This act provided for carriers to be paid, not on the basis of how much mail they carried, hut on the basis of the capacity of their aircraft, whether it was filled with mail or not. This was calculated to encourage (or force) the CAM carriers to use larger aircraft. Requiring larger planes to turn a profit made it even more difficult for smaller companies to compete for the lucrative CAM routes. Brown used his office to force smaller companies to merge into larger ones by holding the CAM contracts over their heads. In a series of meetings that critics called the “Spoils Conferences,” Brown manipulated the airlines like toy soldiers on a map, creating merged companies and shaping four major carriers that accounted for twenty-four of the twenty-seven — CAM contracts.

Even the aviation people who benefited resented Brown’s autocratic dealings. Soon, however, four major companies were created that covered nearly the entire country—these became known as the Big Four. The easiest merger was combining Boeing Air — Transport, Varney, National, Stout, and Pacific into United Air Lines, since all these companies were con- trolled by Boeing in any case. More troublesome was forcing the sizable companies operating in the East and the Midwest—Robertson, Embry-Riddle, Colonial, Texas Air; and Thompson—to merge into American Airways.

Still more difficult was forcing Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT)—known as the “Lindy Line” because it was backed by Lindbergh, and which was the only carrier devoted specifically to the transport of passengers— to merge with Western Air Express and other mail carriers to become Transcontinental and Western Air, or TWA.

The rockiest road was that of the airlines that were merged to form Eastern Air Transport, because not only were there pressures from the  government, but the company was tossed from crisis to crisis by a very active management led by the company president, the flamboyant Eddie Rickenbacker. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he addressed the issue of the airlines with typical New Deal zeal. A Senate committee headed by Senator Hugo L. Black (later to be appointed by FDR to the Supreme Court) conducted an investigation of Brown and the Post Office.

Brown proudly claimed that he had acted in the public’s best interest and had, in a very short time, turned an industry that in the early 1920s was little more than a barnstorming curiosity into a full-fledged, technologically sophisticated (profit-yielding and job-providing) American industry. The Black Committee’s final report offered a mild rebuke of Brown and recommended that the entire CAM system he dissolved, and that the mail he flown by the U.S. Army. Postmaster General James A. Farlev accepted the Black Committee’s recommendation and in an instant, on February 9, 1934, private carriers were out of the air mail business.

The army was ill-prepared to carry out air mail flights. In the first six months of the program, sixteen crashes resulted in eleven deaths, and only fourteen of the twenty-six main lines could be flown with any regularity. Although the record of the army fliers improved, the damage had been done and public opinion called for a return to the old system. Eddie Rickenbacker, a wartime hero (and later to become president and owner of Eastern Airlines) characterized the government’s scheme as “legalized murder.”

The deadly beginnings of the Air Mail Service a decade earlier were forgotten by 1934, and the private airline people, many of whom despised Postmaster General Brown, now saw what the alternative might look like and banded together. In returning to the CAM system, Farley, attempting to save face, decreed that none of the participants in the 1930 Spoils Conferences could he awarded contracts.

The prevailing attitude was that this restriction would never hold up in court, so the government simply turned a blind eye when the same companies submitted bids under very mildly altered names. Eastern Air Transport became Eastern Airlines; Transcontinental and Western Air became Trans-World Airlines, retaining its TWA logo; and American Airways became American Airlines. The only one of the Big Four that did not change its name was United Air Lines, partly because Bill Boeing refused to he a part of the charade, but also because by then Boeing had undergone the most radical changes resulting from the New Deal “Trust-Busters.”

In 1926 the Germans, free from the antitrust restrictions of the United States and taking much more modest (and thus more reasonable) steps in building a commercial air industry, created Deutsche LuftHansa (which became one word—Lufthansa—in 1934). Supplied with the latest aircraft produced in the Junkers factories, and making the first serious attempt to cater to the needs of the passenger, LuftHansa established a  strong market over all of Europe. The company wasted no time establishing a subsidiary in South America, VARIG, which supplanted Aéropostale as the major carrier between Europe and South America.