by Susan Butler
She was in fact very relaxed when she spoke. She spoke without notes, and it was second nature for her to joke about her notoriety, exhort women to stand up for themselves, and thrill them with her adventures. By the mid-1930s she was a professional—she could capture an audience and hold them riveted. Joan Thomas, who wrote for Popular Aviation, held her to be the equal of the great diva Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink—both spellbinders, in a class by themselves. She talked as casually of her historic solo Atlantic and Pacific flights, wrote another correspondent, “as though they had been the imaginative flights of troubled sleep.” A reporter watched her talk for over an hour and ten minutes in late 1935, “without a sound coming from the audience except that of laughter and applause.” She had learned, as well, to be dryly humorous.
As she described the sensation of flight, which she always did rather poetically, she raised her arms and curled her long tapering fingers toward each other, as though she were holding a globe. Then as she stood and talked to her audience, if she was relaxed and everything was going well, and it invariably was, she would drop her hands and clasp her fingers together in what looked like the overlapping grip of a golfer.
Her appearance—so unthreatening, so much like their own—was an effective tool. Like everything else to do with Amelia, it was not left to chance but was the result of planning. She made it a point to dress conservatively and yet with style—to look like the very “best” of her audience, to appear as one whom the men and women listening would accept as “their” social equal, someone with “their” values. For then they might suspend preconceived ideas and listen to what she had to say about women and flying. For evening lectures she usually got quite dressed up, as was the custom of the time. “Smartly tailored evening ensemble” wrote a reporter of her attire in one southern town, while another noted her jacketed dinner gown of purple taffeta “relieved only by a broad white collar and bow of taffeta,” and another wrote of her charming semiformal brown satin dress. She thought that donning traditional attire made the radical things she was saying go down more easily—seem less radical—and she was right.
Like a politician, she gave the same speech over and over, merely changing nuances, altering details. She generally started by brushing away her fame. A favorite opener was the story of the young boy who took her for Lindbergh’s mother. Having broken the ice, she next usually asked how many in the audience had ever been in a plane.
Another subject she always touched upon was the importance of allowing and making arrangements for children to go up in a plane: “If you forbid your children to fly they’ll get a bootleg ride, and a cheap ride is seldom safe.”
Somewhere along the line she usually asserted that flying was safer than driving, particularly at speeds above forty miles per hour, and threw in some statistics. Sometimes she threw in her “transportation sermon,” the gist of which was that periodic physical examinations for those who drove automobiles would cut car accidents by fifty percent.
And then if she were speaking to a women’s group, she would get to the guts of her speech: that women had to stand up for themselves. She would go into the career possibilities for women in the fledgling air industry and urge women to consider trying to break in—in any capacity, hostess, pilot, navigator, factory worker, public relations—wherever they saw an opening. Usually she was quite sanguine about the possibilities, but sometimes she was not: “In aviation as a whole, women are outnumbered forty to one, but I feel that more will gain admittance as a greater number knock at the door. If and when you knock at the door, it might be well to bring an ax along; you may have to chop your way through,” she told one group in 1934.
She would urge women of all ages to break out of their “platitudinous sphere” (one of her favorite phrases), asserting that unlike the prisoner at the bar who is innocent until proven guilty, the woman is guilty until she proves that she can do the things men do. Or she might say that machines were too much man-made—made for men, as she did to one YWCA.
Naturally, when she was talking to a mixed audience, such as the Chicago Geographic Society, or a branch of the national Civic Federation, or a men’s group, such as the Men’s Club of Temple Israel in Paducah, Kentucky (October 19, 1933), she discussed the possibilities that the future held for flying rather than dwelling upon women’s concerns. One of the ideas she threw out was for the government to experiment with midocean sea dromes that could gather weather information, with the possibility that if they worked, a chain of them could also be landing places for transoceanic air service—giant stepping-stones across the sea, which had been the dream of many for years. A usual charge to attend a lecture was $1.50—more than a moving picture but not an inordinate amount for the day. Sometimes the speech was sponsored by the local women’s city club and more often than not was held in the local high school auditorium. There would be introductory remarks by the mayor, the head of the city club, and the head of the local Zonta chapter. Sometimes Amelia would have a movie camera set up and show her exploits and those of other fliers: after her transatlantic flight she showed pictures of the receptions given her in London, Paris, and Rome as well.
She would usually stand chatting until the committee rescued her from the enthusiasm of her admirers, cheerfully autographing programs and answering questions. She was as well unfailingly polite to reporters, going out of her way to let them interview her. As she tried to explain once to Katch, furious because a reporter was interrupting their lunch, the reporter should not only be treated with patience but given lunch, too. “Ask her to come in. She has her living to earn, too,” Katch remembered Amelia saying to her, and Katch grudgingly had been forced to set a place for her at the table.
There was a round window just about this size in their house in Rye that must have given Amelia and George the idea for this picture.
Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, and Muriel Earhart Morrissey.
Amelia with some of the other entrants in the First Women’s Air Derby. From the left: Mary von Mach, Maude Keith Miller, Gladys O’Donnell, Thea Rasche, Phoebe Omlie, Louise Thaden, Amelia, Ruth Elder, Blanche Noyes, and Vera Dawn Walker. Courtesy of fhe International Women’s Air and Space Museum.
Boston gave Amelia a royal welcome after the Friendship flight. Here she is greetingher mother, Amy. Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.
With Gene Vidal, father of Gore. They were the closest of friends. Amelia helped convince Franklin Roosevelt to appoint Gene the Director of the Bureau of Air Commerce. Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann and Gore Vidal.
Working on a dress for her line of designer clothes for active women. The line was carried by thirty department stores across the country.
Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.
At the beginning of the Bendix transcontinentalrace, Floyd Bennett field, June 30, 1933. Amelia and Ruth Nichols were the first women to fly in the race. Amelia had problems with her plane, but beat Ruth by over a day. Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.
Two of Amelia’s endorsementendeavors. Above: 1928. Amelia posing before a Plymouth. Chrysler hired her to be their first celebrity spokesperson. Left: 1928. Amelia agreed to do this Lucky Strike ad because she wanted to donate the proceeds to Commander Richard Byrd’s expedition to Antarctica. The editor of McCall’s, Otto Wiese, was so put off by the advertisementthat he withdrew his offer of employment, and Amelia went to work for Cosmopolitan.
Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.
After announcing that he was going to rest at Hyde Park, his Hudson river estate, and would have no visitors, Franklin Roosevelt invited Amelia and George and their houseguests, Amy and James Mollison, for Sunday brunch. Amy and James, English aviators, were still recovering from a crash landing in Bridgeport, Connecticut after having flown the Atlantic. July 30, 1933. From the left: Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia, James, Amy, FDR. Courtesy of FPG International Corp.
Amelia and Eleanor Roosevelt, on the occasion of the National Geographic Society lunch honoring Amelia in Washington, March 2, 1
935. Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.
The famous portrait by Edward Steichen, taken for Vanity Fair magazine, May 1932.
Courtesy of Vanity Fair. Copyright © 1931 the Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
Amelia took delivery of the Electra on July 24, 1936, her 39th birthday. Shortly thereafter, she flew it to Purdue. Here she is at the Purdue airport, her students lined up in front. Courtesy of Purdue University Libraries, Special Collections & Archives. Copyright © 1997 by Purdue Research Foundation.
Helping promote Gene’s $700 airplane. The occasion is the granting of $500,000 for the project from the Public Works Administration. From the left, sitting: Amelia; Ewing Mitchell, assistant secretary of commerce; J. Carroll Cone, assistant director, Bureau of Air Commerce; Edward P. Warner, Society of Automotive Engineers. In rear: Dr. George Lewis, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics; Leighton Rogers, Bureau of Air Commerce; Gene Vidal; Fred L. Smith, National Association of State Aviation Officials; Robert Renfro, editor of Sportsman Pilot; Al Williams, American Petroleum Institute.
Courtesy of FPG International Corp.
Just after the fateful crash in Hawaii. By the time the plane was repaired, world weather patterns had changed and Amelia had to change the direction of her world flight from west to east. Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.
Amelia and Fred, with a map showing the Pacific stretch of the flight. They finally took off May 21 from Oakland, California. Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.
Amelia and Fred in Jakarta (then called Batavia).
Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.
One of the last photos of Amelia and Fred, taken in Lae, New Guinea (with them is F.C. Jacobs, manager of a New Guinea gold mine). They took off for Howland Island and were never seen again. Courtesy of AP Wide World Photos.
Amelia was just as patient with young people. A St. Paul newspaper reporter, watching her field questions from the young representatives of high school weekly papers, watching her give them kindly, courteous attention even though their questions were long, distracting, and silly, declared she should get a special record for patience.
The amount of time she spent on the circuit was awesome, the schedules (often two speeches in one day) incredible, the distances she traveled amazing. The stamina that allowed her to fly such long distances is apparent in the more mundane pursuits of her life as well. She could spend a month doing one-night stands and not appear tired. She could drive a car astonishing distances with no ill effects. The day she started out on one jaunt, at the beginning of October 1933 in the Midwest, she took her mother, in Chicago visiting the Shedds, shopping for clothes at Marshall Field’s. Then in early afternoon she got into her car and drove to Sioux City, Iowa, a distance of almost six hundred miles, where she was due the next day at 12:15 for lunch prior to giving a lecture at 1:30 at the Sioux City Women’s Club. “I drove here all the way and arrived about 4:30 A.M.,” she wrote Amy. “It was a gorgeous night and I thought I’d rather sleep for a few hours after I reached Sioux City than to get up at an early hour and drive.” She spent the next two weeks crisscrossing Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, Kansas, and Missouri, giving speeches at four more women’s clubs, three college groups, two men’s clubs, and an automobile association, ending up back in Chicago, where she gave two speeches on the twentieth. During the tour she spent a night in Atchison with the Challisses, taking the time to visit her uncle Theodore and the mothers of some of her childhood friends whom she felt close to, and giving an interview to The Atchison Globe. Starting October 21, she spoke in Oak Park, Rockford, and Janesville, Illinois; Whitewater, Wisconsin; Danville, Illinois; South Bend, Indiana; Toledo, Ohio; Lansing, Michigan; and Springfield, Illinois, ending up with two lectures—afternoon and evening—at the Detroit Institute of Arts, thirteen speeches in twelve days. Later she was off to Texas. Nor did she slow down as the years went by. Fourteen days in January 1936 saw her give lectures in South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona.
The amazing thing was that the curiosity of the public remained unabated; it was matched by Amelia’s continuing enthusiasm to the task at hand. No matter that in 1935 she spoke before 136 groups totaling 80,000. She was telling men and women about a brave new world where people would hop on planes the way they hopped on trains, where Europe would be just hours away. And she was telling them it was theirs for the taking. She was telling the women—thirty years before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, forty years before Gloria Steinem launched Ms. magazine—that they should fulfill themselves and be more than wives and mothers. She saw every lecture as a new opportunity to win people over. She probably would have done it for nothing—being paid to give advice was almost irresistible.
In the fall of 1934, as the result of a speech, Amelia met Edward C. Elliott, president of Purdue University. He looked conservative—stiff collar, proper suit, graying hair slicked down and parted in the middle—but he was not. He was a college president committed to educating women for a life outside the home, an extreme view for his time. More typical was the traditional mindset of Henry Moore, president of Skidmore College, who made sure Skidmore coeds concentrated on art and good manners, dressed well, and developed a taste for music, since their goal in life was to maintain beautiful households. Elliott, head of a coed land grant college—he liked to refer to himself as a Hoosier schoolmaster—would cite the opening of the first Purdue residence hall for women, South Hall, as giving distinction to the year 1934 at Purdue. He wanted women to have careers and saw his job as giving them the necessary training. He was so forward looking and so committed to his vision and at the same time so practical that he realized he had to change the culture of Purdue if his ideas were to have impact. Nebraska born, his father, like Amelia’s, had worked for the Union Pacific. He was bright and disarming, a brilliant talker, and an original thinker who delighted in unconventional solutions to problems. He was also interested in flying, with the result that Purdue boasted a flying field, planes, a new hangar, and a curriculum that included aeronautics as a subject of study.
The occasion of his meeting with Amelia was the fourth annual Conference on Current Problems sponsored by The New York Herald Tribune in September 1934, which took place shortly after the new hangar was completed and the women’s residence opened. The audience at the conference—three thousand strong—filled every seat in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. It seemed as if everyone important in American public life was seated on the dais, each in turn expounding their pet idea on how to rescue America from the doldrums of the Depression. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke about bettering relations between capital and labor; Mayor of New York Fiorello LaGuardia spoke about defending the Constitution; Dr. Glenn Frank, president of the University of Wisconsin, spoke about the changes being wrought in Washington. Everyone, including the superintendent of New York schools, spoke in generalities.
Elliott spoke about young people. His ideas were direct and basic: that government must take inventory of occupational facts relating to young people because the economic recovery of the country depended on harnessing their energy, that the young needed guidance to find the direction and location of their goals. His speech over, he sat down and listened to the next person on the program—Mrs. Nicholas Brady, head of the Girl Scouts of America—stress the importance of the scouting program because it prepared women to become competent to manage their future household affairs. How women should prepare themselves to be good wives was exactly what he least wanted to hear. His mind began to wander; he intended to slip out, and would have, except for “this rather personable creature sitting on my right,” whom he decided to stay and listen to. It was Amelia. She spoke about the future of aeronautics and the part women were to play, of the need to pay attention to “young ideas” and the difficulty women were having in obtaining positions in the aviation industry—they were outnumbered forty to one by men, she said. What she did not say—but undoubtedly knew, for it was a painful fact that her friend Clara Studer, editor
of The 99 News, was writing about—was that many women were giving up flying, vanquished by the Depression. The past year had seen a devastating decrease in female pilots: where there had been six hundred in 1933, now, in 1934, the number had dropped by almost half. So many just couldn’t afford to keep up their licenses.
Elliott was impressed by everything about Amelia, from the way she looked to the words she spoke. In his eyes the most important immediate problem to be solved was how to effectively educate young women. He knew that to solve the problem, he had to bring new forces into play. He needed teachers who could be role models for his Purdue coeds, and he realized he was looking at the role model to end all role models. His first thought was that she would be perfect as a speaker at the upcoming vocational conference that the women at Purdue were organizing. The following day Helen Rogers Reid gave a luncheon and again, as Edward Elliott remembered it, “I had the very good fortune of being seated next to Amelia. During the luncheon I learned that she had an abiding interest in the problem of the education of women. Our ideas as to the nature of this problem and its solution fitted.” Elliott, determined to get her on his campus, arranged a dinner with Amelia and George at the Coffee House Club, a mid-Manhattan club frequented by the theatrical, publishing, and magazine movers of the city, one of George’s favorite places. Surrounded by books and paintings, originals of sketches in Vanity Fair, a grand piano, and theatrical mementos, they talked, waited upon by club maître’ d, Williams, “steward extraordinary,” according to George. After dinner Amelia and George sat on a couch beneath the club’s Maxfield Parrish bulletin board, Amelia with her feet tucked up underneath her like a little girl. Edward Elliott, facing them in a chair, came to the point.
