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Inside The UPS Man, a Biography of UPS Founder James E. Casey
Kelly Barner : November 12, 2026
In October 2026, historian and economist Marc Levinson published The UPS Man: James E. Casey and the Creation of Modern Logistics. The book follows Casey from a one-bicycle messenger business in Seattle to the company that became United Parcel Service.
In this episode of Art of Supply, I walk through what the book shows us about how UPS's operating model, their approach to regulation, and their relationship with the Teamsters took shape, and why I recommend it to everyone working in supply chain and logistics.
Who James E. Casey was
James Casey was born on March 28, 1888, in Candelaria, Nevada, and his schooling stopped at age eleven, when he went to work to help his family make ends meet. In 1907, at age 19, he and Claude Ryan borrowed $100 to start the American Messenger Company in Seattle.
In February 1919, Casey and his partners formed a holding company and named it United Parcel Service. He retired as chief executive in 1962 and died in Seattle in 1983, at age 95. In 1948 he described his approach to people this way: "The only way we can find out what a person is capable of doing is to give that person the opportunity of trying and the responsibility of producing results." (pp. 257–258)
How UPS's operating model took shape
In the early 1900s, retail delivery usually meant a driver carrying one or two packages per trip before returning to the store. Casey's first innovation was consolidation. When the King Brothers department store capped what it would pay at an average of 17.5 cents per parcel, he combined its packages with other stores' deliveries at his own office, turning a messenger service into a delivery service.
By 1917, Casey was planning a central depot where parcels from many stores would be sorted before going out on delivery routes. Today that hub-and-spoke design runs through airlines, container shipping, and trucking, but in 1917, nobody was delivering packages that way. He also came up with a tilted table that rotated, so parcels could be sorted by route and loaded in the order they would be dropped off, saving drivers time on the road. By the mid-1920s, UPS had hired an engineer with experience at GM and Ford, who built the company a 180-foot conveyor for sorting parcels in California.
Margins explain why this mattered. In 1921, the Oakland operation ran 35 vehicles and earned $964.52 on $115,014 in revenue, just 0.8%. In 1954, Casey set the goal of two-day delivery of small packages to any city or town in the U.S., at a lower cost than any other option, within ten years.
What the Interstate Commerce Commission was
The Interstate Commerce Act, approved on February 4, 1887, made railroads the first industry subject to federal regulation. It required reasonable and just rates, banned secret rebates and undue preferences, and required carriers to publish their rates. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) it created was the first regulatory commission in U.S. history. By 1940, its authority covered all common surface carriers, including trucking companies and express agencies.
Two terms from that era come up throughout the UPS story. A common carrier must serve anyone who wants to ship the goods it is authorized to carry. A contract carrier serves specific customers under private, negotiated contracts. The Motor Carrier Act of 1935 put interstate trucking under ICC oversight.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 removed most of the ICC's authority over truckers' rates and routes. The ICC Termination Act of 1995 abolished the agency, whose staff had shrunk from about 2,000 in 1970 to fewer than 400.
How UPS worked within, and around, regulation
When California began regulating trucking companies in 1917, UPS could not simply expand there under its Seattle model. In 1919, Casey bought an option on a struggling Oakland delivery company for under $20,000, largely to gain operating rights that predated the new rules. In 1926, the California Railroad Commission ruled that parcel delivery was "essentially different" (p. 78) from other trucking, and in 1934 a federal appeals board under the National Recovery Administration ruled that UPS was a unique type of trucking company not required to pay trucking wages. The 1935 Motor Carrier Act barred carriers from offering common and contract carriage on the same route unless the ICC found it in the public interest.
Several episodes in the book later drew legal scrutiny. In 1938, UPS secretly acquired a Bay Area company, Merchants Parcel, and used it to buy the business of Fred Jakobsen, who had declined to sell to UPS. UPS disclosed its ownership 15 years later.
In 1958, UPS agreed with a Philadelphia competitor, Hourly Messengers, to divide that market, which Levinson describes as a violation of antitrust law. In 1971, retired Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark ruled that UPS had monopolized retail parcel delivery in San Francisco. The case was settled privately, and the opinion was not published.
After 1980, UPS competed in a deregulated market. Federal Express had begun flying documents in April 1973. UPS bought its first aircraft in 1981 and opened its Louisville air hub in 1982.
The history of UPS and the Teamsters
No private company in the U.S. employs more union members today than UPS, and its workers make up the Teamsters' biggest bloc. Both UPS and the Teamsters describe a 1916 meeting in which Casey asked the union to organize his company; Marc Levinson found no documentary evidence of that relationship.
UPS accepted a union shop in Los Angeles in 1941, after a strike of nearly a month. In 1967, after 1,500 Philadelphia-area Teamsters walked out, UPS closed its Philadelphia operation for three years. The first national contract, signed in June 1979, covered 70,000 workers in 220 locals.
The current UPS contract covers more than 300,000 workers and runs through July 31, 2028 (UPS). It is the largest private-sector collective bargaining agreement in the U.S. Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien was re-elected in July 2026, and his second five-year term begins in March 2027.
The UPS Man is worth reading for anyone who designs, manages, or buys logistics services, because it shows where ideas now taken for granted came from: consolidation, centralized sorting, and hub-and-spoke networks were built first to survive thin margins, not to win market share. It also shows how much regulation shaped which carriers could compete, on what terms, and for how long, a useful lens for any leader watching today's transportation and trade rules change. With the UPS-Teamsters contract running through July 31, 2028, the book's labor history gives helpful context for the next round of negotiations.
Marc Levinson wrote this book without having access to UPS's archives, but he documents his sources throughout and makes it clean when he does and does not have evidence for specific events. UPS is well known for a carefully crafted public image. Apparently that extends far beyond drivers and iconic brown trucks to include the history of the company and the life of their founder.