Boardwalk Empire of the Air: Aerial Bootlegging in Prohibition Era America

Roger Douglas Connor Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., 20560

Abstract

Though minimized in the historiography of air commerce, aerial smuggling was a significant factor in the growth of American civil aviation during the 1920s and '30s. While aviators engaged in bootlegging liquor - an illicit, if popular activity - for reasons of personal gain, I argue that the airplane's disruptive ability to abrogate physical, geopolitical, legal, and social boundaries resonated culturally in ways that enabled the rapid growth of smuggling beyond the motivations of simple greed and adventurism. This underlying disruptive discourse emerged in the decade before Prohibition and as aviation became commonplace, it required negotiations both in aeronautical culture and in a nation that eagerly embraced the airplane while shaping a technological identity through "air-mindedness." If Prohibition bootlegging and air-mindedness were compatible in the minds of many Americans, alien and narcotic smuggling by airplane represented far greater transgressions and greatly complicated this new technological identity.

Introduction On June 6, 1931, Customs officials acting on a tip, arrested Los Angeles millionaire oil tycoon and airline entrepreneur Erle P. Halliburton (founder of the Halliburton megacorporation) along with his chief pilot, Frank Glennan, after crossing the border from Mexico to land at El Paso, Texas. Ten cases of high-grade liquor were discovered in his personal Ford 5-AT Tri- Motor "The Cementer." Halliburton paid the then staggering sum of $13,000 as a fine for tariff evasion, but avoided felony prosecution, unlike the vast majority of other aerial smugglers of the era. A little less than three years later, Glennan, still acting as Halliburton's pilot, perished in the crash of a Bellanca Skyrocket in Mexico, twenty-eight miles south of Fabens, Texas. The Coast Guard Intelligence Division determined that Glennan was still engaged in smuggling, acting in concert with the manager of the El Paso Municipal Airport, A.