The Wright brothers had flown the first airplane only 15 years before, and while aviation had advanced considerably since then, it was still primitive by today’s standards. Airmail pilots would be transporting letters in the Curtiss JN-4H, better known as the Jenny, a single-engine biplane with an open cockpit. Jennies cruised at a maximum speed of about 65 miles an hour, barely enough to earn a speeding ticket on modern highways. Their gas tanks held a mere 21 gallons, meaning a pilot could fly only 175 miles before having to land and refuel. That wasn’t enough for Army pilots to make the 215- mile journey nonstop from Washington to New York. So Praeger had designed a relay system: a pilot would take off shortly from the nation’s capital with 6,000 letters and carry them to Philadelphia, where he would hand his mailbags to another airman bound for Belmont Park in Hempstead, New York. At the same time, a pair of Army pilots would travel the route in reverse, carrying letters from New York to Washington.
There was a roar of applause as President Woodrow Wilson arrived in a car with his wife, Edith. Dressed in a finely tailored four-button suit, Wilson produced a letter addressed to New York City postmaster Thomas Patten, who would receive it later that day by plane. Wilson ceremonially deposited his letter in one of the four sacks that would be carried by Lieutenant George Boyle, an Army pilot. Wilson and Boyle posed for a picture.
Then it was time for Boyle to be on his way. He climbed into the plane. The maintenance crew turned the propeller. The engine sputtered, but it didn’t start. They tried again with the same disappointing result. Wilson became impatient. “We’re losing a lot of valuable time here,” he muttered to his wife.
Praeger was mortified. He hurried over to the maintenance crew. “What’s the matter?” he asked. He discovered that the mechanics had forgotten to refuel Boyle’s plane when it arrived that morning. The crew swiftly siphoned gas from other planes and filled the aircraft’s tank. They spun the propeller again; this time, the engine clattered noisily to life. Praeger would later tell people that he heard Wilson sigh with relief at the sound. Boyle wheeled his Jenny around and took off. He circled the field above the cheering crowd, and off he went.
An hour later, Boyle was lost. He had tried to follow the railroad tracks north to Philadelphia, but he got confused and ended up heading south. His journey ended in Waldorf, Maryland, 44 miles southeast of Washington, where he spotted a field and tried to land. When he touched down, he flipped his plane and snapped the propeller. Boyle was unscathed, but he would go down in history ignominiously as “Wrong Way Boyle.” His shipment of mail had to be transported to New York by train, infuriating Otto Praeger.
It was an inauspicious start for the U.S. Air Mail Service. Yet within two years, the Post Office would show that it was possible to fly coast-to-coast in little more than a day, demonstrating the feasibility of commercial aviation at a time when the private sector was too fearful to take the risk. The man behind it all was Otto Praeger. He wasn’t a pilot—he took his first plane ride several months after the service started—but he is considered the father of the U.S. airmail. “Praeger was twenty years ahead of his time,” aviation historian Henry Ladd Smith wrote in Airways: The History of Commercial Aviation in the United States. “In a day of open-cockpit planes, he dreamed of transoceanic airways and multi-engine ships.” Praeger didn’t let anything get in his way, either. Congressmen wanted to shut down his operation, saying it was a waste of taxpayers’ money. The Army tried to snatch it from the Post Office. Praeger was also frequently at odds with his pilots, who accused him of callously risking their lives.
The accusation was not without justification. The men who transported mail in the sky were truly brave and not a little reckless. They flew planes without two-way radios, which pilots would later use to remain on course in bad weather. When they lost their way, they landed and asked locals for directions. If the engines caught fire, they were probably doomed. Pilots didn’t carry parachutes back then. Small wonder the U.S. Air Mail Service would become known among pilots as the “Suicide Club.”
Fittingly, Benjamin Franklin makes a brief appearance in the earliest days of airmail delivery. In 1785, French inventor Jean-Pierre François Blanchard and Dr. John Jeffries, Franklin’s friend from Boston, made the first voyage by balloon over the English Channel. They carried letters, including one to the father of the American postal service. When Blanchard and Jeffries arrived in Calais, they made sure he got it, making Franklin, some would say, the first American to receive an airmail message, another of Franklin’s many firsts.
But aviation historians generally say the first instance of airmail sanctioned by the U.S. Post Office took place much later, on August 17, 1859, when Professor John Wise, a professional balloonist, attempted to carry mail in his balloon Jupiter from Lafayette, Indiana, to New York. We know the Post Office cooperated because Wise said so beforehand in an advertisement: “All persons who wish to send their letters to their friends in the East by balloon today must deliver them at the post office previous to 12 pm, as the Jupiter’s mail closes at that hour. The letters must be addressed ‘via Balloon Jupiter’ added to the ordinary directions and prepaid. This mail will be conveyed by Mr. Wise to the place of landing with the balloon, when it will be placed in the nearly post office for distribution.”
A crowd of 20,000 spectators applauded as Wise rose over Lafayette in his balloon. But Wise couldn’t find any wind, even when he rose 14,000 feet. After five hours, he gave up and landed thirty miles away in Crawfordsville. “Knowing that if there were no currents below I could land safely and easily in the town, and in order to make the arrival more interesting I concluded to send my letter mail ahead,” Wise later wrote in his memoir Through the Air: A Narrative of Forty Years’ Experience as an Aeronaut. “Having with me a muslin sheet nine feet square, I attached to each of its corners strings of about five yards in length. These were tied together at their lower extremities, and to this knot was attached the mailbag, and then I dropped it overboard. It made an admirable parachute. A few minutes travel informed me that it would drift a considerable distance to the south of Crawfordsville, as there was a slight breeze below drifting it in that direction. I pulled the valve of Jupiter, and followed, and soon overtook the mail. We kept near together all the way down, as I could regulate the descent of the parachute, and both aerial machines landed within fifty feet of each other on the public road.”
A postal agent picked up Wise’s mail and put it on a New York–bound train. For more than a century, there was a debate about the significance of Wise’s flight. It wasn’t just that he didn’t get very far; nobody could find any letters from his so-called “trans-county-nental journey” that had been postmarked, which would have proved that the Post Office blessed his effort. In 1957, however, one of them turned up and two years later, on the one-hundredth anniversary of Wise’s flight, the Post Office issued an airmail stamp in his honor.
At the time, the Post Office didn’t seem impressed. It wasn’t until the advent of airplanes that the Post Office got serious about starting an airmail service. Frank Hitchcock, Taft’s postmaster general, tried to get it going when he swore in pilot Earle Ovington as a letter carrier. Ovington carried the mail in the sky from Mineola, New York, to Garden City, a distance of 6 miles, for about a week in 1911. It was more of a publicity stunt than anything else, but he couldn’t get funding for anything more. “The Post Office Department has been up in the air long enough, and now let us get down to terra firma for once,” a skeptical congressman said in 1912.
Where Hitchcock failed, his successor Albert Burleson would succeed. Burleson cultivated an image as a simple rustic, but he was a masterful politician. He belonged to the group of southern Democrats in Congress who supported Wilson, the Democratic governor from New Jersey, when he ran for president that year. When Wilson defeated Republican Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, who was running as the Bull Moose Party candidate, he showed his gratitude to Burleson in 1913 by appointing him postmast
er general and his liaison to Congress, a familiar role for the nation’s mail chief. The tall, severe-looking Texan could often be seen in the House and Senate chambers, trading patronage jobs for votes. He once gave four postmaster positions to a Kansas senator to secure his support for Wilson’s proposed tariff reform. “I had the bait gourd,” Burleson said. “They had to come to me.”
In the year Burleson took over the Post Office, it delivered 18 billion pieces of mail, including 300 million parcels in the first six months of the year. In cities like Atlanta and New York, postmasters were beginning to use trucks to carry parcels to people. The number of post offices had declined to 58,020 as the rural delivery routes multiplied; Burleson noted in his first annual report that 40 million rural residents were enjoying daily visits from their letter carriers. But even as the department closed rural post offices, it was constructing grand monumental buildings in cities, like the Washington City Post Office, which was completed in 1914 and now stands beside Union Station; and New York City’s General Post Office, which is now known as the James A. Farley Post Office, designed by the architects McKim, Mead & White. The typeface for the famous quotation from Herodotus above the entryway is now believed to have been chosen by Ira Schnapp, a young designer from Austria who would later create the Superman logo for Action Comics.
Burleson held his position during Wilson’s two terms in the White House, making him one of America’s longest-serving postmaster general, and he was one of the most polarizing. The son of a Confederate officer, he was a segregationist who transferred black clerks in Washington to the Dead Letter Office, where they would have no interaction with the public. Burleson was no defender of free speech either. Anthony Comstock died in 1915, but his legacy lived on at the Post Office thanks to Burleson. Four years later, the Post Office seized editions of the Little Review, a literary magazine that contained excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was considered risqué in certain quarters and would be banned from the mail for another decade by the department. During World War I, Burleson withdrew second-class mail privileges for socialist publications like the Masses because of the party’s anti-interventionist stand; this was tantamount to censorship because without the discount, most small publications couldn’t afford to widely circulate copies.
Yet in other ways, Burleson was a firm progressive. He believed that the Post Office should own and operate the nation’s telegraph and telephone systems for the benefit of the public rather than shareholders. (During the war, Burleson did take them over with disastrous results. Rates increased and service declined because of a telephone workers’ strike; the public demanded their return to private hands as soon as the war ended.) Burleson was a champion of the parcel post, lowering rates and causing the department’s yearly volume to skyrocket to one billion packages. He enthusiastically promoted a short-lived, but farsighted farm-to-table service, which enabled farmers to ship butter, eggs, and honey through the parcel post to people in cities. He also believed that the department could carry mail in the sky and he knew just the person to get a permanent airline service up and running: Otto Praeger.
The son of a hardware store owner who had emigrated from Germany, Praeger was born in 1871 and grew up in San Antonio, Texas, which was still a town out of the Wild West with gambling halls that never closed and saloons where patrons frequently got into shoot-outs. Buffalo Bill Cody came through town with his traveling Wild West show, telling tales of the Pony Express. It was a lively place and young Otto did his part to contribute to its liveliness. At San Pedro High School, he created his own newspaper, which made him the object of his fellow students’ fear and envy. “Pupils talked about him in whispers,” recalled his schoolmate, Moses Koenigsberg, the future head of the Hearst Corporation’s King Features Syndicate.
Praeger dropped out of high school in 1888 to take a job as a cub reporter at the San Antonio Express, which was full of hard-drinking nomads who wandered from one newsroom to the next. Praeger enjoyed their company, but he had grander ambitions. In 1892, he persuaded the Express to let him travel through Mexico on a bicycle and sent accounts of his adventures back through the mail. He spent three months pedaling through the Sierra Madre and the Sierra Mojada desert. He made his way to Mexico City, where Mexican president Porfirio Diaz received him. When Praeger returned, the New York Times gave him a hero’s welcome. “He has suffered starvation, and has been well nigh crazed with thirst,” the paper wrote. “Praeger was compelled for days to plod his way with a bicycle strapped to his side over paths that even the Mexican muleteers will not attempt, and has come through it all improved mentally and physically.”
Praeger was promoted to city editor and then news editor of the Express. He wanted to be editor in chief, but the paper’s owner held the title and wouldn’t relinquish it. So Praeger quit in 1904 to become the Washington correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, the largest paper in Texas. He enjoyed the bustle of the nation’s capital, but found most members of Congress to be colorless and mediocre, except for Albert Burleson, a Democrat from San Marcos, Texas. The two men went on hunting and fishing trips, talking politics and becoming close friends.
After he became postmaster general, Burleson appointed Praeger postmaster of Washington, D.C. Why Praeger? Burleson wanted to prevent Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan from steering the job to one of his chums. However unmerited his appointment may have seemed, Praeger quickly distinguished himself. The department had tried to hire private trucking firms to replace the horse-drawn wagons used to transport mail in the Washington area, but the haulers wanted too much money. Burleson had a better idea; he wanted the Post Office to buy its own trucks, and it would be up to Praeger to test the feasibility of his plan. Praeger introduced the trucks in Washington and got the new system running so smoothly that Burleson named him assistant postmaster general in charge of postal transportation for the entire country.
Praeger spent much of his time on the road, introducing postal trucks in Detroit, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, carrying a toothbrush and little else. When his shirts became too soiled to wear, he purchased new ones and sent the dirty shirts home through the mail to be cleaned. In Chicago, a Republican congressman insisted that horse-drawn wagons were swifter than the shiny new postal vehicles in traffic, and didn’t want the department to cancel a contract with a local hauling firm that used horses. Praeger settled the matter with a race between his drivers and the private carriers in Chicago’s downtown loop. The trucks beat the horse-powered carts, and soon there were hundreds of gas-powered vehicles transporting packages and letters in the Chicago area.
On an overcast wintry morning in 1917, Burleson summoned Praeger to his office. They stood at the window, looking out over the slush-filled streets and the Capitol building, which could barely be seen through the clouds. “Do you think that airplanes could operate in this kind of weather?” Burleson asked. “You know, we have a lot of it in the winter months.” Praeger didn’t think so. He had seen only one airplane: it had been piloted by Orville Wright himself at a demonstration in 1909. Wright’s plane hadn’t been capable of flying very high, let alone navigating in this kind of weather.
“Shucks,” Burleson replied. “We have come a long way since those flights. You make a study of this thing. I tell you what: if I am convinced that the airplane can operate dependably in any kind of weather—of course, no worse than this—I will put the air mail in the postal service. Don’t you see how that would speed up the mails?”
The first days of the Air Mail Service were chaotic. Wrong Way Boyle got another chance to deliver mail, but ran out of gas and crashed while attempting to land on a golf course in Philadelphia, ending his time as an airmail pilot. Another pilot got lost in fog on the way from New York to Philadelphia and landed in a field of horses in New Jersey, swerving to avoid one and smashing into a fence. Such incidents only increased the public’s fascination with the Air Mail Service. In Philadelphia, the Post Office had to hire securit
y guards to handle the hundreds of people who regularly showed up to watch its planes take off and land.
However, there were some encouraging moments in the first two weeks of the Air Mail Service. Traveling from Philadelphia to Washington one afternoon in 1918, Lieutenant James Edgerton encountered a thunderstorm over northern Maryland; determined to be on time, he headed into it. Almost immediately Edgerton lost control of his plane. “One instant, the plane became a tremendous elevator, leaping skyward hundreds of feet. Promptly, the bottom seemed to drop out, the dizzy fall to cover hundreds of feet,” he wrote rather poetically. “Attacked by solid waves of air, the plane reared, slithered and bucked.”
Edgerton relaxed his grip on the controls, hoping the storm would guide him. To his wonder, it did. “I gave in somewhat to my enemy, and in turn, he gave in somewhat to me,” Edgerton recalled. Remarkably, he was still on course when he emerged from the maelstrom, even though his plane was a wreck. A large piece of the propeller flew by his ear as he glided down to the airfield in Washington. Edgerton had done what had previously been thought impossible; he had flown through a severe storm and survived.
In July 1918, Praeger extended the air service to Boston and insisted that pilots fly in all kinds of weather. Only then, he argued, would the Post Office be able to provide reliable, uninterrupted service. Reluctant to risk the lives of its pilots before sending them to France to fight, the Army refused. Sometimes it grounded pilots on foggy days, but not always. Praeger was enraged one Saturday when he learned the Army had halted the airmail because of inclement weather, but permitted a pilot to fly from New York to Washington the same day for a personal matter.
Captain A. C. Weidenbach, who oversaw the Air Mail Service for the Army, received a furious letter from Praeger, sent by special messenger. “I am afraid that the officers who are flying these routes are laboring under the attitude of mind that this aerial mail service is merely for the purpose of carrying a handful of mail,” Praeger scolded him. “The purpose of the trips as the Post Office Department sees them is to establish a daily aerial movement in the face of weather obstacles, feeling confident that the necessities and exigencies of the situation will speedily devise means to overcome present obstacles.” Weidenbach wouldn’t bend. Only three months after the service was launched, the Army pulled out of it. The Post Office would have to go it alone.
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