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Good afternoon, and welcome. I am Frances Kimball. For thirty-one years I taught American history at the high school here in Concord, New Hampshire, and since I retired I have finally had time for my oldest hobby, which is collecting chain letters. I have been keeping them in a shoebox since 1947. My husband Walter calls it the Box of Doom.
My students always assumed chain letters were invented along with the computer. They are very much older than that, and I think the story is worth telling. So here, in brief, is the history, followed by a tour of my own shoebox. There will not be a quiz.
The Timeline
| The Middle Ages |
Folklorists trace the chain letter back to the "letters from heaven" of medieval Europe. These were said to have been written by Christ himself or delivered by an angel. Anyone who copied one and kept it would be protected, and anyone who ignored it would come to grief. The idea proved remarkably durable: German soldiers were still carrying copies as good-luck charms in the First World War. |
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| The 1890s |
Churches and charities discovered they could raise money with what the newspapers called "endless chain" letters: send a dime to the cause, and send copies to a few friends asking them to do the same. The trouble was in the name. Once a chain gets going, nobody can call it back. |
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| The early 1900s |
Prayer chains went through the mail. You were to copy out a prayer and send it on to several friends within a certain number of days. Those who did would be blessed; those who broke the chain would meet with misfortune. Ministers preached against them from the pulpit, which did about as much good as you would expect. |
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| The 1920s |
In many letters the prayer quietly dropped out, and what was left was pure luck: send this on and good fortune will follow. Break the chain, and, well. The letters began to list examples of both. |
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| Spring 1935 |
The great "send-a-dime" craze, which began in Denver with a letter calling itself the Prosperity Club. There was a list of names. You mailed a dime to the name at the top, crossed it off, added your own at the bottom, and sent copies to five friends. When your name reached the top, $1,562.50 in dimes would supposedly arrive in your mailbox. In the middle of the Depression, that was a fortune. The Denver post office was buried in mail, and within weeks the letters were everywhere. The Post Office Department stepped in and declared that chain letters asking for money broke the lottery laws. |
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| The 1940s to 1970s |
The gentle years, in my opinion. Women traded recipes, handkerchiefs, dish towels and picture postcards by chain letter. No one got rich, but a good many kitchen drawers filled up. Meanwhile the old good-luck letter kept circulating, claiming to have been around the world some number of times and listing people who had kept it going and prospered and people who had thrown it away and regretted it. |
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| The 1970s and 1980s |
The office photocopier made copying twenty letters a matter of a few minutes, and the letters grew accordingly. By the late 1980s, the money chains had moved onto computer bulletin boards and the Usenet newsgroups, most famously in a posting titled "Make Money Fast." |
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| The 1990s |
Electronic mail removed the last obstacles, which were the stamp and the walk to the mailbox. A chain letter can now go to fifty people in the time it once took to lick one envelope. The new ones warn of computer viruses, promise money from Bill Gates, or ask you to send ten copies in ten minutes. The words are new. The machinery is centuries old. |
Why Do They Work?
I used to ask my students this, and between us we came up with four reasons:
- Hope. Something good might happen, and it costs only a stamp (or nothing at all).
- Fear. Something bad might happen, and why take the chance?
- Obligation. A friend sent it to you. It would be rude to be the one who stopped it.
- The list. All those names. Surely all those people can't be wrong.
A Little Arithmetic
If every person sends a letter on to five friends, the first round reaches five people and the second reaches twenty-five. By the fourteenth round, you would need more than six billion people, which is more than there are on the whole earth. Every chain letter runs out of people eventually. The ones at the bottom of the list are always the ones left holding the bag, and there are always more of them than of anybody else.
Is It Legal?
The Postal Inspection Service says that a chain letter asking you to send money or other things of value, with the promise of a large return, is an illegal lottery, and mailing one can get you into real trouble. The good-luck letters and recipe exchanges are simply a nuisance. I am fairly sure a recipe card will not land anyone in jail, though I have never been quite brave enough to ask the postmaster.
Now, come see the shoebox >>
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