Calvin Coolidge was the last president to have never flown in an airplane, yet he played a significant role in transforming aviation in the United States from a laisse faire “wild west” into a regulated mode of transportation.  On many issues, Coolidge chose a course of constructive inaction—believing matters would be resolved in time without his intervention.  However, such was not the case with aviation.  During his term, President Coolidge signed into law legislation that led to the founding of commercial aviation in the United States, he directly influenced and then signed legislation establishing the regulatory relationship of the federal government and civil aviation, and he actively sought to use aviation to enhance the nation’s international standing as well as to help foster peace and prosperity around the world.

Kelly Act of 1925

Starting in 1918, the United States Post Office operated an expanding but money-losing airmail service coast to coast using war-surplus biplanes.  By 1924, the Post Office’s airmail service whisked mail from New York to California in 35 hours—three days faster than the swiftest rail connection.  Railroads started complaining that the federally operated airmail was cutting into their contract mail revenues and should be no longer funded at the expense of the American taxpayer.  Air mail should be privatized.  M. Clyde Kelly (R-PA), chair of the House Post Office Committee and well-know friend of rail interests, introduced a bill authorizing the postmaster general to contract with private air carriers for domestic airmail service.  Kelly’s bill easily passed Congress with little debate.  President Coolidge signed the Contract Air Mail Act of 1925, dubbed the Kelly Act after its sponsor, on February 12, 1925.  In the coming months, the Post Office awarded contracts to operators to carry mail over 12 feeder routes, each linked to the transcontinental airmail line.

Most U.S. major airlines would claim lineage to one or more of these original airmail contractors.  For example, the earliest predecessor of United Airlines was Varney Air Lines, which started contract air mail service between Pasco, Washington, and Elko, Nevada, on April 6, 1926.  And American Airlines would trace its origin back to Robertson Aircraft Corporation, whose chief pilot, Charles A. Lindbergh, flew the first load of contracted air mail between Chicago and St. Louis on April 15, 1926.

Coolidge examining a plane at a Washington, D.C. airfield in 2024. Source: Library of Congress.

Air Commerce Act of 1926

Meanwhile, opinions about the government’s aviation policies captured headlines.  Amid calls for the Federal government to unite all civilian and military aviation into a combined, independent agency—with Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell’s leading the charge, Congress established the House of Representatives Select Committee of Inquiry into Operations of the United States Air Service.  Nicknamed the Lampert committee after its chair, Florian Lampert of Wisconsin, the committee performed a wide-ranging investigation of aviation in America, far beyond its official charge.  By the early 1925 conclusion of testimony before the committee, President Coolidge grew increasingly concerned about what the forthcoming committee report might include, especially a recommendation to form a consolidated military-civil Department of the Air.  He perceived the committee’s activities as a political challenge and took action to regain control of the aviation policy debate.

Coolidge called upon Dwight Morrow, a J.P. Morgan partner and Coolidge’s Amherst College classmate, along with a handpicked group of industry experts to serve on a hastily created President’s Aircraft Board, dubbed the Morrow Board.  At Coolidge’s direction, the Morrow board raced to interview approximately 100 witnesses within a matter of weeks and then to issue a report containing a wide range of recommendations ahead of the scheduled release of the Lampert committee’s report.  Coolidge’s strategy worked.  Two weeks before the Lampert report became public, the Morrow board recommended keeping military and civil aviation separate, with continued development of distinct army and navy air arms.  Furthermore, the Morrow board recommended federal inspection and certification of aircraft, federal licensing of pilots, federal establishment and maintenance of aerial navigation facilities, plus federal regulation over commercial activities, additional federal funding for aeronautical developments, and the creation of a Bureau of Civil Aeronautics within the Department of Commerce.  The Morrow board’s report served to reinforce the existing direction of the Coolidge administration’s aviation policy.  Ironically, the subsequently released Lampert report proved to be far less radical than Coolidge had anticipated with most findings mirroring the Morrow board’s recommendations.

Morrow was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in October 1925. Source: Time Magazine (public domain).

Coolidge sent the Morrow board report to Congress with his full support behind enacting the recommendations into legislative action.  Months later the president triumphantly signed the resulting Air Commerce Act of 1926.  This landmark legislation set the stage for the growth of commercial aviation as an established mode of transportation.  A century later, the act’s influence would continue to influence the federal government’s role in civil and commercial aviation.  Historian Nick A. Komons declared the Air Commerce Act of 1926 “was due in large measure to the political skill of Calvin Coolidge.  The act itself was perhaps the only genuine legislative achievement of the Coolidge Presidency.” (Bonfires to Beacons, p. 88)

Lindbergh

New York hotelier Raymond Orteig offered in 1919 a $25,000 prize for the first aviator(s) to successfully fly non-stop between New York and Paris.  Over the next eight years, six people died and three more were injured seeking the prize.  The son of a Minnesota congressman, 25-year-old airmail pilot Charles Lindbergh obtained funding from a group of St. Louis businessmen to make a solo attempt in a single-engine aircraft.  In May 1927 President Coolidge and much of the world waited anxiously for news as Lindbergh alone made his way across the North Atlantic.  Lindbergh safely landed at Le Bourget airport 33 ½ hours and 3,600 miles after taking off from Long Island, instantly catapulted to an unprecedented international celebrity status.  Coolidge recognized an opportunity to capitalize on Lindbergh’s fame and dispatched the USS Memphis to return Lindbergh and his airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, from Europe.

A record-breaking crowd of 300,000 people joined the President and First Lady at the Washington Monument in welcoming Lindbergh home.  Coolidge bestowed the first Distinguished Flying Cross on the newly-minted hero before bringing Lindbergh and his mother to stay overnight in the temporary White House on Dupont Circle.  The President tasked Dwight Morrow with entertaining Mrs. Lindbergh.  Months later President Coolidge appointed Morrow as ambassador to Mexico amid strained relations between the two nations.  With the President’s full support, Morrow invited Lindbergh to fly The Spirit of St. Louis to Mexico as a goodwill gesture.  Lindbergh landed in Mexico City on December 14 and spent the next two weeks amid adoring crowds in the capital city.  He met Morrow’s daughter, Anne, and the two would wed in 1929.   Departing Mexico City, with the President’s blessing Lindbergh conducted an aerial tour around the Caribbean to enthusiastic public adulation while also pioneering routes for Pan American Airways.

President Coolidge (right) awarding Lindbergh (center) the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Coolidge presented the Congressional Medal of Honor to Lindbergh on March 21, 1928, on the White House lawn.  No one had previously received this medal for a non-military event.  The same day Lindbergh had landed in Mexico City in December, 1927, Congress passed special legislation bestowing the medal on him “For displaying heroic courage and skill as a navigator, at the risk of his life, by his nonstop flight in his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, from New York City to Paris, France, 20–21 May 1927, by which Capt. Lindbergh not only achieved the greatest individual triumph of any American citizen but demonstrated that travel across the ocean by aircraft was possible.”

The International Civil Aeronautics Conference of 1928

Amid enthusiasm for aviation’s potential to change the world for the better, President Coolidge personally wrote to the Conference of the Aeronautical Industry meeting in Washington, D.C. suggesting an international conference the following year in the nation’s capital to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight as well as cement the United States’ role as a global aviation leader.  Coolidge’s additional prodding in subsequent months bore fruit when representatives from 34 countries assembled for the International Civil Aeronautics Conference of 1928 in the first significant national acknowledgement of the Wright brothers’ 1903 achievement at Kitty Hawk, NC.  The President served as honorary chairman of the multi-day conference which included the delegates spending the evening at the White House and Coolidge welcoming the distinguished attendees with an opening address.  His speech included his vision of aviation as a tool for peace and economic prosperity:

“All nations are looking forward to the day of extensive, regular, and reasonably safe intercontinental and interoceanic transportation by airplane and airship. What the future holds out even the imagination may be inadequate to grasp. We may be sure, however, that the perfection and extension of air transport throughout the world will be of the utmost significance to civilization. While the primary aim of this industry is and will be commercial and economic . . . , but no less surely, will the nations be drawn more closely together in bonds of amity and understanding.”

A stamp commemorating the 1928 conference.

Daniel L. Rust is an associate professor of transportation & logistics management at the University of Wisconsin-Superior and the author of the book, Come Fly with Me: The Rise and Fall of Trans World Airlines.