United States Fourth Bureau Definitives

Part V
by Michael Mills

This overprint experiment gave birth to many overprint varieties, forgeries, and fakes, though simple philatelic investigation should properly identify all forgeries. Genuine overprints appear on rotary issues with specific gum breakers and appear only in certain shades. In addition, the overprint is an electroprint of thick black ink raised above the surface of the stamp. They are never impressed into the paper. In addition the overprints are visually distinctive and contain several tell-tale design details.

Commemorative Overprints

In 1928 Postmaster General Harry New blocked the issuance of a new commemorative for either the anniversary of the Battle of Monmouth or Captain Cook's discovery of the Hawaiian islands in 1778. Instead, New compromised and overprinted existing stocks of Fourth Bureau definitives with plainly lettered inscriptions, a la the security overprints.

The Monmouth commemorative, if you could call it that, was the two-cent issue bearing the name "Molly Pitcher," who was believed to have been helpful in manning American cannon at the battle. The inscription "Hawaii 1778-1928" was the message on a two-cent and a five-cent stamp. As the Hawaii overprints were deemed of only local interest, they and were only offered for sale in the then American Territory of Hawaii.

Needless to say, New's half-hearted and ill-conceived commemoratives were not popular and still an embarrassing bit of bureaucratic penny pinching. They're often referred to as the "poor man's commemoratives" and show that, with great advances and success, there are some setbacks and failures.

Perforation Errors

There are several Fourth Bureau values with compound perfs, but these were produced as full sheets perfed 11x10. It usually works out that there is just one horizontal row per sheet with the 10 perf. This was due to the perforating mechanism, which involved two complimentary wheels, a male and a female. The female was an 11 gauge wheel, but the male was a 10 gauge. As the press rolled on, this misalignment of gauges created one row perfed 10 out on each sheet. This can be found on two-, four-, five-, ten-, and twenty-five-cent Fourths.

Partial imperfs have been found for nine different values in the Fourth Bureau series. There are both vertically and horizontally imperforates, as well as pairs imperforated between, in either aspect. Completely imperforate errors are know for the five-, eight-, ten- and eleven-cent values. Gutter pairs are also known.

Canal Zone

The Canal Zone issued its first stamps in 1904, and are a very interesting aspect of American philately in and of themselves. The Zone was set up and governed by a treaty between the US and Panama, a country that the US helped succeed from Columbia in 1903. The US had sovereign powers within the Zone and was run as a giant company town for generations until 1979.

The Fourth Bureau issues sold and used in the Canal Zone all bear the electrotype overprint of "CANAL ZONE" and were only available from the Zone itself, as it was viewed as an independent governing entity by bureaucratic Washington.

Small numbers of Fourths were overprinted for the Zone, in comparison to the US emissions, especially those produced by the flat plate press, and the highest denomination for the CZ was the one-dollar Lincoln Memorial. The Zone also went one step further and applied red "Postage Due" overprints to three of their standard Fourths from Washington.