[On January 12th, 1932, Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. So for the 90th anniversary of that historic occasion, this week I’ll AmericanStudy Caraway and a handful of other political women—share your thoughts and your own nominees for an egalitarian crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
On one of the
most famous American flights, and one that should be.
Our national fascination with Amelia Earhart (1897-1937)—I think you
could make a case that she’s the most famous 20th century American
woman—is entirely understandable. Even before she flew off into the unknown just a
few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday, she was a hugely unique and compelling
figure who also happened to live at precisely the right time: that era of the
first prominent pilots, of the Red Baron and Charles Lindbergh (one of
Earhart’s nicknames was “Lady Lindy”) and Howard
Hughes, of those terrifyingly fragile-looking planes making their way
across the continent and the oceans. And beyond the mythologies, of Earhart’s
individual mystery and of those high-flying national figures in general, she
was also a genuinely complex
and interesting American, one whose identity can help us AmericanStudiers
think about technology and progress, the aftermath of World War I and the lead
up to World War II, gender and identity, and many other topics besides.
Yet I’d still make the case that Earhart’s final journey has
some serious competition for the most significant flight featuring an American
woman, and at the very least that her competitor’s flight, like her competitor
herself, deserves a lot more attention in our national narratives and memories.
In March 1941, Eleanor
Roosevelt (1884-1962), whose husband Franklin was just beginning his third
term as President under the very dark cloud of the ongoing Second World War, visited the Tuskegee Air Corps Advanced
Flying School in Tuskegee, Alabama. Self-taught pilot Charles
Anderson had founded the school for African American civilian pilot
training two years earlier, and was facing in his attempts to support and
extend its efforts all of the discrimination and lack of funding and the like
that we might expect in the depths of the Jim Crow South and in an era when the
military itself (like so many organizations) was fully segregated. And so when
the nation’s First Lady not only visited the school, but despite the protests
of her Secret Service agents requested
a private flight with Anderson and spent over an hour in the sky with him,
the event took on a literal and a symbolic significance that is difficult to
overstate. Nor was this a one-off for Roosevelt, as she facilitated a White
House visit for Anderson and others later that year where they successfully
lobbied for more military support and collaboration for Tuskegee.
The thousands of pilots who would graduate from Tuskegee
over the next few years and become part of the Tuskegee Airmen, and what that community
meant for both America’s war efforts and toward President Truman’s 1948
desegregation of the armed forces, is a rich and powerful AmericanStudies topic
in its own right, and one about which I
wrote in this post. But Roosevelt’s March 1941 flight likewise serves as a
particularly salient single linchpin for her candidacy for my Hall
of American Inspiration. While I don’t doubt that Roosevelt’s name is
familiar to most Americans, I nonetheless believe that, as has been the case
for all of my nominees, our narratives greatly underrate the striking breadth
and depth of her contributions to American and world identity and history: from
the nearly 100 columns
she wrote for national magazines during her years in the White House to her
service as one of America’s first Delegates to the UN General Assembly, her
pioneering work as the inaugural
chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights (work that culminated in the
“Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” a document that Roosevelt called “the
international Magna Carta of all mankind”) to her chairing (the year before she
died) of President Kennedy’s groundbreaking President’s
Commission on the Status of Women, and in many other arenas and ways
alongside these efforts (including her work throughout the 1920s on behalf of
the Women’s
Trade Union League), Roosevelt was for more than three decades one of
America’s brightest lights and most powerful voices.
Amelia Earhart
is largely an a-political figure, one whose appeal has (or at least can have)
nothing to do with politics or with narratives that can divide as well as unite
Americans; I know that it is and might always be impossible to say the same of
Eleanor Roosevelt, or of any First Lady. Yet a moment like that 1941 flight
with Anderson has nothing whatsoever to do with politics, and the more we can
remember and highlight such moments, and the inspiring Americans who made them
happen, the more our national community can likewise take flight. Last
political woman tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other political women or moments you’d highlight?
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