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But public confidence could be inspired only by big, financially secure carriers committed to safety, maintenance, and training, not by the fly-by-night operators abounding at the time.Brown changed the rules so that the airlines received payments based not on the weight they carried, but on the distance they flew and the volume of space they maintained in reserve for the mail. This system guaranteed the airlines a minimum payment every time a mail plane left the ground, and the bigger theplane, the greater the payment. Though an outright gift to the airlines, Brown’s scheme gave them the incentive to order the sturdier and more costly planes then in development—planes, he hoped, that would help convince a wary public that it was at last safe to fly. Brown had codified the First Rule of Airline Economics into government policy: Once the flight was paid for, any additional payload was pure gravy. Letter carriers soon began distributing promotional handbills for select airlines. “Fly with the airmail!… Fly with American Airways,” one read, promising a 10 percent discount on round trips.
    Having revolutionized the economics of the industry, Brown in 1930 turned his attention to its geographical structure. An outpouring of capital, loosed by the long-booming stock market and the Lindbergh hysteria, had turned the airmail routes by the early 1930s into an inefficient and illogical labyrinth. Brown’s compulsion for order was offended. Instead of a crazy quilt of routes, he imagined clean lines running east and west, eliminating the circuitous zigzag of connecting flights by which one airline handed off mail to the next. To effect his plan, Brown went to Congress for the power to award postal contracts regardless of the amount bid. Then he called the principal airline operators to Washington and ordered them into a conference room with a map of the United States. For two weeks he cajoled them to swap routes, trade shares of stock in each other, and do whatever else it took to eliminate duplication, irrationality, and competition—in short, to divide the market to the exclusion of everyone who had not been invited to the meeting. A United official at one point turned to a lawyer and asked whether this activity might violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. “If we were holding this meeting across the street in the Raleigh Hotel, it would be an improper meeting,” the lawyer answered. “But because we are holding it at the invitation of a member of the Cabinet, and in the office of the Post Office Department, it is perfectly all right.” The Post Office, in fact, issued daily press releases about the conduct of the conference, to which no one paid much attention.
    Guided by Brown at each turn, the operators emerged from their meetings with 90 percent of the nation’s airways laced into three unbroken lines running from New York to California. United Aircraft & Transport controlled the northernmost route, via Chicago.Transcontinental & Western Air, or TWA, had the center route, via St. Louis. American Airways was given the southern line, via Dallas. A fourth company, Eastern Air Transport, emerged with the routes running north and south along the Eastern seaboard.
    The Big Four were born.
    Everything was fine until an enterprising Democratic senator, Hugo Black (one day to become a Supreme Court justice), decided to hold hearings into the status of the airmail and learned of the postmaster general’s activities three years earlier. The meetings at the Post Office Department were now cast as a grand conspiracy, dubbed the “spoils conference.” Meanwhile the Democrats, led by Franklin Roosevelt, had seized the White House. So at 9:13 A.M. one morning in 1933 federal agents wearing synchronized watches stormed 100 airline offices around the country and carted away boxes of evidence. Roosevelt with great fanfare fired the private airlines and restored the mail routes to the army.
    Roosevelt’s move to embarrass the