Unlike the past few days, when I really had to dig around to find a good #stampoftheday, there’s a wealth of easy and wonderful choices for today’s stamp.

There’s a 2-cent stamp featuring the Grand Canyon issued on July 24, 1934 that was part of a series of 10 stamps issued that year that pictured notable national parks.

There’s a 3-cent stamp issued on July 24, 1947 commemorating the 100th anniversary of Utah’s settlement, complete with a covered wagon and the words “this is the place,” which Brigham Young said when he led early pioneers on their trip to Utah.
There are 4-cent and 8-cent stamp, both issued on July 24, 1958 that both picture Simón Bolivar, a Venezuelan military and political leader who led what are currently the countries of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama to independence from the Spanish Empire.

There’s also was an 8-cent airmail stamp from 1963 picturing legendary aviator Amelia Earhart. But my father’s collection didn’t include a copy of that stamp, so I can’t show it here.

I’m going with Bolivar because his was one in a series of stamps issued between 1957 and 1961 that honored 10 “champions of liberty” from countries around the world. The ten leaders were:

1. Simon Bolivar
2. Mahatma Gandhi
3. Giuseppe Garibaldi
4. Thomas Masaryk
5. Lajos Kossuth
6. Ramon Magsaysay
7. Gustaf Mannerheim
8. Ignacy Jan Paderewski
9. Ernst Reuter
10. Jose de San Martin

I more-or-less knew 5, but missed Kossuth, Mannerheim, Paderewski, Reuter, and San Martin. How many could you identify?
Nine of the leaders were honored in sets that included a 4-cent stamp, which the current domestic letter rate, and an 8-cent stamp which was then current international rate for first-class surface mail. (Magsaysay, the former president of the Philippines who was the first to be honored, was pictured only on an 8-cent stamp.)

The series is unusual because postal service guidelines for the selection of subjects to be honored on stamps, explicitly state that “U.S. postage stamps and stationery will primarily feature American or American-related subjects. Other subjects may be considered if the subject had significant impact on American history, culture or environment.”
So why did the post office deviate from these guidelines in the late 1950s and early 1960s? The answer is that the stamps were part of larger Cold War efforts to combat Soviet totalitarianism by honoring men who fought for freedom in their homelands. Here’s some of the back story, which I learned from “Stamps and Spies: The Cia’s Involvement In Postage Design” a recent blog post by Matin Modarressi. (Thanks to Jon Seward for a recent comment on one of my posts that let me know about Modarressi’s article).

In 1957, the post office created a Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee to help evaluate proposals for new stamps. The seven member committee included three philatelists, three artists, and one representative from the U.S. Information Agency, then the lead institution for public diplomacy. This representative, Deputy Director Abbott Washburn, attended monthly meetings of the stamp committee. At the same time, he or his boss attended meetings of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) of the National Security Council.

The connection is important, Modarressi reported, because declassified documents show that OCB played an active role in the selection and promotion of the “champions of liberty” stamps. Minutes of an OCB meeting on May 22, 1957, for example, state that “the OCB Working Group on the Philippines would coordinate a draft Presidential announcement in connection with the commemorative stamp” featuring Magsaysay.

Other documents show that in 1959, after the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Western armed forces from West Berlin, OCB recommended that the Post Office help communicate U.S. support for the city by issuing a stamp honoring Ernst Reuter, who had been mayor of West Berlin in 1949 and 1949, when the Soviets blocked access to the city. Not only was the proposal accepted but the committee and the post office agreed to speed up production of the Reuter stamp and to delay a planned “champion of liberty” stamp honoring Sun Yat-sen.

Yet another document revealed that in early 1959, after the CIA learned that the Soviet government was planning celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s death, the chief of the CIA’s clandestine service wrote an internal memo endorsing the idea of a Leo Tolstoy stamp as part of the ‘Champions of Liberty’ series. (It’s not clear if this was proposed and rejected or never formally proposed.)

In addition, it seems clear that the Soviets and their allies paid attention to the new series of stamps. Most notably, mail sent to Czechoslovakia using the 1960 stamp featuring TomᚠMasaryk, the leader of Czechoslovak independence, usually was returned to the senders. And in a letter to the State Department, the Czechoslovak embassy accused the United States of “not issu[ing] the stamp to honor Masaryk as it had alleged, but to use it as a propaganda means against the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.”
Even though the stamps were motivated by Cold War tensions, they’re still striking. They do, in fact, honor some notable “champions of liberty.” And, while I am well aware of some pretty awful things that the US did in the name of fighting communism, I’m also struck by the fact that the stamps also reflect the fact that there was a time when people around the world not only looked to the U.S. for leadership and the U.S., for whatever reason, honored courageous people who took on powerful forces to fight for basic human rights and freedoms. I’m ashamed that we’ve abrogated that role and I hope we’ll find our way back to it in the very near future.

Be well, stay safe, be a champion for liberty, fight for justice, and work for peace.