The involvement of Halliburton, a prominent businessman, and Musick, a prominent aeronautical pioneer raises significant questions. Both had strong stakes in establishing the commercial legitimacy of aviation, so why risk engaging in such an illicit activity? Given that the traditional narratives of aviation in the Prohibition-era scarcely mention smuggling, does their participation suggest a much larger role for criminality in the development of the airplane when the historiography has framed the emergence of American aeronautical commerce almost exclusively in terms of air mail and barnstorming? If smuggling did indeed form a significant part of early aeronautical commerce, how did American society negotiate the tension between lawlessness and the rhetoric of the airplane as a beneficent agent of social change?

The negotiations inherent to these questions played out first as theoretical conundrums for policy experts, but historical contingency in the form of the First World War and federal Prohibition suppressed these concerns until they exploded onto the national stage. Though criminal enterprises were employing the airplane as early as 1911, international tensions in Europe and North America meant that smuggling did not reemerge until 1918. While aerial smuggling did appear as a European problem as well as a North American problem, federal Prohibition established a culture of aerial criminality in North America that rapidly outpaced the expansion of European smuggling. From the Progressive perspective, the implementation of the Volstead Act, and the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution that created Prohibition, represented the beneficent reorientation of the newly risen modern federal state's power for social transformation inward from its wartime focus on the exhaustive cycle of preparedness, mobilization, and industrialization. The negotiation between the state and society in these transactions resulted in significant cultural turbulence. Progressives had watched distraught as social mores regarding sexuality and abstention in all its forms were undercut as the nation embraced the trappings of modernism.