I have waited years to be able to use the research I did on this subject, so thanks for asking this question!

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While not the entirety of the question, much of the image of “The Roaring ’20s” is based on life under Prohibition, the Volstead Act. The town of Minot, North Dakota, serves as an incredible example of this in part because of geographical position and town demographics. First off, it was the last major stop on the Soo Line railroad, which ran from Chicago (and Al Capone’s empire) to Canada. It was a town in the borderlands surrounded by an expanse of rural grassland and open farmland that proved impossible to regulate.

Demographically, the “city” of 10,476 (according to U.S. census data in 1920) had a large amount of transient (and lower-class) workers from both the railroad and seasonal farm labor. The combination set the stage for a small-town city to wage a war against drinking and alcohol that sometimes sounds like the mythological tales of Elliot Ness and the Untouchables.

Setting the stage for the ‘20s, North Dakota adopted prohibition of alcohol when it entered the Union in 1899; however, it differed from the later Volstead Act in that it did not outlaw personal use or importation, rather retail sales a la bars. 1 However, Minot had a reputation as being a rough town. Historian Mark Timbrook writes that as early as 1896 many businesses in the city moonlighted as vice vendors, providing alcohol, gambling opportunities and women to the people of Minot. 2

In 1917, North Dakota adopted a “Bone Dry” provision much closer to the language of the Volstead Act, and officials in the town set out to enforce it. Bill Langer, the North Dakota Attorney General, decided to crack down on the alcohol trade in the town. Langer conducted a 1917 raid in which enforcement agents arrested 156 people. He was also savvy to new technology and realized that telephones could warn offenders of the upcoming raid. Agnes Geelan, a Langer historian, writes how “Langer knew that unless precautionary measures were taken, the first person arrested would start telephoning to warn others. To forestall that, Langer sent two of his men, fully armed, to the telephone office.” 3 It was this raid that earned him the nickname “Wild Bill,” a moniker showing his occasionally radical drive to enforce the law. It should be noted that Langer is a very infamous politician. He was elected Governor, ousted for a felony, spent time in jail, elected to the Senate in 1941 where he was accused of “moral turpitude,” but kept his seat till his death in 1959. Data from a 10 year period ending in 1921 shows that Minot saw 3,274 cases of drunkenness, 78 cases of bootlegging, and 76 cases of “running a blind pig,” (speakeasy) along with hundreds of other cases that could be related to alcohol consumption. 4

More to the spirit of “life in the roaring ‘20s,” all of this shows that Minot was already a wet city deeply involved in manufacturing, distributing and consuming illegal alcohol. Police and newspaper records here reveal some interesting trends in how officials working in tandem with federal authority enforced alcohol prohibition that in many ways mirrors that of the rest of the country. I argue that arrests for consumption-related offenses served as a method of social policing, where the upright permanent and middle-class and above folks could regulate the misdeeds of the “others,” the outsiders. Drunkenness and the stories relating to it take up the most prohibition-related column inches in the Minot Daily in 1922, and were so frequent that by the end of the year the paper appears to have stopped reporting on them. A great example of this is the case of one Roy Rennels, who gained infamy for consuming what was dubbed “squirrel whiskey” by the Daily. Rennels “climbed a tree after drinking too much firewater.” The article also explains that the citizens who reported Rennels were at first concerned and then entertained by the subsequent attempts to get the intoxicated man out of the tree. Rennels was so stubborn that police had to climb up and get him.5 With Rennels’s case, the Daily gives a glimpse into how the city dealt with its drunks that is missing from many other articles. Rennels found himself in the columns of the Daily again just the very next day. After his evening festivities, he was put to work on a “street construction crew.” The squirrely worker proved hard to tie down still, as he escaped from the crew and was never heard from again in the city.

The incident exemplifies the old adage “idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” so they put Rennels to productive work. Further, Rennels was an outsider who wasn’t just a drunk, albeit a comedic one perhaps. He was an anomaly who caused a unique disturbance, worthy of more column inches than a simple blurb in the public records section. The supposed morally upstanding folks could look at the incident, shake their heads, and say “good riddance.”

But all of this speaks to life within the city itself; what about the vast expanses of open land outside Minot? There, federal agents had to work alone against a swath of bootlegging and moonshining from enterprising farmers. The city police stayed inside the city unless called upon to reinforce a raid. The sheer vastness of the space federal officers had to regulate made their task more difficult and extremely expensive. Several cases show the ingenuity that rural bootleggers utilized while manufacturing illegal liquor, remarkable for their location if nothing else. Often farmers used outbuildings, as they were convenient and kept stills out of plain sight. Police raided the farm of one Albert Klimpel and found his still in the coal shed.6

The incidents could also be humiliating, as when the McKenzie Co. Sheriff found out police arrested the tenant of his farm, John Anderson, for running a still on his own property; however, we cannot ever know whether the lawman simply turned a blind eye, or truly was ignorant of the still. 7 Others hid stills in weeds and grass around their property. A man named Albert Lewis was arrested at least twice, using a bob sleigh to transport liquor. What all of these cases show is that farmers adapted their agricultural lifestyle to take advantage of the lucrative alcohol market, and as shown with repeat offenses from men like Lewis they had no intention of giving that trade up after police arrested them. Like those who ran speakeasies, an arrest meant merely the loss of stock, a fine and some jail time. After that was done, they could resume business as usual. The local manufacturers usually did not fit into the same category of social degeneracy as the drunks because they had a permanent address and were merely cashing in on a lucrative market.

A few unique cases show the degree to which adaptation extended to moonshiners. James McClure’s arrest did not catch my attention initially. Police picked him up for transporting two gallons of whiskey. The local judiciary attempted to make an example of McClure, who initially used an Indiana address. The article quotes judge George H. Moellring as saying “you can’t beat the liquor laws-we’ve got old John Barleycorn on the run,”8 McClure says he’s done, and will return to work as soon as he’s free. With this promise, Judge Moellring suspended his 90-day jail sentence. The piece resembles social propaganda, showing a man who had fallen to vice and made the choice to clean up his act in order to receive mercy at the hands of the law.

It turns out that McClure was a professional distiller. When police raided his farm, located in Surrey and less than 10 miles from Minot, they found the “best whiskey ever seized by Minot agents.” It is unclear how they knew that, however the article subtly implies some sampling of forbidden fruit. His still put out a gallon per hour, and they found 450 gallons of mash along with the still. The whiskey tested out to be 120 proof, and McClure claimed to have made 180 proof whiskey previously. That is essentially pure grain alcohol.9 He got his skill from previous employment. McClure used to work in a Kentucky Distillery. McClure’s case is remarkable in many ways; first, that he had that big of a still and such a massive amount of mash, but still gets off the hook. As previously stated, he got his sentence suspended by promising to return to work. There are hundreds of arrests in 1922, but the McClure raid was one of the largest raids on a private residence, and he received a lesser punishment than some of the street drunks.

I could go on about raids on private residences, the role of the railroad, and police corruption that goes hand-in-hand with the mythos of the area, but I hope that this has helped paint a picture of North Dakotan borderlands in the Prohibition era.

A final grain of salt – my primary source research focused on the Daily and those who ultimately got caught. There were of course plenty of folks who didn’t participate in the alcoholic battles waged by Langer and federal officials in Ward County, but on the whole I feel that Minot’s story is an incredible microcosm of a town that earned the nickname “Little Chicago.”

Sources to follow!

EDIT: I wrote this and saw u/NDMetal gave a way more in-depth answer than I did, so definitely read his answer!

Pretty bad. Rural America was mostly farmers. The farming industry had done really well during the war, as it had been selling food overseas to its allied nations like the United Kingdom and France, etc. but now those countries were producing their own food and didn't need to buy from America. Meanwhile the agricultural industry was mechanising, so they were producing even more food now and laying off farm hands who were no longer needed. The Republican government also introduced tariffs on foreign goods, to try and nurture American goods, but then other countries introduced retaliation tariffs which further strangled American agriculture, and Canada stepped in to fill the void in the market and most places that still needed to buy international food bought from them.

So the increased production and the decreasing market meant that the cost of food went way down and many farmers were selling at a loss, and loads went out of business and collapsed, and were forced to sell their land as it was no longer profitable. Farm land wasn't farmed because the cost of seeds outweighed the potential earnings of selling, and mixed with a draught lots of areas were turned into dustbowls (the Tennessee Valley Authority was introduced under Roosevelt to fix this issue, as it covered several states and the federal government during the 20s had refused to step in because of their attitude of letting the market correct itself). So most people in rural America were poor and desperate during these times.

Finally, socially they were not pleased. Most of rural America was highly socially conservative and they didn't like the new social changes in the cities and saw it as corrupting, sinful, etc. They maintained their more traditional values and resented the cities for their sinful behaviour.

To summarise, they were a group of poor, desperate and impoverished people, unhelped by the government policies and with no money and many having to take the embarrassing decision to sell the land they may have owned for generations, and in a country that they saw changing for the worst socially and all the problems I mentioned were made even worse during the Depression, as they hadn't had the previous prosperity to pull through that the rest of America had benefitted from.

So basically rural America sucked in the 20s.