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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The Most Modern Thing
By Richard F. Snow
Years ago a writer friend told me about having interviewed a pioneer airman, a veteran from the earliest days, when pilots went up wearing goggles, a cloth cap, and a business suit. He asked the inevitable question: How had the flier ever summoned the nerve to go up in those primitive bundles of sticks and fabric?
The old man smiled at him. “Primitive?” he said. “Son, those were the most modern things in the world.”
They still are. Computers may be changing our technological landscape more radically just now, but the flash and tilt of an airplane performing the everyday miracle of cutting what a doomed World War II fighter pilot called “the surly bonds of earth” continues to tell the eye and the spirit that these are the most modern things in the world.
More than all the other hectic engines that drove the acceleration of the past century—more than the automobile, more than television—the airplane sped us to where we are now. My mother was one year and 10 days old when, on December 17,1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright sent their father the telegram that began SUCCESS FOUR FLIGHTS FRIDAY. … I was sitting with her in a darkened July room when the TV brought in a message that flowed directly from that of the brothers: “The Eagle has landed.”
The all but unimaginable accumulation of technical genius and human courage that lies bracketed by those two messages may stir us, but it can’t exactly comfort us. As Fredric Smoler and Walter Boyne discuss in this issue, the airplane—for all the damage it did to the passenger trains and the century-old civilization of the ocean liners —has made its most powerful impact on our world as a weapon.
During the 1940s it worked a horrid recalculation of what is acceptable practice in waging war, and afterward it established a bizarre interregnum during which the safest place to be when the fighting started was in the military. But we should also remember that while this legitimization of terror bombing was being refined, a few hundred British teenagers, equipped with some particularly capable descendants of the machine the Wrights had brought forth just 38 years earlier, saved us all.
The final thing to emerge from Pandora’s box was hope. And perhaps the change the brothers worked is in the end big enough to offer this troubled infant century a gleam of it.
An early hint of this comes from a most unlikely source. By the time he published The Big Money (1936), the third book of his epic poem/history/novel/collage USA, John Dos Passos had presented profiles of many significant Americans and had roughed up most of them. J. P. Morgan doesn’t fare well, nor does Henry Ford. But the Wright brothers escape the lash of his passionate, angry skepticism about America. Here’s how he ends his section on them:
In the snorting impact of bombs and the… sudden stutter of machine-guns after the motor’s been shut off overhead,
and we flatten into the mud
and make ourselves small cowering in the corners of ruined walls,
the Wright brothers passed out of the headlines
but not even the headlines or the bitter smear of newsprint or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chatter of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom millions or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new monuments
can blur the memory
of the chilly December day
two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio,
first felt their homemade contraption
whittled out of hickory sticks,
gummed together with Arnstein’s bicycle cement,
stretched with muslin they’d sewn on their sister’s sewingmachine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio,
soar into the air
above the dunes and the wide beach
at Kitty Hawk.
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