Carrie Nation Wields Hatchet: Temperance Crusader Dies

Carrie Nation spent the last decade of her life walking into saloons with a hatchet and smashing everything she could reach: bottles, mirrors, bar fixtures, furniture. She was arrested over thirty times and paid her fines with lecture fees and the sale of souvenir hatchets. She died on June 9, 1911, at 64, in Leavenworth, Kansas. Born Carrie Amelia Moore in Garrard County, Kentucky in 1846, she grew up in a family with a history of mental illness. Her mother believed she was Queen Victoria. Her first husband, Charles Gloyd, was an alcoholic who died within two years of their marriage. The experience turned her personal grief into a political mission. She married David Nation, a lawyer and minister, and moved to Kansas, which had been officially dry since 1880 but where the prohibition law was openly ignored. Saloons operated without interference from local authorities. Nation began her campaign in 1900 by walking into Dobson's Saloon in Kiowa, Kansas, and informing the bartender that she was going to destroy his establishment. She did. Her tactics escalated from rocks and bricks to the hatchet that became her trademark. She targeted "joints," as she called them, in Kansas, Texas, and other states, sometimes alone and sometimes with groups of hymn-singing supporters from the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She was physically imposing, nearly six feet tall, and utterly fearless in confrontation. Her direct-action approach was controversial even among temperance supporters. Many considered her methods extreme and counterproductive. But she galvanized local prohibition movements and drew national attention to the gap between prohibition laws on the books and their enforcement on the ground. She also advocated for women's suffrage, arguing that women needed the vote to protect their families from the saloon trade. The national prohibition she fought for arrived nine years after her death. The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. It lasted thirteen years before being repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933.