Undelivered

A fascinating insight into notable speeches that were never delivered, showing what could have been if history had gone down a different path For almost every delivered speech, there exists an undelivered opposite. These "second speeches" provide alternative histories of what could have been if not for schedule changes, changes of heart, or momentous turns of events. In Undelivered, political speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum presents the most notable speeches the public never heard, from Dwight Eisenhower’s apology for a D-Day failure to Richard Nixon’s refusal to resign the presidency, and even Hillary Clinton’s acceptance for a 2016 victory—the latter never seen until now. Examining the content of these speeches and the context of the historic moments that almost came to be, Nussbaum considers not only what they tell us about the past but also what they can inform us about our present.

In the early nineteenth century, when the Hudson’s Bay Company sent men to its furthest posts along the coast of North America’s Pacific Northwest, the letters of those who cared for those men followed them in the Company’s supply ships. Sometimes, these letters missed their objects – the men had returned to Britain, or deserted their ships, or died. The Company returned the correspondence to its London office and over the years amassed a file of “undelivered letters.” Many of these remained sealed for 150 years and until they were opened by archivist Judith Hudson Beattie, when the Company archives were moved to Canada. These letters tell the fascinating stories of ordinary people whose lives are rarely recounted in traditional histories. Beattie and Helen M. Buss skilfully introduce us to both the lives of the letter writers and their would-be recipients. Their commentaries frame, for contemporary readers, the words of early nineteenth century working and middle class British folk as well as letters to “voyageurs” from Quebec. The stories of their lives – fathers struggling to support a family, widowed mothers yearning to see their sons, bereft sweethearts left behind, and wives raising their children alone – reach out over two centuries to offer rare insight into the varied worlds of men and women in the early nineteenth century, many of whom became settlers in Washington, Oregon, and the new British colony of Vancouver Island.

In 1906, at the Klondike Mine schoolhouse in Hatcher Pass, Alaska, teacher Raymond Williams gave his nine students a very special writing assignment that upon completion was to be sent to nine different people who would judged the work, and jointly decided on one grand prize winner. However, before this could happen, a mining explosion caused a landslide that crushed the classroom, and killed all nine students, yet sparing the life of their teacher. Although dreadful, the accident was all but forgotten until 1987, when a group of deer hunters on Kodiak Island discovers the wreckage of an old Army DC-3 airplane that had disappeared forty-five years earlier. Inside, investigators find several items such as the nine student desks, one unique brass U.S. Postal Service outdoor mailbox, along with other miscellaneous mining pieces that were all associated with that mining disaster. Upon removal of the aircraft fuselage to the Coast Guard Air Base on Kodiak Island, while the plane's cargo is being inspected, strange events begin to happen that lead people to eventually realize that something paranormal was at work and maybe some of the students that had used those school desks although long dead, were still present and involved in something very evil. In The Undelivered, a teacher's satanic beliefs dramatically change the lives of a handful of people that come in contact with the aircraft's contents. And, no amount of love, religious beliefs or educational training will change the course of what is to be.

In the dying months of my seventy-eighth birthday in the year 2011, something clicked within me. I was remembering a historic undelivered letter and the private and painful burden I bore for a time to keep this letter undelivered. My reflections took me back to the 1985 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) held in Nassau, Bahamas. The Commission of Inquiry was looking into whether or not the first prime minister, Sir Lynden Pindling, had any involvement in drug-trafficking proceeds and was over in late 1983, and its outcome was almost and probably forgotten by the general population.

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike--the largest in United States history--for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions. Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions. It also led to fifty years of clashes between postal unions and management over wages, speedup, privatization, automation, and service. Rubio revives the 1970 strike story and connects it to today's postal financial crisis that threatens the future of a vital 245-year-old public communications institution and its labor unions.