Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy by Jenifer Van Vleck (review)

The emerging field “The United States and the World” promises to broaden U.S. diplomatic history. Drawing from transnational perspectives, placing diplomatic history in conversation with social history, cultural history, and political economy, it is an interdisciplinary project. Van Vleck’s history of twentieth-century U.S. commercial aviation, a richly contextualized account of Pan American World Airways, is written within this new scholarly frame. The view from 30,000 feet, Van Vleck argues, captures much about the twentieth-century relationship between the United States and the world. The aerial gaze was the imperial gaze of American globalism.

According to Van Vleck, globalism is a “global imaginary that represented the world as one but also endowed the United States with exceptional national characteristics and unique entitlements to global power” (11). One thread of the book is therefore a cultural history of aviation discourse. The airplane, Van Vleck submits, was a potent symbol of “The American Century”—of frictionless global commerce and consumerism, with a dash of, to quote Henry Luce’s tired 1941 Life magazine essay “The American Century,” “big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice.”

Pan Am shuttled a great number of corporate executives around the globe, even if most commercial goods still traveled by sea. But Van Vleck demonstrates—drawing from an array of printed sources—that for many Americans, international aviation represented worldwide prosperity, harmony, and technological progress. With the exception of Pearl Harbor, Americans themselves were never bombed. It is hard to imagine residents of Tokyo or London having any affinity for this aviation discourse, no matter how much they yearned for Coca-Cola. But Van Vleck’s focus is upon how elite Americans rendered “the world” spatially thinkable; they often did so looking down from above. A different focus—on comparative history or “The World and the United States”—would be a different scholarly enterprise.

The “internal contradictions and external challenges” to American globalism is the second theme of the book; globalism was also “the dominant ideology of U.S. foreign policy during the twentieth century” (241). Concentrating, in this context, on Juan Trippe, the force behind Pan Am, the book is grounded in archival sources. American globalism, called “internationalism” in this era, was a “nationalist globalism.” Pan Am was a corporatist entity. From its birth in the 1920s, it depended upon government largesse and direction, becoming in many instances an instrument of U.S. military power. Chapters move from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy to postwar conflicts with Great Britain over its imperial trade preferences, to Cold War air routes, and to the decline of Pan Am amid broader fears of U.S. decline during the 1970s.

The question is whether the two threads—cultural histories of grand imaginary and political histories of grand strategy—that Van Vleck admirably attempts to sew together can be treated as a single stitch. The book contains many moments of insight, concerning how aviation discourse represented U.S. power through the “benign activities of trade, travel, and tourism” (128). But whether or not U.S. diplomatic history and global/transnational histories of the United States—in this instance coercive power and its discursive representation—will come together or fall apart remains to be seen.