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When you’re young, your parents lie to you a lot—they tell you Santa Claus is real,
they tell you Brussel sprouts are delicious, they you that you’re handsome and that they
don’t like your sister more than you, and of course they tell you the classic fib that
babies are delivered by storks.
Now of course, none of those things are true: Santa Claus was invented by Jeff Bezos, Brussel
sprouts are made of gross-juice, you’re average-looking at best, and your sister is
way cooler than you.
As for the one about the stork, though, it’s not exactly true, but it’s close enough
that we can pretend it is for segue reasons.
Although babies were never delivered by birds, they were delivered, for a very brief period,
by the United States Postal Service, which, personally, I much prefer to bird-delivery
as I’ve rarely had a postal worker poop on my head.
So, you see, back before we had email or snapchat, mail was the lifeblood of America, and the
US Postal Service was the circulatory system that distributed that blood.
If you wanted to send your friends a letter or a package or a drunken photo of yourself
with puppy ears, you had to do it through the USPS.
In fact, the Postal Service was considered so important that the Postmaster General made
the second-highest salary of any public official in the US, more than anyone except the President,
and that’s actually still the case to this day, which you have to imagine is a little
embarrassing for the Vice President.
The key moment, though, was in 1913, when the Postal Service made a change that would
revolutionize American commerce: a brand new parcel service, that allowed people to send
packages up to 11 pounds or 5 kilograms—far above the previous four pound limit.
This was important because it made mail-order shopping possible, which lead to the popularity
of catalogues like Sears Roebuck, which lead to massive growth in American consumerism,
which lead to Americans buying goods on credit, which lead to an over-expansion of credit,
which lead to a stock market crash, which lead to the Great Depression—or, as I like
to call it, the big mood—which lead to the book The Grapes of Wrath, which lead to me
getting assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, which lead to me procrastinating
my reading by starting a YouTube channel, which lead to the video you’re watching
right now, which led to thousands of hours of lost human productivity, but I’m getting
off topic: the parcel service meant that now, through the mail, you could send and receive
heavier items like toasters, shoes, baby dolls, baby strollers, baby cribs, and, for a short
time, babies.
Turned out, when the parcel service was first created, they had forgotten to make a specific
rule against mailing children.
Easy mistake, we’ve all done it, but it meant that parents looking to save money on
train tickets started mailing their children, and in the spirit of the referee who let Air
Bud play basketball, because there wasn’t a specific rule against it, it was allowed—briefly,
at least.
The first known case of someone sending their child in the mail was by Jesse and Matilda
Beagle of Glen Este, Ohio, who paid 15 cents in postage to send their newly born son—who
was 10 pounds, just under the 11 pound limit—to their grandmother’s house, which was about
a mile away.
Now on the one hand, you could argue it would have been more responsible for them to just
walk their baby there themselves, but on the other hand, responsible parents don’t end
up getting talked about on YouTube 107 years later, so who’s the real winner here?
While the Beagles may have been the first, they weren’t the last.
To be clear, mailing children was never a common practice, but there are a few other
recorded examples, including a Mrs EH Staley of Stratford, Oklahoma who mailed her two-year-old
grandson to his aunt in Wellington, Kansas for 18 cents.
The most famous story is of May Pierstorff, a six-year-old girl whose parents sent her
as freight mail on a train, where she traveled 71 miles from Grangeville to Lewiston, Idaho
in 1914 to visit with her grandmother.
Her story is now the subject of the children’s book, Mailing May, which joins a long line
of books that treat child endangerment like an adventure.
One interesting aspect of child-mailing is that the the children weren’t hidden in
boxes or crates or giant novelty birthday cakes; they were just normal, package-free
children who would have postage pinned to their clothes, and they’d get handed to
the mailman, who would transport them wherever it was they needed to go.
In a way, it was less like being mailed and more like getting carried somewhere by a babysitter
whose other babies were envelopes, but now let’s get to the real question: Was mailing
children actually legal, or was it just the kind of illegal thing that people still did
in the early 1900s, like brewing moonshine or preventing minorities from voting?
The answer is that it’s not totally clear.
In 1913 the Postmaster general made a public statement in response to reports of child-mailing
that claimed there was already a rule on the books that the only live things the parcel
service would transport were bees and bugs, which would, obviously exclude children, but
nonetheless, on June 14, 1920, the Postmaster General made a new rule specifically barring
children from being sent in the mail, implying that the legality of the practice was at least
up in air enough to make a specific rule about it.
Now, on an unrelated note, the current postmaster general—aka the second highest-paid public
official in the US—is someone named Megan Brennan, who went to MIT, which means that
she probably loves learning new things about math, science, and computer science.
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