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Rare early map promoting the United States Post Offices' newly established air mail route.
This map was issued in the wake of the Air Mail Act of 1934, a major landmark in American Mail and related aviation policy
After an intermittent series of government sponsored experimental flights between 1911 and 1918, domestic U.S. Air Mail was formally established as a new class of service by the United States Post Office Department on May 15, 1918, with the inauguration of the Washington-Philadelphia-New York route for which the first of special Air Mail stamps were issued.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. Congress used legislation (such as the Kelly Act and the McNary-Watres Act), and the U.S. Postal Service under Walter Folger Brown used air mail contract regulations, as tools to foster private-sector aviation companies (manufacturers, airlines, and conglomerates thereof) in order to encourage the development of a civil aviation system that would provide passenger airline service and cargo transport by air as widespread facets of American life. These events devolved into ethically dubious backroom deals between the government and corporations just in time for the Great Depression to create a populist backlash against such "fat cat" behavior. The resulting Air Mail scandal led to the Air Mail Act of 1934, which mandated the separation of air carriers from their equipment manufacturers, breaking up companies such as the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation.
![[ Temperance Allegorical View ] Black Valley Railroad. Tickets Sold at all Liquor Shops. Accidents by Collisions are Entirely Avoided, as no up Trains are Run Over the Road.](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/101469.jpg)
