U.S. MAIL: The Story of the United States Postal Service. By Arthur E. Summerfield as told to Charles Hurd. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 256 pp. $5.

MAILMAN U.S.A. By William C. Doherty. David McKay. 308 pp. $4.50.

JOHN CRAMER of the Washington Daily News recently reported the mounting cries of complaint from Post Office workers under pressure to buy U.S. Mail, a book by the Department’s leading literary critic, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. “Not enough of our employees have bought it,” Cramer quoted some supervisors as telling postal workers. “It’s been suggested we really ought to make a better showing. . . . We think you ought to give us an assist on this.”

Summerfield, his voice muted in this book through an “as told to” collaborator, surveys postal history, describes and defends present programs of the Department, and prophesies a bit about mail transport in the post-Summerfield, space age. The book would rank among the dullest ever written but for the fact that it appears at about the same time that another writer has decided to cover the same material from a very different point of view. Placed side by side, the views tend to tangle.

Mailman U.S.A. comes from William C. Doherty, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers. Doherty is a jovial Irishman with a keen wit and, at least where Postmasters General are concerned, a bitter pen. He sees the history of the Post Office as a continual struggle between letter carrier unions seeking more pay and Postmasters General denying them. This bias distorts the postal picture a bit but, with Summerfield writing as if unions like the NALC did not exist, the sum of the two books, if the reader observes carefully, is an objective view of some postal problems.

Both authors agree that Summerfield tried to bring efficiency and modernization to a creaking postal operation when he took over the Department in 1953. Summerfield credits his administration with producing mechanized service, new buildings, sound money policies, good recruitment programs and faster ways of transporting mall. Doherty credits the administration with “manifold and manifest improvements,” but immediately adds that “Summerfield’s efforts have been only a fleabite compared to the over-all problem.” Looking at seven and a half years of Summerfield, the union leader concludes that “the postal service has deteriorated in his administration, and it is getting worse each day.”

In Doherty’s view, Summerfield has spent too much time with machines and too little with men. “No matter how swiftly the mail is processed in its journey through a post office,” Doherty says, “it will not reach its destination faster unless it is placed more quickly in the bag of the letter carrier.” Doherty’s chief solution: revoke the economy order of April 18, 1950, when Postmaster General Jesse Donaldson, Summerfield’s predecessor, cut home deliveries to one a day, curtailed street collections and reduced by half parcel post deliveries to businesses. More service, of course, would mean more jobs.

AT THE HEART of the squabbling between Summerfield and Doherty lies a conflict over the purpose of the Post Office. Is it a business or a public service? Although the subtitle of his book, perhaps by oversight, calls it a service, Summerfield describes the Post Office as “the biggest business in the world” and asserts that it “can and must be placed on a basis of paying its own way.” He adds: “It is the proper role of taxation to assume the burden of paying for such unmeasurable service provided for the equal good of all citizens. But in the Post Office, services are performed in the form of individual transactions - all measurable, all distinguishable, each from the other.”

But Doherty argues that “the American people want their Post Office to be a service, not a cold-blooded business concern or a public utility.” He finds It curious “that this question of supplying sufficient revenue to cover the cost of a salary increase is never brought up in the case of other federal employees.” The Post Office, he continues, “should no more be expected to show a ‘profit’ than should the Department of Agriculture. . . . ”

Neither man comes to grips with the most controversial and dangerous aspect of postal history, the Department’s censorship of the mail, although Doherty does offer a few cogent comments on the subject. Summerfield strings together the Department’s dullest press releases and his most banal speeches on the matter, and repeats his odd logic that the Post Office actually protects the mail by censoring it. He also continues to foster the misinformation that obscenity causes juvenile delinquency.

Doherty puts some new light on the problem when he reports that the same high-handed, unjust procedures used to censor mail are employed when the Department takes disciplinary action against an employee. “The office of Postmaster General is not a judicial one,” Doherty says as he argues for the end both of censorship and of star-chamber proceedings against employees. “It was never intended to be such and should not be allowed to retain any of the judicial prerogatives with which it has become accidentally endowed over the years.’’

Doherty sums up the reign of Summerfield in a chapter titled, “The Tragedy of King Arthur.” “It is ironic,” Doherty writes, “that, despite his many real and permanent achievements, he will probably be remembered principally as the Postmaster General who made Lady Chatterley’s Lover a best seller.” In this regard, it is significant that Summerfield, in a book discussing all the ramifications of postal history and his administration, never once mentions Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That is a measure of Summerfield’s book, and of the man.

STANLEY MEISLER is a wire service newsman now stationed in Washington.