Up in the Air: New Approaches to the History of American Aviation

When I first set out to explore the historiography of aviation some three decades ago, serious work on the topic tended to focus on technological development, the history of individual airlines and airplanes, aviation’s military impact, and biographical studies of famous aviators and aeronautical entrepreneurs. There was little to be found in the aviation literature about the impact of aviation on everyday life or its political and social implications, not to mention its reflection in culture. Without diminishing in any way the significance of these earlier studies, which were necessary building blocks for what was to come later, all this has changed today, as is evidenced by the three books under review. One can only applaud this happy turn of events.

Another aspect of the literature on aviation that struck me three decades ago was that seldom, if ever, did it make an effort to insert its topics, research, and conclusions into the larger master narratives that historians had constructed to understand the twentieth century. Aviation seemed to have been confined to a form of splendid isolation, a field of study far removed from the dominant historical paradigms; and if you went to a large bookstore to seek a book on the history of aviation, you were more likely to find it in the transportation section than with history books. In fact, this happened to my own first book on aviation, A Passion for Wings (1994), even though it bore the subtitle Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918.

I mention this because the three books under review, whatever their shortcomings, do not suffer from this defect. Jennifer Van Vleck’s Empire of the Air is a case in point, as suggested by its ambitious and far-ranging subtitle Aviation and the American Ascendancy.

Van Vleck has set herself a daunting task. She has chosen to intertwine three narratives: an abbreviated and highly idiosyncratic history of U.S. aviation; the story of Pan American Airways; and, dominating and providing the backdrop against which both are meant to be understood, “American ascendancy” in the twentieth century. The history of Pan American Airways, of course, is well-trodden ground. Marilyn Bender and Slig Altschul’s The Chosen Instrument: Pan Am, Juan Trippe, The Rise and Fall of an American Entrepreneur (1982) remains an essential starting point even though its early date and focus on Pan Am’s founding father do not permit the broader perspective that Van Vleck seeks to provide. Indeed, by drawing ably on Pan American and U.S. government documents, Van Vleck is able to deepen our understanding of Pan Am’s history by showing the extent to which the U.S. government in the 1920s and 1930s underwrote Pan Am’s success. It did so by funding the development of airfields in Latin America and funneling money to Pan Am under the guise of aid to South American countries, though its real purpose was to promote American political and economic interests and, in the second half of the 1930s, to thwart feared German penetration in that part of the world. Pan Am was to benefit from these government-funded facilities both during and after the Second World War.

Emphasis on the indispensable support of the U.S. government for Pan Am’s Latin American expansion is one of the major strengths of Van Vleck’s account. What is almost entirely missing, however, is any discussion of specific Latin American countries and their response to Pan Am’s often imperialistic demands and the European competitors who were active in Latin America in the 1920s and ‘30s, whose...