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CHAPTER 4
The Airmail Pilots’ Strike of 1919

Leon D. Smith was known as “Bonehead,” but not because he was stupid. He got that nickname after walking into a whirling prop, and living to tell about it—stunned, bloody, and partially scalped.

On the morning of July 22, 1919, Leon Smith was about to prove that there was nothing wrong with his mental processes. He reported for work before dawn at the Belmont flying field in suburban New York City, ready to assume his duties as a Post Office Air Mail Service pilot. After loading seven sacks of first-class mail in the forward locker of his de Havilland DH-4, Smith paused, lit a cigarette, and waited. His scheduled takeoff time came and went, and still Smith sat there on the muddy tire of the DH-4, pondering.

In the previous two weeks, 15 Air Mail Service planes had crashed, killing two pilots and seriously injuring others. In every instance, fog was the culprit, and as Smith sat there a thick, murky blanket of it obscured his vision. Horizontal visibility was so bad that he could see only about 100 yards—not even to the field boundary. So Smith waited, hoping the fog would lift.

Of all the hazards early pilots feared, fog was the worst, even more so than thunderstorms. A man could see a thunderstorm and avoid it in those days by flying underneath right down on the deck. The DH-4 was built like a brick, double strutted, but if the turbulence got too heavy, you could set it down on those big balloon tires almost anywhere. Farmers seldom complained about the few feet of crops the landing gear might flatten. Having one of the celebrated airmail pilots land in your field was an event well worth a few ears of corn.

Fog was different. It could sneak up on you almost instantaneously, and then there was big trouble, as you tried to get a few feet lower where you might be able to pick up that familiar windmill that was your next checkpoint. The panic set in when you realized that you ought to be just about to the windmill now, and you still couldn’t see anything except a blur of row crops straight down. That’s when you yanked back the throttle and set her down.

But what if the blur below you turned out to be trees instead of a nice flat farmer’s field? Then you would be faced with an Air Mail Service pilot’s worst choice—either a crash landing or a blind climb into the soup, with­out instruments, relying on the seat of your pants, or the sound of the en­gine, or a change in the pitch of the wind through the wing guy wires. Any­thing to tell you that you were still right side up.

Air Mail Service pilots were, by their nature, brave men. But bitter experience had taught them to avoid fog at any cost.

That’s why Leon Smith was still sitting there when his boss, a Post Office supervisor who was not a pilot, shouted at him to get moving.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll kill myself for a sack of two-bit letters,” Smith said, trying to explain to his nonflying superior that the weather was unflyable. Smith allegedly used “abusive language” in challenging the supervisor to find a pilot, any pilot, who would fly that day.

The supervisor fired Smith on the spot, turned to the back-up pilot, E. Hamilton “Ham” Lee, and ordered him to take to the air. He, too, refused to fly and was also fired.

Actually, the pilots had been unhappy over wages and working condi­tions for a long time before the flap at Belmont erupted, but it seemed im­possible that they would ever cause any real labor problem for the Post Of­fice, let alone go on strike, because they just didn’t seem to be that type.

Certainly there had been no hint of future trouble when the airmail was inaugurated amid gala ceremonies in Washington the year before. On that day, May 15, 1918, President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson were present, chatting with Major Reuben Fleet, the commander of Army pilots temporarily detailed to the Post Office, and Lieutenant George Boyle, who was sched­uled to fly the first sacks of mail out of Washington to Philadelphia. Political bigwigs milled around the old Polo Grounds, which were being pressed temporarily into service as a flying field, while nervous functionaries self-consciously loaded sacks of mail aboard the JN4D-2 Jenny and the two pilots posed stiffly in front of the plane for newspaper photographers.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a similar scene was in progress, with Lieutenant James C. Edgerton accepting a lavish bouquet from his kid sister prior to departing for Washington and bearing, among other things, a let­ter from John S. Wanamaker, the famous department store owner and former postmaster general, to his successor, Albert Sydney Burleson.

In the first years of operation the Air Mail Service proved remarkably efficient as it expanded westward to Chicago via Cleveland. The crucial ingredient in its success was the skill of the pilots who flew the antiquated war-surplus Jennys and DH-4s.

Most of the pilots were ex-military men who had resigned their commissions to take civil service appointments, and many of them had become pilots prior to World War I. Smith had been the senior instructor in charge of pilot training for the Army during the war and had learned his trade at the Curtiss Flying School in 1913. Lee was a veteran who held the world record for consecutive loops, set on June 18, 1918. He landed his Jenny when it ran out of gas on the 105th loop.

Because Americans have always been fascinated by speed and the technology of transportation, Air Mail Service pilots were the objects of genu­ine adulation. Their exploits were regular fare in newspapers and magazines by the early 1920s.

Their superiors in the Post Office Department in Washington also praised the pilots in the early phases of the service, when their skill at “con­tour” or “terrain” flying, as it was called then, enabled them to complete over 90 percent of their scheduled flights. But Post Office bureaucrats be­came openly critical of the pilots when the service expanded westward across the “hell stretch” of the Alleghenies, and the efficiency norms estab­lished on the original WashingtonNew York corridor proved impossible to maintain. All-weather capability was only a distant dream in 1919, de­spite what the bureaucrats thought.

In the second year of airmail operations, government officials came to expect and demand a high percentage of completed flights. Most of the pressure came from two men: Postmaster General Burleson and Otto Praeger, the assistant postmaster general in charge of the airmail.

Burleson was a politician from Texas whose loyalty to Woodrow Wilson had won him the Post Office appointment in 1913. Early in Wilson’s first ad­ministration, Burleson had been an important man, but as time passed and weightier matters (such as the World War) occupied the President, Burle­son found himself increasingly pushed into the background.

Burleson was looking for a scheme by which he could regain his lost clout. He decided upon the Air Mail Service. Together Burleson and his crony Praeger, a paunchy, bespectacled newspaperman from Texas whose only qualification for office was his friendship with Burleson, pushed hard to make the airmail a success.

Burleson never tired of bragging that under his administration the Post Office had produced annual surpluses of as high as $20 million, and he claimed he had accomplished this by “eliminating wasteful and extrava­gant methods of operation and making no expenditure for which ade­quate service has not been rendered.” In his annual message to Congress in June 1919, Burleson declared: “The high standard of daily perfect flight is being maintained regardless of weather conditions.”

Praeger was a carbon copy of his boss when it came to pinching pen­nies, and he was equally ignorant of aviation. He once told a convention of aeronautical engineers that “a commercial flying machine should be able to land in a city lot near the heart of town, instead of on a 40-acre field out where the commuters live.” This combination of ignorance and tight-fistedness set Burleson and Praeger on a collision course with the pilots.

In midsummer 1919, the East Coast experienced a period of extremely bad weather, but Post Office supervisors, most of whom were not pilots, insisted that the pilots fly as usual. As a result, there were 15 crashes, two of them fatal, in the two-week period just before Smith refused to fly. The deaths forced the pilots of the Eastern Division to hold a series of meetings during which they decided to assert what they regarded as the pilot’s prerogative to determine whether or not the weather was flyable. They had precedent on their side, for even the Army allowed its pilots some discre­tion in this area. The pilots agreed that if one pilot refused to fly, all of them would refuse to fly. When Leon Smith said “no,” they were as good as their word, and the strike was on.

Post Office officials knew there was some discontent among the pilots, chiefly because of problems with the aircraft, but they routinely brushed aside complaints. The pilots wanted to continue using both DH-4s and Jennys because the lighter and smaller Jenny was better for low-altitude flight in bad weather. The Jenny carried the lightweight, dependable Hispano-­Suiza 150-horsepower engine, and it could fly much more slowly, thereby giving the pilot greater reaction time when hedgehopping under a low-cloud ceiling.

The Post Office wanted to phase out the Jenny in order to standardize its operations with the larger and faster DH-4, which the government had available in considerable surplus from the war. A further complication arose because the Curtiss Company had modified the DH-4 to carry the liquid-cooled Liberty engine, which had also been mass produced too late in the war to see service. The trouble was that the Curtiss modification didn’t work very well, and the Liberty-equipped DH-4s had a nasty habit of overheating, especially at low altitude. Pilots with gallows humor some­times referred to the DH-4s as “flaming coffins.”

Eventually, and partly because of the fuss they were making, the pilots got the DH-4 modified to suit them, and toward the end of its service ca­reer they were very pleased with it. Rube Wagner, who joined the Air Mail Service in 1923, recalls:

The DH had big wheels on it, so you could land it anyplace where you’d land a Jenny. But it was heavy, the engine was over 400 pounds sitting big and long out in the nose. Eventually it worked all right, when they got the timing gear fixed. They built a stub-tooth gear for it and made that engine all but foolproof. That Lib­erty 12 engine was running just like a clock toward the end. We hated to give it up.

What the pilots really wanted, of course, was a completely new mail plane designed and built specifically for their use. J. L. (Larry) Driggs, president of The American Flying Club, an association of aeronautical en­gineers, supported the pilots’ criticism of the DH-4 by declaring: “If the pilots themselves have found the DH-4 unfit and unsafe, then their word should be taken in preference to that of the engineers at Curtiss who supervised the alterations.” But Driggs’s sensible advice made no impact on the economy-minded Burleson and Praeger, who were determined to use up the available supply of surplus Liberty-equipped DH-4s.

But if the Post Office wouldn’t buy new aircraft, the pilots at least wanted the DH-4s properly equipped with instruments. Here, too, they ran into opposition. Because they were expected to fly in bad weather, the pilots requested that the Post Office purchase “stabilators,” primitive needle-and-ball-type turn-and-bank indicators for their aircraft. The devices cost only about $75 each, but Praeger turned down the request, advising the pilots: “Steer by compass. Turn indicators are too expensive.” This was almost the last straw.

Praeger had heard that the pilots were in a fighting mood, and he was more than ready to tangle with them. When he learned that Smith and Lee had refused to fly, he issued a press release approving their firing, citing postal regulations for letter carriers as justification.

Upon receiving a telegram of protest signed only “Air Pilots,” Praeger warned the pilots that by sending an anonymous telegram they were “conspiring against the government.” The pilots replied in an open letter released to the press that it was not conspiracy “to avoid killing oneself for the sake of a two-cent stamp,” whereupon Praeger huffily informed the press that the Post Office would be master in its own house. “These pilots came into the service as every other pilot,” he said, “with knowledge that they must comply with orders, and where flying conditions are such that they cannot operate, they have the option to resign. If they refuse, removal must be made!”

Sympathizing with the underdog pilots, the reporters asked a series of hostile, probing questions that succeeded in nettling Praeger. Finally, flustered and angered, Praeger admitted that there had been a series of bad crashes in the weeks preceding the strike, but he shrugged it off as “something which happens all the time.” When asked a question about stabila­tors, Praeger insisted that they were not commercially available. He added pompously that he would never recognize a pilots’ union, nor would he ever have to, because there were “other pilots aplenty.” All in all, Praeger’s performance was a public relations disaster.

Praeger had a long history of hostility to labor organizations, as might be expected of a former editor of the conservative Dallas Morning News. He was apparently resolute in his intention to break the strike by replacing every pilot, if it came to that. Indeed, the Post Office had a backlog of hun­dreds of applications from pilots who wanted work.

Praeger even tried to arouse patriotic resentment against the pilots by saying that criticism of the DH-4 constituted a “calumny on our aeroplane industry.” In so doing, he revealed his own ignorance. Most of the pilots had distinguished war records, and the DH-4 was not an American plane at all. It was a British design manufactured under license in the United States.
The upshot of Praeger’s pomposity and bungling, which the press faith­fully reported in headline stories, was that public opinion shifted strongly in favor of the pilots. The pilots were popular and glamorous figures. There was strong support for them in Congress and growing criticism of Praeger.

Two standing committees in the House announced that they would investigate, and Halvor Steenerson, chairman of the powerful Post Office Committee, announced that he would personally investigate the firings, which under Civil Service rules required a hearing that Praeger had re­fused to grant. In general, the pilots struck a sympathetic chord when they issued a public manifesto declaring: “We will insist that the man who risks his own life be the judge—not somebody who stays on the ground and risks other people’s lives.”

Burleson and Praeger were considerably taken aback by the adverse reaction to their hard line against the pilots. Although they had wanted to attract the President’s attention, this wasn’t exactly what they had in mind. In response to a request from the White House for information, Praeger tried to smooth the whole thing over by saying: “This represents one of those cases where the newspapers misled the public by printing only one side of a case” (a lament that has a curiously modern ring). But he quickly backed down under the mounting pressure and showed signs of adopting a more moderate tone in his dealings with the pilots.

Largely because of the efforts of Charles I. Stanton, the superintendent of the airmail (himself a pilot, although not a regular airmail pilot), the pilots went back to work on July 26, four days after Smith had refused to fly. Working feverishly behind the scenes while Praeger made a fool of himself in public, Stanton had arranged a deal whereby if the pilots went back to work, either Praeger or the postmaster general would meet with a com­mittee of their representatives to discuss grievances.

By the time the conference between Praeger and the pilot committee was held in Washington on July 27, the pilots’ position had been greatly strengthened by events reported the previous day in the New York Times. A reporter had investigated Praeger’s earlier assertion that he had not bought stabilators because they were not available and found that, as the pilots insisted all along, they were commercially available. He reported: “Today they [the Post Office] agreed to buy some.” The story made Praeger appear to be either a fool or a liar. Many pilots insisted that he was both.

Despite the pilots’ strong position, however, they emerged from the conference with only half a victory. Praeger had agreed in advance to discuss a pay raise, although pay had not been directly at issue in the dispute, perhaps because he wanted to use the carrot-and-stick technique on the pilots. The pay raise was to be his carrot. On the crucial question of weather, there was a compromise. Praeger agreed to hire as field managers pilots who would, in case of dispute, go aloft to demonstrate that the weather was flyable.

Praeger then agreed to a small pay raise, but there was a quid pro quo: there had to be a sacrificial lamb to satisfy his pride. That lamb was to be Leon Smith, who had earlier described Praeger as a “damned donkey.” Lee was rehired, and the pilot committee wanted to hang tough on Smith, but it finally agreed to make his rehiring the “subject of further discussion.” Pending that discussion, Smith took to barnstorming, making news when he took a 106-year-old Indian woman for a ride at a county fair in Batavia, N.Y., a few months later.

The pilots learned two crucial lessons from the strike: first, they needed some kind of organization, or structure, through which they could communicate with each other and protect themselves; second, they needed a leader, someone from among their own number who was willing to step forward and stick his neck out by acting as spokesman.

They tried to satisfy the first requirement by forming the Air Mail Pilots of America, but it was a weak, unaffiliated organization that soon folded. They tried to get around the leadership problem by hiring a lawyer, but that proved too expensive. The pilots did little else, and as a result, within a few months they were faced again with the same old problem of officials making decisions that showed no understanding of the risks of flying. In one case, an “efficiency rating system” was instituted based on ground speed, which forced the pilots to compete with each other and obviously encouraged them to take chances.

Despite their failure to put together any lasting organization, the pilots knew what needed to be done. Years later, after the Air Mail Service had been phased out and most airmail pilots had gone to work for the new private airlines, most of them strongly supported some kind of pilots’ association.

At the time of the strike, Dave Behncke was an unknown pilot trying to make a living selling rides and barnstorming in his surplus Jenny. When he emerged to assume the crucial leadership role in forming the organization that became the Air Line Pilots Association, the old airmail pilots were the rock upon which he built. They remembered the strike of 1919, and Behncke could always depend on them to sell the concept. Stories about “Fat Otto” Praeger usually got the point across to younger pilots that union­ization was the key to survival.

As for Leon Smith, he was never rehired despite Praeger’s promise that there would be further discussions. Eventually he disappeared into obscurity—the first martyr in the struggle of the piloting profession to protect itself. He would not be the last.

To Chapter 5

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