While completely fictional, Tale Wind nonetheless served as a cautionary tale for real-life stewards. Some coworkers and members of the public—especially the most macho and chauvinistic men—would inevitably greet them as dim-witted “screwballs” worthy of ridicule. And the main trait that made Barney so vulnerable was true of real-life stewards: unlike the other men at the airlines, their embodiment of manhood was not tied to their physical skills or management prowess. Instead, they were soft and dapper, relying on good looks, charm, and servile work for their livelihoods. The quasi-gang rape scenes in Tale Wind thereby stand out as alarming artifacts of a very real homophobia that flew just under the radar.
REARMING MASCULINITY
Historians of gender highlight World War II as a watershed moment. Mobilization allowed women to occupy positions in the workplace that men otherwise held. These women’s gender bending was celebrated in the war years, allowing many of them to connect with long-suppressed yearnings to hold a job on par with men. Less notable but equally true is that some men—at least in the male-only regular corps of the military—found themselves in notionally feminine jobs, working as cooks, secretaries, or nurses. Wars, after all, are moments when societies relinquish various fictions regarding proper gender roles: men become largely self-sufficient on the front, while women become equally autonomous and multi-capable at home.54
FIGURE 6. Abuse of a steward by his coworkers in Tale Wind installment. Pan American Air Ways, November-December 1938, 7. Courtesy Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
Nonetheless, predominant notions of manliness tend to harden during wars. Whatever room war creates for men to enter women’s work doesn’t prevent the masculine ideal from becoming more tied to aggression, risk taking, and exposure to death and violence. Along these lines, the steward’s softer masculinity of the 1930s was increasingly out of place as America moved toward war in 1940 and 1941. As most stewards joined the sixteen million men who registered for the draft in October 1940, Eastern rushed to envelop its stewards in military-inspired rhetoric and jettison their “gay” public image.
In June 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor, the airline’s in-flight magazine carried its most thorough justification yet of Eastern’s all-male flight attendant corps. Most notable is how the airline now disavowed notions of style. Entitled “Eastern Carries the Male!,” the article noted that Eddie Rickenbacker’s choice of stewards was based “on the premise that air transport had grown up and that service rather than glamour or silk stockings was needed to keep the clientele pleased.”55 The article then stressed that the steward corps possessed a military-like discipline and sense of purpose. It recounted the World War I heroics of Walter Avery, Eastern’s head of stewards, who had famously downed one of Germany’s Red Barons while serving on the Western front. By emphasizing that the flight attendants were led by two World War I flying aces, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker and Walter Avery, the article cast stewards as the loyal foot soldiers of distinguished military men.
Despite their misgivings, the war ultimately forced even Rickenbacker and Pan Am’s CEO Juan Trippe to abandon their all-male flight attendant corps. Eastern began to address its male labor shortage in 1943 with its first female hires since the company’s earliest years of passenger service. Pan Am followed in 1944 when it hired seven women in March, then an additional twelve a few months later. Just as much as United’s first stewardesses from 1930, these new hires were trailblazers. They fulfilled all the duties of their male counterparts, including loading mailbags into the plane’s cargo hold, rowing passengers to the docks, and handling customs forms. A member of Pan Am’s first stewardess class, Genevieve Baker, recalls her instructor saying, “You will be paid on the same basis as men stewards. You will have the same chances of promotion but—don’t use your sex as an excuse. Never say, ‘You can’t expect a woman to do that!’”56
Only in one key way did Pan Am distinguish between its male and female flight attendants. Given the fear that women would not be able to work the sustained hours demanded on long-haul routes, the company’s stewardesses were concentrated on shorter trips from Miami to Havana and Nassau, while men were still exclusively used on the routes to the Canal Zone, Brazil, and Buenos Aires. Over time, these gender-based restrictions would give way as stewardesses proved their abilities even to the originally dubious Rickenbacker and Trippe. Their success, when coupled with the more intense homophobia and continuing technological advances of the postwar era, further led the 1930s steward toward historical obsolescence.
THE 1930S STEWARD: A POSTMORTEM
As workers who were also public relations tools for one of America’s most technologically advanced industries, stewards and stewardesses in the 1930s embodied an idealized future that was supposedly being wrought by the high-tech machine age. In this sense, they were vessels for the aspirations of what all of U.S. society would strive to look like once the pain of the Depression gave way to new prosperity, thanks to new technologies like the airplane. No wonder, then, that both stewards and stewardesses captured the imaginations of ordinary Americans. Hollywood fell in love with these women who could gallivant from New York to Los Angeles, exhibiting poise, professionalism, and alluring beauty along the way. Meanwhile, in the mode of the dapper “Rodney the Smiling Steward” and his confreres at Eastern Air Lines, stewards found financial stability and access to a high-society lifestyle despite being low-skilled workers in the heart of the Depression. These men enjoyed the same exhilarating mobility that stewardesses did—both a geographic and socioeconomic reach beyond what their education, skill set, and financial resources would otherwise permit.
The steward’s appeal was very much grounded in a social milieu peculiar to the 1920s and 1930s urban elite. Airlines’ clientele at the time were exclusively America’s very rich, and the companies hiring men actively sought to ensconce the steward in the “gay” leisure world these passengers already knew. Thus stewards were servile but also sophisticated and fashionable. Their natural good looks could be used to sell air travel. Their cutting-edge, dapper uniforms granted them access to upper-crust venues like fashion shows and nightclubs where they could promote air travel as glamorous, just as opulent and exotic as a night out on the town. Of course, in some ways, the steward was no more than a bit player in the “gay” social scene of these upper-crust elites. It wasn’t his privilege to overindulge in the life of good food, fine alcohol, dancing, sexual excess, and opulent locales. Yet just as the elite men who partook in this charmed life were more feminized by their surroundings, so too was the steward vis-à-vis other working-class men. His livelihood depended primarily on his looks and style, and he was even less credentialed than the nurses who worked as stewardesses.
The composition of the 1930s flight attendant corps depended on complex interactions of cultural notions of gender and sexuality, technological advances, racial segregation, and economic considerations that at times favored stewards and at other times compromised their viability in the job. On the whole, stewards garnered a fairly generous amount of tolerance, even as they were dandied up and promoted as inviting sex objects by their respective employers. This tolerance suggests an easiness with white masculinity norms in the prewar era that would virtually vanish with the onset of hostilities and would be ghettoized after the