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 …

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 Sky…

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…

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 …

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…

In aeronautical terms, peace meant the flooding of a nascent civil aviation industry with cheap surplus aircraft and thousands of unfulfilled and rambunctious young veteran aviators who did not have the chance to slake their thirst for adventure in the skies over Western Europe. Though a number of first person accounts and journalists drew attention to the intersection of Prohibition and the emerg…

David Courtwright in his Sky as Frontier echoes Bilstein noting, "In a way the 1919 Volstead Act, rather than the 1925 Kelly Bill, provided the first federal subsidy to commercial aviation" so that "at a time when joy riding prices were declining, liquor runs kept pilots in the air." Again, in spite of the significant implications of this assessment, Courtwright does not press the issue further. I…

Yet, there is some admirable scholarship, including Anne Funderburg's Bootleggers and Beer Barons of the Prohibition Era, which features an entire chapter on the airplane's role in bootlegging. Unfortunately, she is unable to quantify the place of the airplane in the larger context and even she resorts to the anecdotal approach to laundry listing sundry episodes. Similar narrative interludes may b…

In the process of research for this paper, I chronicled over 500 distinct events or instances of popular discourse on aerial smuggling reported in the popular press. These reveal four significant insights. The first is the notion expressed by Bilstein, Courtwright, and others that smuggling was simply an outgrowth of barnstormers simply looking for additional work as the novelty and thrill of flig…

The connection between aerial bootlegging and other forms of smuggling is particularly important as it established an enduring culture of aerial criminality in the United States that not only endured through the end of federal Prohibition, but that also continues to this day. Thirdly, the federal response to criminality and the other concerns inherent in the growth of civil aviation in the form of…

This further developed a spectrum of criminality that, on one end, tolerated aerial bootlegging, which often served the purpose of underlining the progress of aviation in integrating American society - i.e. if the airplane is good for bootlegging, it must be good at other, more beneficent, activities. At the other end of the spectrum, was the trope of the nihilistic criminal enterprise that employ…

Where Rodgers wore his criminality proudly, Bert "Fish" Hassell regarded his smuggling activities as just a short chapter in an expansive and remarkable career as both a commercial pilot and military air commander. In 1967, Ed Bergman, in an article for Private Pilot magazine, interviewed the members of Florida's OX5 Club chapter (an organization of "pioneering" aviators) on their experiences in P…

The Bureau of Prohibition that acted as the coordinating entity for Prohibition enforcement bounced from one administrative umbrella to another, which resulted in a scattering of its official records, though this alone does not appear to account for the minimal documentation of enforcement activities. Aerial Smuggling as Disruptive Discourse Aerial smuggling may have been an unintended consequen…

We can carry light valuables by night, drop them down on a feather bed on the other side, load up with dutiable commodities and return before daylight, while the customs officers are shooting at lightning bugs under the impression they are aerial smugglers."9 The degree to which populist commentators were willing to proclaim the downfall of the tariff system with the emergence of tariff-avoiding a…

May 1910, the Mexican government approached President Taft's Secretary of State, Philander Knox, to regulate aerial smuggling across the U.S. southern border. Ostensibly to control tariff violations, the Mexican government had a clear interest in suppressing the movement of aircraft and aerial mercenaries from the United States in support of revolutionaries and bandits. However, most American obse…

Rumors emerged of smuggling into newly dry Florida, which prompted the specific targeting of airplanes by the state legislature, which also encouraged newly-dry Ohio to follow suit.15 West Virginia and Michigan also engaged with the problem of aerial smuggling before the onset of federal Prohibition.16 Wisconsin saw the potential of the airplane as a flying saloon where imbibers could venture to a…

They are also not exceptional as the same rhetoric applies to the application of military aviation generally, and the bombing of civilians specifically. It is also all too familiar to students of the twentieth century history of technology. Quantifying the extent and rapidity of growth in aerial smuggling is difficult. At the end of Prohibition, the Coast Guard Intelligence Division assessed that …

Outside these hotspots, routine reports of smuggling aircraft occurred across the length of the southern and northern borders. Moonshiners also employed airplanes for internal transport and first person accounts testify to complex domestic networks of aerial transport. Taken as a whole, these reports suggest that even in the early years of Prohibition that upwards of one hundred aircraft were enga…

For instance, Al Capone's Chicago air operations alone (run by his brother Ralph) claimed to own twenty aircraft of their own, which does not even account for the huge number of independent rings allied to Capone, or operating in competition with him, who had their own air fleets.23 Blaise "King Canada" Diesbourg, aka "King of the Airplanes," was a French Canadian who handled the Canadian-side log…

Profits allowed the former aviator to buy a Lincoln Standard biplane. Why did Rodgers shift from terrestrial smuggling to an aerial form? He regarded the airplane as a ticket to "big time" smuggling. While others were already efficiently bridging the border with liquor smuggling, the internal infrastructure in Texas in 1919 was "not anything but … little chunks of paving with miles and miles of mu…

If the public drew a strong line between bootlegging and more nefarious forms of aerial smuggling, Rodgers makes clear that line was easily crossed as he and his racketeer/supplier from the Mexican side of the border "operated together, six or seven years, dealing in liquor, arms and ammunition, watches, perfumes, silk, and even smuggling Chinamen in."26 He did so with the complicity of Army Air S…

In the mid-twenties, he found that bootlegging offered greater reward than airmail flying and was less hazardous. He operated out of the Lincoln School of Aviation in Nebraska which used flight instruction and barnstorming as cover for operations that ran beer and whiskey from both Canada and Mexico to customers in Omaha and Lincoln. The activity was highly organized and the operation was well sup…

Narcotics were popularly seen as so far outside the norm that they were not suitable as a topic for pulp action films under Hays motion picture production code. Instead, alien smuggling became the go-to topic for depicting air-minded villains. Acosta's account reinforced a favored unsubstantiated trope of the aeronautical underworld as depicted by Hollywood - the trap door for jettisoning passenge…

Conclusion The widespread lawlessness of American aviators in the Prohibition era appears in tension with the expansive political and cultural campaigns to legitimize and normalize aviation in American society for the establishment of an "air-minded" nation. The criminality of prominent aviators like Erle Halliburton and Ed Musick points to an apparent contradiction between normative and deviant …

It was also doomed by that same mobilization as many worldly veterans found the dry movement arcane in aftermath of the cataclysm and social upheaval with which they had been associated. Air-mindedness represented an opposite - a break from the "grounded" thinking that had led to war and the hope for a diminution for the rigid veneration of boundaries that was inherent in nationalistic militarism.…

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Under My Wings. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1956. Snow, Crocker. Log Book: A Pilot's Life. Washington: Brassey's, 1997. "Plane and Owner Held on Charges: E. P. Halliburton, Oil Man and Pilot Seized and Ship Taken as Liquor Carrier" Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1931, B1; "Oil Man Faces El Paso Trial: May Return E. P. Halliburton on Hooch Charge" El Paso Herald-Post (El Paso, Texa…

"Airships and Tariffs" Logansport Pharos Tribune (Logansport, Indiana), January 30, 1907, 2. "Aerial Smuggling" Waterloo Semi Weekly Courier August 11, 1908, 4. Tombstone Weekly Epitaph (Tombstone, Arizona) February 6, 1910, 4. "Airships and Tariffs" Logansport Pharos Tribune (Logansport, Indiana), January 30, 1907, 2; "Smuggling By Airship" The Washington Post (Washington, DC) April 25, 1909, 5. …

Federal confirmation of aerial narcotic smuggling occurred by April 1920, "Booze and Dope Runners Use Aeroplane" "Use of Aeroplane to Smuggle Booze Suggested By Ace" The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia) February 22, 1919, 10. "Smuggling of Narcotic Drugs Into the United States By Means of Aeroplanes" Memorandum to the Secretary General of the League of Nations from Department of State via …

Bert Acosta, "Outlaws of the Air" - Part 1: "Gangsters, Modern in Their Ways, Turn to Smuggling Aliens, Dope and Illicit Liquor" (December 30, 1935), 15, Part 2: "Bootleggers of the Skies" (December 31, 1935), 13, Part 3: "Smuggling Aliens Across the Border" (January 2, 1936), 15, Part 4: "Smuggling Dope" (January 3, 1936), 19, Part 5: "Policing the Air Lanes" The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (January 4, …