Rediscovering Hiram Bingham
Of all the indignities suffered by America’s military aviators during World War I, perhaps none were as richly symbolic as the requirement that they wear spurs.
“It is a queer sense of humor that requires a field officer, who in the course of his duties suddenly is called upon to mount his winged steed, to divest himself of his spurs and put them in his pocket for safety,” recalls Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) Hiram Bingham in his 1920 memoir An Explorer in the Air Service. “I speak the more feelingly on this matter because of one Sunday afternoon at Potomac Park, when I was invited unexpectedly to fly with Colonel Lee of the Royal Flying Corps and had to listen to the laughter of the crowd while I took off my spurs. It would not have been so bad had I not been wearing wings at the same time.”
The extent to which the Air Service’s leadership remained invested in the equine was reflected in more consequential ways, too; Bingham relates several anecdotes about “old cavalry officers” who drove the pilots under their command to despair through their indifference to and ignorance of aviation. (“Stop those fans!” shouted one officer inspecting an active flight line on horseback. “Don’t you see they scare my horse?”) But it was Bingham’s mention of spurs — an “archaic” uniform regulation that was only lifted temporarily, at the height of the conflict — that made World War I seem real to me in a way that countless Hollywood movies never have. The romantic ideal of the flying ace is not a character I recognize in real life. But who can’t relate to the embarrassed aviator who, mired in a hidebound bureaucracy, is forced to wear spurs?
As the director of the United States Schools of Military Aeronautics, and later officer in charge of air personnel for the American Expeditionary Forces in France, Bingham was not a pilot by profession. But he was an active and enthusiastic pilot nonetheless, and the story he tells in An Explorer in the Air Service is so deeply sympathetic to the aviator’s point of view that by the end of the book — which I discovered while researching early pilot selection criteria — it was hard for me to think of him as anything but an aviator. Of course, if you have visited Machu Picchu in Peru, you likely already know what I had to learn through Google: that Hiram Bingham III is best known for bringing that ancient Inca citadel to the world’s attention. He is secondarily known as a Connecticut politician who spent eight years in the U.S. Senate; on his Wikipedia page, his time in the Air Service merits barely a paragraph.
Bingham was born in Hawaii in 1875, the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries (his grandfather, the original Hiram Bingham, was the inspiration for the Reverend Abner Hale character in the James Michener novel Hawaii). His parents spent years struggling to convert souls in the remote Gilbert Islands, and returned to Honolulu only days before his birth, following an ocean journey that took them through Samoa, Fiji, and New Zealand. As author Christopher Heaney observes in Cradle of Gold, his book about Bingham’s thorny legacy as an explorer, this meant that Bingham “traveled further while in the womb than most Americans would their whole lives.”
As a teenager, Bingham relocated to New England and enrolled in Phillips Academy in Andover, paying for his room and board by working in the dining halls. He continued on to Yale, where, as Heaney describes it, he came to embrace a more worldly approach to life than his parents’ — one that was greatly facilitated by his marriage in 1900 to Alfreda Mitchell, granddaughter of the jeweler Charles L. Tiffany and an heiress to the Tiffany fortune. When Bingham decided in 1907 to undertake an overland journey from Venezuela to Colombia, Mitchell’s money paid his way, as it did during a second expedition in 1908 and 1909. And while Bingham managed to source outside funds for the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 — the trip that would make him, and Machu Picchu, famous — Mitchell still had to chip in $1,800 (around $45,000 in today’s money) to pay for the expedition’s surgeon.
“Alfreda’s father had died in April, and when Mrs. Mitchell heard that Hiram was leaving again, she was as furious as Alfreda was quietly heartbroken,” Heaney writes. “Alfreda couldn’t say no, however, and in the midst of feelings of loss and abandonment, she gave her husband what he needed.” By then, Bingham was leaving not only Mitchell behind, but also six of the couple’s eventual seven sons.
Mitchell’s “quiet heartbreak” recalled for me another passage in An Explorer in the Air Service:
“It may not be out of place to state here that during the first few months of my duty in Washington, the officer who, under General Squier, was in immediate charge of the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, was not a pilot, had only been up once or twice, was frankly afraid to fly even as an observer, and went so far as to say to me that for the father of seven sons to take flying lessons showed that he did not love his children. I could not help wondering whether the Secretary of War would expect an officer who was afraid of riding horseback to direct the fortunes of the Mounted Service School or even command a cavalry regiment successfully.”
When I first read this, I shared Bingham’s unreserved contempt. Who indeed would expect pilots to be led by someone who was terrified of flying, even at a time when, according to Bingham, four percent of all advanced students were killed in training? (Bingham himself suffered two plane crashes: “one due to my own stupidity, and one due to engine failure.”) But Cradle of Gold reminded me that Bingham did not embrace flying solely from a sense of professional obligation — he embraced it because, like riding mules through the Andes, it was something he wanted to do.
Did this make him selfish and uncaring? It’s a question that pilots continue to struggle with, a hundred years after Bingham took his first lessons at Glenn Curtiss’ pioneering flying school near Miami. Today, most of my friends are helicopter pilots. Saving lives is something that many of them do routinely, often under exceptionally challenging conditions, and clearly someone has to perform this important work. But I don’t know anyone who took up flying as an obligation. Most of us were driven by passion and a desire for self-actualization, and we pursued that passion — or would have — even in the face of objections from friends and loved ones.
This is not because, as the officer in charge of the Aviation Section might have supposed, we have a death wish. Research has suggested that those of us who love flying may appraise its risks very differently than people who do not. As the psychology professor Paul Slovic summarizes, “If we like an activity, we tend to judge its benefits as high and its risks as low; if we dislike it, we judge the opposite — low benefits and high risk.” Bingham, who liked flying, probably perceived less conflict between his military duties and his responsibilities as a father than did the Aviation Section officer.
Of course, I doubt that Mitchell’s heartbreak was due solely to the fear that the jungle might swallow her husband forever — there was also the drag of being left alone with six kids for months on end. While average family sizes may now be smaller, this is also a conflict that many of today’s pilots can relate to. Aviation careers often demand extended time away from home, and the spouses and children left behind can be justifiably resentful. This is a more complex question of “selfishness,” one that can only be negotiated in the context of individual relationships.
Although Bingham’s marriage survived his South American expeditions and his military service, it finally ended in the way that many pilots’ marriages do. Mitchell divorced Bingham in 1937, citing, according to Heaney, cruelty, “cold indifference,” and an “attitude of superiority.” The fact that Bingham had a long-time mistress didn’t help matters, either. Mitchell, an avid violinist, proceeded to marry her accompanist, while Bingham married his mistress, Suzanne Carroll Hill.
Suzanne Carroll was with Bingham in 1948 when he made a triumphant return to Machu Picchu for the inauguration of the Carretera Hiram Bingham, the Hiram Bingham Highway. The same year, he published Lost City of the Incas, which, despite its flawed archaeological theories, remains a bestseller. Bingham’s story also inspired the 1954 film Secret of the Incas, starring Charlton Heston. Nearly three decades later, Heston’s costume served as the prototype for the iconic look of the Indiana Jones character in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In 1956, Bingham passed away at the age of eighty, oblivious to his enormous future influence on pop culture, but perhaps still satisfied with the name he had made for himself. In their own ways, his sons carried on his complicated but distinguished legacy. In particular, Hiram Bingham IV is now recognized as a hero who, while serving as a vice consul in Marseilles, disobeyed orders from Washington by helping more than 2,500 Jews — including Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt — flee from Nazi France.
While Lost City of the Incas remains essential reading for every tourist visiting Machu Picchu, An Explorer in the Air Service is now so obscure that it doesn’t even appear on Bingham’s Amazon author page. That is not entirely surprising. It recounts no epic battles, and it can be more than a little tedious in its bureaucratic minutiae. But apart from its historical interest to aviation buffs, An Explorer in the Air Service is a useful corrective to the tendency to romanticize World War I beyond all recognition. For the most part, the Great War’s epic aerial battles were fought not by extraordinary men “whom fate has chosen to realize the dream of the world” (as one commentator of that era put it) but by the same sort of people who are pilots today: who accept the risks inherent in aviation because they love to fly, and who for the same reason will put up with a good deal of bureaucratic absurdity — although not without some snide remarks.
