The newcomer was Rex Beisel, a man who had received good training in the old school of Curtiss Airplane Company but had gone west to create a new private airplane. The stock-market crash had made Rex available and we now promptly scooped him up. We thought Rex a bit opinionated, and expected to have to handle him roughly at times, but we knew there was great capacity there. And in this we were right, for Rex created a strong engineering organization as a substitute for the genius of Chance Vought, and came ultimately to head the Vought Division in his own right. The story of how this was done, like the story of Hamilton-Standard, or Sikorsky, or Pratt and Whitney, or any of the great independent outfits like Grumman, or Martin, or Douglas, or Boeing, is worth a book in itself; but for our purposes here we can sweep in only those high lights that seem to back light the slipstream itself. And though the several stories run concurrently, we are concerned more with events than with precise timing. There was, however, one vital factor that influenced the performance of every aircraft company, and in the end, imperiled the existence of them all. For while the creative force of the Morrow Board policy carried over beyond the 1929 stock-market crash, it did not survive the ordeal of the New Deal. With the election of President Roosevelt in 1932 and his advent into the White House in 1933, an earthquake hit American aviation. When President Roosevelt ordered the cancellation of the air-mail contracts and directed the Army to take over, the young air-transport business suffered a vital blow. When, after the deaths of several Army pilots who had had no preparation for the complex transport task, the lines were returned to private operations, the blight of Congressional investigation fell upon the whole aircraft industry. Senator Hugo Black, later a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who had been probing the ocean-mail subsidies, now turned his attention to aviation. The airplane, long a subject of great public interest, crowded the headlines with sensational charges and countercharges, none of which seemed to lead anywhere other than to the glorification of the investigators. Then Senator Gerald P. Nye, not to be outdone in courtesy, dragged out the old myth of the “munitions racketeer” and the “merchants of death” and dusted it off for the more modern treatment of klieg lights and other technological advances in the art of public relations. Whatever else may be said for these hippodromes, they had the effect of knocking down an airplane program just as a killer in the stockyards fells an ox with one neat blow from a maul. Even though the programs remained on the statute books, it would have required a courageous procurement staff, indeed, to make contracts with such apparent renegades as headed the unhappy aircraft companies.