Airlines and Air Mail

The Post Office and the Birth of the Commercial Aviation Industry

F. Robert der Linden

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184418
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Conventional wisdom credits only entrepreneurs with the vision to create America's commercial airline industry and contends that it was not until Roosevelt's Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 that federal airline regulation began. In Airlines and Air Mail, F. Robert van der Linden persuasively argues that Progressive republican policies of Herbert Hoover actually fostered the growth of American commercial aviation. Air mail contracts provided a critical indirect subsidy and a solid financial foundation for this nascent industry. Postmaster General Walter F. Brown used these contracts as a carrot and a stick to ensure that the industry developed in the public interest while guaranteeing the survival of the pioneering companies. Bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and politicians of all stripes are thoughtfully portrayed in this thorough chronicle of one of America's most resounding successes, the commercial aviation industry.

Chapter 1

Foundations

On the morning of May 15, 1918, a crowd gathered around a single-engined Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny” trainer parked at the Polo Grounds near the Potomac River in the nation’s capital. Thousands of spectators pressed against rope barricades hoping to catch a glimpse of the festivities as five hundred dignitaries arrived amid much fanfare. Present were Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson and Second Assistant Postmaster General Otto Praeger, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and his assistant secretary, Franklin D. Roosevelt, members of the recently formed National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and numerous members of Congress. At 11:15 A.M. President Woodrow Wilson and the first lady arrived to witness the inaugural flight of the U.S. Air Mail Service.

Within minutes a truck arrived carrying four large bags of mail. Into one, President Wilson placed a letter addressed to the postmaster of New York from General Burleson. After a short presentation ceremony, the pilot, Lt. George L. Boyle, climbed into his frail craft, started his reluctant 150-horsepower Hispano-Suiza engine, and bounced down the Polo Grounds, crawling into the air at 11:46, headed for Philadelphia. The plan was for Boyle to land at Bustleton, Pennsylvania, where his load of mail would be transferred into another Jenny and flown to New York. Fifteen minutes before Boyle took off, Lt. Torrey Webb left from the Belmont Race Track on Long Island and headed south for the same destination, thus opening two-way Washington–Philadelphia–New York service. That was the plan. Webb reached Philadelphia one hour later without incident. Boyle was not so fortunate.

Navigating by a single road map, Boyle became confused while attempting to follow the railroad tracks north. Without the aid of an accurate compass, Boyle found himself sixty minutes later over Waldorf, Maryland, twenty-five miles southeast of Washington. Landing to seek directions, Boyle flipped his aircraft, fortunately damaging only his pride. When news of his accident reached Philadelphia, the connecting flight left for New York, on schedule, but without the Washington mail, arriving on time at 3:37 P.M.

Lt. George L. Boyle opened air mail service when he took off in his Curtiss JN-4 from West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., on May 15, 1918. (Smithsonian, SI# 2000-6152)

In Philadelphia, Webb transferred his mail load into a Jenny piloted by Lt. James Edgerton, who took off with no trouble and smoothly proceeded to Washington, where he landed at 2:50 P.M. to the applause of numerous well wishers, including his sister and fiancée. Thus the first day of regularly scheduled air mail service drew to a close.¹

Today, we think nothing of flying thousands of miles to conduct business, visit relatives, or spend leisure time vacationing halfway around the globe. The ability to travel these vast distances, by air, is truly one of the greatest social and technological accomplishments of the twentieth century. In the span of only ninety years, this new and revolutionary means of transportation has changed how we perceive the world and has conquered heretofore unconquerable obstacles of time and distance. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the industrial age, heavier-than-air, powered flight, went from birth to maturity in an unprecedented short period of time. Unlike previous transportation systems, which evolved over centuries, aviation developed almost overnight.

Today, the ability to fly is taken for granted. The average American citizen is aware of the story of the Wright brothers and their remarkable creation in 1903. Most people know that the airplane was quickly forged into a weapon of war that is today capable of prodigious destructiveness. They see the sky full of gleaming jet airliners effortlessly traversing the continent over invisible routes to distant destinations. These aircraft and the airlines that operate them have always seemed to exist. That their creation and development in the United States was the product of a conscious effort by the federal government is little known. That the very existence of the airlines is the product of an often-abused bureaucracy is imperceptible. Yet that is the case.

Since 1792, the Post Office Department, now the Postal Service, has borne the responsibility of uniting the country through the communications system of the mail. The Post Office provided the vital link between communities, the lifeline between businesses and friends, and the one national instrument capable of spreading information throughout the nation quickly and efficiently. So important was this mission that the American citizen has always been willing, though usually grudgingly, to accept the intrusion of the federal government and the expenditure of tax dollars, even at a loss, for the benefits of mail service. To this end, the Post Office has traditionally sought ways to improve service, particularly through improvements in speed.

Post roads were the first manifestation of the growing federal presence across the nation. These public roads, which proliferated in the nineteenth century, were usually the first reliable links between new and old communities, and there was constant pressure from an expanding country for the Post Office to keep pace with America’s internal development. Concurrent with the boom in transportation technologies, first with the roads, then the canals, and soon the innovation of the railroads, the Post Office kept pace by placing the public mails on stage lines, ships, and rail cars. Through the use of contract mail carriers, the Post Office was able to spread the mails across the nation while directly supporting new transportation technologies through payments for services.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, contractors were carrying the bulk of mail between city centers and were dependent upon the federal largess to keep their burgeoning enterprises profitable. Subsidies, a term generally anathema to Americans, have always been an integral part of the functioning of the Post Office. The first subsidies were granted in the 1840s to promote the development of American steamship lines that were threatened by foreign competition. This action promoted the creation of improved ship designs, advanced the state of the ship builders’ art, and directly benefited U.S. business. Regional opposition, particularly from the South and the West, curtailed the use of subsidies until the advent of World War I. During this conflict, the federal government once again employed the strategy of subsidies to support the domestic merchant marine. With British and German merchant ships engaged in combat, the United States was deprived of the use of much of the world’s commercial fleet. Through the renewed implementation of postal subsidies, the federal government once again came to the aid of a developing industry. Thus, by the end of World War I, the concept of federal support for new transportation technologies clearly had been established.

Concurrent with federal support of transportation came the politicization of the Post Office as, over time, its power and influence grew. For almost one hundred years the Post office was the only visible manifestation of the federal government seen by the average citizen. As such, the control of local post offices and the appointment of local postmasters became crucial political tools and rewards for successful campaigns and the means for political parties to extend their influence throughout the country. With lucrative federal patronage available to the winners, control of the Post Office and its spoils was fiercely pursued. The position of postmaster general became the nation’s preeminent patronage post, usually awarded to the victorious president’s most trusted advisor. Commonly, the postmaster general was the party leader, campaign manager, and critical liaison with Congress. He controlled the money, and it was to him that local, state, and federal politicians petitioned for rewards. Despite the diminished influence of politics following the creation of a federal civil service through the Pendleton Act of 1883, which abolished many of the former patronage jobs, and subsequent reforms during the Progressive Era to rectify repeated scandals, the influence of the Post Office and the postmaster general remained great.

With the precedent of direct federal assistance to transportation technologies and the important political role of the Post Office thus well established, America entered a new era in the ongoing relationship between business and government when, late in the spring of 1918, the Post Office inaugurated the nation’s first regularly scheduled air mail service.

That day was the culmination of the efforts of many in both the Post Office and Congress to reap the promised benefits of aircraft speed. As early as 1910, Congress began to show interest in the potential of aircraft to carry the mail. That year Rep. Morris Shepard introduced the first air mail bill, which unfortunately died in committee.² Despite this setback, Postmaster General Frank H. Hitchcock, a promoter of the air mail concept, pressed on. At an international air meet on Long Island, Hitchcock allowed a special air mail service to fly as part of the festivities. Thus, on September 23, 1911, pilot Earle Ovington was sworn in as America’s first air mail pilot and, squeezing a full mail sack between his legs, took off in his delicate Queen monoplane for Mineola, some five miles away. Six minutes later, Ovington banked his aircraft and pushed the bag out of the cockpit. The bag fell to the ground near the local postmaster.³ Although purely ceremonial, this was the first time aircraft officially carried U.S. mail.

Hitchcock’s subsequent efforts to convince Congress to provide fifty thousand dollars for an experimental service fell on deaf ears. With the advent of Wilson to the presidency in 1913, the new postmaster general, Burleson, continued his predecessor’s efforts to foster the creation of an air mail plan. Little was done, despite bipartisan efforts. A change occurred on September 1, 1916, when Otto Praeger, a former reform-minded newspaperman and Progressive city clerk of San Antonio, Texas, became second assistant postmaster general and administered the delivery of the mail. Praeger adopted Burleson’s desire to push for air mail.

Immediately upon taking office, Praeger began to campaign for air mail service in Alaska and Massachusetts. Although these efforts met with failure, his determination to push through service between New York and Chicago convinced enough members of Congress to authorize an experimental service between New York and Washington, D.C. With the support of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the purpose of which was to foster aviation development, and of Standard Aircraft, which hoped that this undertaking would prove an outlet for its aircraft products, Burleson approved the project, and with the begrudging cooperation of the U.S. Army Air Service, which initially was to provide the pilots and aircraft, the service began in May. Burleson, a former Populist, had no compunction against the government entering what traditionally was the purview of business. Despite the tradition of contracting with private transportation enterprises for the delivery of mail over long distances, Burleson realized that this infant industry needed substantial government assistance during its formative stages.

Despite setbacks that any pioneering enterprise would expect, the new U.S. Air Mail Service quickly became a generally reliable service, completing an average of 91 percent of its flights.⁴ In August 1918, the army withdrew, leaving the Post Office in complete control of the operation, equipped with its own aircraft and pilots. Under Capt. Benjamin Lipsner, new Standard biplanes, each with a capacity of three hundred pounds, were acquired and the base of operations in Washington shifted to College Park Airport (the oldest in the world) in nearby Maryland. Under Lipsner’s direction the service grew with a specific goal: that of a proving ground for eventual civil aviation. According to Lipsner, this noble experiment was “the mechanical laboratory for the advancement of commercial aviation. . . . The first step toward the universal commercial use of the aeroplane.”⁵

Once rational procedures and reliable accounting practices were implemented, Lipsner pushed for the logical extension of his vision: transcontinental air service. Realizing that the time savings afforded by the speed of aircraft could be realized only over long distances, the Post Office pressed for New York–to–Chicago service, which opened on September 5, 1919. By this time, specially modified de Havilland DH-4 light bombers were converted as mail planes and introduced into the schedules, soon becoming the ubiquitous symbol of the Air Mail Service. Conflicts with Praeger forced Lipsner’s resignation and the replacement as chief of flying by James Edgerton, one of the original pilots on the inaugural route. Despite this and continuing battles with the army and Congress over control of the operation, Praeger pushed forward, Edgerton building the route infrastructure, writing the operations manuals, and selecting and training the pilots and crew as the operation expanded westward.⁶ On May 15, 1920, two years to the day after opening service, the air mail reached Omaha, and on September 8 the transcontinental route to San Francisco was completed.

At this point, all schedules were flown during the day as neither the aircraft nor routes were equipped with measures to allow for night and bad weather flying. In a dramatic display of the possibilities of continuous operation and to counter the attacks by critics that the operation was too costly and inefficient, on February 22, 1921, just ten days before the new Harding administration took office, four pilots, two from each coast, took off. Only one of the four schedules was completed, but the event made headlines. Battling bad weather, which killed one pilot and grounded the other two, Frank Yeager pressed on over his night stage from Salt Lake City via Cheyenne to North Platte, Nebraska. Pilot Jack Knight relayed the mail from there to Omaha, where he was to hand it over to the connecting flight from Chicago. Unfortunately, that flight was grounded, and, braving the night and deteriorating weather, guided only by bonfires lit across Iowa, Knight completed his epic flight. Once in Chicago, the mail was again transferred and flown without incident to New York in the remarkable time of thirty-three hours and twenty minutes.⁷ This astonishing achievement highlighted the potential of air mail service. Yet much work remained.

Incoming postmaster general Will H. Hays was less than enthusiastic about this aerial experiment. Hays appointed as the new second assistant postmaster Edward W. Shaughnessy, who promptly sought to increase cooperation with the army. Shaughnessy...