Dear Mr. Suchner: Your letter is intensely interesting.1 Before mentioning its substance, may I remark that I do not share your doubts about your own ability to express yourself. Consequently I shall put your name down on my list to invite, some day, to an evening at the White House. I should like to hear your views expressed to a group.2
You have discussed a factor affecting the Post Office Department which is at the very foundation of efficiency in any organization, large or small. That factor is morale. Without it an Army, for example, is worthless. With it an Army will unhesitatingly challenge a foe of far greater strength.
You do not say so in your letter, but you imply that morale is purely a function of pay.3 If this is your assumption, I should like to make two observations. This does not agree with my experience in organizational work, extending back over the past half century. I do not minimize the importance of pay rates, but I do think that leadership throughout an organization, from its highest to its lowest echelon, is far more important.
My second observation is that in the statistical analyses dealing with the pay of government workers, including most of the postal groups, it appears that the over-all remuneration of these groups is higher than that received for comparable work in civil life. In making this statement I do include, of course, the continuity of employment, the rate of pay upon retirement from active service, ordinary and sick leave privileges, and such perquisites as opportunity for cheap insurance, as well as allowances for uniforms.4
In spite of these two observations, I by no means doubt the sincerity or even the accuracy of your conclusions. The only point I want to make is that possibly we must look elsewhere than merely to pay rates if we want to restore that great morale that you say declined rapidly in the Postal Service after 1937.
You are talking about a twenty-year period during which great and startling changes have come to the world. I have had businessmen come into my office and in describing their operations--some of them very large and some modest in size--they have made almost exactly the same statements about their companies that you make about the Postal Service. Possibly there has been a change coming over all of us--not merely those in the Postal Service. Maybe we are not sufficiently interested in doing "more than our share."
I agree with your further implication that if a man does not take pride and find joy in his work, then that work is mere drudgery. My question is--have we allowed this to happen to ourselves on almost a universal scale?
We have rules saying that if an individual works one minute beyond a fixed weekly schedule he must be on an over-time basis; other rules prohibit one individual from touching the type of work that belongs under the rules to another. We have possibly become more highly organized into pressure groups in the United States than ever before. As a consequence the farmer watches the city worker; the city worker resents the man in government service; and the man in government service resents the fact that his influence does not seem to be as great with the powers-that-be as that of some groups that he considers of far less importance. We watch each other with a suspicious eye rather than devoting ourselves completely to our own tasks in the confidence that all other Americans will do the same and thus as a single, united nation advance the interests of all of us, both at home and abroad.
These observations, even if true, have not necessarily any applicability to the specific situation you describe which, no matter what its cause, is serious. I shall give your letter to the Postmaster General in order that he may have both your account and your suggestions. I shall ask him eventually to give me his own impressions on the same subject.5
As you can imagine, I rarely have time to answer a letter at this length; but I have made the time to do so today because of my appreciation of the trouble you took to explain for me a matter in which of course, as President, I must be and I am deeply interested.
I do hope that we shall get to meet one day and I can hear more of your convictions.
With best wishes, Sincerely
