by Jeremy Scott
Byrd’s heroic fantasy was hugely presumptuous; he’d qualified as a pilot only a year before. Yet during that year he had flown almost every day. Experienced pilots were few, and in the infancy of this new profession he was adept as any. Still, he was only a lieutenant and, due to his medical condition, on the active list only under sufferance. He knew himself this was a brazen ambition, one which could only be achieved by enlisting powerful allies.
Brought up in a family long involved in politics, Byrd knew the value of string-pulling, and he possessed a talent for promotion exactly suited to the times. The expense of this project, and the truly stupendous cost of his later expeditions, would all be met through superlative promotion. His imagination was attuned to the popular mind, he understood what the public wanted; bread did not concern him but he knew about circuses. And he possessed an instinctive skill for another modern art, an art so new it didn’t yet have a name but would come to be called ‘public relations’.
The former football coach at Yale University, Walter Camp, was a national celebrity at this time. Middle-aged, gung-ho and forceful as a pit bull, he regularly exhorted America to get into shape and kick ass. He’d devised a physical fitness programme taken up by many across the country. He’d been a famous figure for years and had contacts with many influential people. Byrd approached him with a proposition. He argued that it must be an American pilot and aircraft that first flew the Atlantic. America was an also-ran in aviation and needed to restore her prestige. Explaining that he was preparing a scheme to put to the Navy, he invited Camp to join him in the project. In return he’d announce to the press that he and the crew were training for the arduous flight on Camp’s fitness programme and dietary regimen.
Camp responded warmly to the idea. Not only did it provide publicity for the product he was peddling, but it was the sort of macho endeavour that exactly fitted his own public image. But he, like Byrd, realised the magnitude of what they were proposing. It so happened that among the people Camp knew was the famous explorer Admiral Peary, and he suggested to Byrd they bring him on board to strengthen their team. Peary had been a childhood role model to Byrd; in 1909 he’d been the first to reach the North Pole. Now in his mid-sixties and long retired from the Navy, he enjoyed a legendary reputation, somewhat, however, tainted by the claim of his former associate Frederick Cook to have got there the year before him. In the light of Byrd’s later questionable adventures around the Pole, it is ironic he should have hit upon Peary as exemplar in the role.
Camp and Peary set up a meeting with the Secretary of the Navy. It must have cost Byrd blood not to attend it himself, but it was wise not to do so. He was already mistrusted by his senior officers; he was known to have political connections and to have pulled strings to secure his posting aboard the presidential yacht. There is nothing that Naval brass dislikes more than to be leaned on by politicians, and to learn that this upstart junior had engineered a personal meeting with the Naval Secretary would have united them in cutting him down to size. So Byrd’s proposal was made strictly through the proper channels. He presented it to his commander at Pensacola, who endorsed the plan and passed it on to Washington for consideration.
The US was now involved in the war in Europe and American pilots were flying primitive warplanes in France, but all of these were European models; not a single American plane reached France in time to engage in combat. The Flying Corps – existing only as a subordinate, unrespected arm of the Navy – had accomplished nothing to date, and the first crossing of the Atlantic would furnish it with validity, even distinction. The admirals on the Navy Board were aware of the Naval Secretary’s wish that the flight should take place but were concerned about the public reaction if it proved a disaster. Failure would reflect upon the Navy. Aerial navigation was an unproved science, and one in which they had no confidence. The Board ruled that, for an American plane to attempt the crossing to Europe, it would be necessary to station picket ships at fifty-mile intervals along its course to provide route markers – and rescue if necessary.
Byrd was exasperated when he learned of the judgement. The Navy was engaged in a war, and it was clearly out of the question to deploy fifty vessels in line across the Atlantic. He realised the Board was stalling in a manner designed not to antagonise the Secretary, a way of avoiding a decision. But his proposal did produce one unlooked-for reaction. He received orders to leave Pensacola, move at once to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and set up a Naval station and refuelling depot on the north Atlantic seaboard. He did not understand what this signified. Had his covert lobbying become known and his punishment was exile? Alternatively, Nova Scotia was the nearest spot to Europe and the logical start-point for a transatlantic crossing. Whichever the Naval Board’s intention, he did as ordered. He requisitioned the materiel and equipment necessary together with two seaplanes, had the lot loaded into railroad boxcars, embraced his wife and entrained with his party for Nova Scotia. Once there, his team had the station constructed and habitable in just three days. Byrd chose good men to work with him, then and later. Mistrusted by his superiors, disliked or resented by many fellow officers, his men were devoted to him. And he to them, it must be added. Never matey with those under his authority, he was always conscious of their welfare. He was a fine leader who commanded affection and respect – and got results.
Very soon the station was operational with both planes flying submarine patrols. It was stocked with gasoline, sufficient not just for their own uses but enough to service several of the huge Curtiss seaplanes now in existence. Meanwhile Byrd saw to his instruments and made ready to pilot a flight across the Atlantic. And then in November came the Armistice. The war was ended.
Byrd was ordered back to Washington to await reassignment. There the pleasure of homecoming was ruined by news that a first air-crossing of the Atlantic was about to start. On 16 May 1919 three Curtiss flying boats took off from Byrd’s station at Halifax, on a course for Europe. NC-1 and NC-3 both developed engine trouble and made forced landings in the sea. The NC-4 reached the Azores, where the plane was delayed for nine days by bad weather. It then completed the second leg of the flight to Lisbon. The transit was not non-stop, yet it was the first crossing of the Atlantic ocean by air and it proved the effectiveness and reliability of the new instruments used to navigate the course.
But their inventor Richard Byrd had been elbowed off the flight. It was a bitter, crushing blow.
With the end of the First World War the two fighting services, Army and Navy, settled back into their normal peacetime activity of fighting each other.
Not everyone in high command shared the Navy Board’s belief that the aeroplane was a weapon of limited usefulness. General Mitchell of the Army, a colourful personality who had made a name for himself in the war, set out to steal the Flying Corps, bypassing his seniors to go directly to Congress with the proposal of creating a national air force under his own command. In high indignation the Navy Board saw someone trying to make off with their toy and in standard infantile reaction protested that they wanted it themselves.
Byrd had enemies on the Navy Board; he’d got up the nose of more than one of the admirals comprising it, but he had friends in Washington together with a network of contacts he’d kept warm during his exile in the wilderness. Washington was the capital of networking and his brother a member of the Senate, but Byrd already knew his way around. With three other pilot officers and the best legal and political advice he composed a draft bill to lay before Congress. It proposed the formation of a separate Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy Department. He went the rounds, canvassing for support and backers. His was a known face on the circuit, he had a good service record, the Byrd sun compass and other of his inventions were by now standard equipment on long-distance flights, his case was convincing and he was an excellent salesman. He obtained the endorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Naval Secretary Daniels. His indefatigable lobbying ensured the Bill’s passage through Congress, though when it reached the Senate General Mitc
hell did his best to scupper it. But Byrd had gained powerful supporters and it is testament to his political skills that the Bureau of Aeronautics Bill was passed in the Senate. The despised Flying Corps came of age, and it developed into an entity in its own right with its own command.
Byrd was a member of the Bureau from the start. It was a desk job unfitting for a man whose ambition was to be a national hero, yet his desk was sited in a strategic place from which to promote his own career if the opportunity offered. But now the nature of the game had changed. President Wilson had been voted out of office and replaced by a Republican, Warren Harding. The political and emotional climate of the nation had altered, shifted so radically it had become almost another country. For the first time in history, if not the last, America had lost its nerve and was running scared.
The Armistice had been greeted by an outburst of joy throughout the US. Men and women quit their offices to pour onto the streets and join spontaneous parades. They whooped, cheered and embraced one another, high on victory. Eight hundred Barnard College girls danced in a conga-line through Morningside Heights and couples behaved disgracefully in public places. In New York Fifth Avenue was solid with celebrants partying beneath a fluttering storm of 155 tons of ticker tape.
With peace, censorship was abolished, restrictions on electricity were lifted, Times Square and Broadway blazed bright again. But with defeat of the foreign enemy another enemy was revealed existing within America itself: Bolshevism. Imported into the US by immigrants, Bolshevism found ready support among workers who had been denied the right to strike during the war. Now they did. In cities and plants all over the country they laid down their tools and walked out. Their grievances were legitimate: hours of work were long, wages low and the cost of living had almost doubled in the last four years. They had been promised a better fairer world after the war was won – where was it?
Then in 1919 the Red Scare moved into a curiously modern phase. In his house in Washington, Attorney General Palmer had just gone to bed when there was a loud explosion outside his front door. On investigating, he found dismembered limbs and a headless male torso in a pool of gore on his doorstep. When the police came they further discovered torn scraps of a radical pamphlet. Another bomb, this time in a parcel, blew the hands off a black servant taking the mail to Senator Hardwick, an advocate of tight immigration controls.
The following year brought an outrage at the very heart of New York’s financial centre, where at the junction of Broad and Wall Street the Sub-Treasury Building stood beside the US Assay office. On the opposite side of the road was the headquarters of J.P. Morgan, the fount of world capitalism; beside it the Doric façade of the Exchange itself. On the morning of 16 September, a horse-drawn wagon loaded with barrels came down Wall Street toward the intersection. As it drew level with the house of Morgan it exploded with a giant roar. A huge flash of blue-white flame crashed against the street fronts, bursting the windows as it ballooned into the interior. A wall of smoke and dust billowed down the street in a storm of falling masonry, while from all around came the screaming of the wounded hid in the acrid smoke. The Exchange Building quaked in the blast. Those on the floor – where trading was brisk – felt it tremble beneath their feet, then the high windows shattered and the glass blew down on them in a storm of lethal hail. Among the carnage littered across Wall Street were the remains of a horse and splintered fragments of the dray, but the body of the driver was not recovered.
The effect upon the country resembled that of the twin towers. A security which men and women had taken for granted suddenly was no longer there and the world was another place. Very swiftly the Red Scare developed into one of those bouts of paranoid hysteria which periodically sweep America, from the Salem witch trials through McCarthyism in the 1950s to the present day. The journalist Guy Ernpey suggested that the tools for dealing with the Reds could be ‘found in any hardware store’. The wave of intolerance spread to affect anyone perceived to be less than 100 per cent American: Blacks, Jews, Catholics. One of Chicago’s bathing beaches on Lake Michigan was tacitly divided into two segregated areas. One hot summer afternoon a black boy who had gone swimming there was sprawled on a floating railroad tie thirty yards from shore. Perhaps asleep, he drifted slowly across the invisible frontier dividing black from white. Some white boys on the beach started to throw stones at him. He was seen to push off from the float and swim a few strokes before going under and disappearing from sight. A group of young black men swarmed onto the white beach to attack the stone-throwers. A general melée ensued in which no one was seriously hurt, but this was not so in the resulting race riots which raged through Chicago for a week. There were beatings, stabbings, shootings; homes and shops were torched, thousands rendered homeless and destitute.
Such then was the emotional climate in America at the time when Richard Byrd was seated in his office at the Bureau of Aeronautics trying to work out his personal destiny. The public mood was troubled by the economic recession still persisting three years after the war, poisoned further by the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the constraints of Prohibition. Yet, undeterred by the pessimism surrounding him, Byrd came up with an inspiring plan. He put forward a proposal to pilot an aircraft to Europe on a non-stop, solo, intercontinental flight. He argued that the US was so shamefully behind Britain and France in aeroplane design that American-built planes were regarded as obsolescent. It was inevitable that a European machine with a foreign pilot would soon succeed in a first Atlantic crossing, and the most technically advanced nation in the world was about to be publicly trumped. However the reason Byrd gave for attempting the flight was to prove that the navigational instruments he’d invented could be operated in flight by a solo pilot. A flyer could follow a precise course over the ocean to his destination without need of a navigator. Ostensibly this was no publicity stunt he was proposing but an all-American technological achievement.
The plane he intended to fly was a standard two-cockpit Curtiss biplane, currently in use by the Navy. It had a range of 1,850 miles, but if the navigator’s seat was replaced by an auxiliary fuel tank this distance could be increased by an additional 250 miles. These theoretical range limits were calculated for optimum weather conditions, and this could alter drastically in the course of the long flight. It was an alarmingly slim margin to bank on.
Byrd’s proposal was ratified by the Aeronautics Bureau and passed to the Chief of Naval Operations, who approved it. Byrd then took it to the Bureau of Navigation – with whom he was on excellent terms because of his instruments – and obtained its necessary agreement for the flight. With these endorsements he took it to the Secretary of the Navy.
But this was not the individual who had been schmoozed by old Admiral Peary and briefed on Byrd’s merits by Walter Camp. Another politician, Edwin Denby, now sat behind the desk in that well-upholstered office, and to him Byrd’s project looked to be nothing less than the reckless personal adventure that it was. Moreover one likely to end in ignominy when American pilot, American plane and American instruments crashed into the ocean and sank. These were not the headlines the government was looking for just now.
Byrd’s project was denied. Once again his path into a starry future was cut off.
Some men would have been crushed by having their dreams so brusquely erased and surely Byrd was disheartened. Yet many Naval officers would have been more than happy with his situation at the time. He enjoyed a Washington posting which enabled him to live at home with his wife and family, he had an important administrative job, and a salary plus living allowance appropriate for the Capitol. As the services scaled down to a peacetime level others had reason to envy the position he occupied.
The Byrds by now had three sons. His salary, together with Marie’s inheritance, allowed them to live a highly civilised life in Washington. As a senator Byrd’s brother provided access to the right circles, but family connections on both sides together with the contacts he had built up ensured the couple were invited regularly to th
ose parties where it was propitious to be a guest. The job he was doing in the Bureau was valuable, but though it did not show to anyone except Marie, he was bitterly discontent.
His despondency was at odds with what had become a fast-rising mood in the US. Despite the continuing restraints of Prohibition the spirit in America had by now improved remarkably. President Harding’s administration, based on insider dealing, graft and corruption, coincided with a soaring economic recovery. From a smoke-filled room supplied with every known brand of whisky a group of Ohio pals lolling in armchairs with waistcoats unbuttoned ruled over a boom of prosperity such as never before had been seen in history. Everything came together to provide it at this time, but it was the machine that made it possible. ‘The Roaring Twenties’ was one of the names the period was known by, and louder than the strident frenzy of the era was the roar of the machine. Assembly lines and mass production made goods and luxuries available to all, while demand for them rose exponentially sputted by advertising. In America the sun had dispersed the clouds to shine upon a newly prosperous land where the tills were jingling merrily and the sound at night was jazz.
But Richard Byrd was impervious to the optimism enthusing almost everyone. His own future had been frustrated. He was desperately unhappy in his job; he wanted more, much more, and something very different from this. The Navy had failed him, he needed a sponsor. But a sponsor for what? It must be big; it must tap into public imagination, capture hearts and minds and open wallets. The drama had still to be chosen but he was prepared in his role. He had the looks to be a celebrity, he had the persona and the will for it, and he had working for him the imagery of flight, the fact that the aeroplane was the ultimate machine, the supreme symbol of the age. The aeroplane represented speed, glamour, risk and the cutting edge of modernity itself. Air races, stunt flying and record-breaking attempts were drawing crowds all over the country. Flight was fashion, women tied their scarves to resemble propellers, aviator caps were a style item, goggles a motoring accessory, even an aeroplane-shaped coffin was available. Skywriting – first used by Lucky Strike – had become a medium in itself. New Yorkers woke one morning to an airy message in puffy white script: Watch the clouds, Julian is arriving from the sky. Soon after, Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the first black man to obtain a pilot’s licence, flung himself from a plane to land on 7th Avenue at 140 Street dressed in a scarlet Devil costume. Quite why was puzzling, but his image scooped the front page.
