In the 1970s, when people travelled and airlines served something resembling real food, my mother decided that the silverware used by Braniff Airlines looked almost exactly like her silverware at home. So when she had a choice, she flew Braniff (which stopped flying in 1982). And when she “deplaned,” Braniff silverware from her meal and my father’s meal were in her handbag. (Knowing my mother, someone else’s used cutlery was there as well.)
Braniff, had started flying in 1930 but was floundering until it benefitted from a failed effort, begun on February 19, 1934, to have the Army Air Corps carry US airmail instead of the private contractors that had exclusively carried that mail since 1927. The effort, which was known as the Air Mail fiasco “dominated the nation’s attention over the first half of 1934” wrote Kenneth Werrell in “Air Power History” in 2010. “It included the major personalities of the day, including President Franklin Roosevelt, congressmen, aviation heroes Charles Lindbergh and Eddie Rickenbacker, two Postmaster Generals, and the leaders of the Army and the Army’s air arm.” In honor of the airmail fiasco – and my mother’s cutlery – today’s #stampoftheday is a 5-cent airmail stamp issued in February 1930 that featured a design used on most of the airmail stamps issued in the 1930s.
When airmail started in the early 1920s, it was handled by the Army Air Corps. By the mid 1920s, however, as part of an effort to spur air passenger transport, the work was given to private operators. The actual subsidies, however, were badly designed. They didn’t really incentivize passenger service and, supposedly were so lucrative that one carrier realized it could make money by buying and mailing Christmas cards that it would be paid to carry.
In 1930, Walter Folger Brown, an Ohio lawyer appointed as Postmaster General by Herbert Hoover, got Congress to not only change the way mail payments were computed, but also to give the Postmaster General the authority to “extend or consolidate” routes when he deemed it to be “in the public interest,” however he interpreted it. Not long afterwards, at a meeting that later came to be known as “Spoils Conference,” Brown gave all the routes to three entities, which, over time, evolved into United Airlines, TWA (which emerged from a merger of Transcontinental and Western airlines); and American Airlines.
The small aviation companies, which complained that they had been left out of Brown’s scheme, found sympathetic ears when Democrats came to power during the Great Depression. In January 1934, Senator Hugo Black, an Alabama Democrat who was later a Supreme Court justice, held hearings where he called the process of giving contracts “spoils” and said the business had gone only to the Hoover administration’s friends. Brown and his supporters argued that the changes had led to a 50 percent drop in the cost of carrying the mail.
Black urged President Roosevelt and his appointees to move against the airlines. Administration officials asked Maj. Gen. Benjamin Foulas, then the chief of the Air Corps, how long it would take for before the Corps could take on the task. Foulas , who later wrote that “answered casually” said 10 weeks. So on February 9th, administration officials announced that the Air Corps would take over airmail on February 19th. This was a significant mistake because, as Foulas later wrote in his autobiography, “very few of our pilots had extensive instrument and night-flying experience.”
Not surprisingly, then, things did not go well. Three days after the service started, two airmail planes crashed into each other and both pilots were killed. By early March, 12 pilots had died in 66 crashes or forced landings. Moreover, the cost to fly the mail quadrupled.
The administration came under scorching criticism from many quarters, including the nation’s most famous aviators. Rickenbacker, a famed World War I pilot (who was vice-president of one the three holding companies that had lost a lucrative contract) said the deaths had been “legalized murder.” And Lindbergh (who was a consultant to two airlines), said that using the Air Corps to carry the mail was “unwarranted and contrary to American principles.”
The disputes, moreover, were widely reported. According to Werrell, major national newspapers ran stories about it on half of the days in February and March and 30 percent of those were on the paper’s front pages.
In early March, Roosevelt summoned Foulas and Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Army Chief of Staff, to a meeting where Foulas later reported “MacArthur and I received a tongue-lashing which I put down in my book as the worst I ever received in all my military service. There was no doubt that what bothered Roosevelt the most was the severe criticism his Administration was getting over the contract cancellation. He did not seem genuinely concerned or even interested in the difficulties the Air Corps was having.”
In May, Roosevelt and Postmaster General James Farley returned to having private entities carry airmail. Some newcomers, notably Braniff and Delta, won contracts. But the big airlines again got most of the business even though, officially, no airline company that had held a contract before the government takeover could now receive a new contract. To circumvent these rules, the three previous operators simply changed their names.
Later that year, Congress passed legislation sponsored by Black that broke up the aviation holding companies that had previously held the contracts and made bidding for contracts more competitive. With air mail revenue less certain than before, the airlines put new emphasis on carrying passengers. New aircraft were introduced that could carry both mail and passengers, and planes became more comfortable and easier to fly as well.
In addition, “the Air Corps learned from the weaknesses exposed by the air mail operation,” contended John Correll in a March 2008 article in “Air Force Magazine.” “The old attitudes that assumed flying in daytime and good weather gave way to approaches that made use of instruments and radio communications…and within a short time, the open-cockpit biplanes were rendered obsolete by a new generation of fighters and bombers.”
As a result, “the Air Corps that entered World War II was an entirely different force than the one that had been ordered to carry the air mail seven years before.” And a few decades later, thanks to these fights, my family got some inexpensive free cutlery as well.
Be safe, stay well, fight for justice, and work for peace.