Carry Amelia Moore Nation was an American temperance agitator. She opposed alcohol before the advent of Prohibition.
Background
Carry Amelia Moore Nation was born on November 25, 1846 in Garrard County, Kentucky, United States. She was the daughter of George Moore, a prosperous stockdealer and planter who was the descendant of a pioneer Irish settler in the region, and of Mary Campbell who was descended by way of Virginia from the Scotch clan of Campbell and related to Alexander Campbell, the religious leader. The name "Carry" is correctly so spelled because her unlettered father wrote it thus in the family Bible at her birth. Her mother developed a psychosis, probably of a manic-depressive type with grandiose delusions that she was Queen Victoria, and her appetite for extravagant dress and equipage was humored by her family. Mrs. Moore spent the last three years of her life in the Missouri State Hospital for the Insane, and her mother, brother, and sister were also insane. The Moores and Campbells were slave-holders, and Carry's childhood was strongly influenced by the superstitious lore and religious excitements of the negroes. At ten she underwent a spectacular conversion in a "protracted meeting. " Moore had a Wanderlust, and before Carry was sixteen the family had lived in a dozen counties of Kentucky, Missouri, and Texas.
Education
Her schooling was brief and sporadic. She attended for a time boarding schools in Missouri and the State Normal School at Warrensburg, where she received a teaching certificate.
Career
She taught in a primary school at Holden, Missouri, supporting her child and her mother-in-law.
Kansas was one of the original prohibition states, a constitutional amendment having been voted in 1880. Despite stringent enforcement laws, there were numerous "joints" where liquor was sold more or less openly. In 1890 the United States Supreme Court held that liquor shipped into Kansas and sold from the "original package" was subject only to the interstate commerce laws. The "wets, " financed by distilleries which flooded the state with liquor, almost secured the resubmission of the amendment. Carry Nation was soon deeply involved in this struggle.
So far as she had a definite theory of action, it was that since the saloon was illegal in Kansas, it was permissible for any citizen to force his way in and destroy not only liquor but furniture and fixtures. Saloon property, she avowed, "has no rights that anybody is bound to respect. " In the spring of 1900, always supported by "visions" of her divinely infallible mission, her activities spread rapidly and with increasing violence to neighboring towns and counties. In Wichita she wrecked the Hotel Carey and other expensive saloons, smashing mirrors, windows, bars, panelling, pornographic paintings, and liquor stocks valued at thousands of dollars. It was here that she first used the hatchet which became her distinctive weapon, and was confined in the Sedgwick County jail for seven weeks, when she was released on a writ of habeas corpus, In her subsequent career through Enterprise, Danville, Winfield, and Leavenworth, to Topeka, the capital, where she invaded the governor's chambers, and later in New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Rochester, San Francisco, and other large cities, she was arrested some thirty times, usually on such charges as "disturbing the peace. " Her numerous fines she paid from her earnings by the sale of souvenir hatchets, lecture tours, and stage appearances.
She never became wealthy, but for half a dozen years she sometimes earned as much as $300 a week. At one time she was under the managership of the Furlong Lyceum Bureau, and later employed her own manager, Harry C. Turner. She had little business sense and was excessively generous, giving large sums to the poor and to temperance projects, and was easy prey for swindlers. She built a home for drunkards' wives at Kansas City, Kansas. Among other propaganda methods she carried on several short-lived publishing ventures, such as The Smasher's Mail, The Hatchet, The Home Defender, and published her autobiography. She was often in physical danger of reprisal from her enemies and was frequently clubbed, cut, shot at, or otherwise attacked.
Her later years were marked by numerous melodramatic experiences, for her notoriety was now international. She visited several American universities, including Harvard and Yale, which she denounced as "hellholes"; the students greeted her with wild burlesque. In 1908 she toured the British Isles but was antagonistically received. Increasing feebleness compelled her retirement to a farm in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Her last five months were spent in a Leavenworth hospital with a clouded and apathetic mind.
She was buried in the family plot at Belton, Missouri.
During her crusading years the temperance advocates were sharply divided on the righteousness of her tactics, and although many indorsed her work, she never received the whole-hearted support of any national body. The tangible results of her activities in her own lifetime were slight beyond the closure and intimidation of many saloons and the probable prevention of a "backward step" by the Kansas legislature. In a very real sense, however, she was the spearhead as well as the goad of an aroused public opinion against the saloon. When in 1920 the long drive for constitutional prohibition reached its goal, Carry Nation had been largely forgotten, but a just appraisal of the social and psychological forces contributing to that end must certainly give her a large, if unpremeditated, place in the furthering of the program for forcible prohibition.
Achievements
Carrie Nation organized a branch of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and with a few militant women began a campaign to expel the "jointists" from Medicine Lodge.
She is particularly noteworthy for attacking alcohol-serving establishments with a hatchet.
Personality
Carry Nation was a woman of commanding presence, nearly six feet tall, weighing 175 pounds, with extremely muscular arms. She dressed in a sort of black-and-white deaconess uniform. Her fierceness and garrulity when aroused were proverbial. Her invective was amazingly vigorous, couched in a King James version of billingsgate. An ignorant, unbalanced, and contentious woman of vast energies, afflicted with an hereditary paranoia, she was subjected to early hardships and mystic seizures which fused all her powers into a flaming enmity to intoxicating liquor and its corrupt purveyors.
She was a semi-invalid from digestive troubles.
Quotes from others about the person
"She hath done what she could. "
Connections
On November 21, 1867 Carry married her first and only love, Dr. Charles Gloyed, a young physician and Union veteran from Ohio. Gloyd was addicted to liquor, and all his bride's reform efforts were wasted. He was a Mason and spent much time roistering at the lodge, which incited in her a permanent hatred of fraternal orders. After a few wretchedly unhappy months she was persuaded by her parents to abandon Gloyd, who died of alcoholism six months later, leaving her with an infant daughter, Charlien, her only child, who lived to a weak and insane maturity.
In 1877 she married David Nation, a lawyer, minister, and editor nineteen years older than herself. They had little in common and were constantly bickering. He divorced her for desertion in 1901
