Empire of the Air

Aviation and the American Ascendancy

Jenifer Van Vleck

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780674050945
• eBook ISBN: 9780674727328
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

From the flights of the Wright brothers through the mass journeys of the jet age, airplanes inspired Americans to reimagine their nation's place within the world. Now, Jenifer Van Vleck reveals the central role commercial aviation played in the United States' rise to global preeminence in the twentieth century. As U.S. military and economic influence grew, the federal government partnered with the aviation industry to carry and deliver American power across the globe and to sell the very idea of the "American Century" to the public at home and abroad.

Invented on American soil and widely viewed as a symbol of national greatness, the airplane promised to extend the frontiers of the United States "to infinity," as Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe said. As it accelerated the global circulation of U.S. capital, consumer goods, technologies, weapons, popular culture, and expertise, few places remained distant from the influence of Wall Street and Washington. Aviation promised to secure a new type of empire—an empire of the air instead of the land, which emphasized access to markets rather than the conquest of territory and made the entire world America's sphere of influence.

By the late 1960s, however, foreign airlines and governments were challenging America's control of global airways, and the domestic aviation industry hit turbulent times. Just as the history of commercial aviation helps to explain the ascendance of American power, its subsequent challenges reflect the limits and contradictions of the American Century.

1

The Americanization of the Airplane

On December 17, 1903, from atop the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, accomplished the world’s first sustained, controlled flight in a machine-powered airplane. The flight lasted for twelve seconds and covered a distance of 120 feet. Later that day, Orville and Wilbur Wright made three more flights, including one of fifty-seven seconds. The brothers’ brief telegram to their father—“Success four flights Thursday morning”—scarcely conveyed the magnitude of their achievement. Only five observers witnessed the event: three men from the nearby Kill Devil Hills lifesaving station and two residents of nearby towns. Several weeks later, the Wrights released a statement to the Associated Press, but concerned about patent infringement, they divulged few details about how their flying machine actually worked. Lacking precise information, newspapers that reported on the Wrights’ claims published stories rife with misinformation and rumors. The U.S. government, meanwhile, largely ignored the Wrights; believing them to be cranks, military leaders repeatedly rejected their bids to sell their flying machine to the War Department. For the next five years, then, few Americans had any inkling about what the events of December 17, 1903, would mean for their nation and the world.¹

In Europe, meanwhile, scientists made important advances in aeronautics, and governments actively invested in the development of both military and commercial aviation. As a result, during World War I, the bombers and pursuit planes used by England, France, Germany, and Italy were considerably more advanced than aircraft produced in the United States (whose fledgling air service flew French- and British-made aircraft during the war). And by 1925, European commercial airlines, mostly government-operated, were flying mail and passengers between the continent’s major cities and even to colonies in Africa and South America, whereas the United States had yet to develop a single international airline.²

By the end of the 1920s, however, the United States had become the world’s leading aerial power. By 1929, U.S. airlines had carried more passengers than the airlines of England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands combined, airmail routes stretched from coast to coast, aviation stocks were soaring, and the American public had gone wild for the airplane, resulting in countless aviation-themed popular songs, films, books, magazines, and collectibles. “America has once again used her natural advantages to zoom ahead of her European competitors in the race for the empyrean of the aerial age,” observed an editorial in the British trade journal Airways.³

Europe’s postwar social and economic devastation, the comparative strength of the U.S. economy, and the Air Mail Act of 1925, which brought federal revenue to the nation’s airlines, all contributed to the United States’ rapid ascent into the skyways. Two events, however, proved decisive in catalyzing public and government interest in aviation: the U.S. Army Air Service’s 1924 round-the-world flight and Charles Lindbergh’s nonstop transatlantic flight of May 1927. Discourse surrounding these two history-making flights ultimately resulted in the national adoption of the airplane as a “child of America,” as the trade journal Aeronautical Digest stated in 1922. Aviation had developed simultaneously in several nations; its most important innovations, after the Wright brothers’ initial invention, came from Europe; and the airplane itself was a globalizing technology that appeared to diminish the salience of national borders. Yet in the American cultural imagination, aviation tapped into nationalist narratives about frontier conquest, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism (the idea that the United States possessed a unique character and mission). The accomplishments of the Wright brothers, the U.S. Army Air Service, and especially Lindbergh appeared to prove historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1898 “frontier thesis,” which attributed American democracy and industriousness to the nation’s pioneer history. But whereas Turner had pessimistically concluded that Americans had no more territorial frontiers to conquer, the airplane opened an entirely new frontier—a frontier of the air, filled with virtually unlimited promise.⁴

To be sure, aviation animated nationalist narratives in every country that developed the technology.⁵ While the peaceful implications of commercial air travel encouraged internationalist or cosmopolitan sensibilities, the destructive capacities of military airpower, amply demonstrated in World War I, raised concerns about national security. Aviation’s political economy, moreover, developed within the institutional framework of the nation-state: aeronautical laboratories were typically government funded, most of the world’s airlines originated as state-owned utilities, and even in the United States, the aviation industry would not have gotten off the ground without federal support for research, manufacturing, and airmail carriage. Yet if the link between aviation and nationalism was not unique to the United States, the transnational culture of the airplane increasingly looked and sounded American. By the end of the 1920s, people around the world had witnessed the 1924 U.S. Army flight, danced the “Lindy hop,” and marveled at Hollywood films such as Frank Capra’s Flight (1929).

The Americanization of the airplane, however, was far from inevitable. That the Wright brothers had first flown on the sands of North Carolina did not necessarily mean that the United States was destined to win “the race for the empyrean of the aerial age.” In fact, for the first two decades of the century, it seemed rather unlikely to do so.

The Wright Brothers and the Early Air Age in the United States and Europe

The first American experiments in machine-powered aviation yielded highly discouraging results. In 1898, Samuel Pierpont Langley, a renowned astronomer and the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, secured a $50,000 grant from the War Department to design a flying machine. Widely publicized, his experiments led many to believe that the ages-old dream of human flight was about to be realized. But in October 1903, when Langley catapulted his “Aerodrome” from the roof of a houseboat docked in the Potomac River, the ungainly machine plummeted directly into the icy water. A second attempted flight ended the same way, ending also Langley’s career as an aeronautical inventor. Newspapers around the country made great sport of mocking Langley—the Boston Herald suggested that he try designing submarines, since his inventions seemed to have a penchant for water—and the War Department decided to eschew further investment in aviation.⁶

Thus, when the Wright brothers announced their own flight in December 1903, the same month that the Aerodrome made its second and final plunge into the Potomac, the American public had good reason to be skeptical about their claims. Orville and Wilbur’s fears of patent infringement exacerbated such skepticism, as the brothers refused to divulge photographs or any information that might allow rival inventors to understand how their flying machine worked. And in 1905, when the Wrights invited a group of journalists to observe a flight, mechanical problems and inclement weather forced them to cancel the event. In the absence of reliable information, reporters resorted to speculation (the New York Herald described the Wright Flyer as a balloon) and, in one notable instance, outright forgery (The Independent magazine assigned Wilbur Wright’s name to a 1904 article, “The Experiments of a Flying Man,” which contained excerpts from two lectures that Wilbur had given but had not actually been written by him).⁷

The first eyewitness account of the Wright Flyer appeared on January 1, 1905, in a rather unlikely place: pages 36 through 39 of Gleanings in Bee Culture. The journal’s publisher, beekeeper Amos Root of Medina, Ohio, had observed the Wrights flying at Huffman Prairie, a field near their Dayton home, and his report appeared alongside such articles as “Judging Honey at Fairs.” Root had “recognized at once,” he wrote, that the Wrights were “really scientific explorers who were serving the world in much the same way that Columbus did when he discovered America.” Beyond his fellow apiarian enthusiasts, however, Root’s testimony remained in obscurity. Meanwhile, leading scientific journals continued to discount the Wrights’ claims. According to Scientific American, for example:

Unfortunately, the Wright brothers are hardly disposed to publish any substantiation or make public experiments, for reasons best known to themselves. If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter … would not have ascertained all about them and published them long ago?

As the New York Herald put it, the Wrights “are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It is easy to say ‘We have flown.’ ”⁸

Though War Department officials stopped short of calling the Wrights “liars,” they too were skeptical and dismissive. In December 1904, the Wrights met with their congressman, Representative Robert Nevin (R-Ohio), and informed him that they wished to sell airplanes to the government. Nevin instructed them to write a letter stating their intentions and promised that he would bring it to the secretary of war, William Howard Taft, and arrange an appointment for the brothers to meet with him. Illness, however, prevented Nevin from delivering the letter to Taft personally, and the War Department summarily rejected the Wright brothers’ offer to “furnish machines of ‘agreed specifications at a contract price.’ ” The department’s $50,000 investment in Langley’s Aerodrome debacle had been a public embarrassment; for years, moreover, it had received hundreds of letters from crackpots claiming to have invented flying machines. As aviation historian Tom Crouch has noted, “Yet another letter, this one from two ‘inventors’ who claimed to have solved the problem of the ages in the back room of a bicycle shop, was not calculated to impress.”⁹

After a second rejection from the War Department in October 1905, the Wrights turned elsewhere—to interested parties from Britain and France. “It is no pleasant thought to us that any foreign country should take from America any share of the glory of having conquered the flying problem,” Wilbur wrote, “but we feel that we have done our full share toward making this an American invention.… We have taken pains to see that ‘Opportunity’ gave a good clear knock on the War Department door.” Since the War Department refused to “reopen the door it had slammed in our faces,” in April 1906 the Wrights sold their first flying machine to a French syndicate, acting as a government proxy, for the sum of one million francs (about $200,000).¹⁰

Even in France, the Wright brothers encountered skepticism and hostility. Prior to World War I, Paris had been the world’s capital of aviation, and the French maintained considerable national pride in their history of aeronautical innovation—which dated to 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers discovered how to fly a hot-air-filled balloon. Thus, when Wilbur Wright arrived in Paris in June 1908 to perform demonstration flights, he was widely perceived as a dubious foreign interloper. French aviators believed that the Wrights’ flying machine would prove incapable of fulfilling the terms of their contract with their buyers, which required the aircraft to “ris[e] by itself from a hard ground,” to make two flights of no less than 50 kilometers in length and one hour in duration, and to land “without damages.”¹¹

Initial French skepticism, however, would quickly turn to wild enthusiasm. In August of 1908, after spending two months reassembling his aircraft (which had been shipped overseas in parts), Wilbur Wright began flying at Le Mans, a field on the outskirts of Paris. Disproving his critics, the flights were sensationally successful. Spectators “nearly went wild with excitement,” he reported in a letter to Orville. “You never saw anything like the complete reversal of position that took place after two or three little flights of less than two minutes each.” The French aviators who had initially scorned the Wright brothers now sang their praises, and the press conceded that the United States now rivaled France as the world capital of the air age. “Our supremacy in flying is no longer questioned over here,” Wilbur wrote. The Aéro Club awarded the brothers a gold medal, and Les Sports, a sportsmen’s journal that had previously been critical of the Wrights, “is now one of our strongest boosters.” Within a week, Wilbur Wright had become a celebrity in France. Thousands flocked to Le Mans, from millionaires and royals to peasants who traveled 50 miles by bicycle to get a glimpse of the flying machine. Wilbur was celebrated in song (“Il Vol,” or “He Flies,”), verse, and portrait; images of the Wright Flyer, both realistic and caricatured, appeared in commemorative pamphlets and postcards sold by street vendors. “The furor has been so great as to be troublesome,” Wilbur wrote his sister Katharine. “I cannot even take a bath without having a hundred or two people peeking at me.”¹²

Shortly after Wilbur Wright’s success in France, Orville achieved equivalent prestige in the United States. In February 1908, the Army signed a contract to purchase a single Wright B Flyer for the sum of $25,000. To demonstrate that the aircraft could meet the Army’s specifications, in September 1908 Orville conducted a series of public flights at Fort Myer, Virginia, across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. As at Le Mans, the flying machine attracted thousands of awestruck spectators, and once-skeptical newspapers and magazines now published effusive paeans to the Wrights. In an editorial dated September 11, 1908, the day Orville set a world endurance record by remaining airborne for seventy minutes and twenty-four seconds, the Washington Post described the sight of the airplane as “a delicious thrill,” inspiring one of those “moments in every man’s life when he is a poet.” It was, the Post concluded, “a wonderful achievement for the man and a glorious triumph for the race of men, which has conquered the air, as it won the earth and the sea, even to the uttermost horizon.” Yet triumph was soon marred by tragedy: on September 17, the Wright Flyer crashed, gravely injuring Orville (he would be hospitalized for seven weeks) and killing his passenger, Army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, in the world’s first airplane fatality.¹³

Even after the crash, however, the Wrights’ popularity and acclaim continued to grow in both Europe and the United States. Wilbur remained in France during the fall and winter of 1908–1909, winning several awards including the prestigious Michelin Cup (for a flight of over two hours). In January, Orville and Katharine Wright joined their brother in the town of Pau, where over the next three months Wilbur trained French pilots to operate the Wright Flyer, and then for a tour of Europe and more successful demonstration flights in Germany, Italy, and England. When the Wrights returned to the United States in the spring of 1909, they arrived as national heroes. Initially ignored or mocked, their invention was now celebrated as a great patriotic achievement, the latest evidence of national pioneering and ingenuity. The brothers themselves were construed as quintessential Americans, embodying the small-town virtues of hard work and humility: “they are the same imperturbable ‘men from home,’ ” wrote Arthur Ruhl in Collier’s, who “still live in the little side street across the river from the main part of Dayton.”¹⁴

Although the French had appreciated the Wrights’ achievement more quickly than had their own fellow citizens, Americans now represented their flights as evidence of the United States’ superiority over Europe in aviation. According to an article in The World’s Work, flight in Europe had been merely “parade-ground experimental” before Wilbur Wright arrived, and the French “added nothing essential to the principles that the Wrights were practicing.” The Wrights’ own publicity materials contributed to this nationalist narrative by emphasizing that their airplanes were products of American resources and labor. “We send our lumber expert regularly into the West Virginia forests and there select our stock piece by piece.… Our cloth is made by the most reliable mills in New England,” stated a Wright Company brochure from 1911. Ironically, the machine that had to cross ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Logic of the Air
• 1. The Americanization of the Airplane
• 2. Good Neighbors Are Close Neighbors
• 3. Global Visions, National Interests
• 4. “America’s Lifeline to Africa”
• 5. From Open Door to Open Sky
• 6. Mass Air Travel and the Routes of the Cold War
• 7. The Jet Age and the Limits of American Power
• Conclusion: “Empires Rise and Empires Fall”
• Photographs
• Sources and Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index