Flight & freedom, early & late

Manned flight and U.S. independence were achieved in 1783, but both gave way to empire

He made them ride over the heights of the earth and fed them on the harvest of the fields; he satisfied them with honey from the crags and oil from the flinty rock . . . Jacob ate and was well fed, Jeshurun grew fat and unruly, they grew fat and bloated and sleek. — from the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32:13, 15 (REB)

Manned flight began the same year the United States won its independence—1783—when Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier flew in a basket tied beneath a hot-air balloon.¹

Inspired by the hot-air balloon, individuals and groups of citizens experimented with flight during the next century. People attached to balloons, people in gliders, and even people under “large, tethered kites” flew.

Part of what inspired them was the view. The generation before the airplane, John Stilgoe explains, was “born to see landscape through clouds, to wonder at large-scale spatial and atmospheric distortion, and to fly in silence with the leisure to look and think.”²

Of course, the hobbyist’s innovations and the leisure didn’t last. Within a decade of the first Wright brothers flight in 1903, their “engine-driven aircraft had been co-opted for military use and by a near-fanatic emphasis on speed.”³ Some airplane passengers, though, such as Anne Morrow Lindbergh, could still marvel at the likes of a “shadow of a single elm, flat on the ground, like a pressed fern” as she sat beside her famous husband in 1931, and to see houses as “bright rectangles and squares, like facets of cut stones.”⁴

But after traveling on one commercial flight in 1948, Lindbergh “condemned the American passengers as detached, able to observe but feel nothing about the landscapes below, ‘comfortable, well-fed, aloof, and superior,’” Stilgoe says, quoting a portion of Lindbergh’s account. The passengers, Lindbergh said, suffered “the illusion of being a god.”⁵

This shift in perspective from the early flyers to modern air passengers speaks directly as well as metaphorically to a shift from civic participation to empire. America’s worldwide air bases and extensive flight routes led Americans in the 1940s and 50s to see the world in a new way, with “an aerial perspective, which looked down on the world . . . as a united, unbounded sphere of American influence,” Jenifer Van Vleck writes.⁶ This “logic of the air” became the “logic of a type of American empire — an empire based, primarily, not on the direct control of territory but on access to markets, on the influence of culture and ideology, and on frequent military interventions in other countries, all of which the airplane facilitated,” Van Vleck says.⁷

Benjamin Rush describes the age of the American Revolution, which he lived through and which gave birth to the age of flight: “Everything is new and yielding.”⁸ But revolution yields to empire when routine, speed, and a global marketplace begin to replace the political innovation, deliberation, and love for locality that feed the spirit of revolution.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Performers in hot air balloon" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed June 10, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/1493d270-3c48-0132-4670-58d385a7b928. Used by permission.

1. Stilgoe, John R. What Is Landscape? Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: The MIT Press, 2015, 21.

2. Stilgoe, 23.

3. Stilgoe, 25.

4. Stilgoe, 26-27.

5. Stilgoe, 27-28.

6. Van Vleck, Jenifer. Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013, 4.

7. Van Vleck, 5.

8. Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. 1st ed. New York: Morrow, 1991, 178.