FIGURE 2. “Rodney the Smiling Steward.” Pan American Airways Magazine, March 1933, 15. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, FL.
The “Rodney” marketing campaign involved placing hundreds of life-sized, full-color cutouts of the steward in train stations and travel agencies all along the East Coast and as far west as Chicago. The goal of the promotion was the same as most airline marketing strategies through the 1950s: to lure the wealthy clientele of train and ship lines to Pan Am’s international air routes. But the use of a male steward as the company’s publicity ambassador would never again be replicated at Pan Am until after the 1970s, reflecting just how unique the steward’s moment of visibility was. Rodney’s short life span and his subsequent consignment to public relations obscurity both testify to his softer version of masculinity, which for a brief while in the 1930s enjoyed a higher degree of social acceptability among Pan Am’s wealthy prospective clientele.
The “Rodney” campaign accentuated the steward’s softer features, especially his dashing good looks and elegance when adorned in his formal black-and-white uniform with red highlights. With his smile and slightly cocked head, Rodney combined both youthful attractiveness and an approachability that invited people to size him up, thereby placing him in the notionally feminized role of alluring sex object. According to Pan Am’s corporate newsletter, Rodney had tremendous potency in this regard, at least in its own offices: “From all the comments, Rodney has made quite a hit....We thought he would, ever since the first day he was brought into the office for final inspection, suntanned, shoes shined, close-shaved and all, and the ladies deserted their typewriters to flock around.”22
Stewards shared these alluring physical qualities with other working-class men in the service industry, but their role as icons of style stood out against more widespread images of working-class masculinity: the exceptionally muscular images of white male factory workers and agricultural laborers (think of those popularized in WPA art), or the renderings of doting but safely asexual black train porters, busboys, and the like. The conflation of the steward’s white skin and his job’s fashionable servility drew him closer toward the aesthetic excesses of the dandified urban “fairies.” His suntan, dapper dress, and well-manicured face emulated those of the wealthy (largely heterosexual) playboys of high-society Midtown or Harlem speakeasies, while his class status placed him in a more passive role of serving other men and using his charm to accrue favor. A 1938 interview that Washington Post columnist Tom McCarthy conducted with Eastern Air Lines steward Bill Hutchison again emphasized these same characteristics seen in the “Rodney” campaign, highlighting the job’s emphasis on male physical beauty. “Besides having to pass rigid physical examinations,” the article notes of stewards, “they’ve got to watch their diet as closely as a movie star. When the needle on the weighing machine goes beyond 150 pounds they’re likely to have outgrown their job.” Coupled with this rigorous weight regimen came a preoccupation with suntanning: “What Bill was worrying about, particularly, when I saw him was not what he’d do when he got tired of being a flight steward, but rather what the March winds were going to do to his red and painful Florida sunburn.”23
Stewards’ white skin was an essential physical trait that reinforced their softness, or, if you will, their “gayness.” In the very train stations where Pan Am placed the life-sized Rodney cutouts, thousands of African American men held very similar jobs but never attained the status of sexualized public relations agents. Indeed, the railroads chose these men in part because of their supposed sexual undesirability. In his study of Pullman train porters, journalist and author Larry Tye notes that porters’ dark skin—when coupled with the predominant racism of the time—meant that “passengers could regard them as part of the furnishings rather than a mortal with likes, dislikes, and a memory.” This ability to effectively become “an invisible man” allowed porters intimate access to the sleeping quarters and changing rooms of white men and women.24 Thus, just as he never attained the status of a sex object, the Pullman porter also never became an ambassador of the newly crystallizing “gay” subculture that arose in America’s largest cities during the pre–World War II era.
The sexual history of stewards and stewardesses on planes was quite a different story. In their workplace, the primary object of 1930s sexual desire, white skin, was placed in arm’s length of the passenger. Since no airline hired African Americans as flight attendants until the civil rights era of the late 1950s, the entire career was dominated by white women and men.25 Stewardesses bore the brunt of this newly unleashed sexual desire. Many male passengers showered affection on these women and also sought out their company once the plane landed. A stewardess from 1939 noted, “You never have a trip that two or three or four men won’t ask you to dinner or a luncheon.”26 Hollywood only stoked the notion of stewardesses’ sexual availability. The famed actress Joan Bennett, who played a stewardess in the 1936 film Thirteen Hours by Air, enticed men by giving them advice on how to score a date with a real stewardess. Her words advanced a prevailing view and also exposed the galling willingness of the airlines to force their stewardesses into sexual roles: “If you ask her for a date,” commented Bennett, “she is obliged to say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and accept. It is a company rule on all airlines!”27
Nothing of the sort would be expected of male stewards, given deeply entrenched social codes that required men to initiate sexual advances with women and forced male-male sexual encounters to play out with furtive exchanged glances and the subterfuge of double entendres (including the term gay itself). Such codes ultimately made stewards much more difficult to deploy as erotic ambassadors for the airlines, just as stewardesses’ nursing skills were hard to market in delicate and appealing ways. Thus, in relatively short order, Rodney and other steward-centered public relations efforts were overshadowed by efforts from Hollywood, newspapers, and the airlines themselves to promote stewardesses as the most enchanting sexual newcomers of the decade. But that is not to say that the steward immediately disappeared as a public relations ambassador. Instead, his role simply became more limited. Meanwhile, with the rise of new aviation technology, these marketing attempts centering on stewards became even more suspect as “gay,” at times suggesting outright homoeroticism.
GREAT STRIDES IN TECHNOLOGY, GREAT MISGIVINGS ABOUT MASCULINITY
The year 1936 featured phenomenal advances in civilian air travel, empowered by significant innovations in aircraft technology. It saw the introduction of the world’s most successful (in terms of being the longest serving, safest, and most widespread) aircraft of the pre–World War II era: the Douglas Corporation’s DC-3. Indeed, the DC-3 dominated the skies for the next two decades, becoming the workhorse for the world’s major airlines well into the 1950s and serving as the preferred transport plane for the Allied militaries in World War II. An even grander plane debuted that same year: the Pan American Clipper (a seaplane originally manufactured by Sikorsky and later by Boeing), which boasted the largest payload and longest range of any civilian vessel. The Clipper was the world’s first flying behemoth and allowed Pan Am to initiate service all the way from San Francisco to China. The DC-3 and the Clipper could fly transcontinental or overseas routes, increasing flight times from just a couple hours in the air to full overnight trips. In fact, Pan Am’s record-long 2,400-mile nonstop flight from San Francisco to Honolulu would spend almost a full day in the air. These new planes also doubled capacity, accommodating at least twenty-one passengers each.
Air travel after 1936 was consequently a very different experience than before, for both passengers and flight attendants. Both of the latest aircraft offered passengers greater comforts, starting with a smoother ride, a climate-controlled environment, and a cabin with improved soundproofing. The lack of air pressure still required pilots to stay below a ten-thousand-foot ceiling, which made for a bumpy ride at times, but the aerodynamics of the DC-3 in particular (with its wings integrated in the body of the aircraft) significantly lessened the risk of accidents. Seeking to emulate the luxury of rail travel,