A Note on Sources

This book was by far the most complex project that I have undertaken to date. There were so many strands that needed to be followed, understood, then woven together into a digestible whole that told the story I wanted to tell. As much as I have included in this book, that which I left out could fill entire shelves with additional books on the subject matter. There are times when, as a historian, one is frustrated by a paucity of source material—for this book, it was the opposite. I often felt overwhelmed by the amount of material available, and making sense of it all while also trying to be as thorough as possible wasn’t easy. My aim in writing this book was to try and capture the Zeitgeist of this era, using the World’s Fair, aviation’s Golden Age, and the rise of fascism as lenses through which to gain an understanding of it. It is not an attempt to write a definitive account of the fair or any of the main figures that are featured in this book. There are a number of secondary sources that I would highly recommend to readers who are interested in pursuing these topics in greater depth. Cheryl Ganz’s book, The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress, is the best book written to date on the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The late Claudio Segrè’s biography of Italo Balbo is the most informative and well-written book in English on this controversial figure. Balbo himself wrote a number of volumes in Italian on his air voyages. The late Douglas Botting’s Doctor Eckener’s Dream Machine is an excellent dual biography of the man and his airship. Eckener’s memoir, My Zeppelins, is also available in English, and is a great read. He was a bit of a poet. If you want to understand in detail the first “Space Race” of manned ballooning in the 1930s, David DeVorkin’s Race to the Stratosphere is the definitive account, while Tom Cheshire’s The Explorer Gene is an outstanding multibiography of an extraordinary family—the Piccards.

Prologue

The 1930s conjure still-painful images: the great want of the Depression—the drawn and haggard faces of men and women lacking comprehension of why their world had been knocked out from under them—contrasted with the exuberance of frothing crowds motivated by self-appointed national saviors dressing up old hatreds as new ideas. The downcast, the beaten, the hypnotized, and the enraged typified the age. Or so it seems in retrospect. But there was another story that embodied mankind in that decade pregnant with foreboding. In the same year that both Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in Germany and the United States, respectively, the city of Chicago staged what was, up to that time, the most forward-looking international exhibition in history. Instead of trying to re-create an idealized neoclassical past, as its predecessor in 1893 had done, the 1933 World’s Fair’s organizers, architects, scientists, and artists looked to the future, unabashedly, as one full of glowing promise. The Technicolor vision of the future they produced could not have contrasted more sharply with the gritty black-and-white economic and political realities that surrounded them. And yet, they were undaunted.

No technology loomed larger at the fair than aviation. And no persons at the fair captured the public’s interest as much as the romantic figures associated with it: Italy’s internationally renowned chief of aeronautics, Italo Balbo; German zeppelin designer and captain, Doctor Hugo Eckener; and the husband and wife team of Swiss-born aeronaut Jean Piccard and Chicago-born aeronaut Jeannette Ridlon Piccard. To underscore this, the 1933 Fair’s official promotional poster prominently and explicitly featured an aviation motif. This was for a reason. If one was forward looking in 1933, one gazed skyward. It spoke to the inner Icarus in all of humanity.

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Italo Balbo during his first trip to the United States (1929). Alamy Images.

In the summer of 1933, the trans-Atlantic flight of Balbo’s famed gleaming-white flying boats, and their subsequent precision landing on Lake Michigan in front of adoring crowds, provided perhaps the signature event of an eventful fair. This was a time when aviation had outgrown its early, awkward age—interrupted by World War I—but still possessed a certain elitist quality personified by aviators such as Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Bessie Coleman, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Jean Mermoz, and Ernst Udet. This golden age of aviation and its high priests and priestesses portended to many the world over that a new age was dawning—an age when man would not only leave the ground behind, but also his uglier, less admirable, heritage of war, poverty, corruption, and disease. Pilots were the heroes of the age. And perhaps no one more comfortably assumed this mantle than the amiable, goateed, black-shirted, charmer from Ferrara, Italy. Italo Balbo was both a product of his times, and one who shaped them. In his person, two of the main, and most attractive, fashions of the 1930s—aviation and fascism—merged seamlessly. It was only later in the decade, as the hysterically enthused youths were turned into jack-booted monsters perpetrating any crime in the name of nation or race, that Balbo’s political creed was discredited—his legacy in Chicago and elsewhere forever tarnished. But for a moment in 1933, this all lay in a future that still seemed so promising. No one then could have known that 60 million would perish in a war that would dwarf the earlier 1914–1918 conflict.

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The Graf Zeppelin over San Francisco (1929). Alamy Images.

Three months after Balbo’s flying boats returned to Europe, Hugo Eckener piloted the world-renowned Graf Zeppelin north from Brazil to Chicago. Its presence graced the fair with an indescribable sense of wonder and inspired those in attendance with Eckener’s dream of a more peaceful and technologically advanced world—a world connected by giant airships (looking like “silvery fish,” according to Eckener) running nearly silent among the clouds. By 1933, the problem that presented itself to Eckener in realizing this dream was not so much technological as it was political. With the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power, Germans and German Americans were forced to confront ugly truths and make difficult choices. For Eckener, the trip to the 1933 World’s Fair represented an opportunity to make a final public display of his contempt for Nazism. Facing the possibility of denunciation to the Gestapo for his lack of enthusiasm for local Nazi sympathizers in Chicago, he was eventually marginalized by Hitler as the official head of Germany’s fleet of airships. Yet his brilliant vision for the future continued to inspire many the world over. The tragedy that befell the Graf Zeppelin’s sister ship, the Hindenburg, four years later seemed to confirm that without Eckener’s direct guidance, his dream could not be sustained.

For Auguste and Jean Piccard, flight meant ascension into the heavens above. Rather than traveling from city to city above the Earth’s surface, the two brothers seemed to want to break free of the Earth itself; to go higher than any human beings had ever been and attain what Icarus had failed to reach. Their manned aeronautical capsules, attached to gas-filled balloons, represented the true beginning of space exploration. By training, Auguste was a physicist; Jean a chemist—but ballooning became a passion that they married to their pursuit of science. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity had posited that cosmic radiation existed in space. As no one had actually been in space, this had not been observed, or measured, directly by humans. The Piccard brothers looked to change this by breaking free of the Earth’s atmosphere and acquiring physical proof of the existence of cosmic rays. This required ascending to heights in excess of ten miles above the Earth’s surface. The genre of science fiction literature had existed since the days of Jules Verne, but these men weren’t just reading about the future. They were making it.

Ultimately, the Piccard attempt at a height record in 1934 would not be a brotherly endeavor, but rather a shared accomplishment of Jean and his wife—Chicago native Jeannette Ridlon Piccard. When Dow Chemical (which had assisted the Piccards in designing the capsule to be used for the record ascent) heard that a woman—and a mother no less—would be sharing the risks with her husband of high-altitude flight, it required the Piccards to remove the company logo from the craft. On the other hand, as Jeannette trained to pilot the balloon in the months leading up to the ascent, Orville Wright endorsed her efforts by serving as an observer during her practice flights. Jeannette Piccard was not merely attempting to break altitude records; she was breaking important social barriers as well. She and Jean were true partners. They were going up. They might not return alive. And the world was watching. These pioneering aeronauts blazed a trail for those that followed, as attested by Jeannette’s work with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) later in her life.

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Jeannette Ridlon Piccard and Jean Piccard after their recordsetting flight into the upper reaches of the stratosphere in 1934. Courtesy of Bertrand Piccard.

Today we are navigating both the relentless advent of new and exciting technologies, as well as the appearance of authoritarian-style political leaders in a number of countries, including our own. These are both hopeful and uncertain times. As in the 1930s, technology seems to be almost a force with a life of its own, perhaps more so. Yet there is also a retreat into a national, ethnic, and racial tribalism that defies a progressive view of man. This book aims to serve as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. Fascism combined with advances in aviation technology to level large swaths of the cities of Madrid, Shanghai, and London before, in the hands of the Allies, leading to the eventual nuclear annihilation of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one who witnessed the impressive Italian Fascist planes flying in formation above Chicago’s distinctive skyline in 1933 could later fail to see the connection. The Cold War–era Space Race too had its origins in Chicago and the Soviet Union in 1933–1934, as Russian aeronauts competed with the Piccards to reach the outer limits of the stratosphere, thus anticipating Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn, and the Apollo program.

Beginning in 1893 with the first World’s Fair held in Chicago, historical forces embodied by rapid technological advances and frightening new political philosophies had been gathering momentum for decades, before converging on the shores of Lake Michigan forty years later. A young boy attending that first fair with his parents, coming again as a grown man to the second, would have witnessed breathtaking change in the interim, embodied by aviation pioneers such as Alberto Santos-Dumont, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and the Wright Brothers. And perhaps he may have witnessed firsthand the unspeakable horror of World War I as well. Yet what lay ahead was more extraordinary and terrible still. For a brief, shining moment in the midst of that benighted decade of the 1930s, a city of tomorrow, and all the hopes it embodied, teetered on the edge of an abyss that yawned so ominously before it. It was only in the skies above that humanity still seemed fully capable of breaking free, avoiding cataclysm, and claiming its noble heritage from Icarus.

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