Abstract
Civil aviation reform up to September 1937 was a fiasco, but things were then set to change. President Roosevelt gave aviation more attention and invested more resources in pushing it forward. The Interdepartmental Committee on Civil Aviation Legislation was his first move in those respects. It was a key player in developing the government’s proposals, but many of its ideas were prompted and drawn together by the trio: Clinton Hester of the Treasury; James Rowe, administrative assistant to the president 1938–41; and James Roosevelt, the president’s eldest son and secretary to the president 1937–38. James Roosevelt took up his post in the White House at the start of his father’s second term: he resigned because of personal and health problems in November 1938.1 But during that relatively short period, many gave him “the credit for getting departments together and sponsoring the framing of the legislation” that later became the basis of a revised bill introduced to the House by Clarence Lea, and passed as the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act.2
There is practically no governmental regulation of American air lines.
Business Advisory Council 1937
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Notes
Bill Libby, My Parents: A Different View (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976)
James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately F.D.R.: A Son’s Story of a Lonely Man (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1959): 233–50 and 290–311, respectively, cover his time in the White House.
Charles S. Rhyne, Civil Aeronautics Act: Annotated with the Legislative History Which Produced Lt and the Precedents Upon Which Lt is Based (Washington, DC: National Law Book Company, 1939), 52; Civil Aeronautics Act 1938, PL No. 706, seventy-fifth Congress, third Session, 23 June 1938.
James McGregor Burns, The Lion and the Fox 1882–1940 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovic, 1956), 155.
Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952)
Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (New York and Boston: Little Brown, 1990), 65–66.
Bernard M. Baruch, The Public Years (London: Odhams, 1961), 14, 228, and 240.
Quoted from Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1991), 7.
John Edward Smith, FDR (New York, Random House, 2008), 239, citing New York Times, July 5, 1929.
Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, Navigating the Rapids 1918–1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berk (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 178, entry June 16, 1938.
Edward G. Hamilton, “Pending Air Legislation Threatens to Become Factor in Federal Reorganization Program,” Airline Pilot, February 1938.
Quoted from Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004), 161.
Alonzo L. Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 218.
Samuel I. Rosenman, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 volumes (New York: Random House, 1935–50), 101–2
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© 2011 Alan P. Dobson
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Dobson, A.P. (2011). The Passage of the 1938 Civil Aeronautics Act. In: FDR and Civil Aviation. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119635_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119635_4
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