Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story to tell of how a group gets distracted from it’s mission by the rewards of being a political insider and in doing so discredits themselves and the stamp that honored them.
First let me make a note about the condition of the stamp from my personal collection. As the reader may remember, all stamps discussed on this site are from my collection and were not gathered specifically to write about. This stamp has been in my collection for several decades. One can still spot the staining that can happen when you soak stamps to get them off envelopes. When one, in this case The Philatelist himself, tries to soak too many stamps at once the water becomes dirty from the gum and the stamps can turn yellow. The Scott catalog image of the stamp indicates that the paper started out white. Mea Culpa.
The stamp today is issue A952, a 10 cent stamp issued on October 12th, 1974. It is printed with the slogan of the National Association of R——- Citizens, as the group was then known. I have chosen not to use the R word as in the intervening years it has come to be derogatory. The Scott catalog list the stamp as worth 25 cents cancelled. The staining is a detriment to the stamp’s already low value.
To be frank, I do not like this stamp. It is not because of the R word. Language changes over time and seeing how a word is used in a different era can be just the type of interesting hook that a stamp collector thrives on. My problems with this stamp are two fold.
The first problem is the picture of the little girl on the stamp. I am not sure if she indeed has an IQ under 50 or it was picked because the real life person had the look the organization was going for. Either way it seems exploitive. I suppose at least she does not have her hand out at the encouragement of the many paid employees of the organization.
The second problem is the government by way of the postal service honoring an organization that has morphed into an identity political group on one side of the political divide in the USA. The group started in the early fifties as a support group for parents of children with IQs under 50. This is where the cut off point where at the time you shouldn’t send your child to public school. The group has had many names and currently calls itself The ARC. In the beginning it did good work advocating for government support programs for the understandably overwhelmed parents of these children. It also funded research into fetal alcohol syndrome and lead poisoning in the hopes of reducing the numbers of such children where it might be prevented.
This sounds like worthy work and perhaps justifies a stamp in a retrospective honor of this work. Instead the group has expanded with ever larger paid staff and clearly is just a cog in the Democratic party apparatus. The current blog on the groups website is nothing but this political agenda, with no mention at all of the children with IQs under 50 that the group is alleged to be about. Some may agree with their political agenda and that is fine. But in getting away from the original mission the organization and it’s stamp become discredited. The postal service is not likely to issue a stamp for the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee for doing a good job getting their people elected. They don’t put live politicians on stamps and this should also be true of political groups, especially those that clothe themselves as a charity.
Well, my drink is empty so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. I ask all of you not to use the R word or be otherwise derogatory about children with IQs below 50. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.