photo by: Louis Dalrymple/Library of Congress

March 20, 2019

Hatchet-Wielding Activist Carry A. Nation Knew to Pick Her Battles

A young man stands on a street corner in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, casually smoking a cigar among friends. He is unhurried and unbothered—that is, until a hand knocks the offending stogie from his lips.

“If the Lord had wanted you to smoke, he’d have put a chimney on your head!” says Carry Amelia Nation, a radical women’s rights advocate and temperance leader of the early 20th century.

photo by: Philipp Kester/Wikimedia Commons

A 1910 picture of Carry Nation with her hatchet. A devout Christian, she refused to be photographed without her Bible in hand.

“My great-grandfather [was] in Carry Nation’s Sunday school class and when he told me that story, I was absolutely flabbergasted,” says Kim Newman. “Well, she didn’t get [his] smoking stopped—he smoked all his life. But when I found that out, it was like Pandora opening the box.”

Since 1999, Newman has been the official costumed Carry Nation interpreter for the Medicine Lodge Stockade Museum, which includes Nation’s 1890 home. Built in 1882, the one-story, gable-roofed brick house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 11, 1976. It is one of two homes listed as the Carry A. Nation House on the National Register; the second is her childhood home in Lancaster, Kentucky.

There is a long tradition of Carry Nation interpreters at the museum—dating back to its inception in 1961. As part of her work with the museum, Newman conducts tours and participates in the annual summer Medicine Lodge Indian Peace Treaty parade, all in character.

“It’s just making her come alive and making people view her through different eyes,” says Newman.

Born on November 25, 1846 in Kentucky, Nation’s first marriage to the alcoholic Charles Gloyd left her a widow with a mother-in-law and disabled daughter to care for.

Her second marriage to the sober but frivolous David Nation ultimately brought her to Medicine Lodge in 1890. Nation soon joined the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and, as she ministered to inmates, she saw how alcohol had led them to a life behind bars.

Kansas had become the first U.S. state to approve a statewide constitutional prohibition on alcohol in 1881. In this restriction, Nation saw an opportunity. Armed with a steel rod or bricks wrapped in newspaper, she and WCTU colleagues began smashing saloons around 1900, smashing six bars in Kiowa, Kansas. A short but stout woman, standing at around 5’4”, Nation would break the liquor bottles and kegs behind the bar, destroy any lewd pictures she came across, and scold saloon owners and patrons. While these raids led to some saloon closings, Kansas’ Prohibition law remained poorly enforced and the sale of alcohol widespread.

“She just got tired of trying to influence local politicians into shutting down saloons that shouldn’t be open,” says Blair Tarr, a historian and curator at the Kansas Historical Society. That frustration led Nation to upgrade her tools, exchanging the rod for her iconic hatchet.

That hatchet was Nation’s most visible weapon, but it was not her most powerful one. “I think she knew very well how to get public attention to her,” says Tarr. “She saw anything as a possibility just to get the word out.”

From the first, she worked to turn her name into her brand. Nation’s first name was initially ambiguously spelled, sometimes written as Carry and others as Carrie. Realizing the marketing potential, Nation started spelling her name Carry A. Nation as she hoped to carry a nation to Prohibition. Her ability as a self-promoter was extensive: She traveled the country on speaking tours; authored the 1904 autobiography, The Use and the Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation; published newsletters; and sold photographs and hatchet-shaped stick pins as souvenirs (with the merchandise proceeds paying for “lodging, transportation, meals, and occasionally a fine,” says Tarr).

Nation’s tactics and marketing drew their own fair share of detractors—and supporters. At a time when women were often wholly dependent on their husbands, Nation’s smashings and newsletters empowered women.

photo by: Wystan/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

Nation speaking to a gathering in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on May 3, 1902.

“She was publishing her Home Defender and her Hatchet, two different news[letters] and she had subscribers,” says Ellie Carlson of ElliePresents, a Chicago-based Carry Nation interpreter. “They called themselves the Home Defenders. She wanted you to take a pledge to be a Home Defender, to lock your husband out of the house if he spent his pay packet at the pub, to contact Carry and leave and take your children and not live in an abusive home.” Comprised of women and men, the Home Defenders were an activist force, occasionally organizing their own raids.

Nation’s support for Prohibition was more intersectional than is often recognized. The St. Louis Dispatch quoted Nation as saying, “If I could vote, I wouldn’t smash.” For Nation, the cause of Prohibition was much larger than stopping the sale of alcohol—it was a battle for women’s rights.

“She would help women and children of alcoholic husbands. In fact, she built occasional homes where they could go as a refuge,” says Tarr. “She’s talking about these things when nobody else is talking about them.” Nation even sold her Medicine Lodge house in 1902 to fund one such home in Kansas City, Kansas.

Now, over 100 years after Nation’s death, her life and work continue to resonate, in Medicine Lodge and beyond.

“My real goal is to make people feel like they really met Carry Nation,” says Ellie. “She wasn’t just this crazy lady from 100 years ago—some of these things are still happening today.”

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Zubin Hill is a Content Marketing Intern at the National Trust. She loves exploring how communities negotiate their built history and learning new languages.

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