Background
Paul Henderson was born on March 13, 1884 in Lyndon, Kansas, United States. He was the only child of Clark Ebenezer Henderson and Flora Anne Waddell Henderson. Early in his youth his family moved to Chicago.
military Soldier airline executive
Paul Henderson was born on March 13, 1884 in Lyndon, Kansas, United States. He was the only child of Clark Ebenezer Henderson and Flora Anne Waddell Henderson. Early in his youth his family moved to Chicago.
In Chicago, Henderson attended South Division High School.
The death of his father while he was still in high school prevented Henderson from going to college.
Henderson went to work for the Western Stone Company, a Chicago building-material and contracting firm operated by his future father-in-law. By 1916 he had become its president. The following year he entered the armed forces and rose to the rank of major in the army ordnance department, seeing duty in France and studying the military use of airmail.
After the war Henderson returned to the Chicago area and held various executive positions in the stone industry. He also became a lieutenant colonel in the army reserve corps and campaigned for the establishment of municipal airports. In 1922 Henderson was appointed second assistant postmaster general in charge of airmail, then an experimental service, less than four years old, that used war-surplus planes and incurred substantial deficits. Deciding that it must either be made a paying proposition or abandoned, Henderson believed the service could become a mainstay of a thriving commercial aviation industry, which in turn he deemed essential for national defense. Under his energetic leadership--and aided by legislation that reduced airmail fees by establishing a zoning system, thus attracting increased public use--the fledgling system became increasingly dependable.
As a result of the steady expansion of a lighted airway system across the country, regular night mail flights began on July 1, 1924. A year later Henderson's efforts were crowned with the opening of an overnight route between New York and Chicago. This regular round-the-clock service boosted airmail revenues above expenses for the first time. Encouraged by the improvements that had taken place during his tenure in office, Henderson welcomed the Kelly Act of February 2, 1925, which initiated the transfer of airmail operations from the government to private enterprise. He believed that it was now a propitious time for him to leave the government, and in August of that year he joined the recently founded National Air Transport (NAT) as general manager. Elected president of the aeronautical chamber of commerce, he became a prominent industry spokesman and promoter of aviation securities.
He also held high offices in the corporate ancestors of Eastern and Trans World airlines. Frank J. Taylor, a historian of United Air Lines, which absorbed NAT in 1928, stated that Henderson assumed too many tasks. Nevertheless, as a vice-president in the newly formed United organization he survived the difficult days of industry boom, depression, and consolidation--but not the Black committee.
Henderson's career in aviation came to an abrupt end in 1934 when disclosures of irregularities in the awarding of airmail contracts under the Hoover administration led to the temporary cancellation of commercial airmail service and forced the resignation of a number of top airline officials. As a key witness at the hearings conducted in 1934 by a special Senate investigating committee chaired by Hugo Black, Henderson described the part he and three other United officials had played in the so-called Spoils Conference of late May-early June 1930, at which an allotment of potentially lucrative airmail routes had been carried out by favored contractors without competitive bidding on the invitation of Postmaster General Walter F. Brown. Henderson indicated that he had questioned the propriety of the conference from the beginning and participated in it only as an "interested spectator. " He asserted that his efforts to obtain route extensions for United had been in jest, and he maintained that the airline received no new mileage from the conclave, partly because he refused to take the proceedings seriously. Nevertheless Henderson and other airline magnates who attended the conference were proscribed under Section 7(d) of the Airmail Act of 1934 from filling executive positions for any public carrier holding airmail contracts, and he was forced to relinquish his post with United.
During the remainder of his career, Henderson engaged in residential real estate development in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and supervised investments in a wide range of ventures, including gold mining, oil drilling, an engraving company, and a radio school. In 1942 he moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he renovated an old farmhouse and inn. Following the death of a son in an air crash in 1946, his health failed and he became less active. He died in Washington.
Henderson was a member of the Presbyterian church.
Quotations: "The airplane is as truly a business tool of today as a turret lathe, a typewriter or a lift truck. "
Henderson was a member of the Union League in Chicago and the Engineers' Club in New York.
In South Division High School Henderson met his future wife, Mabel Madden, the daughter of Martin B. Madden, a quarry owner, Republican politician, and longtime Illinois congressman. They were married on June 11, 1910, and had five children.