SHE CARRIED A NATION
Think "Carry Nation" and the image of a crazed hatchet-wielding zealot immediately comes to mind. Fran Grace would like to change that perception.
Grace is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Redlands and author of the forthcoming biography "Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life" (Indiana University Press).
The book's publication coincides with the 100th anniversary year of the beginning of Nation's campaign to destroy saloons in Topeka, Kansas. The Kansas Museum of History opened a special exhibit, "Carry A. Nation: The Famous and Original Bar Room Smasher," that continues through October 2001.
Nation's critics during her heyday of "hatchetation" (her word) dismissed her as a crank, or worse. One male writer at the time said, "By the crucial year 1900, Carry Nation had reached her (mid-fifties), a fact which medical authorities will agree will produce glandular difficulties of the menopause that allow suppressed forces to erupt violently."
Her actions are better understood considering her conservative religious upbringing in a movement that branched into the Disciplines of Christ and Church of Christ -- along with the death of her alcoholic, saloon-going first husband, leaving her a destitute single mother after just 16 months of marriage.
Still, God and grief did not suddenly converge to turn a compassionate Midwesterner into a raving maniac.
"How did she carry compassion in her heart and a hatchet in her hand? This is one of the questions I wanted to answer," Grace said.
Grace's six-year quest for information about Nation was a personal as well as professional journey, as she herself was raised in the Church of Christ. "I was trying to find a place in a religion that has no place for women, in search of a usable past. I found it in Carry Nation."
In the book, Grace describes the political and social, as well as religious, context that led to Nation's crusade.
She depicts a Midwest reminiscent of scenes from "Angela's Ashes," where men drank their wages and abandoned their wives, the women powerless to control the money or even to divorce them.
Nation, of course, was not the first to take up the cause. The Woman's Temperance Union had been founded in 1874 to work toward prohibition. While it lacked the political clout to be effective, it provided a training ground for women, including Nation, to learn how to wield the clout that might become available.
"Nation chose violence as a last resort," Grace said. "She had no economic power; she had no vote. Exclusion can have violent consequences, as we've seen so many times throughout history."
Nation entered the spotlight when she arrived in Topeka in January 1901 and organizing the Home Defenders Army to attack local bars. On Feb. 5, they struck the Senate Bar, so-called because of clientele of politicians, chopping up kegs of beer and hacking a slot machine to pieces. The result was one of her first nights in jail and the beginning of national fame.
Nation retired her hatchet in 1905. She continued to lecture and founded a women-centered community for the victims of alcoholic husbands and fathers.
Born Carrie Amelia Moore in 1886, she kept her second husband's name after a mid-life divorce and legally changed her name to Carry A. Nation, believing God had chosen her to "carry a nation" to prohibition. Did she? After all, prohibition did not become law until 1919, eight years after her death.
"I don't think she caused it to happen," Grace said. "But she came along at a time when the temperance movement was faltering and she certainly gave it a jumpstart."
Information on "Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life" is available on the Indiana University Press Web site at http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress. Link to the Spring 2001 Catalog.
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