The people who deliver your Netflix envelopes and Amazon boxes were once responsible for a lot more. They brought paper copies of your bills, magazines, and even messages from friends, written on pieces of paper and enclosed in an envelope. If you wanted to send a message of your own, you had to bring it to a building called a "post office" and buy a "stamp" to pay for the delivery.
There are still post offices around -- older people still use them. And if you happen to drop into one, you might get a surprise: naked men!
1. A muscleman felling the forest in Kenova, West Virginia.
During the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal put dozens of artists to work painting murals and friezes on the walls of hundreds of post offices all over the U.S.. They were very serious, naturalistic works, showing extremely muscular pioneers taking their shirts off to "tame the wilderness" and go to work in in agriculture or industry.
2. A boatswain in Plymouth, Pennsylvania.
3. A rugged farmer making hay in Hammond, Indiana.
4. There are naked men, too, mostly muscular Indians who are solemnly handing over their land to the white settlers. This one in Des Plaines, Illinois depicts Spanish conquistadors impressing the natives with...um, I guess cloth.
5. Though sometimes the Indians are memorialized as violent savages: this fully-naked dude is trying to defend his land...um, I mean attack a wagon train in Melrose Park, Illinois.
More after the break
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