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Republicans quickly turned into a bloody spectacle, for the military pilots no longer had the equipment or training to carry out the job. Within weeks12 army fliers perished, five in the first week alone. The demure Charles Lindbergh took time from his trailblazing on behalf of Pan Am to harangue Roosevelt publicly, setting the nation’s two most beloved public figures against one another in a conflict that wouldlast their lifetimes. An editorial cartoon showed FDR hiding froma dozen skeletons wearing goggles and flying caps. Stricken by the first political crisis of his presidency, Roosevelt soon relented, restoring the airmail to private contractors. To save face, Roosevelt decreed that none of the previous contractors could hold any new routes—a thoroughly impractical requirement, since so much of the industry had been swallowed by the Big Four or driven from business in the wake of the spoils conference. Roosevelt therefore looked the other way when American Airways changed its name to American Airlines, Eastern Air Transport became Eastern Air Lines, and TWA added “Incorporated” to its name—all to qualify themselves as different companies. (United did not have to alter its corporate identity because subsidiaries had held the offending contracts.) The incumbent airlines preserved virtually everything they already had, although in this round of bidding two scrappy regional airlines managed tosneak into the airmail business. One, named Braniff, snared the Dallas-Chicago route. The other, named Delta, grabbed Atlanta-Chicago. It was, at least, a foot in the door.
    Lawful or not, the manipulations of Walter Folger Brown prepared the airlines to handle an onslaught of paying passengers. But the public still needed convincing. It needed comforting—and a strong dose of marketing. It would get both from Cyrus Rowland Smith, the president of American Airlines.
    Like Trippe, Smith was born in 1899. Like Trippe, he had learned to fly. But where Trippe flourished by uniting technology and politics, Smith, a drawling andhard-drinking Texan known to all as C.R., did so through a combination of technology and salesmanship.
    With backing from Wall Street, American had gobbled up dozens of failing airlines around the country, including the airmail contractor that had employed Charles Lindbergh as chief pilot a few years earlier. In doing so American had built itself into the largest airline holding company in the United States, but the operation was far from seamless. When he became president in 1934, Smith’s biggest challenge was theragtag fleet, which included practically every species of airplane flying at the time. Smith vowed to move toward a single aircraft type.
    The state-of-the-art passenger airplane was the DC-2, with seven window seats on either side of the aisle (in addition to an airmail compartment). It was a perfectly good airplane except that it never seemed to make money. Smith, an accountant by training, determined that with a few more seats installed (or with berths on night flights, as a “sleeper” plane) the DC-2 could operate in the black. On Smith’s demand Douglas Aircraft in 1935 worked feverishly to make the plane wide enough to accommodate berths or 21 seats-three seats abreast instead of two. The additional seven seats made all the difference. Theyincreased the cost of operating the plane only about 10 percent but increased the seating capacity by 50 percent. An instant moneymaker, the craft was called the DC-3 (the acronym stood for “Douglas Commercial”).
    It was a sleek, futuristic airplane, a flying work of art deco with rounded edges and mirrored aluminum. It looked sturdy and was—“relatively stronger than theBrooklyn Bridge,” American boasted.The use of sleeper berths on night flights helped to demonstrate the tranquillity of the ride. American sold its first sleeper ticket to littleShirley Temple, shaming adults who remained afraid to fly. On top of everything else the DC-3, at a