Getting smashed: Why Carrie Nation campaigned against alcohol with an axe
Speaking from experience, it takes a hell of a lot to surprise bar staff. One can only imagine the looks on the faces of bartenders all over America when Carrie Nation gave their watering hole a visit in the early 1900s.
It would be strange enough that a woman in her 60s would stroll into a bar singing a choice cut of hits from the Christian hymnbook, more often than not with a coterie of followers. One of those abolitionists, they’d think. They might not even bother asking them to leave, reasoning that those requests would have a lot more power coming from their fellow man rather than the manager of the very establishment they’re protesting. Then suddenly, the woman brings out a hatchet. Oh dear.
This was Carrie Amelia Nation, who hated alcohol with a passion that few people have had before or since. Kendrick Lamar wishes he hated Drake with the passion that ‘Mother Nation’ hated alcohol with. She had reason to as well. Her first marriage was to a man who drank himself to death not three years after they tied the knot, and while she soon remarried, she devoted all of her time that wasn’t spent working or raising her family to the then-nascent temperance movement.
At first, this work was mainly spent hanging around outside saloons, singing Christian hymns and greeting bartenders with words like “greetings, destroyer of men’s souls”. I can think of a few people in the service industry who’d love nothing more than to be greeted like that, so perhaps it makes sense that tactics like that didn’t work. She prayed for guidance and, on the morning of June 5th, 1900, she had her prayers answered quite literally.
According to Nation, she heard the words “GO TO KIOWA” and “I’LL STAND BY YOU”. Kiowa was a nearby town to her home in Kansas with a notorious saloon at the centre. Quite marvellously, Nation interpreted this supposed hearing of the words “I’ll stand by you” as “destroy this bar however you can”. Which is exactly what she did.
Two days later, she rocked up to Dobson’s Saloon with a basket full of rocks, announced, “Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate,” and proceeded to destroy the bar’s entire stock with said rocks.
Nation did this to two more bars in Kansas before something happened that she took as divine approval of her work. A tornado levelled the eastern part of the state. Thus, to Nation, her work had really begun. From 1900 to 1910, she was one of the most notorious women in America, travelling the country on successful lecture tours and using the money raised from them to pay her countless bail fees. She was arrested 35 times over the course of the decade for her violent activities.
However, she wasn’t a single-issue campaigner. Like many temperance campaigners, she saw the abolition of alcohol as a feminist issue, due to the number of women victimised by their drunk husbands, so she was also a tireless campaigner for women’s suffrage, but everything eventually came back to banning alcohol, and while she gave up on the whole “twatting bars with an axe” act by 1910, she never stopped campaigning otherwise, giving lectures literally until she couldn’t anymore.
On January 14th, 1911, Nation collapsed halfway through a speech and never woke up. She descended into a coma and was officially pronounced dead on June 9th. She had good innings for her time, 64 years old after living a life as radical as hers is nothing to be sniffed at, but considering she was a mere nine years away from seeing the national alcohol prohibition she worked tirelessly to achieve being enforced? Her passing can’t help but be tinged with regret.
However, this does also mean she missed all the bars and pubs named after her in an insulting tribute. That said, Carrie Nation was a tougher woman than that. I’m sure she’d have taken it as a badge of honour.