Summerfield served as
Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1952 to 1953. At the
1952 Republican National Convention he played a key role in winning the GOP presidential nomination for General
Dwight Eisenhower. As Michigan's delegate chairman Summerfield convinced the large, uncommitted Michigan delegation to support Eisenhower, thus providing "Ike" with a major boost before the voting. In December 1952, President-Elect Eisenhower chose Summerfield as the federal
Postmaster General; he served in that post from 1953 until 1961. His assistant postmaster was former
U.S. Representative Ben H. Guill of
Texas. As postmaster general, Summerfield oversaw attempts to reform and modernize the
United States Postal Service (USPS) and the U.S. mail system, which was still conducting many sorting and processing operations by hand. Summerfield called for an increase in postage rates to subsidize the purchase of new mechanized mail processing and sorting equipment. Some of this equipment was adopted, including the
Hamper-Dumper internal mail sorting/transport system and the
Mail-Flo Letter Processing System, which used conveyors to speed mail processing. However, rapidly increasing mail volume and postal deficits prevented the Post Office from completely modernizing and mechanizing all of its many post offices. To improve the Post Office's image with the public, Summerfield began a promotional campaign designed to showcase Post Office achievements. Summerfield was involved in the creation of the 1954 ABC television anthology program
The Mail Story, a docudrama featuring stories about USPS. On July 4, 1955, in order to highlight its new image as a modern organization, the Post Office adopted a new red, white, and blue color scheme for all Post Office collection boxes, trucks, delivery vans, and equipment, as well as new technology and procedures for mail delivery. As part of that effort, Summerfield supported experiments with
rocket-delivered mail, using the
missile mail carrier. The first and only flight of the missile mail carrier occurred on June 8, 1959, when a letter-stuffed
Regulus cruise missile was successfully launched from the U.S. Navy submarine
USS Barbero.
Opposition against obscenity As Postmaster General, Summerfield was a vigorous opponent of the mailing of
obscene materials through the postal system. In 1955,
postal inspectors seized a rare volume of the 2,400-year-old play
Lysistrata by Aristophanes, which Summerfield described as "obscene, lewd and lascivious". When the first unexpurgated edition of ''
Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was published in the US in 1959 by
Grove Press, Summerfield moved to ban it from being sent by mail, saying that "any literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by the pornographic and smutty passages and words". Under Summerfield, the post office targeted not only producers of obscene materials, but also recipients. Among the best known was
Newton Arvin, an esteemed professor of English at
Smith College, who was disgraced as a result of his prosecution for possessing "obscene photographs" in the form of
physique magazines such as
Grecian Guild Pictorial which contained homoerotic photographs of scantily dressed men. Arvin's story was made into an opera,
The Scarlet Professor, which featured Summerfield as a character. In January 1961, toward the end of his tenure as Postmaster General, Summerfield oversaw the indictment in Chicago of more than fifty members of the "Adonis Male Club", a gay
pen pal service, for conspiracy to send obscene materials through the mail. The accused men had their information printed in local newspapers, and many lost their jobs and were disgraced in their community. One man committed suicide, and another attempted suicide. All defendants eventually pled guilty or were found guilty. A government spokesperson said that many more white-collar men would have been prosecuted, but were instead allowed to be sent for psychiatric treatment by their employers. ==Death and legacy==