Post Office Bans “Protest Against the Marines in Nicaragua” Stickers on Envelopes
Attaching stickers with political messages to first-class mail was used by activists in the 1920s and 1930s. The stickers were similar to non-political ones related to holidays or charitable cases. In this and other cases, the Post Office banned some stickers because they criticized the U. S. Government. This particular ban protested the presence of U.S. Marines in Nicaragua, in an early chapter of a struggle involving U.S intervention in Nicaragua.
U.S. intervention later became a major scandal in the 1980s because of secret and illegal actions by members of President Ronald Reagan’s administration, including the president himself. For the beginnings of the Iran-Contra scandal, see October 5, 1986, and November 3, 1986.
The Post Office engaged in other abuses of civil liberties over the years. During World War I it barred almost the entire anti-war press from the mails (see July 7, 1917). On September 26, 1917 it banned Emma Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth because of her radical views. And on December 27, 1928 it banned an Italian-language anti-Fascist newspaper. It was not until January 13, 1958 that the Supreme Court ended the Post Office ban on homosexual material. On December 11, 1964 after an expose it finally abolished the “observation stations” it had built in men’s restrooms at Post Office facilities which facilitated spying on alleged homosexual activity in the restrooms.
Learn more: Thomas Walker and Christine Wade, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle (2011)
And more about the Iran-Contra Scandal: Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (1991)