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Like most cities during Prohibition, Kansas City had illegal alcohol, bootleggers, speakeasies, cops on the take, corrupt politicians and moralizing reformers. But by the time the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, Kansas City had been singled out by one observer as one of the wettest cities, as well as the wickedest. A grocer managed a still in the basement of his store. A raid on the Tingle Oil Company found two hundred drums of oil and the largest illegal brewery ever found in the state. This seedy underworld transformed the Heart of America into the Paris of the Plains. Author John Simonson resurrects forgotten stories by revisiting places where they occurred and telling the salacious history of booze in Kansas City.

Even in law-abiding southwestern Michigan, the Eighteenth Amendment turned ordinary citizens into scofflaws and sparked unprecedented unrest. Betta Holloway reached her breaking point when her husband, a Portland cop, was shot pursuing a rumrunner. She relieved his pain with a neighbor's homebrew. As farmers across the region fermented their fruit to make a living, gangsters like Al Capone amassed extraordinary wealth. Baby Face Nelson came to Grand Haven and proved that he had no aptitude for robbing banks. Even before the Volstead Act passed, Battle Creek bad guy Adam "Pump" Arnold routinely broke all local prohibition laws--and every other law as well. Meanwhile, Carrie Nation hectored Michigan with her "hatchetations." Authors Norma Lewis and Christine Nyholm reveal how the Noble Experiment fueled a rowdy, roaring, decade-long party.