Carry Nation’s Canny Rampage

On this date in 1900, a 54-year-old Sunday school teacher walked into the most elegant bar in Wichita, Kansas, raised a heavy cane, and began to wreak havoc. By the time she was done, Carry Nation had broken the drinking parlor’s costly Venetian mirror, damaged its life-size painting of a nude Cleopatra, and smashed bottles, glasses, and decanters wholesale.

It was the start of a new phase in what would later be called the “culture wars” in America. Lampooned as a crank, a lunatic, and a menopausal virago by her enemies, Nation was in reality a woman of sincere beliefs who considered her vigilantism thoroughly justified. Her direct action raised questions about the responsibilities of citizenship and the role of government in legislating morality that remain on the front burner of American politics 106 years later.

She was born in 1846 in a region of Kentucky known for its evangelical fervor. When she was a 10-year-old tomboy, her family moved to western Missouri, where the violence between proslavery and abolitionist factions in nearby Kansas was still a raw memory. Citizens in the region hotly debated John Brown’s militant acts in what some considered a righteous cause.

At 21, Carry Amelia Moore married Charles Gloyd, a well-spoken man whom she loved dearly. His taste for hard liquor landed their marriage on the rocks after six months and killed him less than a year later. She would afterward look on the saloon as “the place where the serpent drink crushed the hopes of early years.”

In 1874 she made a marriage of convenience with David Nation, a sometime preacher and lawyer. The couple lived a hardscrabble life in Texas, where for a time she managed a hotel. They moved to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, in 1890. Fired by a religious conversion experience, she became a leader of the local branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She also campaigned for woman suffrage and gained a reputation as a champion of the poor.

Kansas, one historian noted, “conceived itself to be the child of Plymouth Rock,” its ideals rooted in the Puritan heritage that Yankee settlers had brought to the state during the slavery struggle. An 1878 temperance camp meeting there had attracted 100,000 participants. Two years later the state had adopted a constitutional provision prohibiting alcohol.

In spite of the legal ban, Kansas liquor merchants and tavern owners continued to operate openly. Drug stores sold “medicinal” alcohol; the state’s best hotels had well-appointed bars.

The federal government, which in the 1890s obtained as much as 30 percent of its revenues from taxes on alcoholic beverages, actively thwarted the state laws. In 1890 the Supreme Court had ruled that interstate commerce provisions of the federal Constitution allowed merchants to ship liquor into dry states as long as it remained in its original packaging. The Washington Post warned that people would “become a law unto themselves” in light of the federal “despoiling” of states’ rights.

In the late 1890s the national prohibition movement was faltering, and there was even talk of repealing the Kansas ban on liquor. Nation decided it was time to act. She had already gained attention for instigating an 1894 “petticoat riot,” in which townswomen removed a keg of whiskey from a Medicine Lodge drug store and sledgehammered it in the street. During the summer of 1900 she had used brickbats to attack taverns in Kiowa, Kansas.

Now she traveled alone to Wichita and on December 27 inflicted $3,000 worth of damage on the bar of the Carey Hotel. Her smashing made her famous and landed her in jail.

Released in January 1901, she continued her rampage. She stormed drinking “joints” in Wichita and other Kansas cities, sometimes drawing crowds of 3,000 spectators. By now she had begun to carry a hatchet on her forays, a weapon that became her trademark. Angry imbibers pelted her with eggs and rocks. A bar owner’s wife punched her in the eye.

In February she descended on Topeka, the state capital, and trashed the luxurious Senate bar there. A gifted self-promoter, she understood that her “hatchetations” were energizing the temperance movement. Her tactics cut through all the nuances of alcohol regulation and limned the issue in stark, understandable, and headline-friendly terms.

While pro-alcohol forces attacked Nation as a fanatic, she inspired thousands of ordinary citizens to join her in her wrecking parties. She advised her followers, “You don’t know how much joy you will have until you begin to smash, smash, smash. It is wonderful!” Imitative raids demolished bars around the Midwest. Contributions and letters of support poured in. She tied her tactics to the refusal of the legislature to grant women suffrage. “You wouldn’t give me the vote,” she declared, “so I had to use a rock!”

Her smashings continued intermittently for another three years. At the same time she conducted an energetic publicity campaign. By the spring of 1901 she was already traveling widely on the lecture circuit. In March she started her own newspaper, the Smasher’s Mail. She raised money by selling autographed photos of herself and pins in the shape of miniature hatchets. She traveled to New York and Great Britain. For a time she joined a burlesque company, bringing her message, “Hell Is No Joke,” directly to denizens of the low life. Officials of the WCTU didn’t condone her raucous methods, but they recognized the power of her hatchetations to “frighten the liquor sellers and awaken the sleeping conscience of Kansas voters.”

For almost a decade she continued to lecture and promote temperance and other social reforms. At the end of her life she established a large home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she welcomed women escaping abusive relationships and others in need. She died in 1911, eight years before the Eighteenth Amendment banned the alcohol trade across the country.

The failure of national Prohibition in the 1920s removed the issue from the national agenda, but abortion, narcotics, homosexuality, and pornography are among the moral causes over which partisans have seen fit to similarly engage in direct action or violence in attempts to alter public policy.

Though Carry Nation was not the wild-eyed extremist of myth, she used her extra-legal tactics to campaign for an uncompromising, coercive, and religion-based intrusion of political authority into private affairs. Her methods, emulated by other zealots, have ultimately proved unsupportive of reasoned debate and dangerous to personal liberty.