| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Airlines and Air Mail: The Post Office and the Birth of the Commercial Aviation Industry. By F. Robert van der Linden. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. xvi, 349 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8131-2219-8.)

In a thoroughly documented—if occasionally tedious—book, F. Robert van der Linden makes a compelling case that the birth and expansion of the commercial aviation industry was largely a factor of United States Post Office mail routes and mail contracts. The vision for supporting a civilian aviation industry came from Walter Folger Brown, the postmaster general from 1929 to 1933. Van der Linden details Brown's dual objective of having the government enforce fair rates and at the same time maintain the private sector character of commercial airlines.

Using the railroads as a model (often an inappropriate one), Brown found himself excluding smaller carriers whom he deemed unprofitable (an assessment with which van der Linden agrees) in favor of larger companies. Brown wanted the pioneers, as he called them, to have their investment protected, and he sought to give them preferences over smaller carriers when it came time to issue new contracts or routes. As might be expected, though, once the government's nose was in the tent, there was no getting it out: Brown soon involved himself and the post office in everything from determining the airlines' management to dictating new technology.

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