by Susan Butler
Laura Ingalls, flying solo, was making good time until she made her refueling stop which, because it was unplanned, took much longer than it should have. George Pomeroy in his DC-2 (his crew were playing cards in the back) also lost precious time refueling.
Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes, meanwhile, were having problems with their directional gyro as well as with their radio, which conked out halfway across the continent—providentially after enabling them to learn that of their two refueling sites, only Wichita was clear and fog free. They went in dodging thunderstorms. They were sure, when they landed their trim blue Beechcraft at Mines field near Los Angeles, that they were in last place, sure they were, in Louise’s words, “the cow’s tail” of the race. They landed only to show they had gotten through and were puzzled to be greeted by the crestfallen faces of Vincent Bendix and Cliff Henderson. Then they were stunned when Cliff said to petite, blond Blanche, as she squeezed out of the plane handsomely attired in blue-green culottes and green flannel shirt, “I’m afraid you won the Bendix race. I wish you hadn’t but if it had to be a woman I’m glad it was you.” Then, to add insult to injury, Laura Ingalls in her Lockheed Orion followed them in to claim second place.
Louise noted with amusement that by evening the press releases referring to Bendix’s prize for the first women to finish no longer called it the “consolation prize,” as they had before, but the “special award.” It added $2,500 to the $4,500 Bendix prize that Louise and Blanche walked away with. Their time of 14 hours and 55 minutes set a new east-west speed record that would stand for two years, until Alexander Seversky finally broke it. Their victory stilled the voices of those fanatics who leaned on the strength argument to hold female pilots back, for petite Blanche Noyes, ex-actress, ex-star of White Cargo, weighed all of eighty-five pounds.
It was a moment of great satisfaction to all the women pilots—a vindication of their prowess, and another step forward. Two years before, Cliff Henderson had said they weren’t good enough pilots, safe enough pilots, strong enough pilots, to compete. Now they had walked off with the first and second prizes. It made no difference to Amelia that she had been bested by her good friends. They could sense her pride. “I don’t think there was a jealous bone in her body,” mused Blanche later. “She was just a fine woman all the way through.” Amelia took her time wandering about the field, watching the races, seeing people, among them Gene.
A few days later she had something else on her mind: Beryl Markham, attempting to fly from England to New York, crashed in Nova Scotia, nevertheless becoming the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone from east to west. Naturally, Amelia was asked if she had any inclination to try the flight from that direction. “I don’t know—you know I’ve seen that ocean twice, and it doesn’t get any prettier,” she replied. But she was already planning her round-the-world flight, had been since August, when the Department of Commerce granted her a license, “restricted for long distance flights and research.”
The next week all thoughts of transatlantic flights were crowded out of her mind by her concern for Gene Vidal. In spite of the large chunks of time spent with Paul Mantz, Purdue, and her new plane, there had been no change in her relationship with Gene. They were as intimate as ever. She had been asked to testify before the Senate Air Safety Committee and turned her appearance into a spirited defense of Gene and of bureau efforts to make the airways safe. She was “obviously nervous” as she sat down, according to the Washington Post, probably because she knew she was going to be walking out on a limb. Senator Copeland, chairman, seeking to put her at ease, said that the committee “wanted to find out all we can in answer to the question of air safety.” Instead of replying to that point, according to the paper, Amelia “vigorously defended Federal airways personnel, whom,” she declared were “on trial.” She went on for several minutes in that vein. The headline over her picture was all she could have hoped for: “Amelia Earhart Lauds Bureau of Air Commerce,” as was the caption that ran underneath: “tells Senate Air Safety Committee there was ‘no group more loyal, interested and conscientious’ than the Bureau of Air Commerce.” Having made her point, she then went into an assessment of various airports and navigation aids, and ended up returning in the afternoon with a receiving set tuned into the Washington airport so that the senators could hear what a radio beacon sounded like.
When Amelia and Paul were making plans to fly to Denver for the Fourth of July air races, Amelia had wanted Gene to come, too. How to do it discreetly? Like a politician, using her people skills, Amelia had proceeded by indirection: She asked Paul to ask him. Paul wrote to Gene, “Amelia has consented to fly her ship up there, and I am wondering if it will be possible for you to come over and join us. Amelia mentioned particularly she would like so much to see you.” Gene answered to Amelia, sending her a telegram that he couldn’t do it: “Still can’t leave here.” It seems probable that there were two reasons he turned down the invitation: one was Paul Mantz, and the other was the demands of his job.
Laura Ingalls had applied to Gene for a position in the Bureau’s air-marking program. What did Amelia think? queried Gene. Not a good idea. “After your note Ingalls out,” Gene replied. Amelia then asked Gene to hire Blanche Noyes, who was in need of a job after her husband Dewey was killed, for the air-marking program. He authorized it the end of July.
Things were too quiet in Washington that August as far as the Bureau of Air Commerce was concerned, quiet even by summer-doldrums standards. As Gene wrote Amelia, “it is the quietest period we have had since I have been here—whatever that means.” He needed to find out.
It was the calm before the storm.
In mid-September came a Washington bombshell: it was announced that by executive order the bureau was going to be reorganized. Gene and his two assistant directors were to be fired, and a new director, a lawyer with sweeping new powers, would be appointed in his place. Amelia plunged in to the fray in support of her man.
Roosevelt was about to run for his second term. He had made Amelia a member of the advisory committee of the National Youth Administration, along with such heavyweights as the president of the NEA (National Education Association), the president of the biggest labor union in the United States, the president of Howard University, and others of the same caliber; Amelia had enthusiastically agreed to campaign for him and up to that point she had been letting Gene arrange the particulars of her support, for it was not only appropriate but politically helpful to him to act as her spokesman. Roosevelt not only liked her but needed her voice for the Democratic party.
Amelia decided to work through Eleanor, even though FDR was in Washington. She sent a remarkable telegram to the First Lady threatening to desert a planned campaign event and refuse to support FDR publicly if Eleanor didn’t make Franklin change his mind about firing Gene. It was a powerful threat; Amelia pulled out all the stops.
SEPT. 15 1936
MRS. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT,
THE WHITE HOUSE.
I AM WIRING YOU CONCERNING A MEAN AND UNFORTUNATE INSTANCE OF POLITICAL SCHEMING BECAUSE OF MY PROMISE TO YOU TO JOIN THE NEW YORK STATE AUTOMOBILE CARAVAN NEXT WEEK AND ISSUE A STATEMENT FOR THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE. AVIATION IS MY VOCATION AND AVOCATION. I SHOULD RATHER HELP THE INDUSTRY PROGRESS THAN PROGRESS MYSELF THUS I FEEL THE PRE-EMPTORY DISMISSAL OF THE DIRECTOR OF AIR COMMERCE AND TWO ASSISTANTS SUBSTITUTING LEGALLY TRAINED INDIVIDUAL FOR ONE OF PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE IS ALMOST A CALAMITY THERE IS LITTLE USE OF MY TRYING TO INTEREST OTHERS IN THE PRESIDENT’S CAUSE WHEN MY HEART IS SICK WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT AN INDUSTRY CAN BE JEOPARDIZED AND AN INDIVIDUAL’S CAREER BLASTED BY WHAT SEEMS A PERSONAL FEUD. MAY I HOPE THAT BEFORE ANY SCALPS ARE ATTACHED TO ANYONE’S BELT THE PRESIDENT WILL PERSONALLY ASCERTAIN THE TRUE SITUATION FROM MR. VIDAL. SURELY ONE DAY’S NOTICE OF DISMISSAL CAN ONLY RESULT IN CONFUSION IN A BUREAU LONG A TARGET OF ATTACK AND IS POOR REWARD FOR LOYAL SERVICE. PLEASE BELIEVE THIS MESSAGE IS NOT INSTIGATED BY ONE OF THOSE AFFECTED INSTEAD IT IS SENT PERSONALLY AND SOLELY IN THE INTERESTS
OF FAIR PLAY. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO QUESTION ME PLEASE WIRE INSTRUCTING WHEN I MAY TELEPHONE YOU.
That was on a Tuesday. Amelia knew that Eleanor, a strong Vidal supporter, would share her outrage. Eleanor showed Franklin the telegram, and according to Janet Mabie, Amelia’s overly warm defense of Gene made Franklin burst out laughing. “He admired her spirit and he laughed and laughed.” The next day he had lunch with Secretary Daniel Roper, head of the Department of Commerce, Gene’s boss. Secretary Roper informed the press that he and the president discussed the makeup of the Federal Maritime Commission during the meal, but they discussed the bureau also, for the next day its reorganization was canceled. By the time FDR left Washington the next evening on his special train bound for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to speak at Harvard’s three hundredth anniversary celebration, it had all been solved—Amelia had been notified and was wiring thank you.
SEPTEMBER 17
MRS. FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT.
THANK YOU SINCERELY FOR YOUR HELPFULNESS IN THE MATTER ABOUT WHICH I WIRED YOU. AM INFORMED OUTCOME NOW PROMISES TO BE SATISFACTORY TO VIDAL WHOSE LOYALTY MERITS THE FAIR TREATMENT WHICH YOUR INTERESTS SECURING. I AM SURE YOU UNDERSTAND I WAS ACTUATED BY DESIRE TO SERVE THE INDUSTRY, THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ADMINISTRATION. GRATEFULLY, AMELIA EARHART
It had taken the two women just forty-eight hours to change FDR’s mind. Eleanor had acted decisively, even though she was undoubtedly feeling poorly, for by Saturday she was feverish and in bed with the flu, necessitating FDR’s unexpected return to Washington. So powerful was the combination of the two women that FDR permanently shelved his plans to reorganize the bureau. Gene, meanwhile, was madly trying to get in touch with Amelia and, knowing she was flying her Electra to Purdue, was preparing to travel there to see her.
His cable dated the eighteenth: ARRIVING BY RAIL INDIANAPOLIS SEVEN THIRTEEN SATURDAY MORNING WILL PHONE YOU ON ARRIVAL
On the following day, the nineteenth, from Indiana, for the first time efficient Amelia endorsed the president. If FDR had wondered even for a moment whether it was all that important to keep her happy, his doubts were permanantly laid to rest: Amelia’s endorsement was headline news. Still under the circumstances it is hard not to find double entendres in the statement itself: “I am aligned with President Roosevelt because of his social conscience. Throughout his term of office he has fought against odds to reduce human misery. He has realized that obsolescence can affect parts of the machinery of government just as it does the machinery of industry,” ran Amelia’s endorsement.
A week later Amelia and George took their conspicuous place in the Democratic Caravan, a parade of cars carrying prominent people that was rolling through upstate New York. When she spoke in the tiny town of Mechanicville, it was reported on in the national press. It was also noted that she, not George, was at the wheel of their car.
The Caravan, along with the rest of the Democratic Party, was heading for Syracuse for the opening of the Democratic State Convention in the Armory on Monday the twenty-eighth, where, in his home state, FDR was scheduled to give his first political speech to kick off the campaign. As the president spoke, Amelia was prominently seated nearby with Mrs. Herbert Lehman, wife of New York’s governor, and Frances Perkins, secretary of labor. Later, Amelia, too was put on the schedule. Earlier in the day she had made a campaign speech over the NBC radio network for her Rye neighbor and friend Caroline O‘Day, the state’s only woman representative, whom Amelia had first supported when she ran in 1934. O’Day was one of the friends that Amelia and Eleanor Roosevelt had in common: she had been one of the founders of Eleanor’s Vall-Kil furniture factory in 1927, along with Marian Dickerman and Nancy Cooke. Now at the end of the afternoon, dressed in a knitted blue two-piece suit with bright scarlet and white kerchief at the neckline and a blue camel’s hair coat, Amelia stepped to the podium and seconded O‘Day’s nomination for a second term. As she did so, the delegates, particularly the women, many of whom had remained through the entire session just to hear her and Mrs. O’Day, raised a loud cheer.
Gene Vidal wasted no time, once his department was saved, in consolidating his position with the Democratic powers-that-be by demonstrating his position as Amelia’s confidant and adviser. He immediately wrote Mary Dewson, vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that Amelia would now campaign for the president not just in New York State but all over the country: “she plans to include her thoughts as to The President in some 28 lectures which she will give during the next months. I feel that it is a good break that she is lecturing in both Ohio and Michigan. Please let me know if there is anything further I might do for you.”
Mary Dewson gracefully replied, “We really are very grateful to you for what you have done in getting Miss Earhart interested in working for President Roosevelt.”
The annual army-navy football game at West Point was scheduled for the twenty-eighth of November. Gene was planning to take Gore and invited Amelia to join them. As the teams fought up and down the field, Gore was impressed with Amelia’s “good working knowledge” of football; she and Gene were having a great time together. During the half she devoted herself to Gore: “What color is a crowd—pink or gray or what?” he remembers her asking him, and as it got later and colder and furs looked more and more attractive, “How many animals go into making the average complement of clothes?” They traveled back by train and, Gore remembered, “as her fans peered excitedly into our train compartment, she described how she planned to fly around the world.”
Going around the world had been a rite of passage since Magellan, who in 1519 was the first to try—and the first to die in the attempt. A Circumnavigators Club for those who circled the globe dates from 1902. The first person to race around the world was Nellie Bly, an ambitious, talented reporter who worked for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. In those pre-airplane times, her goal was to beat Phineas Fogg’s fictional record, as dreamed up by Jules Verne, of eighty days. She did it with time to spare. Nellie left New York City in November 1889, crossed the Atlantic and the Mediterannean, proceeded to Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and San Francisco, then returned to New York 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes later. It won her fame and fortune, parades and book contracts.
So began a new challenge for intrepid adventurers, most of them American, of which there seemed an endless number. It was as if Americans, so newly having conquered their own continent, having made heroes of Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and John Fremont, in the past century, had the energy to spare and the mindset to just keep going until the world was as familiar as their own country. As travelers got the hang of foreign shipping and train schedules, the times kept dropping: 67 days, 60 days, 54 days, 40 days—until in 1911 a one-legged Frenchman by the name of André Jaeger-Schmidt circled the earth in 39 days, 19 hours, 42 minutes. By 1913, ten years after Kitty Hawk, the time was down to 35 days, 21 hours, 36 minutes, achieved by another American, John Mears. He made the last forty miles of that trip sitting on the wing of an airplane.
Naturally that started everyone thinking about doing it entirely by plane. In 1914 a company seeking publicity put up a prize for an airplane race around the world—the winner to get $100,000—but before anyone could even begin to get excited, World War I put an end to the quest. It would be another ten years before the first flight around the world, in 1924, when again it was done by Americans: U.S. Army fliers in four Douglas World Cruisers, open-cockpit single-engine seaplanes, aided by the navy, which stationed ships along the ocean routes. One plane crashed in Alaska, another was damaged and abandoned at sea, but two returned 175 days later. The fliers had a terrible time.
“Would you do it again?” one of the men was asked. “Not for a million dollars—unless we were ordered to” was the reply.
Major Jimmy Doolittle and his wife went around the world in 1933, partly by plane and partly by boat, to study aviation developments and foreign commercial airlines. The Lindberghs made their second survey flight, which took them around the world, that sam
e year. As Amelia was preparing to start, they were surveying India.
Wiley Post and Harold Gatty, an Australian navigator who had flown with Charles Kingsford-Smith, were the first civilians to fly around the world in a plane. They took off in Wiley’s Lockheed Vega Winnie Mae on June 23, 1931, from Roosevelt field. Wiley thought he could circle the globe in ten days, but they did much better than that, completing their circle in 8 days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes. It was a sensational accomplishment, even though their circumnavigation covered only 15,474 miles, barely more than half the circumference of the globe. Wiley was lionized and given parades, and he wrote a book about the trip. Then he flew solo around the world in 1933 in 7 days, 18 hours, handily beating his previous record. Fifty thousand people were waiting at Floyd Bennett field when he landed.
According to Harry Bruno, the pilot and public relations genius who raised the money for Wiley’s flights, twice around the world wasn’t enough for Wiley. When he and Will Rogers took off in the summer of 1935, their real destination was another round-the-world jaunt—the North Pole was just the first step. Wiley wanted to be the first person to do it three times. He thought it was a wonderful way to raise money, have fun, and stay in the public eye. It never occurred to him that he would crash and be killed.