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Carrie Nation gets a bum rap. Mostly she’s remembered as a self-righteous crusader and crank who burst into saloons, hurling rocks and smashing everything up in a misbegotten campaign to root out the evils of alcohol.
But that does an enormous disservice to her and her place in history.
What gets overlooked is her passionate campaign for social justice, clean politics, and women’s rights — and her extraordinary skill not just at causing a ruckus, but at gaining public attention for her cause. She understood the power of performance.
Her visibility and voice were her most powerful weapons. She used them well.
Now comes a new book by political science professor Mark Lawrence Schrad that takes a fresh look at Nation — he calls her “one of the most ridiculed women in American history.”
Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition revises the history of the temperance movement and casts it as populist progressivism, pro-justice activism.
As Schrad tells the story of Carrie (later Carry) Nation, when she saw wrongdoing, she couldn’t keep quiet.
A Kansas hotel owner and president of Barber County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, “she had already exhausted every nonviolent means of moral suasion against the liquor men: pleading with tavern-keepers, writing letters, signing petitions, organizing temperance marches, and praying in front of illegal saloons. Nothing worked.”
That’s when she began attacking the so-called “dives.” On the night of June 6, 1900, Carrie loaded her buggy with rocks and bricks and rode 20 miles to Kiowa, Kansas. Shortly after 8 o’clock the next morning she dropped in on the unlicensed, illegal Dobson’s saloon and starting smashing up the place.
You can read her remarkable speech “This Den of Vice” delivered to the stunned saloonkeeper and his early morning customers.
“Mr. Dobson, I told you last spring to close this place, you did not do it, now I have come down with another remonstrance. Get out of the way, I do not want to strike you, but I am going to break this place up.”
And you can read her speech the following year at Carnegie Hall, “Prohibition or Abolition—What it Means,” on the Speaking While Female Speech Bank.
Nation kept up her radical campaign for nearly a decade. She took her message across America and even to Great Britain. Newspapers carried stories about her sensational attacks, and she became a celebrity.
The sharpened hatchet was her hallmark; her demonstrations were called “hatchitations.”
She was physically attacked, jailed, fined, and pilloried in the press as “Crazy Carry.”
A crank? Yes, in the best sense — someone who cranks the engine to create energy, power, and forward motion.
A crank? Yes, in the best sense — someone who cranks the engine to create energy, power, and forward motion.
She brought national publicity to the suffering of women and children because of alcohol abuse, put a spotlight on public corruption, and focused attention on the fact that women were legally powerless and had no electoral recourse for reform.
Her visibility and voice were her most powerful weapons. She used them well.
© Copyright 2021
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