The Jacksonian-era movement to keep the Sabbath pure deplored Sunday mail delivery.
Said one evangelical: “We have always viewed it as a national evil of great magnitude, and one which calls for national repentance and reformation, that the mails are carried, and the post offices kept open, on that holy day in every part of our country.”

Others, however, including Saturday-Sabbath keepers, said ending Sunday mail deliveries would amount to the government deciding what day is holy and therefore would violate the separation of church and state.

And Richard M. Johnson, the chairman of the congressional committee with jurisdiction, warned of calamity:

“The mail is the chief means by which intellectual light irradiates to the extremes of the republic. Stop it one day in seven, and you retard one-seventh of the advancement of our country.”

Eventually the devout won, with help from organized labor, which considered this an issue of workers’ rights.

Sunday delivery ended in 1912, partly because some clergy considered it a desecration of the Sabbath, and partly because people who the clergy thought should be in the pews on Sundays were instead socializing at post offices. Two post offices still open for Sunday delivery are in Angwin, Calif., and Collegedale, Tenn., where many people observe the Sabbath on Saturday.

Today, the U.S. Postal Service, whose financial condition resembles that of the federal government of which the USPS is another ailing appendage, is urging cancellation of Saturday deliveries, perhaps en route to three-days-a-week delivery. The USPS lost $5.1 billion in the latest fiscal year — after serious cost-cutting. Total 2012 losses may exceed $14 billion, a sum larger than the budgets of 35 states.

The fact that delivering the mail is one of the very few things the federal government does that the Constitution specifically authorizes (Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power to … establish post offices and post roads”) does not mean it must do it. Surely the government could cede this function to the private sector, which probably could have a satisfactory substitute system functioning quicker than you can say “FedEx,” “UPS” and “Wal-Mart.”

Read More