Chapter 21
Origins of the American Airlines Split
In the Japanese film Rashomon, the survivors of a violent adventure emerge with totally different accounts of what happened, remembering words nobody spoke and events that never occurred. Or were the words spoken, and did the events occur? Strong emotions trigger distortion, and Rashomon illustrates the ambiguity that often characterizes eyewitness accounts influenced by fear and anger. Whom does one believe, for example, when two old enemies, with the fires of indignation still burning in their eyes, recount differing versions of history?
The defection of the American Airlines (AAL) pilots from ALPA in 1963 has a Rashomon-like quality because there were no dispassionate observers on either side. According to the ALPA loyalists on AAL, men like A. M. “Breezy” Wynne, Frank A. “Doc” Spencer, Carl Rubio, and Roy Dooley (to name but a few), the dissidents who took control of their pilot group in the late 1950s were simply wreckers, no better than the ignorant barbarians who sacked Rome and amused themselves by destroying priceless works of art.
On the other hand, the AAL leaders of that era, some of whom are still active in the cloned version of ALPA called the Allied Pilots Association (APA), tell a totally different tale. They insist that the proper history of their separation from ALPA should begin by recounting Clancy Sayen’s tyranny and the treacheries of other pilot groups out to “get” AAL. The separatists often cite the strike benefits denied them after the December 1958 walkout. ALPA loyalists insist that the AAL separatists knew in advance that they wouldn’t be eligible for strike benefits.
Where does the truth lie? How can we purify the facts to reveal what went wrong in 1963? For make no mistake about it, the separation of the AAL pilot group from ALPA was a crisis on a grand scale. All the prerequisites for ALPA’s total dissolution were present in 1963.
Historians can often tell what happened, but not why. The trouble that led to AAL’s separation from ALPA in 1963 began with a bitter personality conflict between C. E. “Gene” Seal, the AAL master chairman elected in 1956, and Clancy Sayen. Why the two men hated each other is lost to history and perhaps unrecoverable, since both men are dead.
Tom Latta of AAL attributes
the split to Sayen’s refusal to “mollycoddle an idiot.” But then, Latta was no
admirer of Gene Seal, and as one of the diehard ALPA loyalists, we must expect
him to have a low opinion of the secessionists. Fairness requires us to
remember that Sayen could be professorially impatient with slow learners, and
there is some indication that Gene Seal fit that description. Clancy Sayen did
not suffer fools gladly, and whether or not Gene Seal was a fool, Sayen
certainly thought him one. Almost certainly, the initial trouble between Sayen
and Seal arose because of some quirk in the mental makeup of each man, some
“chemistry” that makes one man instinctively dislike another. For whatever
reason, within a year of Seal’s accession to the AAL master chairmanship, his
relationship with Sayen can only be described as poisonous. Nearly 20 years
later, the fruit of their split lives on in a dangerous and quite unnecessary
division in the ranks of professional airline pilots.
ALPA’s history up to 1963 had been a remarkable story of unification across company lines. The cooperative spirit of the first generation of professional airline pilots was their greatest single resource, and without it Dave Behncke’s scheme to unionize pilots would have died aborning. But after World War II, and certainly by the 1950s, the old spirit of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity among pilots was beginning to erode. Of course, ALPA had seen its share of fractious skirmishing even in the best of times. But the old guys knew how to put their intramural quarrels aside. By their nature, the first generation of professional airline pilots were independent freethinkers who always applied the arts of conciliation and compromise imperfectly. When the chips were down, however, they knew that an imperfect compromise to preserve unity beat none at all. Bitter experience had taught them that without the strength they derived from each other, they would stand alone before the impersonal power of giant corporations whose personnel policies could be quite predatory. Aside from the Transcontinental & Western Airways (TWA) pilots’ foray into company unionism in 1933 (and even that, we must remember, was owing to severe management pressure), there had never been a serious threat of disunity before it erupted at AAL in 1963.
But by 1963, everything was
changing. Inevitably, a new generation arrived made up of pilots less steeped in
past struggles and more complacent about the professional status ALPA had
created for them. The new generation was also increasingly indifferent to ALPA
and its administration. Pioneer pilots, by and large, paid close attention to
ALPA affairs, and they couldn’t understand the lackadaisical attitude of younger
pilots, particularly when it came to governance at the local level. By the late
1950s many pilots simply took for granted that somebody else would do the hard
work needed to sustain ALPA. While complacent pilots golfed or pursued second
careers, a minority ran ALPA’s local affairs at each airline. Although most of
these individuals were dedicated to making ALPA work, on some airlines a few
pilots used ALPA as a gimmick for personal aggrandizement. The indifference of
the rank and file and the poor attendance at local council meetings meant that
a minority on any airline could, with proper planning, seize control and
eventually dominate the master executive council (MEC) itself. The danger was
that a well-organized clique could speak for an indifferent majority of pilots.
The old-timers worried about ALPA’s future, but by 1963 they were either retired or verging on it and could only watch in disbelief as the tragedy of 1963 unfolded. “The young Turks brought it off,” says Albert E. “Prince” Hamer of AAL, who joined ALPA in 1931. “I had been inactive in ALPA for a number of years because I was in the Chief Pilot’s Office, but in 1963, a year before my retirement, I went back on the line. I went to a couple of these ‘get out of ALPA meetings’ and talked against it. I said I thought that was playing the company’s game. I was just blown off the floor. They said I was an old man who didn’t know what he was talking about.”
John J. O’Connell, the last
loyal MEC chairman on AAL (who is definitely not to be confused with Nick
O’Connell, the MEC chairman who led the 1963 defection, or John J. O’Donnell,
who was elected ALPA president in 1970), is a soft-spoken man who chooses his
words carefully. Operating under the old idea that if you can’t say something
good about somebody, you shouldn’t say anything at all, O’Connell has refused
public comment on his old opponents in AAL ever since his retirement in 1968.
But in an interview at his Sun City,
Pilots at AAL had felt a
pervasive sense of injury for a long time. As the backbone of ALPA in the early
days, the first to organize 100 percent, the first to negotiate a contract, and
the only pilot group to stand absolutely rock firm during the threatened
nationwide strike of 1933, the AAL pilots felt superior to other pilot groups.
Their devotion to ALPA was so strong in the early days that from the election of
Clyde Holbrook as ALPA’s first first vice-president through Tom Hardin’s
selection as member of the first Air Safety Board, they dominated ALPA affairs
in all areas except the presidency itself. The AAL pilots’ dominance, in turn,
produced something of a backlash that manifested itself by the late 1940s in an
almost automatic anti-AAL voting block in most conventions. Willis Proctor of
AAL failed in his challenge to Behncke in 1947, although in truth even many of
Proctor’s fellow AAL pilots were lukewarm about his candidacy. During the Sayen
era, both H. Bart Cox in 1952 and Wiley Drummond in 1956 mounted formidable but
unsuccessful challenges for the presidency. Both of these AAL pilots were men of
wide reputation and long service to ALPA, and their rejection left many AAL
pilots feeling aggrieved.
“In retrospect,” says Jerry
Wood of Eastern Air Lines (EAL), “there was no conspiracy [to deprive AAL pilots
of the presidency]; it just happened, and guys like Wiley Drummond, who was a
real gentleman, understood and didn’t let it bother them. American was pretty
much the mainstay of ALPA for so long that they got used to the idea of being
dominant, and this led to some disgruntlement when they couldn’t be any longer.
Up until 1956, the dissidents were in the minority, and I can still remember
Wiley Drummond leading them back into the convention that year to make it
unanimous for Clancy.”
Shortly after 1956, Wiley Drummond, H. Bart Cox, and other old-time ALPA loyalists of AAL began either to retire or to graduate to management ranks. Drummond, for example, became director of flight agreements (he died in an automobile accident in the early 1970s). “I talked to Drummond at the time of the split,” says ALPA loyalist Tom Latta of AAL, “and he was appalled, but like a lot of the older guys he had no way to express himself.”
“The 1956 convention was sort
of a landmark in the trouble between American and the rest of ALPA,” says
Stewart W. Hopkins of Delta Air Lines (DAL). “Every convention they would lose
the presidency or the vice-presidency or whatever, and their people reacted
badly. I think some opportunists started using this to take things over and just
guided the rank and file along. I remember writing Clancy a letter after the
1956 convention saying, ‘These guys are beaten and bloody and you had better
hold out the hand of friendship.’”
As men like John O’Connell began losing the reins of power on AAL, a series of MEC chairmen (Gene Seal, Paul Atkins, Nick O’Connell), each a bit more inclined toward the dissidents’ point of view than the last, took control. John O’Connell had made himself persona non grata by criticizing the performance of the AAL negotiating committee, on which the dissidents were entrenched.
“I had a lot of contact with the dissidents because they took
control of the negotiating committee late in my term as MEC chairman,” O’Connell
remembers. “It took them 14 months to negotiate one contract, and whenever I sat
with them in
The passing of the older generation of leaders like Wiley Drummond made things easier for the generation of dissidents at AAL. After 1957, they made opposition to Sayen the key to their internal politics, largely because their anti-Sayenism struck fertile ground among rank-and-file pilots. No AAL leader ever seemed to lose support through an open display of hostility toward Sayen, whose habit of socializing with prominent United Airlines (UAL) pilots like H. B. Anders and Chuck Woods led AAL pilots to believe that he was plotting against their interest somehow.
“Sayen did spend a great deal of time over at United when they ran into trouble,” says Frank A. “Doc” Spencer of AAL, “but that was only because they were handy. The American pilots, when they wanted something done, perceived Sayen as too busy to attend to their difficulties. At the time, we were either the biggest or the second biggest airline, paying a quarter of the dues of the whole Association. They figured they only got about one-twentieth of Sayen’s attention.”
AAL’s management, “whose
grudges against ALPA dated back to the Behncke era, clearly encouraged their
pilots to believe that Sayen was singling out AAL for harsher treatment than
other airlines, particularly UAL. AAL and UAL were competing fiercely during the
1950s for dominance, both technologically and economically. This competition
cost both airlines money unnecessarily, particularly in inaugurating jet
service. Although Pan American World Airways (PAA) was the first to fly large
numbers of jets, AAL was nominally the first to use them in domestic service.
(Actually, National Airlines [NAL] pilots were the first to fly Boeing 707s
commercially in
There is very persuasive evidence that MIS management so resented ALPA’s crew complement policy that they began actively encouraging the separatist movement among their pilots as early as 1955. This is not to say, however, that the coming schism in ALPA was a management plot. Rather, one can conclude from certain company actions that management aided and abetted the separatist movement by making things easy for pilots who were hostile to ALPA, thus assisting their rise to power within the AAL pilot group. Nick O’Connell, the MEC chairman who led the defection, was allowed a work schedule that was extraordinarily favorable, according to ALPA loyalist Roy Dooley, who in 1964 made a carefully documented postmortem study of the secession at the request of Charley Ruby. Dooley puts the circumstantial case for AAL management’s complicity this way:
I don’t think American’s management at the local level could
control anybody’s flying assignments. I think C. R. Smith and Bill Whitacre
[vice-president for operations] did it from the top. Whitacre was a pilot in
bombers who became a general in World War II, but he did not fly the line, and
he was recognized by the old-timers as a pilot hater. By the time this came up,
he was in a position to do what he could to influence people, and I think he was
told by American’s top management, C. R. Smith, to do what he could to help
these guys to get out of ALPA, to embarrass ALPA, screw it up, and maybe destroy
it. I think there was a definite effort by management to get the American pilot
group established with their own union. Not long ago I was told this personally
by a man who was high in management. He said, “Well, you know,
Dooley’s suspicion of C. R.
Smith rests on abundant historical precedent. As a protégé of E. L. Cord, Smith
took a crude view of labor relations. Although Cord gained effective control of
AAL in 1932, he had made so many enemies in
True to form, Smith announced a pay cut coupled with more restrictive work rules almost immediately after taking over. The Great Depression made a handy excuse, but in good times or bad, Cord’s enterprises adhered to the “iron law of wages.” Put simply, that “law” of classical economic theory holds that the proper wage for any worker is an amount so low that only the most desperate unemployed person will work for it. Ipso facto, since plenty of unemployed pilots asked AAL for work in 1932, C. R. Smith figured he was paying pilots too much.
In fairness to Smith, we must acknowledge that he was not alone in wanting to “reform” the pilot pay system in 1932. The operating companies, faced with declining revenues as the Great Depression deepened, sought to end the system inherited from the Post Office in 1926 that paid pilots base pay plus mileage. Some airlines, like Northwest Airlines (NWA) and PAA, already paid pilots monthly salaries. Although this “reform” did not cut salaries drastically at the time, every pilot knew it would work out to a substantial reduction as newer, faster aircraft came on-line.
Dave Behncke staked ALPA’s whole future on the fight against flat monthly salaries. If he could not deliver on this vital issue, the typical pilot of that era would see no reason to join ALPA. In a supreme test of nerve and will, Behncke threatened a nationwide strike early in 1933. He knew ALPA could not win. “I figure we would have lasted about five days,” Behncke later admitted to the 1934 convention.
By persuading the National Labor Board (NLB), predecessor of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), to intervene in the case, Behncke averted the strike. NLB’s function was essentially to keep labor peace, and only by convincing its investigative staff that there really would be a nationwide strike was Behncke able to present the ALPA case. If the NLB investigators had concluded that Behncke’s strike threat was merely a bluff, they would have stood aside, the strike would have gone forward, and ALPA would have been broken. Students of aviation history today would know about pilot unionization only as an odd episode that ended in an abortive strike in 1933. Labor history is littered with similar examples of unions that destroyed themselves with premature strikes.
But largely thanks to the AAL pilots, that didn’t happen. The first AAL pilots were tough, with the nerve to stand up and spit in C. R. Smith’s eye. More than the pilots of any other airline, the AAL pilots of 1933 stood firm behind the strike threat. “I believe they would have walked out to the last man,” Behncke said later. Even at UAL, Behncke’s own airline, a dozen pilots stood ready to scab, and at other airlines there were even more. Fortunately for ALPA, the NLB investigators interpreted the steady resolve of the AAL pilots to shut down C. R. Smith’s airline as typical of the whole industry. The AAL pilots were truly the rock upon which ALPA was founded.
Was C. R. Smith, many years later, creating the conditions upon which ALPA would founder?
After the 1956 convention at which Clancy Sayen defeated AAL’s Wiley Drummond for the presidency, several ALPA loyalists openly complained about AAL management’s involvement in the campaign on Drummond’s behalf. Apparently fearful that these manipulations would lead to more difficult labor relations once Sayen was reelected, AAL’s management tried to mollify Sayen. “It was not our desire to inject ourselves in any way into the internal affairs of ALPA prior to the convention,” wrote Paul Kayser, vice-president of personnel at AAL. Many ALPA loyalists were skeptical of Kayser’s sincerity.
Clancy Sayen could not help but resent the increasingly hostile attitude of the AAL group after 1956. There is good evidence that Sayen tried to undermine the AAL leaders with their rank and file. Writing to Walt Cary in 1956, Sayen bemoaned “the willingness of the average intelligent pilot to permit the lunatic fringe to run his affairs. I noticed, for example, in the minutes of the last AAL Council 22 meeting that of some 350 pilots in this council, there were 17 present. Most of them were of the unstable, noisy minority that promotes irresponsible action.”
As one might expect, Sayen’s meddling in AAL’s internal affairs played into the hands of the dissidents, who quickly exploited the notion that ALPA’s national officers were persecuting them. Rank-and-file AAL members naturally felt closer to their own elected leader (even though he was elected at poorly attended council meetings) than to ALPA’s national officers. Moreover, the local leaderships’ nearly absolute monopoly on the sources of information gave the typical AAL pilot a distorted view of Sayen’s protracted quarrel with Gene Seal and his successors, Paul Atkins and Nick O’Connell.
Much later, as an illustration of this point, Bob Harrington of AAL wrote to Charles Ruby, “The only people I know with the Association are the ones I elect and send up there. I, like many others at American, do not like the present schism, but whom do I believe?”
ALPA loyalists in the late
1950s had a hard time combating what Tom Latta called “the spoon-fed hate” that
the AAL leadership directed against Sayen. “There was a series of events dating
back a long way for which Sayen was not responsible,” agrees Frank A. “Doc”
Spencer of AAL. “But the American pilots felt he was, and they would not listen
to the other side of the story.”
ALPA loyalist Tom Latta, an engineering graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute with a distinguished record of service on AAL’s “nuts-and-bolts” committees, places primary blame on the AAL leadership:
It all started because the leadership group at AAL after J.J.
O’Connell’s term was so poor that Eastern and Delta tended to dominate ALPA.
They put up good people like Jerry Wood and Stu Hopkins. The AAL group spent all
their time making asses of themselves with this “dump Sayen” movement. It began
with the eight-hour controversy, which was a very emotional thing with us. A lot
of the guys wanted to cut C. R. Smith’s throat, drag him down to
The average pilot, by the early 1960s, by the time this prolonged propaganda campaign began to work, was ready to believe anything. Seal and his crowd on the MEC monopolized the sources of information flowing to the AAL group, and they stopped at nothing to make Sayen look bad, to distort the record however they could. That propaganda campaign got the whole AAL pilot group to where they just couldn’t think straight.
By 1961, it was obvious that some concession would have to be made to the AAL group to preserve ALPA’s unity. Since the dissidents had made Sayen the principal focus of their complaints, it seemed logical that a change of leadership might palliate them. As we have seen, Sayen was also tired of ALPA and actively seeking another career. Although Sayen’s friends, still in the majority in ALPA, would never have let the AAL dissidents drive him from office, his decision to resign in midterm seemed to be in the best tradition of internal compromise to preserve unity.
Although fair-minded pilots
were appalled at the virulence of the AAL leaders’ assault on Sayen, they
accepted his resignation as an unpleasant fact of life. The reaction of William
M. Masland, one of PAA’s most respected pilots, indicates the esteem that most
ALPA members felt for Sayen. Masland spoke for a majority of airline pilots when
he congratulated Sayen for what he had done for the profession. Masland pleaded
with Sayen to reconsider his decision to resign, perhaps to take a sabbatical
and then resume the presidency:
You have weathered the
Quesada attack on the profession and established it as a force in the industry.
The next years will determine which way it goes from here. Are there
alternatives you would consider? If there are any such ideas that you yourself
hesitate to propose, there are many of us who would be willing to do so if we
only knew what they were. We in ALPA all seem to start from scratch each
election. The result is that most of the term is spent in learning the job, and
in the process the incumbent repeats all the errors of his predecessor. You have
carried yourself very well indeed, and most of us back you. You have created a
new form of labor union, a showpiece and example.
The positive reaction to Sayen was international. Capt. A. D. Mills of the Canadian Air Line Pilots Association (CALPA) wrote to Sayen offering to step down if Sayen would agree to accept the presidency of CALPA. Mills declared that CALPA wanted Sayen, “money no object,” after a “sabbatical among various misty and sun-drenched isles.” (Sayen resisted this tempting offer, however; as noted in Chapter 19, he operated a trucking business, dabbled in politics, and became an Eastern vice-president before his tragic death in 1965.)
Sayen’s midterm departure from the ALPA presidency in 1962 meant that ALPA was, in effect, meeting the AAL dissidents and their supporters halfway. The next step was up to the AAL leadership.