Even when the associative state triumphs, there are always malcontents complaining about the relationship between capital and government. Once Hoover was gone, Congress took a closer look at the airmail contracts and the flurry of corporate activity surrounding them. Pop Hanshue told the legislators exactly how Western became so successful. Why had the company been confident it was going to get the mail contract? He testified that the company’s friends Robinson (“the banks”) and Chandler (“the newspapers”) had friends in the Hoover administration.19 He laid it out plainly, in a way that has convinced many historians that the whole mess was a corrupt blunder corrected by Roosevelt. But Hoover never hid his intentions. That was the way it was supposed to work. The government facilitated leading men, who in turn facilitated the government’s facilitation. It wasn’t corruption that enabled Herbert Hoover Jr., after being the first person to take a class in radio engineering at Stanford, to study aeronautical economics at Harvard on a Guggenheim grant and then get hired to run radio development at the Chandler-and-Robinson-financed federal-Guggenheim contractor Western Air Express. It was coordination, the way royal families arrange marriages. There weren’t any planes and then there were a lot of planes—that was the important part, not who got rich. After all, somebody had to. The tangle of names and firms, partnerships and stock offerings and board positions, starts to sound less like the tense strings of a conspiracy network and more like the dull thrum of business as usual.