Authors: Tom D. Crouch
Orville believed that Crane’s evidence, and the evidence of common sense, would prevail. If Whitehead had really flown one half mile in 1901 or seven miles in 1902, why did he abandon that machine in favor of gliders designed by other men almost a decade before? If he had flown in 1901, why could he not do so thereafter?
In October 1937, Orville remarked to writer Fred Black that he suspected Stella Randolph’s book had “originated in the mind of A. F. Zahm, of whom you already know. He has been quite active in this matter, as I have learned from several sources.” This was not a case of paranoia on Orville’s part. In May 1935, a month before Ms. Randolph’s first article appeared and two years before her book was published, Zahm wrote to Emerson Newell, a leading member of the Curtiss defense team at the time of the Wright-Curtiss suit, requesting any information collected on Whitehead for use in court.
34
Zahm, who was now employed as an aeronautical expert by the Library of Congress, continued his search for material that would support the Whitehead claim, offering a reward to anyone who could provide proof of the story. Such proof was never forthcoming, but Zahm seldom missed an opportunity to argue that the tale was true. In his own self-serving history of early aeronautics,
Early Power-plane Fathers
(1951), he commented that Stella Randolph’s book “evinces notable research,” and concluded that Whitehead “must either be credited with a real flight or denounced as a charlatan. The latter course would be ungracious, indeed repugnant to the code of honor prevailing among reputable men….”
35
Like the Montgomery story, the tale of Gustav Whitehead refused to die. It resurfaced again in 1945 when a radio announcer introduced Charles Whitehead as the son of the man who had invented the airplane.
Liberty
Magazine included the story in an article on the broadcaster, which was reprinted in the July 1945 issue of
Reader’s Digest
.
“The Gustav Whitehead story is too incredible and ridiculous to require serious refutation,” Orville commented to Alexander McSurley of
Aviation News
in 1945. Nevertheless, he responded to the new round of publicity with an article of his own, “The Mythical Whitehead Flights,” published in the August 1945 issue of
U.S. Air Services
. It did not lay the Whitehead issue to rest.
The Whitehead supporters are still with us—livelier than ever. A more militant generation took up the cause in the early 1960s, determined to obtain what they regard as a fair hearing for their case. They found and interviewed the last group of Bridgeport residents who
claimed to have seen Whitehead fly six decades before, and scoured local newspapers for additional information. In spite of their effort, the story has not been materially strengthened since 1937. The tale was not true then and it is not true today. The voices have simply grown louder and more strident.
In recent years, partisans have built and flown a “replica” of the Whitehead machine. The fact that the original drawings and engineering data required for an accurate reproduction no longer exist does not seem to have deterred them. Ironically, the Smithsonian Institution is charged with being so pro-Wright as to refuse to consider the possibility that there might be a kernel of truth in the Whitehead story. That would have tickled Orville.
36
By the end of his life, Orville realized that he would never be able to lay the rival first-flight claims to rest. The problem involved psychology rather than historical truth. However persuasively he might argue, whatever the courts might rule, there would always be someone anxious to defend the cause of yet another candidate for the honor of having been first to fly. The fact that none of those claims has ever been proved does not seem to matter. A. F. Zahm would have been tickled at that.
He would be less pleased by the fact that no one has ever come close to stripping Wilbur and Orville Wright of their title as the inventors of the airplane. The various claimants have had almost no lasting impact on public opinion. The great mass of Americans have never doubted the priority of the Wrights. Nor should they.
T
he twenty-five years during which Orville faced challenges from the Smithsonian, Zahm, Montgomery, and Whitehead also saw him permanently enshrined as one of the great heroes of American history. Medals and awards—among them the American Distinguished Flying Cross and the French Legion of Honor—flowed in from every direction. Between 1915 and 1947 he received a grand total of eleven honorary degrees from colleges and universities in Europe and America, including Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Cincinnati, Earlham, and the University of Munich.
1
Distinguished visitors to Dayton were obliged to call at Hawthorn Hill. The celebrities ranged from Carl Akeley, the big-game hunter and showman, Nobel Laureate Dr. Robert Millikan, poet Carl Sandburg, and physicist Michael Pupin, to such aviation personalities as General William Mitchell, Admiral Richard Byrd, and the great scientist/engineer Theodore von Karman.
The two most memorable visitors were Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Roosevelt. Lindbergh came to Dayton at Orville’s invitation on June 22, 1927, less than a month after he had flown the Atlantic. The stopover was a signal honor. Lindbergh, on his way back to St. Louis for the first time since his triumphant return to New York, had promised his financial backers he would make no further public appearances before returning home.
He landed the
Spirit of St. Louis
at Wright Field, the new Army
Air Corps research and development facility just outside the city limits, where Orville and General William Gilmore were waiting with a car to take them along a parade route through downtown Dayton. When Lindbergh explained his promise, Orville ordered the car driven straight to Hawthorn Hill.
Thousands of Daytonians waiting to catch a glimpse of their hero streamed out to Oakwood. “Dinner was about to be served,” Ivonette Wright Miller recalled,
when from nowhere people began to appear on the front lawn. Soon the front lawn was crowded, then the side lawns and the hillside at the back. It was not a crowd but a mob, pushing and shoving, trampling the flower beds and bushes, climbing trees, all clamoring for a look at Lindbergh. When people came up on the porch, the occupants of the house took refuge on the second floor. But the mob persisted, demanding at least a glimpse of their hero. Finally, Orville Wright, more to save his house from ruin than to gratify the crowds, appealed to Lindbergh, and he made a brief appearance on a little balcony of the front portico, tall and boyish, with Orville Wright at his side. The crowd seemed satisfied and dispersed.
2
The following day, Orville drove Lindbergh down to the laboratory on North Broadway. Harold Miller, who was a member of the small party accompanying them, remembers a moment that typified Orville’s enthusiasm. As they were walking into the building Orville saw a crowd of old friends watching from the street. With an enormous smile on his face, Orville looked at Miller and pointed to Lindbergh with his hand behind his back, scarcely able to control his glee at being seen with the young hero.
3
President Franklin Roosevelt’s visit to Dayton on October 16, 1940, had a very different tone. Orville’s politics are difficult to categorize. He had some faintly socialist notions about production and finance. An admirer of Roosevelt’s, he was deeply honored by an invitation to join the President and James Cox, ex-governor of Ohio and 1920 Democratic candidate for President (with FDR as his running mate), for a parade and tour of Dayton. When the trip was complete, the presidential car drove back to Hawthorn Hill and was about to turn up the long, winding drive. Orville tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder and asked to be let out on the street, preferring not to take the President out of his way.
4
The banquets, medals, awards, honorary degrees, and visits from distinguished guests were only the beginning. The Wright brothers
were the most memorialized Americans of the twentieth century. Of all their countrymen, only Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln have inspired commemorative zeal to match.
The mythic stature attained by the brothers reflected the nature of their achievement. The airplane was not simply a bit of new technology; it was something akin to a miracle. Flight symbolized the most basic human yearnings. To fly was to achieve freedom, control, power, and an escape from restraint.
And the invention came from such an unexpected quarter. The Wrights had no special training in science or engineering. While both were well educated, neither had completed the formal coursework required for his high school diploma. Before the summer of 1899, they seemed the most ordinary of men.
That was part of their fascination. They were the quintessential Americans, whose success seemed compounded of hard work, perseverance, and common sense, with a liberal dollop of Yankee ingenuity—raised to the level of genius. It was Horatio Alger writ large. They were proof that the values of an older America retained their validity in a new, complex, and somewhat frightening world.
The first monument planned to honor the Wrights was to have been built at Huffman Prairie. At the time of Wilbur’s death in 1912, forty prominent Daytonians formed a Wright Memorial Committee to commemorate the events that had occurred there. They proposed to erect two Greek columns, “if possible obtained from the ruins near Athens,” in the middle of the Prairie. The simple columns would be “thoroughly in keeping with the unassuming modesty of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and fittingly mark this historic spot which will be known to posterity as the cradle of aviation.” In spite of Torrence Huffman’s enthusiasm and some interest on the part of the Greek government, the project languished.
5
Early the next year, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum offered his own design. He suggested that the committee commission “a heroic figure, part human, part divine, or rather of a human being transformed into an angelic spirit with wings, typifying man’s mastery of the air.”
6
Nothing came of this proposal either.
The earliest memorial actually built and dedicated to the Wrights stands on the open field of Camp d’Auvours, near Le Mans, where Wilbur flew in 1908. Dedicated in 1912, the great black granite boulder was badly scarred as Allied troops fought their way through this area in 1944, but the simple inscription remains intact:
WILBUR ET ORVILLE WRIGHT
KITTY HAWK, 1903
The American ambassador to France unveiled Paul Landowski’s sculptural tribute to the Wrights, a figure with arms stretched up toward the heavens, in Le Mans in 1920. The French Armée de l’Air dedicated yet another monument on the site of the old Wright flying school at Pau in 1935.
7
The first American monument to the Wrights, a five-foot marble shaft, still stands in the front yard of what was once the Methodist parsonage in Kitty Hawk. In 1927, when the federal government announced plans for a great Wright Brothers National Memorial to be constructed four miles to the south at Kill Devil Hills, the citizens of Kitty Hawk, led by Captain William Tate, raised $210 to mark this spot where the first Wright machine, the 1900 glider, had been assembled and flown. This, they argued, was “the bona fide cradle of aviation.”
8
The little obelisk is seldom seen by the tourists who throng to modern Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head each summer. Kitty Hawk, the tiny fishing village that Wilbur and Orville Wright knew, is a collection of widely spaced houses clustered around a school, post office, and convenience store set a mile back from the main beach road. Ask a local citizen for directions to the Wright brothers’ monument and they will send you to Kill Devil Hills, where the grandest of all memorials to the brothers was finally dedicated in 1932.
It is a lovely thing, a great pylon of Mount Airy granite with wings sculpted into the sides and an aeronautical beacon on top that can be seen for miles around at night. The memorial was conceived in 1926 by Congressman Lindsay Warren as a means of attracting tourist dollars to boost the Outer Banks into the twentieth century.
At the time, the thin chain of sand islands paralleling the North Carolina coast remained, as Orville Wright once remarked, “like the Sahara.” The sole access to the mainland was by ferry, and the only roads on the Banks were wooden “corduroy” affairs that could be moved in response to the shifting sands.
North Carolina legislators and the local members of the Kill Devil Hills Memorial Association agreed that Warren’s proposal was a fine idea. Dayton citizens were not so sure. Fred Marshall, editor of the Dayton-based aviation magazine
Slipstream
, took the lead in the fight against Kill Devil Hills as the site, pointing out that the Outer
Banks remained as remote and inaccessible as they had been in 1903. “Who will ever visit this monument if it is built in the wind swept dunes at Kitty Hawk?”
9
Marshall offered an alternative—“a practical and inspiring” museum to house the 1903 Wright airplane, still on loan to the Science Museum of London. The best spot for such a museum, he suggested, was on a high bluff behind the newly established Wright Field, with a clear view of Huffman Prairie.
Marshall was ignored. A $50,000 appropriation bill introduced by Warren’s ally, Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut, breezed through committee, passed both houses, and was signed into law by President Coolidge on March 2, 1927. Architects Robert Perry Rogers and Alfred Eastman Poor won the $5,000 prize for the monument design. Warren, Bingham, Orville Wright, and Amelia Earhart dedicated the cornerstone on December 17, 1928, in the presence of two hundred “pilgrims” who had braved a series of difficult bus, automobile, and boat rides to reach the site.
10
The Army Quartermaster Corps now had to build the memorial. The first problem facing Captain John A. Gilman, who had recently completed work on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery, and his assistant, Captain W. H. Kindervater, was Kill Devil Hill itself. It was not a hill at all, but a ninety-foot sand dune that was moving across the narrow Outer Banks at a speed of twenty feet a year. During the quarter of a century since 1903, it had traveled some 600 feet toward an eventual resting place in the waters of Currituck Sound. If the dune was to serve as the foundation for a monument, it would have to be permanently stabilized.