ABSTRACT Relying extensively on the sprawling and infrequently examined Records of the Post Office Department within the National Archives, this article examines the service’s efforts during World War I to extend its authority over the foreign-language press, its development of a surveillance system to constrain this medium, and the subsequent breakdown of the linguistic machinery it repeatedly cobbled together outside of New York to inspect the content of these publications. The first two of these themes have received only superficial treatment by scholars; the latter subject remains completely unexplored. Although the department’s hierarchy projected for the public a highly positive image of the orderly vetting of these texts, postal subordinates responsible for this scrutiny railed against their bosses’ detachment and miserliness and their exasperating insistence that contingents of volunteer translators could be recruited and entrusted to decipher compositions in approximately fifty different tongues, including languages as distinct as Esperanto, Ruthenian, Sioux, and Japanese.

中文翻译：

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用两条软木腿跳舞：第一次世界大战期间，美国邮局对外文出版社的严密监视

摘要广泛依赖于国家档案馆中广泛使用且不经常检查的邮局记录，本文考察了第一次世界大战期间该局为扩大其对外语出版社的权限以及其监视系统的发展而做出的努力。媒体，以及随后语言机器的崩溃，它在纽约以外的地方反复拼凑起来以检查这些出版物的内容。这些主题中的前两个仅受到学者的肤浅对待。后一个主题仍然是完全未知的。尽管该部门的等级结构为公众预示了对这些文本有序审查的高度肯定的印象，