REA ceased operations in 1975, when its business model ceased to be viable.

Early history

Express delivery in the early 19th century was almost all by horse, whether by stagecoach or riders. The first parcel express agency in the United States is generally considered to have been started by William Frederick Harnden (1812–1845), who in 1839 began regular trips between New York City and Boston, Massachusetts, as a courier transporting small parcels, currency and other valuables. Another, Wells Fargo & Co., was founded in 1853. Other early express companies included Southern Express Company, Adams Express Company; and Butterfield Overland Mail.

1900 to World War II

The express business flourished in the latter half of the 19th century, and by 1900 there were four principal parcel express companies, all of which included the rapidly advancing railways as one of their means of transport: Adams Express Company, Southern Express Company, American Express Company, and Wells Fargo. Another competitor arrived in 1913: the U.S. Post Office expanded its services to offer Parcel Post. Still, private railway express business increased steadily through the end of World War I.

During the winter of 1917, the United States suffered a severe coal shortage. On December 26, President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the railroads in order to move federal troops, their supplies, and coal. Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo was appointed Director General of the newly formed United States Railroad Administration (USRA), which controlled all significant railroads in the country temporarily starting in December 1917.

All contracts between express companies and railroads were nullified and McAdoo proposed that all existing express companies be consolidated into a single company to serve the country's needs. The result was a new company called the American Railway Express Agency, which was formed in July 1918 as a consolidation of the four major and three minor express companies.^[1The new entity took custody of all the pooled equipment and property of existing express companies (40%, the largest share, came from American Express, who had owned the rights to the express business over 71,280 miles (114,710 km) of railroad lines, and had 10,000 offices, with over 30,000 employees).

The USRA returned the railroads to private ownership and control in March 1920.

In 1925 the English electrical engineer, Frank Ayton reckoned that with 1,800 electrical vehicles in operation, they were the biggest user of electric vehicles in the world. (They also used 4,700 gasoline-powered vehicles for long-distance work and 17,500 horses.

In March 1929, the assets and operations of American Railway Express Inc. were transferred to Railway Express Agency (REA). REA was owned by 86 railroads in proportion to the express traffic on their lines; no one railroad or group of railroads controlled the agency. In response to customer demand, REA added a Chicago, Illinois-based refrigerator car line. In 1927, REA began an Air Express Division. In 1938, the remainder of Southern Express also joined the consolidated REA.

Post-World War II

Due to rate increases, express operations remained profitable into the 1950s. REA concentrated on express refrigerator service after 1940, and continued to expand its fleet of express reefers until the mid- to late-1950s. At that time, business declined dramatically owing to competition from refrigerated motor trucks. By this time, overall rail express volume had also decreased substantially. Federal investment in the interstate highway system after WWII meant that trucks and other vehicles had more flexibility in transporting goods to a variety of cities. The increase in private ownership of automobiles doomed many passenger lines of the railroads, and industrywide restructuring took place.

In 1959, REA negotiated a new contract, allowing it to use any mode of transportation. It also acquired rights to allow continued service by truck freight after passenger trains were discontinued. REA unsuccessfully attempted entering the piggyback and container business. Another blow came when the Civil Aeronautics Board terminated REA's exclusive agreement with the airlines for air express.

REA Express and decline

In 1960 the company's name was changed to REA Express, Inc. By 1965 many of REA's refrigerator cars, stripped of their refrigeration equipment, were in lease service as bulk mail carriers. Many were relegated to work train service.

Generally, business was good in the 1940s. “Alas, things crumbled after World War II which coincided with a rapid decline in rail travel,” according to the America Rails website. “Express shipments had always been handled as dead-end traffic and railroads grew increasingly disinterested in subsidizing a business model losing ever-more money.”

In 1969, after several years of losses, REA was sold to five of its corporate officers. By then its entire business constituted less than 10% of all intercity parcel traffic, and it transported only 10% of its business by rail.

Trying to find a way to survive, REA Express became embroiled in extensive litigation with the railroads and the United Parcel Service, and tried to renegotiate contracts with the Brotherhood of Railway Workers' Union. In November 1975, REA Express terminated operations and filed for bankruptcy. During the railroad strike of October 1974, the first Altair 8800 microcomputer was lost. It had been shipped from Albuquerque to Popular Electronics magazine in New York via REA and never arrived.

"With the company losing money hand over fist for years, it was now in exponential debt. On average, REA had lost $50 million a year since 1969. In November 1975, Tom Kole, REA board chairman, told the press that the recession 'has literally pulled the rug out from under our carefully planned recovery program ….' Disappearing along with 8,000 jobs was all the REA’s property, including those once familiar green trucks with the red-diamond signs, which was sold at auction.

A mail-order bride is a woman who lists herself in catalogs and is selected by a man for marriage. In the twentieth century, the trend was primarily towards women living in developing countries seeking men in more developed nations. The majority of the women making use of these services in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century are from East and Southeast Asia, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and to a lesser extent Latin America. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, large numbers of eastern European women have advertised themselves in such a way, primarily from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia and Moldova. Men who list themselves in such publications are referred to as "mail-order husbands", although this is much less common.

The term mail-order bride is both criticized by owners (and customers) of international marriage agencies and used by them as an easily recognizable term.
History

In 1620, the Virginia Company recruited mail-order brides for the Jamestown colony, sponsoring the emigration of 140 women in hopes of reducing desertion by the settlers and to avoid the men marrying women from the local Native American tribes. They were sometimes referred to as "tobacco wives", because each male colonist who married a mail-order bride had to reimburse the company for her passage at a cost of 120 pounds of "good leaf tobacco". The women who were brought over by the company were free to marry whomever they chose, even men who were too poor to pay their passage fee. The average age of these brides was 20.

France took a similar tactic in the mid-1600s, recruiting and sponsoring approximately 800 women to emigrate to New France. These mail-order brides were known as the King's Daughters (French: filles du roi or filles du roy in the spelling of the era). The New France colony had problems similar to Jamestown's: male settlers returning to France or marrying Native American women and leaving the colony to live with their wives' tribes. For the King's Daughters, the government not only paid to recruit and transport them, it also provided each woman with a dowry of at least 50 livres. As with the "tobacco wives" of Jamestown, the King's Daughters had the right to choose their partners and could refuse any suitor. The success of the program is indicated by genetic studies of modern French Canadians which found that the King's Daughters and their husbands were "responsible for two-thirds of the genetic makeup of over six million people".

When New France began its Louisiana colony in 1699, it requested more mail-order brides. These were known as Pelican girls (for the first ship that brought women to the colony, Le Pélican). This program was not successful; the women had been recruited with false descriptions of the struggling colony and had many complaints about their treatment. When women in France heard of the terrible conditions and of how the Pelican girls had been treated, the government was unable to recruit many more mail-order brides. France had to resort to shipping over thieves and prostitutes, known as "correction girls".

The Órfãs do Rei (orphans of the king) were Portuguese girl orphans who were sent from Portugal to overseas colonies during the Portuguese Empire as part of Portugal's colonization efforts. The orphans were married to native rulers or Portuguese settlers. Their fathers were Portuguese men who died in battle for the king. Both noble and non-noble girls were in the órfãs do rei. Many were sent to the colony of Brazil, and they ranged from 12 to 30 years of age.

There are at least two historical roots of the mail-order bride industry that emerged in the 1800s in the American frontier: Asian workers in the frontier regions (although Asian workers were scattered throughout the world), and American men who had headed west across the United States to the frontier.

Asian men worked through mail-order agencies to find wives as they worked overseas in the 1800s. Key variables determining the relationship between migration and marriage were demographics, legal policies, cultural perceptions and technology. Imbalances between the number of available women and the number of men desiring partners created a demand for immigrant women. As a result of this imbalance, a new system of "picture brides" developed in predominantly male settlements. In the early 20th century, the institution of "picture brides" developed due to immigration restrictions. The Japanese-American Passport Agreement of 1907 allowed Japan to grant passports to the wives of immigrants to America. As immigration of unmarried Japanese women to America was effectively barred, the use of "picture brides" provided a mechanism for willing women to obtain a passport to America, while Japanese workers in America could gain a female helpmate of their own nationality.

European American men sought financial success in the migration West, but few women lived there at this time, so it was hard for these men to settle down and start a family. During the California gold rush in 1849, there were at least three men for every woman, and by 1852 the ratio had increased to nearly seven men for every woman. They attempted to attract women living back East; the men wrote letters to churches and published personal advertisements in magazines and newspapers. In return, the women would write to the men and send them photographs of themselves. Courtship was conducted by letter, until a woman agreed to marry a man she had never met. Many women wanted to escape their present way of living, gain financial security and see what life on the frontier could offer them. Most of these women were single, but some were widows, divorcées or runaways. Mail-order marriages gave Black women an escape from the crushing racial restrictions in the South. In 1885, a group of married Black women in Arizona Territory formed the Busy Bee Club to advertise for wives for Arizona miners, hoping to reduce violence in the mining camps and encourage Black women to move to the area.^:?

To recruit mail-order brides for Oregon, area bachelors combined funds to send two brothers east. The Benton brothers began their search in Maryland, posting "Brides Wanted" flyers. They held meetings at which they described the territory and promised free passage west. More than 100 women accompanied the Bentons back to Oregon. Asa Mercer performed a similar recruiting role for Seattle. Only 11 women accompanied Mercer back on his first trip, but his second was more successful, with more than 100 women travelling to Seattle, accompanied by a New York Times journalist to chronicle the journey. These prospective brides were known as Mercer Girls.

British Columbia welcomed sixty women from Britain, mail-order brides recruited by the Columbia Emigration Society, in 1862. Another twenty women from Australia were bound for Victoria but were convinced to stay in San Francisco when their ship docked there.

In the early 20th century, answering matrimonial ads was a route to entering the United States after immigration limits became more restrictive. It was also a means of escaping war-torn regions. In 1922, two ships docked in New York with 900 mail-order brides from Turkey, Romania, Armenia, and Greece, fleeing the Greco-Turkish War.