed rounds.

Until Progressive Era reforms in the early 20th century, the U.S. president and his political party controlled the appointment of postmasters, which as early as 1858 numbered some 27,000.

And for nearly four years in the 1880s, a Bloomington man was the central figure in deploying this massive patronage army.

In 1884, Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since James Buchanan occupied the White House before the Civil War. Bloomington's own Adlai E. Stevenson I became Cleveland's first assistant postmaster general, an unimpressive-sounding but vastly influential office that hired and fired tens of thousands of small town (officially known as "fourth-class") postmasters.

At the time, fourth-class "PMs" were at the mercy of the party in power and their commissions could be terminated at any time. Such appointments were generally based on recommendations from the local congressman - that is, if the congressman was a member of the president's party.

Stalwart Democrats, chaffing from 24 years of political exile, called on Cleveland to undertake a countrywide purge of GOP postmasters. Publicly, the new administration took a cautious, legalistic path to dispensing "spoils," officially targeting only those Republicans who had exercised "offensive partisanship" while in the employ of the federal government.

In practice, offensive partisanship often meant simply being Republican. Stevenson, for his part, was a proud "spoilsman" who had few qualms about the liberal use of patronage to lubricate the machinery of both party and government (see accompanying political cartoon). During Cleveland's first term, the Bloomington Democrat replaced more than 40,000 postmasters, and friend and foe alike began referring to "Adlai and his Ax."

He was once described as the man who "decapitated 65 Republicans postmasters in two minutes." Stevenson called that description "the highest compliment he had ever received."

Cleveland came up short in his re-election bid, and Stevenson returned to Bloomington and his home off Franklin Park. Meanwhile, the GOP was back in the White House and back in the spoils game. By early 1889, hundreds of postmaster commissions in Central Illinois were again in play.

In Colfax, there were at least six Republican contenders for postmaster, so the GOP agreed to submit the question to a vote (albeit one restricted to members of their own party). The name of the top vote getter was then submitted to Republican Congressman Jonathan H. Rowell of Bloomington.

The spoils system came under frequent fire, though it was usually the political party out of power that did most of the complaining. The Progressive Era and its good government reforms finally made the wholesale politicization of the postal service untenable. In 1912, President William Howard Taft placed fourth-class postmasters under civil service, severely curtailing patronage. And in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did the same to second- and third-class postmasters.

The spoils system did not always pit Democrat against Republican. Sometimes, the provincial, intensely personal nature of doling out patronage led to intra-party squabbling.

In the late 1850s, for instance, President James Buchanan and U.S. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, then the nation's two most powerful Democrats, backed different men for Bloomington postmaster. Buchanan allies brought in Barnett D. Van Druver from Clinton, a move that infuriated Douglas supporters who favored George McElheny, the sitting postmaster. Van Druver, viewed by local Democrats as a Buchananite interloper, was even burned in effigy.