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Romancing the Clipper: America's Technological Coming of Age in Children's Literature - Page 2

Combining all the popular themes of the day, the China Cliper was perfectly suited as subject matter for adolescent literature.  Whitman’s Big Little Books and Better Little Books, as Francis J. Molson has pointed out, were the most popular children’s readings in the mid-30s to mid-40s (148).  This press seized on the clipper and reflected the various themes as youth prepared for war.  The Whitman books performed the same function as did the works of Horatio Alger, Jr., at the time of the Spanish-American War.  They helped juveniles maintain their identities and values amidst threatening change.  The Whitman books had important differences however.  Whereas Alger’s heroes faced social and economic change, Whitman’s clipper heroes faced technological and geo-political change.

For example, Flying the Sky Clipper with Winsie Atkins, a Big Little Book published in 1936, seemed to sense a not-quite-specified trouble brewing in the Pacific long before the actual war.  The values expressed were clear although the circumstances were not.  The story involved Jane Sprague, “the richest little girl in the world,” and Winsie Atkins, son of the president of Trans-Pacific Air Lines.  Jane was being evacuated from Manila and flown to San Francisco on the clipper to avoid a gang’s kidnapping attempts.  This opening focused on the money theme so popular in the Alger-influenced books before the advent of the clipper and gathering war clouds.  The gang that was out to abduct Jane was after money, just as bvoth young protagonists were the products of big money or big business.  Though the gang headed by Slits Slattery consisted of the conventional American racketeers of the pulp fiction of the time, another gang of quite a different, ambiguous nature would also try to down the clipper.  This “Oriental” gang was after important mail carried on board and guarded by a G-man.  The clipper was forced down by another seaplane and then intercepted by a mysterious submarine.  Through timely action by the protagonists, the clipper crew, and a squadron of biplanes from the aircraft carrier Lexington, the important papers in the mail were saved.  The contents of these mysterious papers of such interest to the U.S. Government were never revealed.  Usually mysteries were resolved in the adolescent fiction of the time.  Not this one.  The time for secrets and national security was at hand.

Coincidentally, one theory about the disappearance of the Hawaii Clipper on July29, 1938, follows elements of this 1936 story line.  The real clipper disappeared without a trace.  Some believed it was skyjacked and sabotaged by an “Oriental” gang since it was carrying large sums of money to help the Chinese fight the Japanese.  Though over-shadowed perhaps by the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan (who had served on the China Clipper), this remains an unsolved mystery.

Another puzzle is why the naming system in this Little Big Book is kept so thinly fictional.  The clipper was called the “Sky Clipper,” though the book’s illustrations clearly show the M-130 China Clipper.  Pan American was thinly coded as “Trans-Pacific Air Lines.”  Since Pan Am was the only trans-Pacific airline in existence and since the U.S. Post Office Department requested that Pan Am clipper mailed be marked with the words “Trans-Pacific,” it would have been difficult not to connect the names of the fictional with real airline.  While authors understandably would be reluctant to infringe on a product or company name, less clear is why Pan Am’s stepping-stone island bases across the Pacific were also thinly veiled as “Halfway Island” (Midway), “Maug” (Guam), and “Kawa” (Wake).  The naming may have added to the imaginative qualities of this adventure story.  On the other hand, the codes did point out the “iffy” role of the clipper and these bases in the Pacific.  The flying boat and its bases were ostensibly a commercial adventure, but under the surface they were also a subtle, aggressive extension of U.S. power into the Pacific to meet the Japanese challenge.  Where Pan Am was given permission by the U.S. Government to build island stepping stones to Asia, military engineers were quick to follow.  Furthermore, the U.S. Government was claiming sovereignty over certain Pacific islands at the airline’s request.  The Japanese were quick to protest the presence of the clipper in their mandated Micronesian islands.

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