Van der Linden moves quickly through this early history to the Kelly Act of 1925, which turned the airmail over to private contractors. Regular airmail service began in the spring of 1918 as a federally run operation.
This book is not a narrow monograph about the Air Mail, but rather a history of the origins of the major airlines, told through their involvement in carrying the mail. Although van der Linden tells only one part of this story, he does so at a level of empirical scholarship unmatched by any other history of pre-World War II American commercial aviation. This claim is absolutely correct: American aviation was and continues to be fundamentally dependent on government subsidies, federally funded research and development, military purchases, and industry-friendly regulation. Van der Linden, a historian at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, claims that "American commercial aviation was largely the creation of the federal government" (p. Air Mail from 1925 through 1933, when the Postmaster General had unprecedented power over commercial aviation.
This book makes a major contribution to the history of commercial aviation in the United States by examining the central role of the U.S. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Airlines and Air Mail: The Post Office and the Birth of the Commercial Aviation Industry. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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