Carry Nation: Prohibition's Most Dangerous Weapon

In early June of nineteen hundred, a tall, solidly built woman named Carry Amelia Nation traveled alone to Kiowa, Kansas, pulled rocks and brickbats from a bundle she was carrying, and threw them through saloon windows and into the back-bar. She smashed three joints in Kiowa in a single day. She had never done anything like this before. She was fifty-three years old.

Carry Nation had come to her convictions through experience that was not abstract. Her first husband, Charles Gloyd, had been an alcoholic. He died of alcohol-related causes when she was in her early twenties, leaving her with an infant daughter. She eventually remarried a Kansas minister named David Nation and settled in Medicine Lodge, where she began a campaign through prayer vigils at saloon doorways, standing in the street singing hymns to discomfort the patrons inside.

That approach had not worked. The saloons of Kansas in nineteen hundred operated in a peculiar legal limbo. Kansas had been constitutionally dry since eighteen eighty-one, the first state to enshrine Prohibition in its constitution. But the law was irregularly enforced, and joints operating without official permits continued to do business in many Kansas towns. State authorities declined to close them. Local authorities were often in the pay of the saloon operators.

After Kiowa, Nation escalated. She began carrying a hatchet. Through nineteen hundred and into nineteen oh one, she raided saloons in Wichita, Topeka, Enterprise, and dozens of other Kansas towns, smashing bottles, mirrors, and furniture with the hatchet that became her emblem. She was arrested dozens of times. She paid fines by selling souvenir hatchets to crowds who followed her public appearances. She became, briefly, the most famous woman in the United States.

The national movement to ban alcohol ultimately succeeded. The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in nineteen nineteen, enacted the Prohibition that Kansas had attempted to enforce since eighteen eighty-one. Nation did not live to see it. She died in nineteen eleven, collapsing while speaking in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.