Chapter 7
The Perils of Washington
The idea of establishing a political presence in
Behncke had, in short, chosen to live by the sword of political influence. It was a risky step because ALPA’s enemies were big corporations with deep pockets, batteries of lawyers, and lines of connections. There was a possibility that, having chosen to live by the sword of politics, Behncke and ALPA might wind up dying by it.
Although Behncke was the star in those early days, he had an effective supporting cast. What kind of pilot gave up his free time for the headaches of ALPA work—all unpaid in those days?
James H. Roe of Trans World Airlines (TWA) was typical. Now in
his 70s and living in
Within a month of the time I went to work in 1932, a couple of
pilots approached me about ALPA. They didn’t ask me to join, they just mentioned
it during a layover at
I didn’t actually
meet Dave Behncke until I volunteered to go to
One man can’t
cover Congress, so 10 or 15 of us would map out the group of people we wanted to
see and we would just go in. We got to know a lot of politicians, and some of
them became our good friends. We always wore our uniforms; Behncke asked us to.
I think it was effective, although most of us would rather not have. You could
get into an office a little easier and get an appointment. As you know, senators
and congressmen are busy people, and that was especially true during the 1930s
when so much was happening.
For congressional committee hearings, Behncke always liked to
bring along a chorus of uniformed pilots for moral support. Usually Behncke did
the talking, with occasional help from Eddie Hamilton, an ex-airline pilot who
worked as ALPA’s full-time
Jack Frye got up and told them we shouldn’t be paid more for flying faster equipment, that it was not dangerous to cover more miles and fly through more weather. We had just started flying new Lockheeds, so I said, “Will you please tell us why four pilots have been killed in them recently?”
Well, that did
it! Frye was waiting for me out in the hall. I had come to the hearings on a
pass. Frye said, “I’m yanking your pass!” Then Pat Patterson, who was president
on United, came up to me and said “Lex, you come back to
In the history of ALPA’s struggle to create a presence in
It began as a seemingly
classic case of the good guys vs. the bad guys, with FDR and the New Deal
playing hero while Herbert Hoover and the airline operators played villain.
After a series of spectacular hearings chaired by Sen. (later Supreme Court
Justice) Hugo A. Black, FDR canceled the airmail contracts
Postmaster General Jim Farley had urged FDR to cancel the airmail contracts, but he miscalculated. Farley had intended to reopen the contracts after a short interval, and this time to make sure the airmail money was spread around. On the other hand, FDR, who loved to experiment, started toying with the idea of reestablishing the old Post Office Air Mail Service, complete with its own pilots, planes, and airfields. In the interim, FDR ordered the Army to fly the mail.
After a rocky start, the Army did a pretty good job. In the beginning Army pilots were poorly prepared to fly the mail regularly, and there were some fatal crashes. Because of the depression, peacetime Army pilots were limited to about four hours of flying a month. Even that had to be in good weather because the Army feared that bad weather flying might result in the loss of scarce aircraft. Although most Army pilots had received some rudimentary instrument instruction during flight training, most of the operational aircraft they flew in those days had no modern instrumentation. A few Army pilots managed to stay current by volunteering for Department of Commerce weather research flying, but such billets were extremely scarce. As a result, only a few Army pilots had flown any instruments at all after winning their wings. To complicate matters, the winter of 1934 was exceptionally severe.
“There we were,” wrote Robert L. Scott, a West Pointer who had
been assigned to a Curtiss Falcon squadron after training, “about to start
flying the mail in tactical planes with open cockpits in the blizzards of the
Although the Army pilots learned to cope with the airmail on a
reduced schedule after they got better equipment, there was an immediate outcry
over the fatal crashes. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., calls this outcry the
New Deal’s first public relations setback. It seemed that every prominent
aviator in
It was front-page stuff—a lot of heavy debate, wild charges, and good old-fashioned political hot air. In this volatile environment, when it seemed that everyone else was losing his head, Dave Behncke kept his. Coolly and calmly, he almost single-handedly turned the airmail crisis of 1934 to the benefit of ALPA and the fledgling profession of airline piloting.
From Behncke’s point of view it was all a matter of power: FDR had it, and Behncke wanted a share of it. He knew that FDR would come out on top of this little battle, and he wanted ALPA to be in the winner’s corner.
For this reason Behncke publicly applauded FDR. The President’s actions, Behncke told a press conference, “are regarded by the pilots, who are perhaps closer to the industry than any other group, as being the soundest and most constructive move yet taken in the entire history of air commerce.”
With every prominent aviator
in the country screaming for FDR’s blood, Behncke figured it wouldn’t make much
sense to join the pack. FDR was notorious for punishing his enemies and
rewarding his friends. When the dust finally cleared, ALPA stood out as the only
group inside the industry supporting FDR. Behncke got his reward—a federally
guaranteed minimum wage for airline pilots in the new Air Mail Act of 1935.
Behind these simple facts, however, lies a plan carefully calculated and
skillfully played out by ALPA’s founder.
The cancellations had come as a great shock to Behncke. He was in
Behncke had no alternative but to return to
Behncke had become a familiar figure in
The cancellations had thrown many pilots out of work. The Army took back on active duty some who still held reserve commissions, but most found themselves either on reduced work schedules or not flying at all. WAE furloughed its entire pilot force and ceased all operations. By early March 1934 nearly one-third of ALPA’s members were out of work. Despite considerable grumbling in the ranks, Behncke stood firm in his support of FDR. He tried to alleviate the unemployment problem by encouraging the Army to hire all airline pilots as a temporary reserve force for flying the mail. But most airline pilots didn’t want to become government pilots again. They much preferred working for their civilian employers.
Behncke repeatedly told his pilots to lay low, to trust his
judgment, to put up with being temporarily out of work. He was on thin ice, but
he insisted that FDR would take care of them if they remained loyal and did not
join the attacks on the New Deal. “I’m a strong
Behncke figured that FDR would eventually be forced to restore the airmail contracts to the private operators. The crucial thing, from ALPA’s point of view, was to make sure that when the airmail contracts were written, the pilots would receive a slice of the pie; only FDR could guarantee that result.
While Behncke publicly sided with the President, privately he was urging that the established airlines be given another chance. Underneath the public show of support for FDR, Behncke was alarmed at the prospect of Postmaster General Farley allowing the small operators back into the airmail business. The small airlines paid notoriously low wages, and they were difficult to organize. So with masterful equivocation, Behncke urged that when new contracts were awarded, the government set “minimum specifications” to keep out “shoestring” operators.
Behncke’s position was almost identical to that of Walter F. Brown, Herbert Hoover’s much-abused postmaster general. The only difference was that Behncke stressed safety, while Brown stressed efficiency. In essence, ALPA’s welfare and the welfare of the old, established operators were mutual. Once again, as in the Century strike of 1932, Behncke and the established airline operators who had lost their contracts joined forces in a temporary alliance.
Behncke guessed right: In March 1934 FDR announced that he would restore the airmail service to private operators. He really had no choice. The Army’s business, after all, was national defense, not flying the mail. And with the country in the midst of its worst depression, it didn’t make much sense to spend a lot of money recreating the old Post Office Air Mail Service.
When FDR reopened the airmail contract bidding, he exacted his
political revenge in two ways. First, he insisted on the reorganization of the
airlines involved in the so-called “spoils conferences” that preceded
Second, he insisted that the new airmail contracts specify wages
and working conditions for pilots. Of all the operators, only Patterson of
United, Behncke’s boss, supported the inclusion of a minimum wage law. Behncke
stayed in
Anybody who has ever delved even superficially into ALPA’s history or into the subject of pilot compensation has heard about Decision 83. What was it, and why was it so important?
ALPA owes its existence to the desire of the early operators to abolish, once and for all, the old Post Office system of pilot compensation. Some of the new private contractors continued paying their pilots (many of whom had been flying the routes for the Air Mail Service) in the same way as the Post Office. That is, they paid their pilots a monthly base (or minimum guarantee), plus so much per mile, with added increments for night and hazardous terrain flying. A Post Office pilot could earn as much as $1,000 per month, and salary levels stayed pretty much the same on some airlines until the bottom dropped out of the economy in 1929. Suddenly, operators had to cut costs, and pilots’ salaries were first on their hit list.
When rumors of the impending
“pay adjustment” began circulating in 1929, talk of forming a union gained
momentum. By the time talk had given way to action and Dave Behncke and his
cohorts were secretly collecting signed, undated letters of resignation (or
“pledges”), most pilots would probably have accepted some reduction in pay if
the old Post Office system had remained basically intact. But the operators were
having none of that. They wanted either a straight hourly or monthly wage,
stripped of all the little extras that in their opinion made pilot salaries so
excessive. From the pilots’ point of view, a straight monthly salary was
unacceptable because it made no allowance for different types of flying, routes,
or equipment. A few airlines, such as Northwest Airlines (NWA) and Pan American
Airways (PAA), had used the monthly basis of pay from the beginning, and the
pilots there definitely did not like it.
For pilots with foresight, an hourly system was no good because in the future it would almost surely deprive them of productivity gains associated with flying new, faster aircraft. They resolved to fight.
The focal point of this resistance was on TWA and UAL (United Aircraft Corporation; later United Airlines). On TWA, a pilot named Hal George led the resistance. He had nearly as much to do with creating ALPA as Dave Behncke did. Had he lived, the TWA pilots might well have been spared a lot of misery. Howard Hall remembers Hal George well:
He was a very purposeful man, very good at the word-of-mouth
stuff it took to get things rolling. He got killed because of a fluke. He was
flying the Northrop Alpha from
Well, the weather was bad and he got into a bunch of ice. He got down in the
Allegheny River over just east of
After Hal’s death, I became the primary go-between for ALPA on TWA. Based at
On UAL, Dave Behncke had much
better luck collecting the letters of resignation he intended to use as
bargaining chips. In fact, Behncke’s activities on UAL provided something of a
laboratory for the techniques he would use later to create ALPA on a broader
stage. He rented a room in the Morrison Hotel on June 19, 1931, and
surreptitiously spread the word that every UAL pilot interested in stopping the
pay cut should meet there at a designated hour. The pilots who showed up to hear
what Behncke planned to do with their pledges were so afraid of being discovered
that they blocked the keyholes with toilet paper.
Behncke had a lot going for
him—a wide acquaintance among pilots, a reputation for trustworthiness, and
demonstrated leadership qualities from his days in the late 1920s as governor of
the Central District of the old National Air Pilots Association. Also working in
his favor was the general decline in pilots’ working conditions, pay, and status
during the first full year of the depression.
At the Morrison Hotel meeting, Behncke got the assent of his fellow UAL pilots to confront management directly. The plan was for Behncke to present their signed, undated “escrow” resignations to management, with the warning that if their salaries were cut, they would shut down the airline. They knew it was a long shot, that they could not win a protracted struggle and would eventually have no choice but to come back to work at a lower salary and on the company’s terms, if it would have them, but they signed up anyway. The mimeographed pledge Behncke persuaded his fellow UAL pilots to sign read as follows:
Enclosed you will find my
letter of resignation. The time of the resignation is left blank. I hereby
empower you to deliver my resignation to said employer anytime you see fit.
Particularly in the event that any United Aircraft Corporation pilot should be
discharged because of the movement now under way to protect the interests,
working conditions, wages, and hours of pilots. I hereby authorize you to
negotiate for and on my behalf with my employer in all matters concerning my
working conditions, wages, and hours, and to enter into an agreement with my
employer binding myself to service when agreed to by majority vote.
In the event that you should see fit to deliver the enclosed resignation, I hereby agree to cease working at the time designated by you and not to return to work until your committee has so desired. The above authority is granted to you for a period of one year from date.
The mock legalese of this pledge bears the unmistakable stamp of Behncke’s rambling rhetorical style. Behncke, as the ringleader and spokesman, was in grave danger. He fully expected his brother UAL pilots to stand behind him, but obviously could not be sure that they would.
Behncke was gambling his whole career at this point, and he knew it. It was a nervy, courageous, possibly foolhardy move, but something in Behncke’s psychological makeup drove him to accept this kind of challenge, perhaps even to relish it. In a May 31, 1931, letter to George Douglass (“Mr. V”—from Varney Airlines), Behncke wrote grimly:
The slight standards we have maintained in the past have been maintained only at the expense of a few leaders fighting fearlessly and alone for the good of all. About half have the guts to stand in line, and the other half must be kept there through the medium of a heavy boot. I feel that the right kind of organization will serve as the boot.
Personally, I am either going to nail this fight up for good and all through the medium of an effective line pilot’s organization, or fold up for all time and start selling peanuts—and I don’t like peanuts!!
Behncke’s vision of this new airline pilots’ organization was that it would be solely for working airline pilots—barnstormers, crop dusters, and miscellaneous commercial pilots need not apply. Furthermore, he insisted that it cut across company lines to include all airline pilots, regardless of their employer. He was also determined that all airline pilots receive the same pay for flying similar routes and equipment, regardless of which airline he worked for, whether it was a major “trunk” carrier or a fly-by-night “shoestring” outfit such as Long & Harmon down in Texas.
In early July 1931, just before rumor had it that UAL was going
to unilaterally impose the new “reformed” pay scale, Behncke asked for and
received an audience with the
UAL’s management was flabbergasted. They had no idea that the
long-rumored unionization of their pilots had gotten so far, and they were
hesitant to stick their necks out by reacting to it too quickly. For reasons
that have never been fully explained, UAL’s management proved conciliatory. They
didn’t promise not to reduce pay, but they did promise to consult with
the pilots before instituting any changes. Compared with the negative reception
Hal George and the TWA pilots received at
Clearly, the pay issue underlay the creation of ALPA, but the
mere existence of a union, particularly a small unaffiliated one, would never be
enough to thwart a major corporation. If ALPA were to survive and be effective,
it had to have the backing of the larger labor movement, either an affiliation
with the AF of L or the Railroad Brotherhoods. Behncke ultimately decided on the
AF of L and proceeded to get a “charter” from it at the annual meeting in
The Key Men ultimately ratified the affiliation with the AF of L (although at first they kept it a secret from the rest of the membership), and this act was the key to ALPA’s entry into the NLB’s jurisdiction and, finally, Decision 83. If ALPA had not joined the AF of L, it would have lacked the necessary connections to have its case heard.
In December 1932, during the
dying days of Herbert Hoover’s administration, Postmaster General Walter F.
Brown announced sharply reduced airmail subsidies to the contractors. This move
was undeniably political, made in direct response to President-elect Roosevelt’s
criticism of
The immediate impact of this subsidy reduction was to pinch the airmail operators so hard that they had no choice but to cut pilot salaries to the bone. It was either that or reduce stockholders’ dividends, which was unthinkable.
The average pilot of that era was intimately concerned with his airline’s economic survival and at times would be willing to make substantial sacrifices to help his employer. The focal point of this managerial mentality among airline pilots was on the small airlines, whose owners often poor-mouthed their pilots into believing that any raise or failure to accept a reduction in pay would lead to the company’s speedy collapse.
Combating this kind of thinking was one of Behncke’s early
challenges. Behncke probably distrusted airline managers more than any pilot in
The August 1933 National Recovery Administration (NRA) “Code” hearings did indeed propose a uniform national pay scale for airline pilots. But that scale was so low and the monthly hourly requirements so high that Behncke fought successfully to have the pilots excluded from it.
Title III of the operators’ draft proposal code called for 140 hours per month as the maximum a pilot could fly, and $250 per month as the minimum salary. President Lester D. Seymour of AAL (American Airways; later American Airlines) testified that these figures were “fixed with consideration for the smaller operators,” and he insisted that the major operators would never pay their pilots such low salaries or work them so hard.
Fiorello LaGuardia, who was then running for mayor of
With ALPA out of the Air Transport Code, the operators, who had been talking about reducing pilot salaries for so long, saw no reason to delay it any further. Now Behncke was faced with a genuine dilemma.
The NLB, which was the logical place for Behncke to appeal, was set up as an agency of the NRA solely to adjudicate differences arising under different interpretations of the code—which ALPA wasn’t in! How, then, could Behncke possibly expect the NLB to hear ALPA’s case?
Behncke was determined to have
his cake and eat it, too. Early in September 1933, just after the signing of the
Air Transport Code, the operators formally announced that they were instituting
the new pay system, and ALPA be damned. Behncke played his last card—he
threatened a national strike!
It was a desperate gamble, one that would have wrecked ALPA completely had it come to pass. Fortunately, the operators took it seriously. As UAL’s James Belding recalls:
I think it was about September 1933 when the threatened national
strike came along. I was flying the Monomail down in
I
came back out to the field that night to take my return trip to
Well, no sooner did I hit the field than they said, “Well, the National Labor Board has taken over and the strike is off.”
William M. Leiserson, secretary of NLB, had agreed to take on the airline pay dispute because Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins had been persuaded by William Green, president of the AF of L, to ask him to do so. The reasoning under which the NLB adopted the case lay in an obscure clause of NRA’s enabling legislation that “no industry operating under a code shall reduce pay levels below the precode level.” It was of no consequence that the intent of the act was clearly to cover workers in a code, which pilots weren’t. What mattered were the connections and the muscle of the AF of L, which Behncke made use of—and not for the last time either.
After the crisis had passed Behncke admitted that if it had actually come to a strike, ALPA would have been finished:
I believe that American Airways was the best balanced. They were pretty much together, and I believe they would have walked out to the last man. TWA would have collapsed completely, and I know that on United everything south and east of Chicago would have gone out, and west of Chicago it would have been just about half.
The only way you can keep a striking element in line is to keep them informed. I figured it would cost $1,000 a day to conduct the strike, and our treasury had $5,000, so we would have lasted about five days. After that, our communications would have been cut. We would have been completely broken.
Once again, under nearly impossible odds, Behncke had staved off defeat. There was big trouble in ALPA, nevertheless, for the mere threat of a nationwide strike had been sufficient to unravel some shaky locals, particularly on TWA. It was at this time that one of ALPA’s early stalwarts, Waldon “Swede” Golien, charter member and then current master executive council chairman, led the defection to a company union, “The TWA Pilots Association.”
Things went poorly for the operators from the very beginning of the NLB hearings, mostly because of the situation on TWA. There was a predisposition in the early New Deal years for government agencies to favor labor over management, and the underdog aviators caught the fancy of several NLB members, particularly Sen. Robert Wagner of New York, who wanted to know more about this “TWA Pilots’ Association.” A TWA lawyer named Henry Hogan all but ruined the operators during one exchange over the legitimacy of the company union. Hogan’s curiously detailed knowledge of the TWA pilots’ letters of resignation from ALPA provoked this exchange:
WAGNER: How did you happen to see these letters of resignation?
HOGAN: Because I represent the company and the letters were sent to us.
WAGNER: You are not an officer of the Association. Why should they send letters to you? How did they know the company was interested in them?
HOGAN: If you were a pilot you could answer that.
WAGNER: What? No. It might indicate that the company was evidencing a little interest in their resigning, and that is something you ought not to be interested in because it is none of your business. When a man working for a concern is a member of a union and he resigns and then hurries to tell his employer—well now, I am not a child! That sort of thing must stop. Certain rights are given to them under the law, to organize, and you must not discriminate against them. This is a new era. We are not living in an old century. You must not intimidate them.
The various airline presidents in attendance squirmed in their seats as their high-priced legal talent, hired to keep them out of trouble, proceeded to get them in it. J. Bruce Kremer, a managerial spokesman for UAL, told Wagner: “Candidly, Senator, knowing their fearless spirit, I think a man shows a great deal of temerity who tries to intimidate any of them.”
To which Wagner replied: “It doesn’t take much courage to fire a man, and this sort of thing must stop or we will see to it that there are no more liberal subsidies.”
Now that was a threat, to cut off mail subsidies—enough to make any airline operator pro-union. The assembled airline managers promptly assured Wagner that on their lines, nobody was intimidating pilots. “We consider our pilots to be in a class at least semiprofessional,” one executive explained (italics added).
The NLB hearing before Judge Bernard Shientag of the New York State Supreme Court subsequently arrived at Decision 83. His compromise decision set the monthly maximum flight time at 85 hours, which was what Behncke had been pushing for all along. On the troublesome pay question, he gave in to the operators by establishing a basic hourly pay, which would increase with the speed of the aircraft, plus a small mileage increment.
The operators were shocked. Decision 83 gave the pilots an automatic share of any productivity gains associated with new aircraft, something they believed should accrue exclusively to stockholders. Although Behncke had originally opposed a straight hourly wage, he was willing to accept one because it was geared to the speed of the aircraft.
The NLB staff subsequently converted Judge Shientag’s formula into a scale matched to each aircraft type, and on Dec. 15, 1933, they presented it to the full NLB. Although Behncke was pleased with it, the operators were not, but there was really nothing they could do about it.
By the time Behncke decided that Decision 83 was the “something definite” about pilot pay he wanted included in the new Air Mail Act of 1935, the very existence of NRA, and all its subsidiaries like NLB, was under legal challenge in the courts. Eventually the entire NRA would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Behncke had to hurry if he was going to salvage the pilots’ pay provisions from the sinking ship.
By 1934 NLB was practically defunct, and Decision 83 had no legal
standing. It was for this reason that Behncke stayed in
In May 1934 the private operators were once again flying the mail and ALPA’s members were back at work. Behncke’s strategy had paid off. Largely because Behncke and ALPA were his only supporters inside the industry during the airmail crisis, FDR paid his debt to Behncke by calling for the inclusion of the Decision 83 formula in any new airmail legislation passed by Congress.
By early 1934 a consensus was forming in favor of a full-time professional staff for ALPA. Everyone knew that satisfactory progress would be much more difficult in the future if ALPA continued doing things as cheaply as it had in the past. As a growing membership increased dues revenue, most pilots seemed ready to fulfill a prophecy made by the legendary AAL pilot M.D. “Doc” Ator, who told the 1931 convention of Key Men: “I do not think we should be lenient on dues. This organization has got to be high-class. I might be wrong, but I think we are going to need high-powered men, and they are going to cost us money. This is going to be a damned expensive organization, but we can afford to put this money out for future protection.”
In March 1934 the Central Executive Council authorized a mail
ballot on the question of making Behncke the full-time president of ALPA. The
response was overwhelmingly in the affirmative. Even the most uninvolved airline
pilot of 1934 could hardly help but appreciate the things Behncke had achieved
since 1931. Likewise, the nation’s airline pilots realized it wasn’t fair to
expect “old Dave” to spend his days getting a Boeing 247D to
No one could be certain what the future held, but it was obvious that more battles lay ahead and that the gains of the past year were far from secure. ALPA’s workload would surely increase, and a part-time operation wouldn’t be able to handle it. Already looming were potential enforcement problems. What could ALPA do if some hard-nosed bush-league airline simply refused to pay its pilots the scale mandated by Decision 83? The question was about to become more than rhetorical.