Page 67 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
aggregate demands. In other words, a society with a highly constrained
flow of political information was not one in which democratic power
could readily accumulate. 38
As late as the 1820s, it appeared as though the Anti-Federalists may
have been right in their assessments of information and communication.
Due to inadequacy of information, neither government nor public could
properly understand one another, and the remoteness of government
from the people exacerbated other communication problems due to the
remoteness of communities from each other across the large republic.
By the end of the Jeffersonian era, the faith of Madison and Hamilton
in state governments as informational intermediaries appeared to have
been misplaced.
Against this backdrop, events of the 1820s and ’30s in the realm of
communication constitute nothing less than a revolution. This revo-
lution created a system of national-scale political information that fed
democratic development across the spectrum: the emergence of ideol-
ogy and identity, the creation of a national political agenda and public
will, the explosion in participation among white males, the energizing
of a government previously adrift in its own nation, and the creation of
political intermediaries situated at the center of these processes.
As historian Richard John has shown, the central component of
this revolution was the postal service. 39 Elementary postal services had
existed in the prerevolutionary period and in the early years of the new
republic, but they did not constitute a functional national mail system.
In 1790, the nation had just seventy-five post offices, handling about
300,000 letters that year. This meant the United States had one post
office for every 43,000 people, and these offices carried about 0.1 letters
per capita per year. The vast majority of Americans simply did not have
access to regular mail. Without the kind of telecommunication systems
that would develop later, the absence of good mail service meant that

38 This enervation of the American political system in the Jeffersonian age is consistent
with W. Russell Neuman’s model of the relationship between the volume of political
communication in a society and the degree of political centralization or decentral-
ization. Neuman argues that the nature of power in societies with a high volume of
political communication can vary between hyperpluralistic faction and instability or
totalitarianism,asafunctionofthedegreeofpoliticalcentralization.Butsocietieswith
averylow flow of political communication converge on conditions of entropy and
political decay. See W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (Cambridge,
Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); see fig. 1.2.
39
Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to
Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
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