Katharine was to go with them to Washington for the ceremony, of course. Bishop Wright, however, felt obliged to take part in some church work in Indiana. To attract as little attention as possible, the brothers and Katharine quietly left Dayton on an earlier train than expected and no notice was taken except for a few railroad officials at the depot.
They were to remain in Washington only the day of June 10. There was a lunch in their honor at the Cosmos Club, which for the occasion waived its long-standing policy of men only so Katharine could attend. Prominent among the more distinguished Washingtonians present was Alexander Graham Bell.
Shortly after the lunch the entire party walked the short distance to the White House, where nearly a thousand men and women stood in the East Room as President Taft formally presented two Gold Medals on behalf of the Aero Club of America. At six feet two and weighing three hundred pounds, the president loomed large as he stood beside the brothers. In addressing his two fellow Ohioans, he spoke appropriately to the point and with unmistakable warmth.
I esteem it a great honor and an opportunity to present these medals to you as an evidence of what you have done. I am so glad—perhaps at a delayed hour—to show that in America it is not true that “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.” It is especially gratifying thus to note a great step in human discovery by paying honor to men who bear it so modestly. You made this discovery by a course that we of America like to feel is distinctly American—by keeping your noses right at the job until you had accomplished what you had determined to do.
By evening, the three Wrights were back on board the train, on their way back to Dayton. Thorough testing of new propellers had become a primary requirement. In the meantime, however, there was Dayton’s “real celebration,” the Great Homecoming, to be faced, like it or not.
“Gigantic” was the word used to describe the preparations. The whole story of America and Dayton from earliest times was to be portrayed with “historical exactness,” in a parade of enormous floats being built at the National Cash Register plant. Indians and their canoes, the eras of the Conestoga wagon, the canal boat, the first railroad, Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the evolution of the bicycle, and an up-to-date automobile, would be followed by the first American balloon and a dirigible, all this in prelude to a float titled, “All the World Paying Homage to the United States, the Wright Brothers, and the Aeroplane,” and featuring a handcrafted, half-size replica of a Wright Flyer. There were to be fifteen floats and 560 people in costume (“all historically correct”), in what the newspapers promised to be the greatest parade Dayton had ever beheld.
On Main Street a “Court of Honor” was being created reaching from Third Street to the river, white columns lining both sides of the street and strung with colored lights. “Everywhere is the tri-colored bunting . . . everywhere flutters the pennants and flags and banners,” the papers were saying. Soldiers, sailors, and the Fire Department would march, bands play. Some 2,500 schoolchildren dressed in red, white, and blue would be arranged as a “living-flag” on the Fair Grounds grandstand and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
In the nearly ten years that the Wright brothers had been working to achieve success with their invention, this was to be the first formal recognition by their hometown of their efforts and success and there was to be no mistaking the whole town’s enthusiasm.
While little of such elaborate fanfare appealed to the brothers, they knew that if Dayton saw fit to celebrate, if Dayton felt that was important, then it was not for them to complain or appear in any way annoyed or disapproving. Octave Chanute wrote to Wilbur to say he knew such honors could grow “oppressive” to modest men, but then they had brought it on themselves with their ingenuity and courage. It was well-meant advice, but the brothers had no need to be reminded.
On the eve of the opening of the festivities, the Dayton Daily News ran an editorial expressing much that was felt by a great many:
It is a wonderful lesson—this celebration. It comes at an auspicious time. The old world was getting tired, it seemed, and needed help to whip it into action. There was beginning a great deal of talk about man’s no longer having the opportunities he once had of achieving greatness. Too many people were beginning to believe that all of the world’s problems had been solved. . . . Money was beginning to tell in the affairs of men, and some were wondering whether a poor boy might work for himself a place in commerce or industry or science.
This celebration throws all such idle talk to the winds. It crowns anew the efforts of mankind. It crushes for another hundred years the suspicion that all of the secrets of nature have been solved or that the avenues of hope have been closed to those who would win new worlds.
It points out to the ambitious young man that he labors not in vain; that genius knows no class, no condition. . . .