Carry Nation

American social reformer

• Born: November 25, 1846
• Birthplace: Garrard County, Kentucky
• Died: June 9, 1911
• Place of death: Leavenworth, Kansas

An activist in the temperance and women’s rights movements, Nation gained international notoriety by smashing saloons and is remembered as the most outstanding nineteenth century icon of the temperance movement. She also demonstrated the strength and place of women in temperance reform.

Early Life

The daughter of George Moore and Mary Campbell Moore, Carry Nation was born Carry Amelia Moore. (The name “Carry” was written in her illiterate father’s hand in the family Bible with that spelling.) She grew up amid the slave culture of Kentucky. Her father was a prosperous planter and stock trader; her mother suffered from a delusionary mental illness and assumed she was Queen Victoria, demanding the appropriate degree of respect from those around her.

At the age of ten, Carry was converted at a Campbellite revival, an event that had a profound effect on her spiritual development. Her early secular education was limited because her family moved at least a dozen times between Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas before she was sixteen. She did manage, however, to attend a teacher’s college in Missouri, where she earned a teaching certificate.

Carry’s father lost his slaves and land as a result of the Civil War, and took his family back to Missouri, settling in Belton. Carry met and fell in love there with a young army physician, Charles Gloyd. They were married on November 21, 1867; however, because of Gloyd’s alcoholism and fierce devotion to the Masonic Lodge, the marriage deteriorated soon after the nuptials. Despite her love for Charles, she never persuaded him to stop drinking, which he did in the company of his fellow Masons, and within two years of their marriage he was dead, leaving Carry with an infant daughter, Charlien, who may have grown up insane, an elderly mother-in-law, and an intense dislike for both alcohol and secret societies.

For several years, Carry supported herself, her daughter, and her mother-in-law by teaching in a primary school in Holden, Missouri. In 1877, she married David Nation, an attorney, minister, and editor who was nineteen years her senior. They had little in common, and for Carry it proved to be an unhappy match. They lived for several years in Texas, where Carry supported the family by running a hotel. In 1890, they moved to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where David became a minister and then left the pulpit to practice law. His practice grew large enough to free Carry from the necessity of supporting the family, and as a result, she became active in the temperance movement as well as in religious and civic reform. Because of her interest in charitable activities, the residents of Medicine Lodge called her Mother Nation. Her second marriage also deteriorated, however, and in 1901 Carry’s husband divorced her.

Life’s Work

Before David and Carry Nation moved to Kansas, a constitutional amendment adopted in 1880 had made it a dry state. This occurred nearly half a century before the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and fifty years after the beginning of the temperance movement in the United States. In Kansas, a legal technicality allowed liquor in its original container to be served. Carry, believing that she had a divine mission to stop the drinking of alcoholic beverages, organized a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) with the intention of driving out the “wets” (those who drank).

Carry’s first major confrontation took place in 1899, when, in the company of several other WCTU members, she managed through nonviolent means to shut down seven liquor distributors. During the following year, she changed her tactics when she traveled twenty miles by buggy to smash three “joints,” or saloons, using rocks and brickbats, in Kiowa, Kansas. Carry rationalized that because those establishments were illegal, they had no protection under the law; therefore, she had the right to destroy them. From Kiowa she went to Wichita, where she used a hatchet to destroy the bar in the Hotel Carey. This venture resulted in several thousand dollars of property damage for the saloon owner and seven weeks in jail for Nation. From there it was on to Enterprise and then the state capital, Topeka, for several days of bar chopping. Each incident earned for her more time in the local jail, usually for disturbing the peace.

Prior to her appearance in Topeka, Nation’s activities had been of the hit-and-run variety. She would typically break up a few saloons and then either leave town or go to jail. Realizing that she could not single-handedly close down all the offending liquor establishments in Kansas, she intended to use Topeka as a focal point for an organization that, she hoped, would achieve her goal.

After holding an unsuccessful meeting with the governor of Kansas, Carry Nation set about to organize her mostly feminine supporters into an army of Home Defenders. Led by General Nation, who was ably supported by assistant generals, the force numbered several hundred. Nation accepted numerous speaking engagements to spread her message that the only way to close the joints was to increase the agitation against them. In keeping with her message, she took her Home Defenders on the offensive, smashing the ritzy Senate Saloon. In the melee, Nation, who was often in physical danger, received a nasty cut on the head. Despite the destruction, the bar reopened within hours, selling beer, whiskey, and souvenirs from the wreckage.

Carry Nation’s actions exacerbated the split in the temperance movement: on one hand, between the sexes, and on the other hand, between those who supported such violence as necessary and those who took a more passive and traditional approach to the liquor control issue. Nation helped to focus the issue of prohibition in Kansas. Generally, the Prohibitionists, who represented the more radical fringe, supported her tactics, while the Women’s Christian Temperance Union leadership, made up mostly of Republicans or Populists, opposed them. Those who opposed Nation disliked her taking the law into her own hands, and they rejected her argument that the joint owners, being lawbreakers themselves, deserved to be put out of business violently.

Nation supported herself and paid her fines by means of lecturing, stage appearances, and the sale of souvenir miniature silver hatchets. For a time, she earned as much as $300 a week. To help with her finances, she employed a management firm, and she later hired her own manager, Harry C. Turner. However, Nation had little business sense, giving away most of her money to the poor and to temperance groups, not all of which were legitimate.

Nation also took on a few publishing ventures to spread the word. At varying times, The Smasher’s Mail, The Hatchet, and The Home Defender appeared. While in Topeka, she wrote her autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (1905).

Although she spent the majority of her time in the temperance crusade in Kansas, she did venture to the East Coast, where she visited both Yale and Harvard. However, on both occasions she allowed herself to be portrayed as a buffoon, thus adding to the negative image surrounding her. She later toured England, where again her welcome was less than expansive.

Physically, Carry Nation was a large woman. Nearly six feet tall, she weighed approximately 175 pounds and was extremely strong. When she and her minions broke up the Senate Saloon, she lifted the heavy cash register, raised it above her head, and smashed it to the ground.

After less than a decade in the public spotlight, however, her health failed, and she retired to a farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She spent the last several months of her life in a Leavenworth, Kansas, hospital and died there on June 9, 1911. After her death, friends erected a monument at her gravesite with the inscription “She hath done what she could.”

Significance

Carry Nation’s impact is both real and symbolic. She did show the nation that direct action can help to focus attention on a moral issue. When, in 1901, Nation went to speak to the Kansas legislature, she told them that since she was denied the vote, she would have to use a stone, and use the stone (or hatchet, to be more specific) she did. The joints she smashed were not significant in terms of her impact on temperance and prohibition. In fact, at least a few of them reopened within hours or days of her visit. Her impact had to do with her ability to rally support to her cause. She focused attention on the issue of alcohol consumption. Representing the views of a majority of Kansans, she showed them that one individual could make a difference.

Nation also had a significant impact on women’s rights. She certainly broke with the traditional roles of woman as wife and mother, although she did fulfill both roles. At a time when few women engaged in public protest, Nation was at the cutting edge of that activity. She opened a home in Kansas City for women who had suffered at the hands of male alcoholics. She determined that her activity had been made necessary by a male-dominated world—as a woman, she did not have access to political power. As time went on, however, Nation appeared to be moving toward nonviolent direct action and away from saloon smashing. The masthead of her newspaper The Hatchet (1905) encouraged women to seek the vote instead of resorting to the hatchet.

Carry Nation has been badly treated by most of her biographers. In part, she was responsible for her own bad reputation. In her autobiography, she perhaps revealed too much of her personal and religious life, thus exposing herself to criticism. She played into the hands of her critics when she made outrageous statements or visited college campuses where she should have expected to be placed in a bad light. Her methods appeared unfeminine in a decade when feminine virtue was extolled. She also became the victim of the eastern press, which delighted in poking fun at the crude ways of westerners by mocking Nation as a social misfit and a religious freak.

Carry Nation died almost a decade before the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, distribution, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages. Whether people remembered her in 1919 is not of great importance; the amendment passed in part at least because she focused the attention of many Americans on the issue of prohibition. Whether one was for or against temperance, it would have been difficult in the first decade of the twentieth century to ignore the issue, especially when Carry Nation went storming into bars with hatchet in hand. She also died a decade before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Her statements to the Kansas legislature, as well as her newspaper’s masthead, indicate that Carry Nation well knew the power of the ballot and the importance of working for the right of women to vote.

Bibliography

Asbury, Herbert. Carry Nation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. This older biography paints Nation as a social misfit.

Bader, Robert Smith. Prohibition in Kansas. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986. This general history of prohibition in Kansas contains a positive chapter on Carry Nation and her contribution to the temperance movement.

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975. Provides an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the women’s rights movement.

Grace, Fran. Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Grace contradicts earlier biographers who portrayed Nation as crazy, fanatical, and either over- or undersexed. She presents a more complicated portrait of Nation, tracing the roots of her religious piety and social activism, and describing how contemporaries admired Nation’s riveting speeches and political courage.

Gusfield, Joseph. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963. An interesting and useful history of the temperance movement from its nineteenth century roots to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.

Lewis, Robert Taylor. Vessel of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry Nation. New York: New American Library, 1966. A relatively recent biography written in negative terms.

Mattingly, Carol. Well-Tempered Women: Nineteenth Century Temperance Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Recounts the techniques and rhetoric women used to create the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and campaign for prohibition.

Nation, Carry. The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, Written by Herself. Topeka, Kans.: F. M. Steves & Sons, 1905. Nation’s autobiography sets the negative tone for her biographers.

Schwarz, Frederic D. “1900.” American Heritage 51, no. 3 (May/June, 2000): 107. Describes Nation’s campaign to close bars in Kiowa, Kansas, that served liquor to customers in 1900.