Pursuits of Happiness

John Locke called human choice the engine of happiness, something each person moved toward on their own account. But, when George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration (a predecessor to the national one) he wrote of a people “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” A plural noun doing plural work. The Scottish moralists (widely read in that era) tied happiness to a virtue that can only exists between people, not practiced alone in a room.

Jefferson’s word choice already held two centuries of disagreement. Did happiness belong to the individual as a moral claim to chase? Or did it belong to the commonwealth, something put together like a barn-raising? Historians still argue both sides. Some read the Declaration as entirely Lockean, a document of natural rights. Others see the Scots vision: less about what a person gains, more about what is owed in return. Jefferson wrote a phrase wide enough to hold both, an overlap between our private interests and the social good that framed the dual drives of a new nation.

As I see it, happiness itself is inarguably social, a personal wellbeing tied to others. Try hoarding it, if you wonder. That we need declarations of peace and prosperity is evidence enough. Getting everyone on the same page, so to speak.

But the pursuit of happiness (and the measure of it) stays stubbornly individual. The natural and artistic wonders of a vast world do not arrive at the front door. It requires the drive. The flat open road, the boat out of harbor, the plane in flight, and toward all the dreams beyond–the navigation is always on us.

Large Letter postcards make graphic our search for ourselves and each other. Four cards from the collection illustrate the way.

Washington, D.C. stacks its letters with the Capitol, the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln statue, the White House fountain, the Supreme Court. The statuary of the republic laid out like a garden tour. The walk between buildings, the fountain you sit beside, the steps where a family eats lunch, the institutions and the outing are in the same invitation.

Philadelphia shows Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin’s statue, a colonial rowhouse. The card treats the birth of the country as a place you go, not just a date you memorize. Here you can walk into history on a Wednesday afternoon.

Grand Canyon, Arizona puts Native culture and ancient geology in good relations, with tribal cultures representing the wisdom of people while nature provides the grandeur.

Redwoods of California splits the difference. The large letters are built from tree bark, ridged and red-brown, and the font folds in with the forest behind. Then, a car drives right through the trunk of one letter. Nature and transportation infrastructure occupy the same inch of paper, because by the 1940s they already occupied the same American afternoon.

Today’s collection of 133 large letter postcards is a broad cultural landscape, and the pursuit runs clear to both ends, with a long drive in between. The Capitol dome and the redwood canopy make the same request of a visitor. Show up, and bring someone with you. Look up, and tell the folks at home.

The smaller towns offer the same story at a different scale. A card from Rawlins, Wyoming earnestly calls itself the “Metropolis of the Plains,” packing a courthouse, a garden, and a rail line into a handful of letters for a town of a few thousand people in those days. Topeka spells its name with a church tower, a state capitol, and a sunflower in the corner. Civic pride and natural awe in the same small rectangle. Important most to those who live there, and put on show for far-flung friends and visitors.

The call to each other is what strikes me most. No wonder that roadside murals mimic the large letter design. Packing the car, the long flat highway between stops, the cool breeze from a lookout view. Those fragments gradually form in the personal memories of each traveler. At the same time, the experience often crystallizes at the shoulder of the stranger next to you, squinting in the same afternoon light. 

Thankfully, we still make these excursions 250 years on. Personal experiences expanded in service of functioning society. A happy family vacation, a woodsy writing retreat, a career-changing visit to the National Archives are just a few of my own.

We protect and promote these places not because democracy is functionally fragile or simply symbolic, but because they are the grounding locations for each generation to build the nation in their time. The pursuit of happiness is that continuous movement, home and back.

To Read More

• Life in Large Letters — The Posted Past essay on the collectors, the publishers, and the design evolution of the form.
• America250 — the official site of the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, with events and initiatives around the July 4, 2026 anniversary.
• Curt Teich Postcard Archives Collection, Newberry Library — the research home of the Curt Teich company’s production files and over 360,000 postcard images, including the bulk of the Large Letter cards ever printed.
• Jeffrey L. Meikle, Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931–1950 (University of Texas Press, 2015) — the definitive study of the Teich Company’s linen postcards and their place in American visual culture.
• Lydia Pyne, Postcards: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Social Network (Bloomsbury, 2021) — a wider cultural history of the postcard as a communication medium, from Victorian craze to modern collectible.
• Fred Tenney, Large Letter Postcards: The United States — a collector’s reference guide cataloging Large Letter cards by state, a standard resource for deltiologists working this specific niche.