Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [105]
Scopes’s trial, and the predominantly Northern, urban coverage of it, exemplified the rift in society between the “old” and “new” Americas—one traditional, rural, pious, slow-moving, the other fast-paced, industrial, go-getting, high-living. Throughout the 1920s America’s population was shifting from predominantly rural to predominantly urban—but defenders of the threatened “old” values were not prepared to lie down and accept defeat.
The Spirit of St. Louis before Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight, May 1927.
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THE SPIRIT Of ST. LOUIS
RELIGION MAY HAVE VANQUISHED SCIENCE (AT LEAST ACCORDING to the law) in the Scopes case but modernity was a juggernaut that could not easily be turned back. In the 1920s numerous new technologies transformed the way people lived and worked, but the development of flight was perhaps the fastest-paced and the most revolutionary of the changes taking place. Man was a terrestrial creature and to imagine him moving through the air like a bird required a leap of faith and imagination as well as of machinery. Orville and Wilbur Wright had achieved lift-off for the first time at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina in 1903. The Frenchman Louis Blériot successfully crossed the English Channel six years later. The Great War stimulated a new interest in aviation and by its end in 1918 planes were being used for fighting as well as reconnaissance. Over 50,000 aircraft were built in Britain alone during the war years.
The French, whose flying aces (aviators who had downed five enemy aircraft) had found international fame as gladiators of the air during the war, were as interested in the possibilities of peacetime flight as the Americans. The International Air Traffic Association (IATA) was founded in Paris in 1919. Ten years later it had twenty-three members and its headquarters in The Hague attempted to standardize timetables and safety systems. Established in 1923, Air Union ferried passengers—75 percent of whom were Americans in these early years—across the English Channel. It merged with Air Orient in 1933 to form Air France. Early flight conditions were an unsettling combination of discomfort and luxury: passengers were expected to be up at dawn to catch their planes and even the shortest flights might make numerous emergency landings en route, but they were lavished with caviar while on board.
America’s first air-mail service began in 1918, shuttling daily between New York and Washington. From 1923 the Post Office started contracting air-mail deliveries to private companies, and the following year letters could be sent across the continent by air mail from New York to San Francisco via Chicago and Cheyenne. In 1926 the Air Commerce Act was passed, giving the U.S. Government power to regulate and encourage commercial aviation by building a national network of post routes, airports, beacons, floodlights, boundary markers and weather stations. The service was almost prohibitively expensive, though: until 1928, when it was reduced to a flat rate of five cents a letter, air-mail postage might cost twenty-five cents at a time when a land-mail postcard stamp cost only one cent.
From the start air mail was closely linked to passenger air travel. Because flying was so expensive, pilots flying the first air-mail routes were encouraged to carry paying passengers. But mail planes could only accommodate one or two passengers alongside the pilot, so transporting people rather than mailbags wasn’t initially seen as a viable commercial enterprise. All that would change in 1927.
In the spring of 1922, a shy college dropout from Minnesota enrolled as the only student at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation’s flying school