Denver was linked to the origin of chain letters
Technology has changed much of our world in the time I’ve spent watching the calendar pages turning.
Phone booths are missing — where would Clark Kent change into Superman today? “Telegraph a pass” means little to today’s basketball players. Email and other tokens of social media have pushed to obsolescence one of the gimmicks of the late 1930s and 1940s.
My subject is the Chain Letter. In the Depression years any money-making idea promised a fortune to those who could harness it. Thus, in 1935, a small group of people in Denver conceived the “Chain Letter.”
The concept was simple. A person put five names in order on a sheet of paper and added his or her name at the bottom of the list. The perpetrator then sent 10 cents to the top name of the five plus five copies of the chain letter.
The next step was to cross out the top name and put it beneath his. Then five copies of the letter and 10 cents went to the next name, and on through the five.
If each followed and the chain went unbroken it could result in this: 5X5 = 25X5 = 125X5 = 625X5= 3,125X5 = 15,625 dimes to the originator.
That was a lot of money in 1935 and it sounded good. However, post office officials took a dim view of the process.
The daily mail count jumped 100,000 letters. More than a hundred emergency employees were required to process the mail by hand (and there were no ZIP codes). The weekly overtime pay totaled $6,000.
Well, following in the thought that no good deed goes unpunished, chain letters began to appear in other cities. This led to printers getting involved, exposing a new source of revenue for them. Initially it was 15 cents for two copies then 25 cents.
Chain letter factories emerged; some of them handling 5,000 letters a day and paying themselves 25 cents a customer.
Similar to gambling this became a product-less industr y so by mid-april Postmaster James Farley had seen enough. He ruled that chain letters violated mail fraud and lotter y laws.
He had little chance of prosecuting several hundred thousand Americans but his decision was concerning to many. They came to realize that this was just another pyramid scheme and few were going to get wealthy. So, chain letters began to fade into American histor y in late 1935.
They didn’t completely disappear. I still recall a few wandering through the postal system when I was a teenager.
When I discussed this topic with the CEO she reminded me of a chain letter concept she and her college girlfriends created. She didn’t recall the originator and no money ever changed hands (so she says).
This was their approach. The first person wrote a letter of her doings (family, job, vacation, whatever) and mailed it to a second. That woman wrote her own letter, included the first letter and sent in to a third.
As we totaled the number of correspondents it passed a handful.
The ongoing letter ultimately returned to the originator who read them all then replaced her letter with an updated one.
The chain went on for a number of years then someone dropped it and with a missing link in the chain it broke.
The idea was a wonderful connection among women who were great college friends — some of whom are now no longer linked, another sadness.
I suppose it could be revived through email but it just wouldn’t be the same.