The Guggenheims: Promoting Aviation in America

In October 1929 the American press, both large publications and small, began to bid farewell to the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, which had just made an announcement that it would soon cease the operations it had inaugurated three years earlier. The New York Times began its tribute by proclaiming that aviation itself had become “the flourishing protégé of Harry F. Guggenheim and his associates.”1 In a November editorial from the lay Catholic magazine Commonweal titled “Aviation Is Weaned,” the Fund was lauded for having helped “American aviation off to the flying start it should properly have.”2 This was no mean feat. In essence, after having distributed approximately $4,000,000 during the previous five years, Daniel and Harry Guggenheim had provided the timely financing and the vision necessary to revive the moribund American aeronautics industry. Certainly, the Guggenheim organization was not the only entity to set its sights on improving American aviation—especially commercial and passenger aviation—in the second half of the 1920s. Nonetheless, Commonweal explained, “in any discussion of airways progress in the United States, the work of the Guggenheims is the obvious thing to start with”; its achievements were so impressive, the editorial continued, that it “is more likely that the importance of the Fund will be overestimated than underestimated.”3