A “splendid flying field” in Indianapolis: Aviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era

Abstract

A “splendid flying field” in IndianapolisAviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era Brian M. Ingrassia (bio) In 1917, Carl Graham Fisher offered the facilities of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to the United States federal government for the training of military aviators and the building of aircraft. He asserted that the Speedway, constructed nearly a decade earlier in 1909, was the best place in America to carry out such work. The government partly took Fisher up on his offer, and the 328-acre facility became a focal point for World War I aviation. By autumn of that year, Fisher was mapping and marking cross-country flying routes throughout the lower Great Lakes region; he even began imagining aerial routes along the transcontinental highways he had spearheaded earlier in the decade, especially the east-west Lincoln Highway. In so doing, Fisher seemed to lay the foundation for an aviation network centered on Indianapolis. The war’s aftermath, however, saw the Speedway turn in a different direction. In May 1919, racing returned to Indianapolis in a form made more dangerous than ever before by wartime technological developments. And although there was serious discussion of turning the raceway into an airport in the mid-1920s, the track’s owners chose spectacle over commercial or military utility, cementing the facility’s identity as a site for thrilling motor sports. The story of Great War aviation at Indianapolis, which remains obscured in standard narratives, has a threefold significance.1 First, as historian Mark Foster implies in his brief treatment of the subject, the Speedway’s wartime service was part of Carl Fisher’s project of developing transportation infrastructures connecting early-1900s people and cities.2 Second, it shows that the Midwest, as historian Kristin Hoganson has perceptively argued, was not disconnected from global currents; rather, the region contributed to larger projects of nationalism and imperialism.3 Third, the story hints [End Page 109] at how Midwesterners adopted and adapted transportation technologies for innovative purposes not limited to utilitarian movement of people or goods. Scholar Jason Weems contends that aircraft helped Midwesterners comprehend their region, a former frontier based on a seemingly “infinite notion of the future.” By the twentieth century, though, the “very grid that had once led settlers to a manifest destiny now appeared to lock them in place.”4 Settled in the middle, they turned to modern technologies and cultural spectacles. After World War I, Fisher and his fellow racing moguls had an opportunity to transform the Hoosier track into a regional aviation hub, but instead they doubled down on popular culture, maintaining the IMS grounds as a place for racing before then selling the facility to famed Great War aviator Eddie Rickenbacker right as the postwar economy peaked in 1927. Airplanes may have offered early-1900s Americans a near-utopian “instrument of reform, regeneration, and salvation,” yet motor sport impresarios ultimately chose the racing spectacle.5 The Speedway became a place where Midwesterners fashioned a modernity based on culture as much as upon commerce. The central figure in this story, Carl Fisher, was the guiding spirit behind Indianapolis’s speedway, which itself was modeled on the Brooklands automotive and aerial facility built in Surrey, England, in 1907. Fisher, who made a fortune through a headlamp company called Prest-O-Lite, used his wealth to promote automotive travel, pop-culture spectacles, and real-estate ventures in Miami Beach, Florida, and Montauk Point, Long Island. Fisher was like a playful version of Henry Ford, shaping American landscapes and mobility in his own distinctive way. He and three other Hoosier industrialists—James Allison, Arthur Newby, and Frank Wheeler—built Indianapolis’s famous speedway as a tar-and-gravel track in early 1909 and then, after a series of deadly crashes that summer, repaved it with three million vitrified bricks later that year. In its early years, Indianapolis’s speedway held both auto races and aviation contests, making the regional metropolis a focal point for transportation-based spectacle. By 1911, the 2.5-mile oval held its first 500-mile race, which marked its claim to global fame. When the U.S. entered the Great War, aviation was still an important part of the...