Abstract
U.S. civil aviation emerged in the second half of the 1920S from the doldrums that it had settled in after the First World War. It then soon recaptured world leadership. This transformation molded it into a form and modus operandi, which, while by no means set in stone, nevertheless indicated the character and likely needs of the industry. And it was with this state of affairs that Roosevelt had to engage when he came into office. U.S. civil aviation was still an infant industry, but had already disclosed wayward behavior and its specific needs. There were strong political, defense, economic, and corporate forces at play with vested interests established and ambitions to pursue. The challenges of the industry, in other words, began to appear in clearer and complex form as 1933 approached.
“… incompetent, criminally negligent and almost treasonable.”1
Brigadier General Billy Mitchell on government and air defense shortcomings: September 1925.
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Notes
Quoted in Marylin Bender and Selig Altschul, The Chosen Instrument: Pan Am, Juan Trippe—The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepreneur (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 67–68.
For Hoover as secretary of commerce, see Joseph Brandes, Herbert Hoover and Economic Diplomacy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962).
See R. E. G. Davies, Airlines of the United States since 1914 (London: Putnam, 1982).
Carl Solberg, Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), 64.
M. Josephson, Empire of the Air: Juan Trippe and the Struggle for World Airways (New York: Arno Press, 1972)
R. Daley, An American Saga: Juan Trippe and His Pan American Empire (New York: Random House, 1980)
W S. Myers and W H. Newton, The Hoover Administration: A Documented Narrative (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 430; Davies, Airlines of the United States, chapter 5.
R. K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1969), 410–11
R. L. Wilbur and H. M. Hyde, The Hoover Policies (New York, Scribner’s, 1937), 215–16.
Dick Alan Daso, Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Air Power (Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2000), 114.
Stuart Banner, Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 200.
John W R. Taylor et al., eds., The Guinness Book of Air Facts and Feats (London: Book Club Associates, 1977), 107.
For strategic importance of the Panama Canal, see David Haglund, “De-lousing Scadta: The Role of Pan American Airways in U.S. Aviation Diplomacy in Colombia, 1939–1940,” Aerospace Historian 30 (1983): 177–90.
Shortly after the United States signed the Havana Convention, it was invited to attend an extraordinary meeting of the International Commission for Air Navigation in Paris. President Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, accepted and sent William McCracken in the hope that it might be possible to agree to a reconciliation of the differences between the Paris and the Havana Convention. Unfortunately the talks dragged on, and U.S. Isolationism turned opinion against an agreement. Eventually, in 1934, President Roosevelt ended any further consideration of matters. See Alan P. Dobson, Peaceful Air Warfare: The United States, Britain, and the Politics of International Aviation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 27–29.
Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (New York and Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1990), 73
Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2008), 275–76
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© 2011 Alan P. Dobson
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Dobson, A.P. (2011). Roosevelt’s Inheritance. In: FDR and Civil Aviation. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119635_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119635_2
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