At the dawn of the 20th century, Beardstown, Illinois, is a city of contradiction. A town of river rats, gamblers, and rail-yard workers, it’s also filled with the accoutrements and refinements that accompany wealth . . . whatever its provenance. In Beardstown, the God-fearing don’t just live side-by-side with the sinners—they often are the sinners.

Throughout the first half of the century, the state’s attorney is the formidable James McHugh, who makes his home in Beardstown and has spent his career fostering the town’s prosperity by keeping the balance between virtue and vice. For him, knowing when to look the other way is half the job. But when his son, the Yale-educated Milt McHugh, returns from WWII to take up his father’s position, he approaches the role with a very different sense of morality, as well as a desire to clean the town’s slate for good—public opinion be damned. 

Forty years later, Milt is faced with a town in decline and the prospective fraud trial of a gaggle of corrupt investors known as “The Beardstown Ladies.” As he looks back on his life, his work, and the town his courage and moral fiber has created, he wonders: Was the sacrifice of freedom at the altar of decency worth the price the town has paid? 

Following the people of Beardstown through a century of upheaval, renewal, and decay—and traveling from Prohibition-era Chicago to London and the Pacific during WWII to the soundstage of the Phil Donohue Show—American Pied Piper is the final chapter in a trilogy tracing the rise and fall of the American Midwest.