There was some discussion as to the wisdom of releasing the latest in research or development in this country in exchange for similar data from abroad, but the admiral settled it characteristically. If you couldn’t keep ahead of the other fellow by resort to your own initiative and enterprise in a free market, he felt, then you certainly couldn’t beat him on a closed circuit. An alert mind could often find something in the other fellow’s research which the other fellow might have missed; and if the other fellow beat you to the punch in your own field, you deserved to lose out. The admiral’s highly competitive spirit kept the whole Bureau on its toes and a word of commendation from him fired his supporters to play better ball than they really knew how.
This general type of leadership seemed to permeate the Washington atmosphere of the middle ’twenties. The team of Harding and Coolidge had been elected to office on the slogan of a “Return to Normalcy.” The American people had tasted the European way in World War I and had found it bitter indeed. Then, after President Harding had died, Mr. Coolidge had taken office and given us an administration founded on New England character and integrity. This had been particularly apparent in the monetary field. We in BUAERO had to supply Admiral Moffett with sound bases for our requests for appropriations, but when we did, the Old Man would come through; he had a rare knack for getting money, especially after he had established the principle of the five-year plan. But we were expected to make our appropriations pay dividends; they weren’t handouts for “social” purposes.
We didn’t pretend to know anything about the obscure theories of economics, but anyone could understand the soundness of Mr. Andrew Mellon’s tax policies. The war had left us with the heaviest debt in the history of the country, and with income taxes at high rates. Mr. Mellon seemed determined to reduce the debt, and to this end he resorted to reduced taxation. Meanwhile Mr. Coolidge sat on the lid in so far as expenses were concerned. In BUAERO we got no sudden slashing, but a quiet mandate that when a vacancy occurred, it would not be filled; the work would either be divided among others or, if unnecessary, be allowed to lapse. And between the two processes, prosperity returned. Reduced taxes made funds available for new enterprises; new enterprises paid new taxes which further reduced the debt. Mr. Mellon now began anticipating this result by further tax reductions, which accelerated the creation of new enterprises and new jobs. And so a boom was born and men talked of the “new economic era.”
With the Morrow Board policy and the Moffett five-year building program as its foundation, and the favorable climate of the new economic era as its medium, American aviation seemed to turn around almost overnight. The surviving domestic companies, impelled by the incentive of constructive competition, began forging ahead with their integrated programs of research, development, and production. Foreign designers who had languished in the bad atmosphere of war-torn Europe now began peddling their know-how in the promised land. Mr. Anthony Fokker, the rough-and-ready Dutch designer of the famous German Fokkers of World War I, appeared with a new transport designed around the Liberty engine. It had a welded-steel tubular fuselage and a thick monoplane wing made of plywood. With the Liberty it could be nothing but a “kluck” but with three Wright Whirlwind air-cooled radials, it was a hot number. When Dick Byrd planned to fly over the North Pole I wangled one of them for him which he used with conspicuous success. The smaller Fokker Universal made history in the Canadian bush.
Igor Sikorsky, who, as a pioneer Russian pilot and constructor, had built the first four-engined bomber but had left revolution-torn Russia for free America, now designed a remarkably efficient big bomber or transport and began developing his twin-engined amphibian. Giuseppe Ballanca, after setting up shop in Wilmington, Delaware, produced a single-engined cargo carrier, designed around a single Wright Whirlwind engine with which Lt. C. C. Champion of BUAERO’s Engine Section, now headed by Henry Mullinix, won all the prizes for speed and efficiency at the Philadelphia national air races.
And a new crop of American designers sprang up almost overnight. Tom Hamilton, of Milwaukee, built a single-motored, high-wing metal monoplane around the Pratt and Whitney Hornet engine and put it into service on many freight routes. Mr. Henry Ford, inspired by zeal to do something concrete for aviation, supported his chief engineer, William Mayo, in the development of the Ford Trimotor—a high-wing, metal monoplane built around three Wright Whirlwinds—and its sale to budding air transport lines at a price which would permit profitable operations. In this Mr. Ford was not prompted by the modern incentive of “tax loss”—that idea had not been born in an era of American initiative and enterprise.
Numerous other enterprisers like Stearman, of Wichita, Kansas, and Stinson, of Detroit, Michigan, began creating private aircraft to exploit the coming boom in personal flying. Many, drawing the analogy with the automobile, were convinced that this boom had already arrived, and began building airports and flying services all over the country. Much of this building was based on shoestring finance, but some of it was sound. And all of it might have made steady progress except for one thing: speculation permeated the sound core of aviation just as it ate at the vitals of all other industry.
Even naval officers, who up until then had seemed to pride themselves on a certain aloofness to the marts of trade, now began dabbling in “the market.” Profits here were sure and swift—provided always you were on the inside. One of our friends had an inside tip on a new graveyard to be constructed within the city limits of Los Angeles, with the advice and consent of the City Council, where profits were quick and sure. The harvest for this enterprise was guaranteed to be as sure as—say, death and taxes. This friend looked down his nose at another man whose mouselike wife had been inveigled by a door-to-door salesman into buying a lot in Long Beach, California. The extra burden of paying for this “investment” was about to break the couple down when someone poked a hole in a nearby piece of ground and the oil field on Signal Hill was born. Now the young wife followed the young husband’s battleship around in her private yacht. But none of this seemed to discourage creative enterprise, like the rising aircraft manufacturing and air-transport industries.
Among the newcomers in the manufacturing field, Donald Douglas and “Dutch” Kindleberger began to stand out. Prior to their advent, most of the newcomers had been alumni of the great Curtiss Aeroplane Company, of Garden City, Long Island. But Glenn L. Martin, an early bird who had pioneered American twin-engined bombers with his famous Martin bomber, had collected a stable of promising colts; Don Douglas, Dutch Kindleberger, and Larry Bell had worked for him until some temperamental disagreement sent all three on independent projects. After that, each concentrated his efforts to outdoing the others, and especially the old master, Glenn Martin. We in BUAERO, sitting as we did at the crossroads, could always get the dirt and low-down from the visiting firemen and, after sifting it and appraising it, use our own judgment in how to make it pay dividends in new development. Intercompany competition mixed up with interservice competition and whirled about in the old slipstream might look disorderly and inefficient, but it was motivated by highly creative impulses.
Admiral Moffett kept his own Bureau on its toes by involving us in all sorts of racing or other projects. Back in Bruce Leighton’s time, BUAERO had given Don Douglas the job of building an experimental single-engined Liberty torpedo-bomber plane—one with extra large tanks for long-range flying. But after Don had produced a masterpiece, the Army Air Service seized upon the type while the Navy dawdled, and the Army had completed the first ’round-the-world flight. This job, a masterpiece of planning and operations, proved such a pronounced success that it gave great impetus to other projects. It also gave the Navy such pain that Admiral Moffett never got over it.