Nation, Carry (1846–1911)

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Nation, Carry (1846–1911)

Militant American temperance leader who led a campaign of saloon-smashers in Kansas and became a national celebrity. Born Carry Amelia Moore (first name often erroneously spelled Carrie) in Garrard County, Kentucky, on November 25, 1846; died in Leavenworth, Kansas, after a period of hospitalization, on June 9, 1911; daughter of George Moore (a Kentucky slaveowner) and Mary Campbell Moore; obtained a teaching certificate from the Missouri State Normal School (now Missouri State University, Warrensburg); married Charles Gloyd (a doctor), in 1867 (died c. 1868); married David Nation (a journalist, lawyer, and minister), in 1877 (divorced 1901); children: (first marriage) one daughter, Charlien.

Moved with husband David Nation to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, a prohibition state (1889); began saloon smashing campaign at Medicine Lodge, Kiowa, and Wichita, Kansas (1900); divorced by David for desertion (1901); began national lecture tours; went on lecture tour of Britain (1908); published her autobiography (1909).

A list of uncompromising reformers and justice-seekers enlivens American history, among them John Brown. Carry Nation was a reformer of the same stripe, contemptuous of compromise, willing to suffer repeated arrests and imprisonments as witness to her belief that alcohol was an unmitigated evil. After 54 years of obscurity and suffering, Nation emerged suddenly in the opening years of the 20th century brandishing a hatchet and amazing crowds with her saloon-smashing exploits.

Carry Nation was born in Garrard County, Kentucky, in 1846. Her father George Moore, whom she idolized as her "angel on earth," was a prosperous Kentucky stock-dealer and plantation owner. His lettering of Carry's name in the family Bible just after her birth explains the unusual spelling and suggests that he was not well educated. Carry's mother Mary Campbell Moore suffered from recurrent mental delusions and believed that she was Queen Victoria —Mary's own mother, brother, and sister had all gone mad. The family indulged these fantasies as far as possible, addressed Mary as "Your Majesty," and helped her to dress regally, even to the extent of letting her wear a cut-glass and crystal crown while driving around in a plush carriage. Mary reciprocated by violently abusing her daughter Carry, who was sheltered with relatives for months at a time. Later Carry's own daughter Charlien Nation would show signs of mental derangement, as did Carry herself in the closing years of her life.

Carry went about her latest 'hatchetation' episode in deadly earnestness. With each swing of the gleaming hatchet, she shouted, 'For your sake, Jesus.' One blow destroyed the five-hundred-dollar bar mirror. The long row of liquor bottles and decanters were dragged from the sideboard and systematically smashed. Carry hefted the heavy iron cash register above her head and hurled it into the street…. Carry then slashed the rubber tube that carried the beer from the tanks to the bar faucets …. The Senate Bar was a tangle of wreckage and its attackers were ankle-deep in beer.
—Arnold Madison

Nation's autobiography describes nostalgically her childhood life among the family slaves, who taught her a lurid array of superstitious beliefs. Like many Southern whites, she always regretted the end of slavery and what seemed to her the subsequent estrangement of two formerly friendly races. As a girl, Carry experienced visions of angels and had an evangelical "born again" experience at the age of ten, in a Disciples of Christ church. After a spellbinding sermon one Sunday, and in an agony of conscience over some trivial misdeeds, "I began to weep bitterly," she wrote, "some power seemed to impel me to go forward and sit down on the front bench. I could not have told anyone what I wept for, except it was a longing to be better." The next day she was baptized by total immersion "and although it was quite cold and some ice in the water I felt no fear…. I know God will bless the ordinance of Baptism, for the little Carry that walked into the water was different from the one who walked out." For the rest of her life, a buoyant sense of divine approval helped her face severe tribulations. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the family moved frequently between Kentucky, Texas, and Missouri, her father hoping vainly that a new scene would restore his wife's sanity. Frequent moves, and then the onset of the Civil War, shattered the family's fortunes, especially when their Missouri farm near the border with "bleeding Kansas" was plagued by outlaw groups and deserters from both sides.

In 1863, the Union army occupation commander ordered the family to move to Kansas City, and there Carry began to attend school regularly. She showed an aptitude for history and scripture, and became a Sunday School teacher. Back in Missouri at the war's end, she fell in love with the family's lodger, schoolteacher Charles Gloyd, a demobilized Union army doctor. Overcoming parental objections, she married him in 1867, just prior to her 21st birthday, and they moved to Holden, Missouri. To her dismay, he turned out to be an incurable alcoholic, and all her efforts to reform him, including howling and pounding on the door of the Masonic lodge where he spent his evenings, failed. She left him in 1868 and returned to her sternly prohibitionist parents, learning six months later that Gloyd had died of alcohol poisoning. After a childhood of near-invalidism due to a digestive disorder, Carry had steadily gained strength, and as an adult was 6′ tall and weighed about 175 pounds. She now resolved to support herself, her baby, and her recently widowed mother-in-law, by teaching school. She attended the normal school in Warrensburg, Missouri, then took a job as primary teacher in her adopted home of Holden. Four years later, she lost the job due to the petty intrigues of a schoolboard member, but rather than leave the area she accepted a marriage proposal from a local journalist and part-time preacher, David Nation. It was a loveless marriage of convenience, however, and they soon found out that they were incompatible partners, not least because he was deceitful. She declared later: "Oh husbands and wives, do not lie to each other, even though you should do a vile act; confess to the truth of the matter! There will be some trouble over it, but you can never lose your love for a truthful person."

Carry had hoped that David would provide security for her daughter and mother-in-law. He proved unsuccessful both as a writer and as a lawyer, however, so he moved on with his family to try his luck in the small Texas town of Columbia. Again she kept the family going by taking the arduous job of a small-town hotel manager, which she stuck at for ten years. Her daughter suffered from a hideous, disfiguring sore on her face, and her mouth locked shut so tightly that the local doctor had to knock her front teeth out in order to force food into her mouth through a metal tube and prevent starvation. Through all these hardships, Nation tried to console herself with prayer and was in constant communication and bargaining with God, still tormented by an

overactive conscience and inclined to take the blame for all misfortunes on herself.

Nation bought a larger hotel, near Richmond, Texas, despite its apparent vulnerability to fire, and continued her hard work for a growing number of dependents. She ran a non-denominational Sunday School in the dining room and, during a drought in the summer of 1885, led a prayer meeting in the local Methodist Church basement to plead with God for rain. He answered the call and sent forth three days of rain, which led some townspeople to think she was a miracle worker, others that she was lucky. Her luck certainly held out during a catastrophic fire in 1889 which burned down half the town, including the house right next door to her hotel, but left the hotel itself undamaged. While the guests had fled, she had stayed inside praying for God's mercy and said that from this time on she never again feared fire.

Later that year, Carry and her husband sold the hotel, driven out of town by a feud which led to a severe beating for David, and moved to Medicine Lodge, Kansas. There he became a preacher but his sermons had so little verve that he was not reappointed after the first year. Carry sat in the front pew and shouted instructions and criticisms at the top of her voice, becoming a local oddity whom people came from miles around to watch on Sunday mornings. During a three-day religious vigil several years later, when she felt the constant presence of Jesus, she realized that her mission on Earth was to fight the menace of alcohol, which had certainly had a severely adverse effect on her own life (she now learned that her daughter and son-in-law were themselves heavy drinkers). Since 1880, Kansas had been officially a "dry" state, but in fact the liquor trade flourished more or less openly. There were seven bars in the town of Medicine Lodge alone. Carry Nation's first act of resistance, early in 1900, was to kneel with one Mrs. Eliot, the wife of chronic drinker, outside the bar in which he was carousing, and pray at the top of her voice. The noise, and the spectacle, scared away the bar's patrons, and Nation, emboldened, ordered the town's authorities to live up to the state constitution and close down all the other bars.

The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was the largest women's organization of the era, and for decades it worked city by city and state by state to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Nation joined the local branch and became a lecturer and jail visitor, pleading the cause of sobriety. Always charitable and forgiving despite her sometimes ferocious stage presence, she helped care for "fallen women," and reviled the sexual double standard. Wrote Nation:

There are diamonds in the slush and filth of this world. Happy is he who picks them up and helps to wash the dirt away, that they may shine for God. I am very much drawn to my fallen sisters. Oh! the cruelty and oppression they meet with! If the first stone was cast by those who were guiltless, those who were to be stoned would rarely get a blow.

Most WCTU women prided themselves on orderly conduct and legal methods, but Nation's hard experiences led her to favor a more militant approach, and she won the support of several other determined women in the area who wanted to close down the saloons. Nation gathered crowds when she sang hymns outside another bar in mid-1900, won some of the onlookers over to her side, and shamed the local marshal into closing down the bars and alcohol shops. After an attack on the store of O.L. Day, which culminated in her rolling a whisky barrel into the street and bursting it open with a mallet, the local "wets" retaliated by smashing her windows and threatening to burn her house to the ground. Undeterred, she showed up in court to argue against granting Day a license to sell "medicinal" liquor and had the satisfaction of seeing his business fail a few weeks later.

Next Carry Nation moved to the wilder town of Kiowa, 20 miles to the south, and smashed the windows and bar mirrors of a large saloon, overturning tables and chairs, and ripping "sporting" (salacious) pictures off the walls. Then she challenged local officials to arrest her, or admit that by conniving with the liquor trade they were themselves law breakers. Indecisive, they warned her to leave town, but not before word had spread of her exploits and been picked up by the local press. From that time on, she became a local celebrity and was asked to speak to temperance groups, even to appear on stage in Ten Days in a Barroom. Her jump into the national spotlight came later in December of that year when she attacked the Hotel Carey's Annex bar in Wichita after a night spent on her knees in fervent prayer. One rock destroyed a thousand-dollar mirror, another defaced a large nude painting, then she began to swing an iron bar, shattering bottles, tables, glasses and the elaborate cherrywood bar, all the time chanting: "peace on earth, goodwill to men" and other Biblical slogans.

Arrest and imprisonment followed, but, as the date of her trial grew near, she received a stream of messages of support, offers of legal help, and enjoyed the hymns of revival meetings held within earshot of her tiny cell. Inside the jail, Nation befriended the criminals, who paid her the tribute of writing a poem about her bravery and kindness to them. As national publicity about the coming case intensified, the state authorities decided to drop the charges against Carry Nation, but no sooner was she released than she made a passionate speech to the Wichita branch of the WCTU. Until then they had frowned on her methods but now many of them changed their minds and joined her in a new barsmashing foray. For the first time, in January 1901, she wielded the hatchet which was to become her hallmark. She was re-arrested but again released without trial, then set off to repeat her work in the town of Enterprise, where her attacks were met not only by angry drinkers but also by their wives and the prostitutes who worked in the bars.

Her campaign reached a climax in Topeka, the state capital, where she destroyed another bar, with the help of three sturdy assistants, evaded prosecution, and addressed the state legislature which was considering repeal of the state's "dry" laws (but now decided to preserve them). This was also the occasion on which she arranged for model hatchets to be made, signed with her name, and sold as souvenirs to pay the cost of her campaigning, travel, and fines. Nation moved straight onto the lecture circuit, finding that, after 54 years of drudgery and privation, she was an instant success and a national celebrity. She also began a prohibition newspaper, The Smasher's Mail, which she enlivened by reprinting a selection of the threatening letters she received every month.

Meanwhile, her husband David was feeling increasingly neglected. Nation did not want his company on tour or on campaign, despite his willingness to join her, and he began to complain to the press, who were now hungry for all Nation-related news, that she had deserted him. When he filed for divorce, she said she was not surprised, that she had no respect for him, and that for years he had been an "encumbrance" on her life. This marital upheaval and the almost simultaneous death of her brother J.W. Moore, however, sent Carry into a spell of depression, and when she came to trial in Kansas City for an earlier incident she entered a plea of insanity. The judge ignored it, she was convicted, but was freed on bail before sentencing, and revived her spirits by leading a group of children on an antisaloon attack in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

In September 1901, Nation lectured in Coney Island, New York. She had been a persistent critic of President William McKinley, whom she nicknamed "The Brewer's President" for his reluctance to take strong measures against the alcohol manufacturers and traders, and now she learned that he had been shot by an anarchist. Asked for her opinion, she said she had no sympathy for the assassin but none for the president either. The crowd booed, and when the press misquoted her the next day, alleging that she had praised the assassin, her reputation plummeted. At a series of lectures in the following weeks, she was heckled, pelted with rotten eggs, and stoned. Nation retreated for a while to Kansas but was soon back in public, this time on the college lecture circuit, and the next year appearing in burlesque theaters, which seemed to her one of the best places to surprise an audience which would otherwise never hear her message.

Personal problems continued to pursue her, particularly the chronic alcoholism of her own daughter Charlien. In addition, another of her publishing ventures, The Hatchet, was confiscated by federal marshals as obscene because it contained an editorial warning young men against masturbation, and led to another prosecution. She was exonerated and in 1906 moved her operation to Washington, D.C., where a sympathizer lent her an apartment free of charge for five years and other temperance enthusiasts arranged further speaking engagements. In the winter of 1908–09, she toured Great Britain, remarking after some rough encounters with hecklers that "Scotland is much nearer to Hell than Kansas" and that the British House of Lords ought to be renamed "the House of Frauds." She was pelted with rotten vegetables in London theaters, but won enthusiastic applause from protemperance Britons.

Carry Nation spent the last years of her life in an Arkansas cottage, but still made frequent speaking excursions, and suffered a stroke while lecturing in Eureka Springs, Missouri, in 1911. She died five months later and was buried beside her mother, in Belton, Missouri. Although the WCTU and the more respectable temperance organizations had frowned on her methods, they had to admit that she had given their movement an immense publicity boost by forcing the public to take notice of the issue. Within a decade of her death, the national Prohibition experiment was under way.