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. Combined with the hundreds of thousands of returning young men exposed to unsavory foreign influences, Prohibition provided the rhetoric of a return to order for many Americans, even those who found the idea of temperance personally problematic. As one commentator put it, "the unsettled state of the public mind caused by the War is gradually returning to normalcy" and Prohibition was the mechanism that was making it happen.3

The Historiographic Problem The scholarly historiography of aerial smuggling is remarkably limited in scope. While Roger Bilstein, David Courtwright and several other scholars have acknowledged aerial smuggling as a component of interwar aviation, such mentions are often of the footnote variety mentioned in passing as mere anecdotal evidence of the wide range of applications with which aviation became associated in the early postwar years. Given the problems of accessing evidence, this cursory assessment of the significance of aerial smuggling as a minor curiosity is understandable and is representative of a much larger scholarly challenge in the field of Prohibition enforcement, which also suffers from the loss and misplacement of the official records of the Bureau of Prohibition in its various forms, along with its allied agencies. Besides