Carrie Nation

File:CarryNation.jpeg

Temperance advocate Carrie Nation with her weapons; her Bible and her hatchet.

Carrie Nation (November 25, 1846 – June 9, 1911) was a member of the temperance movement—the battles against alcohol in pre-Prohibition America. She has been the topic of numerous books, articles and even a 1966 opera at the University of Kansas.

Born Carrie Moore in Garrard County, Kentucky, Nation got her myth-making last name from her second husband, David Nation. A large woman (nearly 6 feet tall and 175 pounds) she described herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like", and claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars.

The spelling of her first name is ambiguous; both "Carrie" and "Carry" are considered correct. Official records list the former, and she herself used that spelling most of her life; the latter was used by her father in the family Bible. Upon beginning her campaign against liquor in the early 20th century, she adopted the name Carry A. Nation mainly for its value as a slogan, and had it registered as a trademark in the state of Kansas.^{[citation needed]} Nation also operated under the alias Mary Pat Clarke.^{[citation needed]}

Early life and first marriage

Nation grew up in Garrard County, Kentucky on present day Fisher Ford Drive in what most would consider trying circumstances. She was in ill health much of the time; her family experienced a number of financial setbacks and moved several times, finally settling in Belton, Missouri, where she was buried in the town's cemetery.

Many of Nation's family members suffered from mental illness. Her mother went through periods where she had delusions of being Queen Victoria, and that young Carrie was often tended to in the slave quarters as a result.

In 1865 she met Dr. Charles Gloyd, and they were married on November 21, 1867. Gloyd was, by all accounts, a severe alcoholic; they separated shortly before the birth of their daughter, Charlien, and he died less than a year later, in 1869. Nation attributed her passion for fighting liquor to her failed first marriage to heavy-drinking Gloyd.

Second marriage and call from God

Nation acquired a teaching certificate, but was unable to make ends meet in this field. She then met Dr. David A. Nation, an attorney, minister and newspaper editor, nineteen years her senior. They were married on December 27, 1877. The family purchased a 1700 acre cotton plantation on the San Bernard River in Brazoria County, Texas, but both knew little about farming and the venture was unsuccessful. Dr. Nation became involved in the Jaybird-Woodpecker War, and as a result was forced to move back north in 1889, this time to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where David found work preaching at a Christian church, and Carrie ran a successful hotel.

It was while in Medicine Lodge that she began her temperance work. Nation started a local branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and campaigned for the enforcement of Kansas' ban on the sales of liquor. Her methods escalated from simple protests to greeting bartenders with pointed remarks like "Good morning, destroyer of men's souls," to serenading saloon patrons with hymns on a hand organ.

Dissatisfied with the results of her efforts, Nation began to pray to God for direction. On June 5, 1900, she felt she got her answer in the form of a heavenly vision. She would describe it thusly:

The next morning I was awakened by a voice which seemed to me speaking in my heart, these words, "GO TO KIOWA," and my hands were lifted and thrown down and the words, "I'LL STAND BY YOU." The words, "Go to Kiowa," were spoken in a murmuring, musical tone, low and soft, but "I'll stand by you," was very clear, positive and emphatic. I was impressed with a great inspiration, the interpretation was very plain, it was this: "Take something in your hands, and throw at these places in Kiowa and smash them."

Obedient to the revelation, Nation gathered a number of rocks – "smashers," she called them – and proceeded to Dobson's Saloon. Announcing "Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard's fate," began to destroy the saloon's stock with her cache of rocks. After similarly destroying two other saloons in Kiowa, a tornado hit eastern Kansas. This she took as divine approval of her actions.

"Hatchetations"

Nation continued her destructive ways in Kansas, her fame spreading through her growing arrest record. After a raid in Wichita, her husband joked that she should use a hatchet next time for maximum damage. Nation replied, "That's the most sensible thing you have said since I married you."

Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a bar and sing and pray, while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested some 30 times for "hatchetations," as she came to call them. Nation paid her jail fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets.

Later life and death

Nation published a bi-weekly newsletter called The Smasher's Mail, a newspaper titled The Hatchet, and later in life appeared in vaudeville.

Near the end of her life, she moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas where she founded the home known as Hatchet Hall. A spring just across the street from the house is named after her.

She collapsed during a speech in a Eureka Springs park and was taken to a hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas. She died there on June 9, 1911, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Belton City Cemetery in Belton, Missouri. The Women's Christian Temperance Union later erected a stone inscribed "Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition, She Hath Done What She Could."

Works about Nation

• The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (1905) by Carry Nation
• Carry Nation (1929) by Herbert Asbury
• Cyclone Carry: The Story of Carry Nation (1962) by Carleton Beals
• Vessel of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry Nation (1966) by Robert Lewis Taylor
• Carry A. Nation : Retelling The Life (2001) by Fran Grace

See also

• List of famous tall women
• Temperance movement

External links

• Carry A. Nation: The Famous and Original Bar Room Smasher - Kansas State Historical Society
• Photos of Carry Nation - Fort Bend Museum, hosted by the Portal to Texas History
• Works by Carry Nation. Project Gutenberg

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