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Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps—white male politicians and military heroes—was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this iconographic diversification: workers, people who labor. Stamps that seem to be about labor (those devoted to such topics as labor leaders, collective bargaining, and employment for the disabled) are, we claim, about something other than "labor as such." Drawing on Marx's Grundrisse , we argue that in capitalist societies, waged labor and pauperism are indissolubly linked because laborers have no control over the reliability of their employment. Laborers are "humanity ground zero," people deemed (in capitalist common sense) to have accomplished nothing beyond working for a wage and who therefore cannot be represented in postal iconography as builders of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of fourteen US postage stamps between 1863 and 1922 analyzes images of American Indians in US national iconography. Beginning with a generic image of a native warrior that was rejected by the post office at a time when the Indian wars were still ongoing and ending with a portrait of an important Lakota leader incorporated into a 1922 stamp series, we show how the changing relationship of Native Americans to the US government was reflected in stamps, taken-for-granted tokens that, while often effectively invisible, circulated throughout US society by the billions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]