exuberance, and technical skill. His superiors entrusted him with significant responsibility, and he more than fulfilled their expectations. Ingalls achieved great success in all his endeavors and despite his youth earned the praise, admiration, and respect of those around him. His experiences mirrored the course of the navy’s first venture into the crucible of aerial combat. David Ingalls’s story is naval aviation’s story.
By any reckoning, David Sinton Ingalls of Cleveland, Ohio, lived an extraordinary life. Long before he flew into aviation history, he seemed destined for high achievement. It was in his blood. Born into an affluent, socially and politically prominent midwestern family, he enjoyed great success as a youthful athlete. His exploits in World War I made him a national hero. The postwar era brought further accomplishments—degrees from Yale and Harvard; marriage to an heiress and a busy family life; a high-profile career in politics, law, business, and publishing; a busy and productive stint as undersecretary of the navy for aeronautics in the Hoover administration; distinguished military service in World War II; extensive activity as a sportsman and philanthropist; and a lifelong commitment to his passion for flying as both a pilot and an aviation enthusiast. And whatever activity he pursued, he did so with energy and zest.
David Ingalls’s family tree incorporated some of Ohio’s most prominent citizens. On his mother’s side, he descended from David Sinton (1808–1900), whose parents arrived from Ireland and settled in Pittsburgh. Described much later as a man of “irregular education,” Sinton was known as “a large, strong person with strong common sense.”9 He eventually relocated to southern Ohio, made a fortune in the iron business, and was at one time perhaps the richest man in the state. His elegant, Federal-style Cincinnati home survives today as the Taft Museum of Art. Sinton’s only daughter, Anne (1850–1931), inherited $20 million from her father. She married Charles Phelps Taft (1843–1929), son of Alphonso Taft (1810–91), a man of solid Yankee stock. Originally from West Townshend, Vermont, the elder Taft graduated from Yale (Phi Beta Kappa) and Yale Law School and by 1859 had settled in Cincinnati, where he attained legal and political prominence. He ultimately served as U.S. secretary of war and attorney general and later ambassador to Austria-Hungary and Russia.
Alphonso Taft’s son Charles, the older half brother of William Howard Taft (the future judge, secretary of war, president, and Chief Justice of the United States), became a prominent lawyer in his own right, as well as a congressman and publisher of the Cincinnati Times-Star. According to Robert A. Taft’s biographer, “Wealthy brother Charley” often provided financial assistance to his justice sibling, while emerging as one of Cincinnati’s leading philanthropists. Charles and Anne Taft lived in David Sinton’s mansion until the late 1920s. Their only daughter, Jane Taft (1874–1962), was David Ingalls’s mother. She exhibited a lifelong interest in the arts and became a patroness of many museums and organizations. She also earned a local reputation as a talented painter and sculptress.10
Paternal grandfather Melville Ingalls (1842–1914), another Yankee, hailed from Maine and moved to Massachusetts, where he gained distinction as a lawyer and politician. After relocating to Cincinnati, he fashioned a remarkable career in railroads and finance. In time, he became president of several rail lines, including the Indianapolis, Cincinnati & Lafayette, later part of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, & St. Louis, known as the Big Four Railroad. Melville Ingalls also controlled the Merchants National Bank, the city’s second-largest financial institution. His “imposing estate” stood in Cincinnati’s fashionable East Walnut Hills neighborhood. Melville’s son, Albert S. Ingalls (1874–1943), achieved great success as well, Born in Cincinnati, he attended St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire and Harvard, then went to work for his father’s railroad, starting out dressed in overalls rather than a business suit. He worked his way up through the system at the Big Four, then Lake Shore Railroad, and finally New York Central Railroad, where he became vice president and general manager of operations west of Buffalo, New York. As his career blossomed, Albert Ingalls moved to Cleveland, earning some notoriety as the second man in the city to own an automobile. He was long remembered as a hard worker and quick thinker, a master of English who could clear a desk of correspondence in record time. He exhibited a democratic spirit and genial personality and an admirable mixture of culture, quick-wittedness, broad interests, and robust energy. From an early age, Albert Ingalls enjoyed smoking a clay pipe. Many of his personal traits he passed on to his children, especially David.
Albert Ingalls and Jane Taft married in Cincinnati, linking two important Ohio clans, but soon relocated to Cleveland. The young couple lived first in the city, then in Cleveland Heights. They had three children—David, Anne, and Albert. David, the eldest, was born on January 28, 1899. In 1906, the family moved to Bratenahl, one of the city’s early elite residential suburbs on the shores of Lake Erie, known for its prominent families and manicured estates. Residents included members of the region’s financial and industrial elite, including the Hannas, Irelands, Chisholms, Holdens, Kings, McMurrays, and Pickandses. David Ingalls’s lifelong friend and fellow naval aviator, Robert Livingston “Pat” Ireland, lived nearby. Ingalls spent summers at the lakeshore or visiting his many relatives, especially his Taft cousins.
His academic training included time spent at University School in Cleveland, an independent day school founded in 1890. In 1912, Ingalls entered St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1916, having participated in the requisite campus organizations, including the mandolin club, literary society, and scientific association. He played football and tennis and was twice schoolwide squash champion. Ingalls’s most notable exploits came on the ice as a standout hockey player. Some even compared him to the nonpareil athlete Hobey Baker, who preceded him by a few years. At the time, the school was “ardently Anglophile . . . High Church,” and it drew much of its student body from the New York–Philadelphia Main Line. While at St. Paul’s, Ingalls came under the stern influence of Rector Samuel Drury, a former missionary to the Philippines who worked diligently to improve the school’s commitment to ethical and academic standards. Drury often told his charges, “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”11
Ingalls’s schoolboy years, whether at St. Paul’s or at home in Cleveland, exposed him daily to the controversies ignited by the terrible war that broke out in Europe in 1914 and America’s appropriate response to it. As the history of St. Paul’s School documents, there was considerable anti-German feeling at that time, and both students and faculty quickly forged many connections to the fighting. Several masters attended summer military camps. Graduates enlisted with the French or British forces. Students marched in preparedness parades, volunteered for military drill, and carried out raids on various campus buildings.12 Like the strong winds blowing off Lake Erie, news of the war and the fierce debate it generated also buffeted Cleveland, a flourishing city with a yeasty mix of rich and poor, native and immigrant, liberal and conservative. News of the sinking of the Lusitania in early May 1915 covered every inch of the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. When the German consul in Cincinnati released a statement in January 1916 defending his country’s actions in the war, the story received wide circulation throughout the state. That same day, notices informed Clevelanders that new war motion pictures were playing in local theaters.
Residents read about vigorous efforts by pacifist, preparedness, and interventionist groups to sway public opinion. In 1915, Mayor Newton Baker, known for his antimilitarist stance, joined social reformer Jane Addams in praising the antiwar film Lay Down Your Arms. In the same year, Cleveland Women for Peace held a tea to honor delegates to the World Court Congress. Mrs. Baker, the mayor’s spouse, presided at the event. The miners’ union came out against military preparedness in January 1916, and members of the Cleveland Young People’s Socialist League celebrated an antiwar day the following September. In November 1916, Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County voted for President Woodrow Wilson (“He kept us out of war”) by a 52-to-44 percent margin. This result received the approbation of the November 9 Plain Dealer editorial page, which praised Wilson for “his sane Americanism, opposition to war-at-any-price jingoes, and professional hyphenates.”
Cleveland supporters of preparedness and the Allies, however, were also vocal
