“1,000,000 Silent Salesmen on the Road for Pan American,” the headline reads. It’s 1933 and these “silent salesmen” are lifesize cutouts of “Rodney the smiling salesman,” presenting a travel booklet touting a still very new mode of travel: passenger flight.
Rodney was the silent spokesperson for Pan Am, representing the stewards (today known as flight attendants) who would welcome passengers on board Pan Am flights.
“Rodney” was kitted out in a full steward’s uniform from the top of his military-style hat to his spit-shined shoes. He was a ✨ Style Icon ✨. In the book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, former National Air and Space Museum research fellow Phil Tiemeyer writes, “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.”
Article about "Rodney" the smiling salesman in Pan American Air Ways, Vol. 4, No. 1, March 1933. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida
The same year Rodney began to grace travel agencies and train stations, the first of many films about the glamorous life of a stewardess hit the silver screen. Air Hostess introduced audiences that could afford a movie ticket, but not a plane ticket, to the beautiful stewardess and her high flying job. Rodney in his neat white jacket did the same for stewards.
Although a majority of flight attendants in the 1930s were women, Pan Am and Eastern Air Lines exclusively hired men for the role (Eastern switched from exclusively hiring women to exclusively hiring men in 1936). According to Tiemeyer, these male stewards, who made up one third of the flight attendants across the industry, were sometimes belittled as “interlopers in an already well-established female realm.”
In the aftermath of Prohibition, many of the urban elite who could afford to fly in the 1930s had embraced a “softer version of masculinity” and the steward was presented in such a way to cater to their “more fluid gender and sexuality norms.” Despite this carefully crafted presentation — and at least partially because of it — stewards were derided for being “unmanly."
When Eastern Airlines began exclusively hiring men as stewards, a Washington Post article derided the decision from two completely different angles: Feminists quoted in the article were outraged that women were being excluded from jobs they’d proven they could do. And the men were teased for being “male hostesses,” men doing women’s work.
Similar to stewards, men in other service industries were presented in stylish (and often feminized) ways. Bellhops, waiters, doormen: all were handsomely uniformed and put in public facing service roles. There were also the jazz performers and nightclub personalities from the roaring 20s that bled into the early 30s.
The other side of the coin were the hyper-masculine depictions of factory and agricultural workers that showed up in artwork like Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals and the more widely available WPA murals that would be painted on post offices and civic buildings across the country thanks to the New Deal.
After WWII there would still be these factory and farm workers and there would still be waiters and bellhops and doormen, but the war changed how Americans of all classes saw masculinity. Rodney and his smiling steward brothers would be consigned to history. Pan Am started hiring women, and they and other airlines would soon stop hiring men as flight attendants altogether.
It would be decades before men were once again hired for the role in significant numbers. We explore the community formed by gay male flight attendants in the 1970s in the first episode of our QueerSpace audio series. Listen now.