[HN Gopher] A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail
___________________________________________________________________
A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail
Author : m-hodges
Score : 60 points
Date : 2025-06-27 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| j-bos wrote:
| There's something incredible about how much trust there used to
| be in society.
| ksenzee wrote:
| I don't know whether it's "everyone trusted everyone" so much
| as "everyone expected really bad things to happen anyway."
| Like, if there's a good chance I might lose this kid to
| diphtheria, or drowning in the river, or whatever, sending them
| on a trip alone doesn't feel too dangerous by comparison.
| wredcoll wrote:
| I suspect this is more true than we realize.
|
| I have this idea that if one of us were talking to a bill and
| ted from 2200 or so, one of their questions would be
| something like "so 40,000+ people died in america alone from
| car crashes, and everyone knew this and just ignored it???"
|
| It's amazing what you get used to.
| Nition wrote:
| I have a similar thought re "work sucks"/"nobody wants to
| work anymore", where actually maybe work and people are the
| same as ever but being at home is more entertaining than it
| used to be.
| esseph wrote:
| People have been putting this in newspapers for hundreds of
| years.
|
| Everytime I read the phrase I just groan and move to the
| next thing to read.
| frollogaston wrote:
| For this old timey example I agree, but from like 2000 to
| 2025, I have noticed a decline in trust in the US. People are
| also more trusting today in certain parts vs others, or in
| some other countries, and it's not because of lower
| standards.
| parpfish wrote:
| Half-baked thought:
|
| when something bad happens now it'll be all over news
| broadcasts and social media.
|
| I think it's pretty well established that fear mongering
| will skew your perception of something bad happening, but
| something I hadn't considered until now is that it can make
| the bad thing _worse_. In addition to dealing with whatever
| tragedy befell you, there's a layer of judgemental shame
| piled on top ("how could they be so careless to let this
| happen? They must be a bad, neglectful parent")
| 9rx wrote:
| It is unlikely there has ever been a "everyone trusted
| everyone" moment in human history, but even today we rely on
| "random strangers" to move children to and fro every single
| (school) day. Such trust in people isn't out of the ordinary
| even now.
|
| I doubt parents put their children on the school bus because
| "something bad is apt to happen anyway", rather "it is just
| what you do" without any further thought. The postal service
| carrying humans isn't what we do these days, so it stands out
| as a curiosity.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think these newsworthy stories about isolated cases of
| this happening were in any way representative of society as a
| whole.
|
| You can today and you always could find instances of people
| doing unusual stuff.
| gwerbret wrote:
| I think you can still get a real sense of overall societal
| trust from such stories. Not too long ago I horrified a
| relatively-young person by explaining how in the not-too-
| distant past, people used to have their names, phone numbers
| and home addresses automatically listed in a large, White-
| covered book whose Pages were distributed freely to everyone
| in the city.
| kube-system wrote:
| Why were they surprised? The fact that it's printed? Or
| were they just not aware that the same information (and
| more) is freely available on people search websites today?
| (one of which has the same namesake as that large white
| book)
|
| Either way, I think trust now and always in the US has been
| driven more by the urban/rural divide than anything else.
| Even as this article points out, this was primarily a rural
| phenomenon. When you know your mail carrier on a first name
| basis, things are a lot different.
| arp242 wrote:
| One has to wonder how often things went wrong in the past and
| just didn't get reported on. Or were just shrugged off.
|
| I don't think people of the 19th century were fundamentally
| better than they are today. Things like (sexual) abuse
| happened. There was probably a lot more of it than today: big
| taboo on anything related to sex, women couldn't even vote,
| fewer investigative tools (fingerprints, cameras, DNA). Well,
| it probably wasn't great.
|
| Today if a child would see a friend blow up in front of him
| people would be talking about PTSD, (life-long) trauma, etc.
| During the war my grandfather had a friend blow up in front of
| him. "Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had
| to deal with it, haha!"
|
| In the past lots of things like this were under-represented.
| Today they're probably over-represented.
| kbelder wrote:
| >"Well, you didn't get any help in those days, you just had
| to deal with it, haha!"
|
| I can't help but wonder sometimes if that's healthier.
| Probably better for some people in some circumstances and
| worse in others.
| morkalork wrote:
| I think they just called it shell-shock
| PKop wrote:
| It was way more ethnically homogenous. When that decreases,
| trust declines. See Japan now as a particularly high trust
| modern society.
| kube-system wrote:
| Many of the highest crime places on earth are ethnically
| homogenous. Culture is not determined by skin color. Rather,
| Japan places a high value on the rights of and responsibility
| to the collective good. People in the US are culturally much
| less willing to suppress any rights of the individual, even
| if it supports a collective good. You can be much more
| confident that others will do what's in your best interest if
| society will come down on them hard if they don't.
| amelius wrote:
| Huh, today children can trust their parents to not send them
| through the mail ...
| 9rx wrote:
| From a trust point of view, this isn't any different than a kid
| taking the school bus, is it?
|
| It is really not that even that dissimilar functionally; both
| serving to move a child from one place to another.
| kurrupttt wrote:
| yeah we've done some unironically questionable things over the
| centuries.
| ashton314 wrote:
| I'm delighted that the first picture is of a child being carried
| in a tote bag, and the website is advertising "Subscribe to
| Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote" right up at the top.
|
| Presumably the child is not included.
| orthodonticjake wrote:
| I see no rule that says an adult cannot be mailed
| LorenDB wrote:
| That has been done as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Box_Brown
| tolerance wrote:
| This TIL struck like a laxative!
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Domestic packages may not weigh more than 70 pounds.
|
| https://faq.usps.com/articles/Knowledge/Parcel-Size-Weight-F...
|
| Adults are too heavy.
| lxgr wrote:
| Adult birds can explicitly be mailed:
| https://pe.usps.com/text/pub52/pub52c5_008.htm
| sowbug wrote:
| Flat Stanley was mailed to California. If I recall correctly, his
| parents saved on postage because he was flat.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley
| owlstuffing wrote:
| Reminds me of a book, Mailing May[1], I read to my daughter and
| now my granddaughter. A true story of a family on a budget who
| sent their daughter to see grandma as mail cargo on a train. Cute
| story.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Mailing-May-Michael-Tunnell/dp/006443...
| ljf wrote:
| It is mentioned in the article - I'll have to look out for it
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That book also has drawings that are at least moderately
| accurate of some of the trestles on that railroad line. They
| called them "rails on stilts", and that's a fairly accurate
| description.
| ksherlock wrote:
| "Mail carriers were trusted servants, and that goes to prove it,"
| Lynch says. "There are stories of rural carriers delivering
| babies ..."
|
| Plenty of stories about them fathering babies, too.
| arp242 wrote:
| Some very hairy babies from a very hair baby-maker, or so I
| understand.
| brudgers wrote:
| I am reminded of Bukowski's _Post Office_.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| For me even more interesting is that people found incredibly fun
| abuses of early mail. For instance using the postal services to
| deliver heavy goods such as brick. The transported all the brick
| for an entire bank building in the early days [1].
|
| [1]: https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_2022.2007.1
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named
| Jesse and Mathilda Beagle "mailed" their 8-month-old son James to
| his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia.
|
| Is there more to this story? Presumably they didn't actually box
| up their infant and entrust it to a total stranger!?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-06-27 23:00 UTC)