Carrie Nation smashed private property at will, consumed in her (surprisingly justified) hatred of alcohol.
On June 7, 1900, a 54-year-old, stout-looking matron by the name of Carrie Amelia Nation marched into a saloon in the tiny southern Kansas town of Kiowa. To the assembled drinkers, she apparently“Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard’s fate.
” She then set about the messy business of smashing and destroying all the booze with a supply of rocks, singing hymns and excitedly shouting religious mantras as she went. One can only imagine the surprised looks on the faces of the tavern’s clientele, or the choice language they employed. It was only later that Nation would acquire her most famous prop: A hatchet, which she used in a series of subsequent attacks upon saloons through the first decade of the 1900s, landing her an immortal place in theCarrie Nation would subsequently become one of the single most widely recognized and parodied women in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, at a time when there were relatively few famous women in national pop culture, the nascent Hollywood film industry having not yet come of age. The frenzied image of the woman depicted as the “hatchet granny,” who waged an admittedly delusional crusade against hooch, powered by religious mania, appeared from coast to coast in newspaper caricatures and vaudeville impersonations. She was a figure of both amusement and infamy who embraced elements of her own image, selling merchandise to support herself while she toured, lectured and railed against alcohol. But she was also more than some lone eccentric—Carrie Nation was the end product of the surging temperance movement of her day, and the avatar of several generations of American women who had suffered from a lack of agency during the drunkest, most alcohol-abusing period in the nation’s history. If you had been born into the world that she inherited, you might well have hated liquor too. It’s difficult to overstate just how plastered the U.S. was during the mid-1800s, when Carrie Nation was born as Carrie Moore. Americans had always liked a drink, but even our perpetually drunk founding fathers had nothing on the average per capita alcohol consumption of the 1800s, which reached record highs after excess grain production in the nation’s westward expansion resulted in whiskey becomingAnd the cheaper booze is, the more of it we tend to consume, to the point that the average per-capita consumption was roughlythan it is today. Or in other words, if every single person you know who drinks alcohol consumed three times as much as they do now, that’s what much of the mid-1800s was like in American society. Consequently, a young Carrie Nation’s life was repeatedly touched by tragedy and hardship related to booze. She got married at 19 to a Civil War veteran and physician named Charles Gloyd who was—surprise—a severe alcoholic. They would divorce less than a year later in 1868; no small thing given that divorceswho had to prove their husband’s moral failing in court, and Gloyd would be dead as a result of complications from his alcoholism only a year after that. Our heroine would eventually remarry, and this second marriage to attorney and minister David A. Nation would last far longer, although this time it would be the man eventually seeking divorce in 1901,She marched straight into bars and began smashing everything in sight: bottles, mirrors, counters, kegs, even the walls if she could manage it.That Carrie Nation was delusional to at least some degree really can’t be argued—she believed that God had spoken to her and sent her on a personal quest to smash those saloons, and in her religious zealotryin terms such as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.” Mental illness ran in the family; both her mother and daughter by her first husband were delusional and ended their lives in mental institutions. She was aware of how the public saw her, self-publishing a newspaper titledWhy, then, you might wonder, did she not end up in prison for ransacking bars throughout Kansas and Missouri in the first decade of the 1900s, when the public so often depicted her as insane? The reason was surprisingly simple: According to the letter of the law, Nation was actually on the side of justice in her actions. In particular, Kansas had voluntarily adopted the prohibition of alcohol statewide by 1880, some 40 years before national Prohibition would arrive, meaning that the saloons Nation was smashing up were patently illegal establishments. And yet they operated in plain sight, either paying off corrupt legislators and law enforcement to look the other way, or simply paying insufficient fines while still doing a tidy business. Nation and what was eventually large groups of female acolytes weren’t going to stand for that, and thus they spent a decade smashing up the establishments while raising public awareness of the weakness of the existing law, in the build-up to the arrival of the “noble experiment” of national Prohibition. Bourbon brands, Carrie Nation, and whiskey industry sexism — How a $250 million distillery based its marketing around mocking a historical woman and collapsed in 2025. #whiskey #bourbon #CarrieNation #GarrardCounty www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcoho…If you’re wondering what a “hatchetation” was like in person, by the way, here’s Nation’s own description“I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer. Of course it began to fly all over the house. I threw over the slot machine, breaking it up and I got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beer flew in every direction and I was completely saturated. A policeman came in and very good-naturedly arrested me.” As that last line would imply, Carrie Nation was occasionally arrested on grounds such as the destruction of private property or disturbing the peace, but never spent any significant time behind bars. She bailed herself out with the funds raised by quirky merchandise sales or fees from speaking tours, or was bailed out through collections taken by local temperance movement chapters, which welcomed her into their communities with open arms. She was perhaps the single best-known social reformer of her day, despite having the reputation of a hatchet-wielding mad dog. She even aided in the establishing ofCarrie Nation’s crusade never stopped; nor did she settle down for a peaceful retirement from her evangelism. In 1911, she collapsed while giving yet another anti-alcohol speech in Arkansas, and died shortly thereafter. It was still nine years before the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment would deliver the goal she’d been working toward for the back half of her life, but there’s no doubting her efforts played a crucial, symbolic role. She was buried in Missouri,
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