Criminal - Carry A. Nation

Episode Date: August 18, 2017

At the turn of the century, Carry Nation was “America’s foremost lady hellraiser” and "the apostle of reform violence.” A radical member of the temperance movement, Carrie Nation was known for attacking saloons, bars, and pubs with a hatchet engraved with name. In her own words, she was "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like."  We liked her hatchet pins so much, we thought we’d try to make some of our own. They say “CRIMINAL” on the handle. Get yours here. Thanks to everyone at the Kansas State Historical Society, and to Maya Goldberg-Safir. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is something. So this is like everything under the sun. I'm looking at... That's very close, yes. I mean, I've seeing lawnmowers, stock car, whatever the... It's a soapbox derby car. There are trunks. There's some lawn equipment. This is Blair Tarr, curator for the Kansas Museum of History, which is part of the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka. Inside the museum, behind two enormous double doors,

is an area not open to the public. It's a huge warehouse with floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with the most random assortment of objects. The pink thing that you see up there is actually a breast and larger. And we do have the male equivalent as well in the collection. So it is a little bit of everything because we are charged with the history of Kansas and collecting for it.

And, you know, any aspect of Kansas life, we try to collect a little bit of it. We've got over 100,000 artifacts here. They've got the gallows used to hang Richard Hickok and Perry Smith, the two murderers Truman Capote made famous when he wrote In Cold Blood. They have their gravestones, too. And they have a revolver that was hand-carved out of wood by an inmate at the state penitentiary in Lansing.

He used it to try to bluff his way out of prison. But we were there to learn about a woman and her hatchet. She said very early on that when she would be photographed, she wanted to be photographed with a Bible in one hand and her hatchet in the other. Carrie Amelia Moore was born in 1846 in a farm in Garrett County, Kentucky. Her father, George Moore, was a wealthy farmer who always had a corncob pipe between his teeth. Carrie said that when she was a little girl,

she admired her father so much that she filed her own teeth down to look more like him. Her mother, Mary Campbell Moore, was raising four stepchildren and nearly always pregnant. She spent the end of her life in an asylum. This is a time when it didn't take a lot to put somebody in an asylum, particularly a woman, if they were thought not to be living up to the standards of a woman in the time period. She was put in the asylum by a son who owed her money.

And all he really had to do was say, my mother is crazy, you've got to take her in. And that was really about all that was needed to do that in the 19th century. So Carrie never believed that her mother was really insane. When Carrie was 19 years old, a young doctor showed up at the family's doorstep. His name was Charles Gloyd. He was said to be a smart guy, When Carrie was 19 years old, a young doctor showed up at the family's doorstep.

His name was Charles Gloyd. He was said to be a smart guy. He spoke several languages, opened a small school, and rented a room in the Moores' house. Carrie wasn't allowed to be alone with him under any circumstances. Her mother said he was an active drag on the energies of those around him. But Carrie liked him. He would leave secret notes for her inside of books. She would reply and sneak the books back onto his nightstand.

After two years, they set a wedding date. Her mother was furious. On the day of the wedding, Charles Gloyd showed up drunk. I did not find Dr. Gloyd to be the lover I expected, she wrote. He was never home, out drinking every night. Her parents visited and found Carrie in worn-out dirty clothes with no food in the house. They convinced her to get out of there and move back home with them. Within six months, Charles Gloyd was dead. She prayed for a new husband. She wrote in her diary that she didn't have anyone in mind and asked God to pick someone out for her. A week

later, she saw an older man in the street with an extremely long white beard and a, quote, startling appearance. His name was David Nation. He's looking for somebody to take care of his household. And this happens a lot in the 19th century, too. You have women trying to find some sort of support. You have men who are trying to find somebody to run their household. It's a marriage of convenience in a lot of ways. They married in 1877 and moved to a very small town in Kansas called Medicine Lodge.

She really comes into her own, I think, at this point, because she gets involved with the community. She becomes involved with the Women's Christian Temperance Union because, well, because of her first husband. She's very much interested in the idea of prohibition. And she has a lot to say about that, about how this affects a woman. Obviously, Americans have been drinking alcohol since the Pilgrims. But in the 19th century, the weak beer and cider everyone was drinking at every meal was replaced by rum and whiskey.

And it took people a little while to realize that there was a pretty big difference in the alcohol content. Something was up. By 1830, the average American drank three times as much as we drink today. You know, I guess the idea here is that women are the ones that bore the brunt of a lot of this alcoholism, because if the husbands were drunk all the time, they weren't going to work and they weren't helping around the house. And they were spending valuable money that could be used to feed children and their wives. Carrie was not shy about putting forth that idea.

Not only were men blowing all their money on booze, they'd come home drunk and be physically abusive. Bars attracted customers with gambling and sex, so husbands often brought syphilis and gonorrhea home to their wives. And while women had no legal recourse against their husbands, they could advocate for prohibition. Kansas was the first state to prohibit alcohol in its constitution in 1881. Now the law in Kansas does have that little catch-all about liquor can be served for medicinal purposes,

which is a big loophole in some places, including Medicine Lodge, where there's a pharmacy that liquor is available and obviously a little bit more than just medicinal purposes. There's literally a back room that the pharmacist has where he's serving liquor. A pharmacist might recommend rum with milk to help a woman get pregnant. Rum and aloe might cure a sore toe, and drinking rum with horse urine was prescribed for weight loss. But really, it doesn't appear it took much to convince a pharmacist to take your money and serve you a drink. Outside of the pharmacies, you could also find illegal bars all over Kansas. The old joke is that there were signs out in western Kansas, places, no beer, something like no beer here, near beer, three miles. So it's, everybody knows where there's liquor being served. It's not even a great secret.

Carrie couldn't stand it. She organized groups of women to go into bars and sing and try to reason with the men inside. And when people made fun of her, which they often did in the very small town, she prayed that God would send a tornado to destroy all the bars in Kansas. She would go into the jails and ask each inmate why they were there. They'd all say because they'd gotten drunk in the nearby town of Kiowa. Carrie took this information to the county attorney, and he ignored her. She then went to the state's attorney. He ignored her too. So she went directly to the governor. She wrote,

after appealing to the governor in vain, I found that I could go to no other authority on earth. And so, in June of 1900, she finished her housework, cooked a meal for her husband, and got on the road to Kiowa with a buggy full of bricks. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. She made it to Kiowa after dark and slept at a friend's house. She woke up very early the next morning and went straight to a place she knew to be a secret bar. It was called a refreshment stand. She walked in and said, Men, I've come to save you from a drunkard's grave.

And start smashing. When you say smashing, it's just throwing stuff? Smashing can be destroying glasses, breaking glass, smashing mirrors, smashing liquor bottles, doing damage to furniture in the place, breaking out windows if necessary, just about anything that may cause any sort of damage. So she says to herself, okay, the protests aren't working, the songs aren't working, I've got to step it up.

I've got to step it up and I'm just going to start throwing things. Yeah. She smashed three Kiowa bars that day, even throwing a billiard ball at the head of a bartender. She said she felt invincible. The streets filled up with people watching, and she introduced herself to them as God's right arm. She gave a speech explaining that she was not a criminal,

that the police officers and government officials were the real criminals for refusing to enforce prohibition. She hated politicians and hated President William McKinley. She said, government, like dead fish, stinks worse at the head. She was arrested, but there was a problem. She's destroying property that legally isn't supposed to exist. So that sort of limits you. You can maybe get her for disturbing the peace or something like that, but legally destroying property, that's another story. You can't charge somebody with what isn't supposed to exist to begin with. The Kiowa mayor concluded that nothing had ever happened and let her go home.

So her next target is Wichita. She set her sights on the fanciest bar in the entire state of Kansas, the Cary Hotel Bar. And it was in Wichita that someone handed her a hatchet for the very first time. That became a very handy device. You realize this could do an awful lot. She could take it to a bar and start chopping away at it. So she wouldn't just smash bottles. She'd also start hatcheting the bar.

She could destroy the bars, too, if she thought that was necessary. She was trying to drive home a point. That's a very strong way to drive home a point, but she was trying. The hatchet really suited her. She'd swing it around and say, don't come near my hatchet, it might fall on you. And she used it to wreck everything in the Cary Hotel bar.

Crystal decanters, a chandelier. She even knocked the rungs out of all the chairs. $3,000 in damage. One man said he thought Judgment Day had arrived. She called it a hachitation. And when she was brought before a judge, she addressed him as, your dishonor. This time, she was sent to jail for quite a while.

She found jail inspiring. She thought it strengthened and purified her. And while she was in jail, she received letters from women in other parts of the state. They'd heard what she'd done and wanted her to come to their town and save their homes. This is how she came to reinvent herself as your loving home defender, Carrie A. Nation. People are often wondering about the spelling of her first name

because sometimes she used I-E and sometimes it was Y. Well, up to the time she started smashing, she tended to use I-E. But when she started smashing and began to get an audience, it went over to Y. You could hear her talk. It usually ended up with something like, and with these efforts, we can carry a nation. Newspapers were all over her, and they exaggerated everything. She was called a giant, a secret drinker, a man in women's clothes. One reporter even described her as a, quote, possible werewolf. But what's interesting is when you look at her dresses, preserved at the Kansas Historical Society,

you see just how much the papers exaggerated. She wasn't a giant at all. She was short, and her dresses, while simple and a little bit moth-eaten after 117 years, have a delicate line of pearl buttons up the side and a silk bow on the shoulder. After Kiowa, in Wichita, bar owners knew to prepare for her arrival. When she arrived in Topeka, four bars installed trap doors just inside their entrances. People threw eggs at her face, and she'd calmly wipe them away. There's a story about a bar owner barricading himself and his customers inside.

The Kansas City Star reported that Carrie coaxed them out by speaking gently and saying, Boys, boys, your mother wants to talk to you. But she's gentle enough in the way she speaks that although they've been barricaded in the saloon, they take down the barricade and open up the doors so that she comes in. She doesn't actually do any smashing there, but she does talk to them. And in a lot of ways, I think that's what she preferred to do. If she

wasn't going to be able to talk, she was going to smash in replacement for being denied the privilege of lecturing to them. And when you actually talk to her, most people found her very easy to talk to. If she was provoked, she would get angry. You admire her. I admire her a lot more than I did years ago. And that's probably because of all the things that I know about her now. She had the saying that you wouldn't give me the vote, so I had to use the rock. She was against smoking.

And she would literally walk down the streets of cities and go up to smokers and pull either the cigar or cigarettes out of their mouth and step on them and literally tell them that that was not healthy for them and also not healthy for her. She has good instincts. She doesn't always have the science or the rationale that we might have today behind her, but she sort of understands things that we know now to be very true. In Topeka, she set her sights on a bar called the Senate Saloon that was popular with politicians. So obviously, the people who enacted Prohibition are not exercising Prohibition themselves.

She smashed everything, including a large mirror behind the bar. The museum at the Kansas Historical Society has a shard of that mirror on display. The owner picked up the fragments, and for five cents they could buy a fragment and have whatever they wanted to drink. It happened all the time sometimes with her smashings, that somehow the saloon owner would manage to make a profit out of it somehow. And he did. She found herself back in jail, where she started her own newspaper, The Smasher's Mail. And by the end of the month, she was on the front page of The New York Times. She was signing autographed pictures of herself and started selling them. But then she found something even better.

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by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What is this tiny little, is that a pin? That's a tiny little hatchet? That's a tiny little hatchet, yeah. When she was here in Topeka, a man approached her with a box of little hatchets. He said, you could sell these.

And she did. She sold them out rapidly. There's also a stick pin, too. Stick pins, I think, were 25 cents. These pins, the lapel pins, were 50 cents. She sold them out of a purse that she always carried at her side. 25 and 50 cents was considerable

in the early 1900s. This paid for her transportation. It would pay for fines occasionally, housing, even food when she was traveling about the country. And she was always replenishing her stock because she kept selling these pens. When you look through all the archival photos of her at the Historical Society, some of them show her standing in front of huge groups of supporters. She's always got that leather purse strapped across her chest. They have the purse at the Historical Society, and it's in surprisingly good condition,

an oval handbag with a sturdy metal clasp at the top. They also have her diary and a watch and a Bible she inscribed to her nephew. And are these her teeth? What is this? We don't know if those are for sure her teeth, but we do know that she had false teeth because there is at least one story from, I think it's Trinidad, Colorado, where she went into a saloon to lecture. The owner was not terribly pleased about that, and he threw her out of the saloon.

And apparently part of Paul's teeth got caught, and she actually started choking. There's one here that I always like, too. This was a sign that actually showed up in a lot of saloons. All nations are welcome except Carrie. This was not meant to be a compliment, but she apparently found some humor in it. In August of 1901, she made her way to New York City. She was 55 years old and spoke to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall.

She gave a speech in Atlantic City, where she reportedly sold more than 2,000 of her little hatchet pins. And then she met Susan B. Anthony. Apparently, they didn't have a lot in common. Carrie Nation wrote that an elite East Coast woman like Susan B. Anthony, quote, didn't seem to understand the need for the hatchet. By November of that year, David Nation filed for divorce. She was famous enough for this to be national news. They'd been married for 24 years. I married this woman because I needed someone to run my house,

he told reporters. When asked to comment, Carrie Nation said, David isn't a bad fellow, but he's too slow for me. Over the next 10 years, she traveled all over the U.S. and Canada, giving lectures, smashing, and getting arrested. She even visited Europe. In Scotland, she gave a lecture called How I Smashed, Why I Smashed, and How You Can Smash. I don't think I've ever said the word smash as much as I have just doing this story. I love the word smashing. I've never, it seems to encompass so much. It's like destroying. And it's sort of ironic too, because usually if you use the word smashed, you're usually talking about somebody who's been drinking too much. But yeah, she is probably the best-faced prohibition ever had as far as a figure that you can identify with it.

On January 13, 1911, she was giving a speech in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, when she collapsed. She was 64 years old. The headlines are all over the country that Carrie Nation, the great saloon smasher, has passed away. And she is, in fact, sort of almost forgotten a little bit because she's buried in the family plot at Belton, Missouri. But for many years, there's only a wooden plaque on her grave with her name painted on it. Until in the mid-20s, the citizens of Belton decided she needed something a lot more grander than that. And they put up this nice marble stone on the grave. Before she died, she wrote her life story and called it

The Use and Need of the Life of Carrie A. Nation. She revised it seven times. The 1905 edition ends with the line, Marvel not that the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you. Three marks on drink from Kali A. Nation, your loving home defender. If you go into a saloon and ask a man why he makes that fiery drink that is made by rotting good grains and good fruit and anything that is rotten poisonous and it will rot the man's brain, and will rot his body,

will rot his soul, will rot the tooth of his feet, and make a rotten mess of everything. We liked Carrie Nation's tiny hatchet pins so much, we thought we'd try to make some of our own. They say criminal on the handle. If you follow the link in the show notes, or go to our website, thisiscriminal.com,

you can get one before they're gone. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Our intern is Mathilde Erfolino. Special thanks to Maya Goldberg-Safer. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show.

Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation, and thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia.

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