Mother's Day in America in May 1918 was a special one. The Stars and Stripes, the official newspaper of the AEF, had launched the so-called Mother's Letter Plan, designed to maximize the volume and speed of correspondence from American soldiers in France to their mothers at home. On the day, extra stationery was delivered to billets and trenches across France; and by writing "Mother's letter" on the envelope, priority for this mail was assured. As the Stars and Stripes boasted, "those two words will have precisely the same effect as though the highest postal official in America had, with his own hand, written 'Rush' across the envelope." 1 No one escaped their tone of bullying sentiment: military censors and mail orderlies were exhorted by the newspaper to work night and day to deal with this surge of mail, and soldiers were encouraged to "plan the best letter you ever wrote in your life. .. write it from the bottom of your heart, and the boat that carries the Mother's Letters to America will be a boat laden with as rich a freight as ever craft bore from shore to shore." 2 As the New York Times reported the next day, "Americans in every quarter of the globe yesterday united in one tender thoughtthe memory of their mothers." 3 (One of those Americans was G.P. Cather, Willa Cather's cousin, who sent a letter to his mother on May 18, just ten days before his death; he became the model for Claude Wheeler in One of Ours.) In the final weeks of May, 1.6 million Mother's Day letters crossed the Atlantic. The Post Office was essential to the American prosecution of the war. Its surveillance of the second-class mailthe rate at which most publications were circulatedwas where the Espionage and Sedition Acts' restrictions of permissible speech took greatest effect. The draft was largely administered by mail, and the Post Office delivered a staggering 50 million items to American troops stationed in Europe between June 1917 and July 1918all via a transatlantic shipping system already straining to transport the AEF and its necessary supplies. 4 It inaugurated America's airmail systemdesigned initially to fly mail between New York and Washingtona
