Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy

401 Pages·2013·2.71 MB·English

by  Jenifer Van Vleck

Empire
of the Air

Empire
of the Air
A V I AT I O N A N D T H E
A M E R I C A N A S C E N D A N C Y
Jenifer Van Vleck
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
2013
Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 2012051096
ISBN: 978-0-674-05094-5
For my parents,
Richard and Caren Van Vleck

Contents
Introduction: The Logic of the Air 1
1 The Americanization of the Airplane 18
2 Good Neighbors Are Close Neighbors 53
3 Global Visions, National Interests 89
4 “America’s Lifeline to Africa” 131
5 From Open Door to Open Sky 167
6 Mass Air Travel and the Routes of the Cold War 199
7 The Jet Age and the Limits of American Power 239
Conclusion: “Empires Rise and Empires Fall” 281
Sources and Abbreviations 305
Notes 307
Ack now ledg ments 357
Index 361

Introduction:
The Logic of the Air
On any given day in the summer of 1939, thousands of Americans at Pan
American Airways’ Dinner Key Terminal in Miami, Florida, were watch-
ing the world turn. As newspaper headlines and newsreels warned of im-
pending war in Eu rope, visitors gazed at a gigantic, rotating globe—o ne
of the largest ever built in the United States, weighing 3.25 tons and mea-
sur ing 10 feet in diameter— and refl ected on the state of the world. Per-
haps they marveled at how modern communications and transportation
technologies had seemed to shrink distance and time. Perhaps, in this
context, they worried about the United States’ neutrality and national se-
curity, as the expansionist ambitions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan
had once again brought the world to the brink of war. Or perhaps they
were simply imagining distant lands that they would like to visit, once the
U.S. economy (and their own bank accounts) fully recovered from the
ravages of the Depression. But whate ver they w ere thinking or feeling,
these thousands of Americans could perceive the world as within their
reach, both literally and fi guratively.1
Built in 1933– 1934 by architects William Adams Delano and Chester
Holmes Aldrich, who had previously earned their reputation designing
estates and social clubs for families such as the Astors, Rocke fell ers, and