A Speculation

CXXVIII

As the Black Committee continued to delve into the Contract Air Mail Route mess, Juan Trippe undoubtedly thanked his lucky stars (and his governmental contacts) that he’d been (forewarned and) smart enough to rid Pan American of its few vestigial CAM routes back in the days when Herbert Hoover had just taken office. Trippe had also been wise to begin culling through Pan American’s files for anything especially sensitive, potentially embarrassing, and / or questionable. Now, with a Democratic Administration in Washington his inherent tendency toward secretiveness was paying dividends. 

It wasn’t that Juan Trippe disliked Democrats. It was that he was never certain whom he could trust unless he’d developed a relationship with the person in question over time. He’d worried when Coolidge had succeeded Harding, and worried again when Hoover succeeded Coolidge. Fortunately, all three men were staunchly Republican, and more importantly they were the type of Republicans who didn’t interfere with business unless it was to aid Pan American Airways. Trippe saw Pan Am as a privately-owned arm of the U.S. Government and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to promote America and Americanism using his beloved Pan Am as his tool of choice --- but he had to be sure that the people he was working with shared his sense of patriotism. 

Not that Democrats weren’t patriotic either. Trippe knew FDR, and he didn’t doubt for a moment the President’s dedication to America, the New Deal notwithstanding. In fact, he owed to FDR his own career in aviation. But Democrats were so, well, partisan, and Juan Trippe worried that they’d do something stupid --- like try to knock Pan Am down a peg. 

Since its inception Pan American Airways had had a virtual monopoly on U.S. overseas commercial aviation. Juan had spent much time and vast sums to make sure that Pan American maintained that monopoly. Postmasters General Harry S. New and Walter Folger Brown had understood the importance of the Pan Am monopoly. Juan feared that the presumably coarse machine politician Jim Farley, who just wasn’t, well, you know, a gentleman, wouldn’t understand. 

Juan had done everything he could (if he’d realized it, far too much) to appeal to Roosevelt’s patrician sensibilities in maintaining Pan American’s special relationship with the United States government. 

It really was a unique relationship. The company had been founded by U.S. Military Intelligence Officers to covertly monitor German aviation developments in Latin America. And though Pan Am now secretly owned the very airline that it had been created to spy on (Pan Am’s ownership of Nazi-riddled SCADTA would be a political hot potato in a few more years), Pan Am was keeping a weather eye on the attempted incursions of other foreign airlines into South America as well.  

The airline also acted as a neutral go-between and straw man in U.S. dealings with the various Presidentes who kept a lid on dissent in the region. Trippe loved democracy, but unless it was properly supported it could degenerate into chaos. He saw Pan Am’s role as bolstering democracy in the fledgling representative republics of the Americas. Neither Harding nor Coolidge nor Hoover really gave much of a hoot about what went on south of the Rio Grande as long as American citizens and American business interests weren’t harmed. The three Republican Presidents propped up all manner of tinhorn dictators, sociopaths, and gun-happy madmen just so United Fruit and Grace and a score or more of other good United States-registered corporations could do whatever they did “down there” with a minimum of supervision. As Juan Trippe saw it, American capitalism would ultimately breed American-style democracy wherever it went. In the interim, as democracy took root, irregularities were to be expected. Low-level Pan Am employees acted as couriers and bag-men to low-level local leaders who needed a payoff or a warning from Uncle Sam to stay on the straight and narrow. 

Every Pan Am facility, from Ciudad Juarez to Cabo de Hornos and beyond, was a listening post that collected Intelligence information on developments in the region it served, so that the United States could know when to help crush an insurrection --- or support a coup. Select Pan Am employees attended “Spy School” in the U.S., and acted as covert agents for the government. Deals of all sorts were brokered by such men (and rarely women) with the full faith and credit of the United States behind them. 

Even inside the United States, Pan Am quietly helped the government by developing new aircraft technologies and installing the radio beacons and navigational aids that even the Black Committee wanted more of. Army and Navy pilots went to Pan Am flight schools and practiced with Pan Am planes.

Yes, Pan Am was charging the maximal rate allowable for mail delivery. And yes, it was charging it on a “plus-cost” basis. Yes, Postmasters New and Brown treated Pan Am with what Juan preferred to call deference. But Juan Trippe knew that the nation --- his nation --- was getting much more than it was paying for. He just couldn’t tell anybody because most of what Pan Am was doing for the government was classified. 

He just didn’t know what the Roosevelt Administration would make of it all.

Though there is no hard evidence of what I speculate* happened next, the strange gaps in Pan American’s documentary history strongly suggest that  Juan Trippe did the smartest thing to his mind that he could do under the circumstances. In the six months between FDR’s election and the Inauguration, Juan apparently decided to do away with most of his classified records. Whether they were burned, shredded or locked away in some long-forgotten vault somewhere, many of the airline’s early records ceased, in one way or another, to exist. 

Echoes of Trippe’s mass expungement of records remain in the Departmental memoranda written by men like Harry S. New and Walter Folger Brown at the Post Office Department and in obscure references in other government documents. What and how much went away may never be known, but today everything that is absent would undoubtedly be fascinating to the historian --- possibly even including the secret identity of Captain J.K. Montgomery, the man who laid the cornerstone of Juan Trippe’s aviation empire.  

The question now was: Would Pan Am continue to function as The other State Department or would it be reduced to carrying the out-of-town-editions of the New York newspapers to Asuncion?

Juan Trippe just didn’t know.

*My speculation is limited to the destruction of records regarding Pan American Airways’ covert activities outside of the United States. That the airline acted covertly on behalf of the government and people of the United States throughout its history is unquestionable. Numerous sources, official and unofficial, support that fact.