Carrie Nation – notorious smasher of bars and aggressive apostle of Prohibition

“All Nations welcome except Carrie”, read a sign that was once displayed in bars and saloons right across America. The Carrie that they were referring to was a woman named Carrie (sometimes spelled Carry) Nation. Her reputation for smashing up illegal bars in the early 1900s had spread all over the United States.

Although she fought crusades against alcohol and tobacco, and also militated for women’s rights, Nation is usually best remembered today for her high-profile hatchet attacks on public houses and for her speaking tours on the evils of what she called the “serpent drink”.

This is probably down to her own careful media management of her persona. Nation was adept at self-promotion. Photographs of the tall, grey-haired, sombrely-dressed Sunday school teacher usually show her carrying a hatchet. Posters advertising her lecture tours show her with a Bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other. She even launched newspapers, one entitled Smasher’s Mail and the other called The Hatchet, in which she spread her message of temperance.

The bar-room smashing all began in 1900. At the time, three states, including her adopted state of Kansas, were dry. Kansas had prohibited alcohol in 1880. The following year, its constitution made it a crime to manufacture, barter, sell or give away intoxicating beverages.

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However, the prohibition was largely ignored and the laws were not always enforced. This meant that bars and saloons, known as “joints”, sold alcohol without any fear of repercussions. Nation became so despondent that the authorities were not taking any action to close these places that she took matters into her own hands.

Initially, she led peaceful marches and together with some of her comrades from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she would sing hymns and pray loudly outside saloons. She sent petitions to lawmakers and in September 1900 in the town of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, she even served a warrant on a drugstore for selling beer and whiskey.

When no action was taken to cease the sale of alcohol, she entered a bar in Kiowa, Kansas and destroyed it. Using rocks wrapped in paper that she called “smashers”, she shattered the mirror behind the bar and broke the beer bottles under the mirror.

From Kiowa, she left a trail of destruction in her wake that flowed through bars in other Kansas towns, including the state capital, Topeka. The first attack with a hatchet, which she termed a “hatchetation”, happened in January 1901 and these continued until 1903, when she vowed to use only words as weapons.

Nation carried out her work at great personal cost. It almost cost her her life on several occasions. She was mocked and jeered, attacked by mobs, and arrested and jailed more than 30 times. In Enterprise, Kansas, she was horsewhipped by a saloon owner’s wife after having wrecked his establishment. She was almost lynched in New York.

In order to finance her crusade, she sold souvenirs in the form of photographs of her carrying a hatchet. She also sold hatchet pins and even appeared at vaudeville theatres and carnivals, re-enacting her bar room smashing. Crowds gathered to hear her speak, as she had a certain way with words. A barkeeper in an illegal “joint” was once referred to as a “donkey-faced bedmate of Satan”.

The reasons for her crusade against alcohol were both personal and religious. Her first husband died of alcohol-related problems and she claimed that God came to her in a dream and told her that her mission was to save drunkards. Her home was used for the wives of drunkards.

From December 1908 to March 1909, Nation undertook a tour of Scotland, England and Ireland with her niece and friend, Callie Moore. It was reported that the chief of police of Washington had breathed a sigh of relief, but that he felt sorry for his counterpart in Ireland, who would have to contend with the visiting speaker.

She claimed that England was “more drunken than America, and that unless something was done the degeneracy of the country was certain”. In London, much to the bemusement of staff and patrons, she berated bar workers at the Oxford Music Hall on Oxford Street. They should be ashamed of themselves for selling alcohol, she argued, but to no avail. She was promptly asked to leave the premises.

She referred to Scotland as a “stiff country to rouse” and as soon as she got to Ireland, the American press surmised that she was “in the right place for a fight”. However, she was not taken seriously in Ireland. As she departed Cobh in mid-March 1909 on a White Star liner bound for New York, she vowed to return on another crusade at a later date. She never did return across the Atlantic and died in Kansas in 1911.