Upon his return, thousands turned out to welcome the explorer home.220 Ekblaw subsequently hit the speakers’ circuit, giving illustrated lectures—some with motion pictures—on his Arctic trip to seemingly anybody who would listen: the men’s class of the Methodist Sunday school, the High Twelve Club of the Masonic Temple, the University of Illinois, the Urbana Association of Commerce, the Elks, the Omicron Nu household science fraternity, and the University Republican Club.221 Newspaper reports described packed auditoriums and Sunday school rooms.222 Those who missed the talks or wanted still more could view some of the materials used in his travels, on display in the campus natural history building.223 The readers of the Courier got a laugh at his expense in 1918, when Ekblaw froze his ears in an Illinois blizzard. The explorer reportedly enjoyed the irony of his predicament as much as anyone. Despite the injury, he praised the cold. Whereas heat was “oppressive,” the northern atmosphere was “light, bracing, and invigorating.”224
We can imagine the contents of his public talks based on his published writings. Many of Ekblaw’s observations were ethnographic. In the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, he described the “Eskimo” as a “vanishing race,” which was not to say that the group known as Eskimo would disappear from Greenland, but that their numbers had declined and those who remained were “losing their racial character, becoming alien in blood.” That was the closest Ekblaw came to hinting at whatever intimacies he and other expedition members had with women during the four years they lived among the northernmost people of Greenland, eating their food, driving their dogs, and sharing their hunting grounds.225
Among the animals they killed and ate were birds. Ekblaw wrote about birds as both an epicure and an explorer, in so doing coming full circle back to his childhood passion. After years of hunting for birds in the marshes of Rantoul, he had followed them to their northern limits. Beyond the edge of the known world, he discovered people who had lived there all along. Together in the Arctic Circle, the traveling provincial and resident Danish colonial subjects had feasted on the very things that had brought them together in the first place: migratory birds. For Ekblaw, birds were an entrée into both scientific and cross-cultural webs.
AERIAL CIRCUITS
Bird-watchers were not the only ones drawn into larger ambits through a fascination with the flight paths overhead, as seen in the events of July 17, 1911. That evening, a “fiery meteor” sped across the “northwestern heavens” above Champaign, “throwing off a great light which gradually grew dim as the phenomenon passed to the southeast.” Astronomy students at the University of Illinois ran to the observatory from their rooming houses and, finding the doors locked, they smashed the windows in their eagerness to reach the telescope. Some observers mistook the meteor for a comet. Others reported having seen an airship.226 Unusual though this event was, it was not the only incidence of suspected airships in the night.
Headlines from the Courier reveal a pattern of sightings: “Mysterious Airship over Illinois,” “Was It an Air Ship?,” “Say They Saw Airship,” “Thought They Saw Airship.” These confounding sightings typically occurred at night and they involved searchlights and strange noises.227 To understand why spectators mistook a meteor for a UFO, and why other flashes in the night suddenly brought airships to mind, we need to consider the larger context of aerial ascents.
The recorded history of aerial contraptions in Champaign began with kites, typically flown by children or for advertising purposes, or distributed by advertisers to children, but on occasion the features of public exhibitions. In 1910, a “scientific kite flyer from Boston” gave an exhibition in a park. A few years later, the ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic took umbrage when a contestant in a kite-flying contest cut up a flag for material. Winners of subsequent contests, held in the village of Philo and a military field by the armory, demonstrated a more appropriate spirit of patriotism, by flying American flags rather than snipping them apart.228
For all the patriotism, kite flying brought to mind distant places. After acknowledging a centuries-long tradition of kite flying in Europe, the Courier traced the birth of the sport to ancient China.229 In explaining the rules of the game—to cut or entangle the opponent’s string—it held up South and East Asian rules of sportsmanship, claiming that “it is regarded as very unsportsmanlike in Burma or China to use ground glass and paste on the string.” This recognition of Chinese expertise in kite flying helps explain why the organizers of a 1916 kite-flying contest with a fight component recruited Chinese students to serve as judges.230
Like kite flying, ballooning drew attention outward as well as up. The turn of the century was a great era of long-distance ballooning competitions, with prizes going to the farthest distance traveled and longest time aloft. Given the dangers of setting down in water or mountains, midwestern cities such as Kansas City, St. Louis, and Indianapolis became popular launching places. Thousands showed up for the ascents, and papers covered the international cast of competitors, race routes, and results, often in breathless tones: “St. Louis, Oct. 19—Heading straight for Ontario, across the great lakes, along the best balloon route in America, Captain Von Abereron, the famous German pilot, with his balloon Germania, is believed to be leading in the international race for the James Gordon Bennett cup, which started from this city late Monday.”231 Such coverage placed the rural heartland in the thick of the ballooning world, on the same circuits as the people downwind from Cologne and Berlin.232
Even as it reported on distances covered and time aloft, the Courier also captured some views from the ground. It ran reports of people being showered with sand and gravel as balloonists reduced their ballast. It noted sightings of balloons that had become entangled in telegraph wires or landed on farms.233 It tracked down the mystery of a mammoth balloon that floated over the county one morning on a record-breaking trip.234 It claimed that the entire town of Urbana looked up one afternoon when seven long-distance racing balloons passed overhead.235 And it enabled readers to share in the surprise of a farmer named Charles Grein upon hearing a voice calling to him one day from the heavens.236
Grein had likely seen airborne balloons before that startling episode. Though long-distance competitors took off from only a few cities, balloon ascensionists, like circus performers, popped up in small towns and county fairs around the turn of the century. In Champaign, balloon entertainers appeared at a Modern Woodmen Association picnic, an interscholastic athletic carnival, a corn carnival, a Sunday school picnic, a horse show, a Commercial Club gathering, and multiple Fourth of July celebrations.237 Announcements proclaiming that the Champaign County Fair would have balloon ascensions “and all the usual features of a great fair” reveal that this type of amusement was so common as to be expected at carnivalesque events. Their popularity can be deduced from advertisements promising special traincars for spectators and estimates of twenty-five-thousand-person crowds.238
To enhance the excitement, balloonists on the fair circuit would carry a parachutist who would leap from the balloon at about a thousand feet.239 One carnival company that stopped in Champaign attached a monkey to the chute, but its screams of protest did not go over well with the audience.240 On another occasion, a spectator persuaded the regular parachute jumper to let her make the leap. Mae DeWitt-Ratford, described as a petite divorcée who was “simply crazy” about aeronautics, got the thrill of her life on the first leap and would have gone again if her father and brother had not “put the ‘kabosh’ on it.”241
By 1910, aeroplanes had joined balloons in the air over Champaign. Members of a university aeronautic club flew the first ones, attracting crowds estimated at nearly a thousand.242 In 1911, several people from Champaign were among those who watched a monoplane ascent one county over.243 By 1912, biplanes could be spotted at the state fair, leading the Courier to run headlines proclaiming: “Country Is Mad over Aviation.”244 In 1915, pedestrians spotted an aeroplane sailing just over the roofs of t
he business district of Urbana.245 In 1916, the university appointed an assistant professor of aeronautics and enrolled a seasoned aerial exhibitor who went by the name Satan Day.246
Day was from the area, having grown up in Gibson City, a farm town one county to the north. According to the Courier, he had become the youngest licensed pilot in the country after studying flying at the Curtiss airplane school in New York. One of his classmates there, Charles F. Niles, went on to direct the aerial corps of the Carranza forces in the Mexican Revolution. The Courier claimed that General Villa had tried, via telegram, to recruit Day as head of his flying corps. Villa sweetened the offer by promising Day “charge of the aviation department of Mexico” following the “subjugation of the country.” Though tempted, Day turned Villa down so that he could fulfill his stunt-flying contract. The decision to stick with exhibition flying avoided what would have been, as the Courier put it, “the unusual situation of two American airmen pitted against each other in the opposing forces of the armies of Mexico.”247
Day was not the only exhibitionist to loop the loop in the Champaign skies as balloon entertainments gave way to planes. Some of the most famous aerial performance artists at the turn of the twentieth century were members of the Moisant family, from Kankakee (two counties to the north of Champaign). They ran Moisant International Aviators, a performance company that arranged for flights in a variety of public gatherings, including at the Champaign County Fair.248 Though they were known by the seemingly rural appellation “barnstormers,” part of the appeal of these aerial entertainers lay in their apparent cosmopolitanism.249 John B. Moisant was the first in the family to win widespread fame, following a Paris-to-London flight and a victory over French and English champions. Another flying Moisant, Mathilde, “established a reputation as the most skillful aviatrix of the world” on a Mexican tour.250
Aerial performers did not have to work for the Cosmopolitan Amusement Company to bring a whiff of cosmopolitanism to the small towns where they performed.251 The Moisants’ roster included an “unemotional Irishman,” “the French fool flyer,” and a “Russian birdman [with] a big reputation in his native country.”252 The aviator Bud Mars told a Courier reporter that he had given exhibitions in sixteen different countries, including Japan, where he flew before nobility, with four hundred thousand paid admissions on the field.253 Upon the conclusion of each fair, the entertainers headed on, to other U.S. towns, and to places such as Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Toronto.254 At least once, the departing carnival company took a local boy with them as the latest recruit to the itinerant aerial performance life.255 The crowds who gathered for aerial entertainments could count themselves part of a worldly circuit.
GROUNDED
As aerial ascents connected spectators to cosmopolitan worlds of flight, they also distanced them from more parochial people, such as the rubes to the south who reportedly fired on balloonists overhead.256 These downstate clodhoppers were not the only backward troublemakers who surfaced in the Courier. Other sources of resistance from below included the Arab sharpshooters who fired on the Italian planes that had been dropping bombs in Tripoli and the Mexicans who fired on U.S. aviators along the Rio Grande. The latter led the Courier to call for firmer policies—the kind adopted by Italy and France in their campaigns in North Africa against “the hostile native tribes.” The restive observers on the ground included the birds on the Illinois state game farm. When they saw their first biplane, great confusion broke out in the yard. It took the keepers several hours to calm the disturbed animals.257 The people who had been to the fairgrounds could chuckle at such behavior, regarding flight as more a menace to the pilots than to spectators. As they applauded the cosmopolitan cast of aerial performance artists, they had good reason to agree with the predictions that human flight would bring the world together, that it would bridge continents, eliminate frontiers, and mix people and interests so as to “evolve a world-nation.”258 Every day would be a fair day in this wonderful new age, and none of the kite strings would have shards.
The possibility that human flight might have other meanings—such as fear, danger, and death for those on the ground—seemed very far away to these festive crowds. And yet, for readers of the Courier, that possibility surfaced in more than just reports of mysterious airships, downstaters, Mexicans, and panicked turkeys. It could be glimpsed in story after story coming through the wires, as seen in headlines such as these:
March 19, 1912: “Airship Bombs Kill Arabs”259
Aug. 26, 1914: “German Airship Drops Bombs on Antwerp Citizens”260
Feb. 15, 1915: “Thousands See Fight in Air”261
July 13, 1918: “Air Raids Terrorize Germans”262
And if not in headlines, then the view from the ground could be glimpsed in letters from the Champaign servicemen stationed in France. These reported bombs came down with an “awful hissing noise.” Next time, wrote a soldier who watched the bombs falling on Paris, he would seek shelter in the cellar.263 There were plenty of next times, if not for him, then for others. Another letter, by a different soldier: “We have witnessed aerial battles galore.”264
No wonder that after lionizing aerial artists, the Courier so soon made celebrities of military aces. It was not just that they were thrilling to watch, but that their reports transcended the terrifying view from below. From the earliest days of aerial ascents, the people on the ground understood the power differentials between flyover and flownover perspectives.
AIRPOWER
Although the Midwest does not have as much of a military presence as the U.S. South and coastal states such as California and New York, military installations have long connected this region to the wider world. One such base sprang up near Flatville following the U.S. entry into the Great War.265 That location may seem like a strange choice, given the human terrain. Known as the “German Flats,” the area was composed almost entirely of ethnic Germans, whom others in the vicinity saw as a threat.266 Although some accounts praised the German speakers of Flatville as thrifty and industrious, indeed, as model citizens, others worried about their colonizing tendencies. Having turned worthless swamps into prime farmland, they were “becoming expansionists.” With all the land in their vicinity taken, they were “reaching out into other sections,” picking up farms here and there. Once they acquired land, they kept it, assigning it to their heirs, turning it into hereditary estates.267
After the United States entered World War I, the preponderance of Germans in the area raised concerns about security risks. The anti-German sentiments that had been simmering along came to a full boil when news spread that a resident of Flatville had flown a German flag. Making things worse, he had refused to take it down and replace it with the Stars and Stripes. After violence broke out, residents vigorously denied the rumor, but concerns about loyalty did not go away.268
However concerning its populace, Rantoul had several things going in its favor. The first was its proximity to the University of Illinois, which had established a professorship in aeronautics in 1916.269 Student aviators could receive their theoretical training at the university and then join other servicemen at Chanute for flight instruction.270 The price of land, and its flatness, added to Rantoul’s attractiveness. It was cheaper to build from scratch downstate than to expand an existing aviation field near Chicago, due to real estate costs.271 Though comparatively inexpensive, Rantoul still offered the necessary railroad connections. The grid, too, was a plus. In a time when pilots relied on landmarks such as railroad tracks and waterways to tell where they were, the roads that followed the section lines provided straight lines of flight and mile markers, as the military’s flight manual noted.272
The crowning inducements were the flatness of the area and the massive investments in drainage. All pilots—and especially pilots in training—faced the possibility of “playing the field,” that is, making an emergency landing on unfamiliar ground. The military’s flight manual dwelt on this concern. It instru
cted pilots to “be constantly searching out available landing fields in case of engine failure.” Yet those who trained in Illinois could exhale. Again, the military’s guide: “In the State of Illinois the question of landing fields is almost non-existent, because there are large, flat fields and pastures in almost every square mile of the farming district, and a cross-country flight from Rantoul to Chicago could have no terrors for the beginner as regards the choice of a landing ground.”273 The field was far easier to play when it was indeed a field, not a forest; a flat field, not a hilly one; and a solid field, not muck.274 The wisdom of the choice seemed apparent when plane after plane went down, and pilot after pilot walked away.275
The quality of the air likewise enhanced the likelihood of survival. The “rarified air” of high altitudes threw engines out of tune, as revealed in the report of a military scout who had to walk back under the cover of darkness when his plane went down in the Sierra Madres in Mexico.276 The “Mexican Campaign” against Pancho Villa had taught several other lessons besides: high temperatures took a toll on radiators; dry air made wooden propellers “go to pieces.” The aviators stationed along the Mexican border also complained of fierce whirlwinds. “We appear to be dealing with an absolutely abnormal climate,” wrote one.277 Rantoul, in contrast, seemed normal and thus an appropriate place to prepare U.S. pilots for another presumably normative location: the war-torn skies over France. Military planners may have reconsidered their assumptions about midwestern air quality in January 1918, when paralyzing winter storms prevented a squadron from deploying overseas, but by then the base was well established and a slew of aviators trained.278
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