To pilot Slim Lewis, the instrument panel was “just something to clutter up the cockpit and distract your attention from the railroad or riverbed you’re following.” Some aviators developed their own eccentric technology, such as using a lit cigar to time a route or a half-empty whiskey bottle as a flight level indicator. Coping with the aircrafts’ frequent mechanical glitches and crashes also required ingenuity. When a major hailstorm that pierced his flimsy plane with some three hundred holes forced Clifton P. “Ole” Oleson to land in a field, he patched the rips with dish towels soaked in egg whites donated by a farmer’s wife, then took off for his destination.
In August 1918, the post took over airmail operations from the military, and the department’s own civilian pilots began to fly its own biplanes, which were either custom-built or remodeled for postal service. (De Havilland’s DH-4, which had a more powerful 400-horsepower engine, superseded the Jenny as the fleet’s workhorse.) Much like Pony riders, the aviators were expected to satisfy their employer’s obsessions with speed and sticking to the schedule regardless of conditions. They raced their finicky, flimsy, unreliable aircraft through dense fogs, blizzards, and towering mountain ranges, protected mostly by the small planes’ responsiveness and slow speeds. Of the two hundred pilots who belonged to the service’s “suicide club” between 1918 and 1926, thirty-five died on duty, but many more emerged bloody and battered from crashes.
Somehow, the Air Mail Service managed to complete 90 percent of its flights, although emergency landings were common. Pilot Dean Smith telegraphed a cryptic explanation to headquarters after his engine quit in midair, causing an unusual disaster: “Only place to land on cow. Killed cow. Wrecked plane. Scared me. Smith.” While carrying the mail from Elko, Nevada, to Boise, Idaho, Paul Scott was forced to land by a broken oil line; then, followed by a pack of wolves, he walked twenty-seven miles for help. When Henry Boonstra’s carburetor froze during a snowstorm, he set the plane down on a 9,400-foot-high Utah mountain, grabbed the mail, and stumbled through heavy drifts for thirty-three hours before reaching a ranch house. The resident shepherd lent him a horse, and the pilot finally reached the nearest village and phone three days later. The aviators accepted such hair-raising risks less for the salary than from the desire to hold one of the few jobs in the world that allowed them to fly. As Smith put it, “Alone in an empty cockpit, there is nothing and everything to see. It was so alive and rich a life that any other conceivable choice seemed dull, prosaic and humdrum.”
Thrill-seeking behavior has a strong genetic component, and the right stuff clearly ran in the family of Katherine Stinson, the first woman authorized to fly the U.S. mail. Her parents operated a flight school in Texas, her sister Marjorie trained combat pilots in World War I, and her brother Eddie founded the Stinson Aircraft Company. The “Flying Schoolgirl” took America by storm with her loop-the-loops and skywriting, to say nothing of her leather garb and trousers, then still a rarity for women. In 1913, she amazed the crowd at the Montana State Fair by dropping mailbags from her sketchy wood-and-fabric plane, then went on to enthrall fans abroad before volunteering to be a combat pilot in 1917. She was rejected because of her sex but helped the cause by flying for pledges that brought $2 million to the Red Cross. In 1918, Stinson signed on as a regular Air Mail Service pilot and, despite a crash landing en route from Chicago to New York, managed to break a record for covering 783 miles in eleven hours. (Around 1920, tuberculosis forced her back to earth; she moved to New Mexico for her health, became a successful architect, and lived to the age of eighty-six.)
Businesses were impressed by airmail’s advances and put the post under congressional pressure to offer coast-to-coast service. The first transcontinental route, completed in 1920, linked Long Island, New York, and San Francisco via stops at thirteen small airfields. At first, the mailbags had to travel by train at night because pilots couldn’t fly in the dark. Planes still had no landing or navigation lights, and there were no illuminated runways, much less updated weather reports. Nevertheless, the experimental air-rail service cut nearly a day from the Railway Mail Service’s cross-country delivery time. To do better, the post had to come up with the technology needed to race the mail through the dark.
Even night flight seemed possible in the inventive Roaring Twenties milieu that produced the first robot and liquid-fueled rocket, Kool-Aid and the Band-Aid. The steady improvements in illuminating a cross-country airway included hundreds of rotating beacons and floodlights that replaced runway bonfires, followed later by searchlights that sat on giant concrete directional arrows. By 1924, the post had achieved the goals of routine night flight and regularly scheduled transcontinental service. Letters sped from west to east in about thirty hours with just seven relay stops, each lasting a mere five minutes; headwinds made the reverse trip a few hours longer. Moreover, flight was becoming much safer, thanks to such technical advances as parachutes, control towers, and radio stations that provided fliers with weather forecasts; soon the Department of Agriculture began to send the bulletins, as well as stock market data, to farmers.
The post remained in the airmail business, but it did not operate its own airline for long. Indeed, one of the government-run service’s major goals was to spur the development of commercial aviation and add the skies to America’s transportation grid. By 1925, the department had subsidized enough infrastructure to inspire some thirty companies to test their wings. That year, Congress passed the Contract Air Mail Act, also known as the Kelly Act, which authorized the post to stimulate the young industry’s growth by awarding lucrative contracts to private carriers. The bidding was competitive, but even automaker Henry Ford got some money for the “Tin Goose,” his all-metal plane. The following year, Congress authorized the government to license pilots and planes, investigate accidents and safety concerns, and generally regulate the nation’s newest transportation system.
The Air Mail Service’s efficiency and its pilots’ derring-do burnished the public image of the United States and its post. A few of its aviators, like a handful of Pony riders, became celebrities who captured the popular imagination by racing boldly through the newest frontier. Their archetype was “Wild Bill” Hopson, a former New York City taxi driver in love with speed. Fearless, genial, skilled, and movie-star handsome, he mostly got away with breaking rules as well as records and accumulating a string of forced landings and damaged planes. After one of Hopson’s near-death experiences, his long-suffering supervisor, D. B. Colyer, reported: “The Pilot was only slightly injured, the mail wet in spots, and the plane practically a washout.” On one occasion, Hopson found himself stranded at the airfield in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, while his date for the evening awaited him in Manhattan. He talked a New York City−bound pilot into allowing him to hitch a ride on one of the small plane’s wings, where he clung to its guy wires for the trip’s duration. In 1928, Hopson was killed at the age of thirty-eight while flying the mail and a large shipment of diamonds from New York to Cleveland over Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains, which were notorious for fog and tricky weather. Although untrue, the legend persisted that Wild Bill had made off to Canada with the treasure.
Postmaster General Harry New attributed at least part of the 20 percent increase in airmail volume in 1927 to an obscure twenty-five-year-old Army captain and former pilot for Robertson Aircraft, an Air Mail Service contractor. Charles Lindbergh had just become a worldwide celebrity when he flew the Ryan NYP single-engine Spirit of St. Louis on the first nonstop trip from New York to Paris in just thirty-three hours. Nevertheless, when asked about his future plans, he said, “I am an airmail pilot and expect to fly the mail again.” Indeed, “Lucky Lindy” had mastered his craft during his earlier days on the St. Louis−to−Chicago mail route. (On one occasion, he had parachuted from a plane that had apparently run out of gas, only to have it cough back to life and spiral toward him five times as he dropped helplessly through thin air; after he and the plane landed in separate cornfields, he
took the mail to the nearest post office for delivery.) Lindbergh later volunteered to do some final runs on the route between Springfield and St. Louis with his old Air Mail Service friends and recalled that “to be a pilot of the night mail appeared the summit of ambition for a flier.” (Amelia Earhart, who was the first woman to solo across the Atlantic, was not an official airmail pilot, but she flew the U.S. mail at least twice.)
The post’s time-honored policy of contracting with private transportation companies was a huge success for all parties involved with airmail. Postal service was greatly accelerated, which pleased the department and its customers, and by the late 1920s, the commercial aviation industry, which had been almost entirely sustained by postal subsidies, was poised to take flight on its own. The early airmail contractors evolved into major corporations—including Boeing, Pan Am, and the “Big Four” of United, Eastern, TWA, and American airlines—that were major beneficiaries of an expensive infrastructure of airfields, illuminated runways, and communications all provided by the post. Charles I. Stanton, a pilot who later headed the Civil Aeronautics Administration, summed up the Air Mail Service’s impact on global as well as national development by citing the “four seeds” it planted. Airways, communications, navigation aids, and multi-engined aircraft are, he said, “the cornerstones on which our present world-wide transport structure is built, and they came, one by one, out of our experience in daily, uninterrupted flying of the mail.”
No story of the early days of the Air Mail Service would be complete without mentioning its first stamp, issued in 1918, which showed a blue Jenny framed in an elaborately engraved red border. The stamp is beautiful in its own right, but a fabulous flaw, known as an invert, on one hundred of the stamps made the biplane appear to be flying upside down. This production error provided American philately with its most famous artifacts, each now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Inverts occurred rarely and only during a production process involving two or more colors. The fabled Jennys were produced by a mistake of the sort that usually happened when a sheet of stamps got turned around in the course of receiving a second color. Their popularity derives not just from their great visual and human appeal—the planes appear to be mimicking the barnstormers who thrilled Americans at contemporary air shows—but also from the thrill of the chase. On the day the stamp was released, William Robey, a Washington, D.C., philatelist, went to the post office and bought the only sheet of inverts ever sold from an initially unsuspecting clerk. Intent on dodging the authorities, he sped off to hide his treasure under his mattress until he could sell it, which he did for $15,000.
• • •
DESPITE THE TRIUMPHAL ACHIEVEMENTS of airmail, the new theory that the post should be more like a company than a public service, and therefore should narrow the scope of its services, reduce its deficits, and focus on maximizing revenue from first-class mail, slowly took hold in an America that seemingly thrived under the business-oriented political ethos of the prosperous Roaring Twenties. For the first time, more people lived in cities than in small towns and on farms. Jobs were plentiful again, and upward mobility was in the air. Blue-collar youths “bettered themselves” with vocational training; women got the vote, and some enrolled in the new coed colleges. Anti-immigrant and anti-union sentiment remained high, but racism began to ebb in the cities. The people were united by the mass-produced consumer culture and enthralled by everything modern, from Art Deco design to jazz to the radios and telephones that quickly rendered the telegraph obsolete.
The sky seemed to be the limit until the stock market crashed in 1929, which triggered the Great Depression and sent the government-versus-business pendulum swinging once again. In 1932, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won the White House with his promise to rescue the nation with a “new deal” based on relief for the poor, economic recovery, and reforms to prevent Wall Street’s future chicanery.
Like the rest of America, the post suffered from the devastation wrought by the Depression; its revenues decreased by an unprecedented $119 million between 1930 and 1934 alone. The railroad it had depended on since the Civil War era staggered under the twin blows of the economic crisis and the increased use of automobiles, and its forced cuts in service in turn impeded the RMS. The only way in which hard times benefited the post was by greatly increasing the number of its banking customers, who soared from 770,859 in 1931 to 2,598,391 in 1935, when deposits totaled more than $1.2 billion. (These increases would continue until 1947, when the system claimed 4 million customers and more than $3 billion in deposits.)
During this extraordinarily difficult period, a Congress increasingly accustomed to thinking of the post as a troubled business rather than a public service and now strapped by the Depression put the post on what would become a long, fateful austerity diet. Over time, this starvation regimen would cause its physical facilities to deteriorate and render its technology obsolete, but President Roosevelt himself championed one of the few exceptions to this grim rule.
The New Deal’s architect believed that constructing public buildings would both reduce unemployment and reassure Americans that their government could get things done, even during hard times. He authorized thousands of projects, including courthouses, schools, libraries, and 1,300 post offices, which after all were local representations of Washington. Moreover, at a time when the arts were mostly a privilege of the rich, these handsome new post offices were adorned with murals that celebrated average folk and their local history. As FDR explained, this artwork for the people would be “native, human, eager and alive—all of it painted by their own kind in their own country, and painted about things they know and look at often and have touched and loved.” These postal murals are often attributed to the Works Progress Administration, but they were done under the aegis of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, which was less concerned with employing starving artists than with boosting beleaguered America’s morale.
FDR took an especially keen interest in three of six new post offices designed for New York’s Dutchess County, his aristocratic family’s ancestral turf. The towns of Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck were just miles away from the Roosevelts’ home in the village of Hyde Park, situated on the old thoroughfare that had first been called the King’s Highway, then the Albany Post Road. The president had once served as the county historian, and he supervised every detail of these post offices, from the different vernacular styles of their architecture to the stories told by their murals, starting with the area’s origin myth: Native Americans catching a first glimpse of Henry Hudson’s ship Half Moon.
Poughkeepsie was the county seat, and its post office was accordingly built in the grand style, complete with bell tower, marble columns, mezzanine, and possibly even a secret tunnel to an armory constructed for the president’s safety during World War II. One mural narrates the town’s history from 1830 to 1930, showing how a small country village on a river plied by sloops (FDR complained that the sails blew in the wrong direction) had become a bustling center of commerce served by the railroad. Another painting depicts New York State’s delegates solemnly ratifying the U.S. Constitution, but one charming detail was meant to amuse Poughkeepsie’s children: a tiny mouse peers from its hole just beneath the central handshake between the founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and George Clinton.
The Hyde Park branch could be the poster image for America’s small-town post offices. The gray fieldstone building with its pale blue wooden shutters looks more like one of the county’s cozy cottages or inns than a federal facility. Its murals were painted by Olin Dows, a local historian and artist, who submitted his initial sketches to FDR for vetting. He carefully rendered the regional flora and fauna while highlighting the New Deal theme of the dignity and importance of the community’s people, from the settlers constructing its first buildings to the fishermen catching a whale-like sturgeon. Even the portrayal of the picnic that FDR gave in 1939 to honor England’s King George VI (wh
o famously enjoyed his first hot dog in Hyde Park) deliberately trains the eye on the local folk, especially the fat farmer’s wife hawking her homemade delicacies, rather than on the grandees off in the distance. The scene that shows the crippled FDR checking the blueprints for a new local high school from his car, which was specially equipped with hand rather than foot controls, embodies the handicapped president’s optimism about the future despite great personal and social challenges.
FDR ordered the architects to model wealthy Rhinebeck’s post office on the home of Henry Beekman, a prominent Dutch pioneer known by some of the president’s ancestors. Dows’s murals here feature the scenes of leisure and comfort that befit an affluent community, including colonists dining alfresco, skaters cavorting on a frozen pond, and even an artist sketching the landscape. In the New Deal tradition, however, the town’s working people are also included, from its carpenters, who were famed for their craftsmanship, to the local slaves going about their unpaid labors.
Roosevelt had a soft spot for the bucolic Hudson Valley, but as a native son and former governor of New York, he was obliged to spread the architectural wealth. In 1935, his administration commissioned the huge four-story, block-long General Post Office in the heart of New York City’s gritty borough of the Bronx. The building was designed in the popular Art Moderne style and is best known for its thirteen labor-themed murals, painted by artist Ben Shahn and his wife, Bernarda, which were inspired by Walt Whitman’s democratic poetry.
How the Post Office Created America Page 24