Revisions of Stamping American Memory

Federal Participation in Philately, Conclusion

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 A retailer pointed the Department in the direction of serving collectors as consumers—consumers of products and of imagery from the American past—from which the USPOD would not return. Even when met with strong opposition from collectors, the U.S. federal government did not back down from its desire to issues commemoratives. Without nineteenth-century philatelists and the then-growing community of collectors, the USPOD would not have begun printing commemoratives celebrating American World’s Fairs in the 1890s. Those stamps promoted current events and circulated images celebrating American exceptionalism that contributed to a larger national narrative. By issuing commemoratives, the government encouraged collectors and non-collectors to buy stamps for albums, not just as postage. With the PA firmly established by the early 1920s, the Department created an infrastructure to better handle increased production of commemoratives and to court a growing body of collectors. By the 1920s and 1930s, non-collecting citizens and collectors understood that the narratives on stamps carried legitimacy unmatched by other historical narratives, simply because a federal entity produced them.