Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (7 page)

In retrospect, Mother Thompson’s Women’s Crusade proved to be more of a media triumph than a lasting contribution to the Prohibition cause. After its initial successes, it lost its momentum. Between 1873 and 1875, Ohio and Indiana state revenues dropped considerably. The
New york Tribune
reported that over $300,000 in liquor taxes had been forfeited because so many breweries and saloons had closed. But this proved only temporary. One by one, breweries and saloons reopened as media interest waned and the crusaders returned to their home activities.

The crusade not only brought the by-now almost moribund Temperance issue back on the front pages but kick-started the churches into a further round of activity. Presbyterian Church organizers in Cleveland, who had closely followed the crusade phenomenon from afar, were well aware that many of their parishioners had been erstwhile crusaders. They convened a meeting in the winter of 1874 that led to the establishment of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Representatives came from seventeen states, and this brand-new organization was to prove far more effective than any ephemeral, emotional crusade. Crucial, too, to its success was the election as first WCTU President of the formidable Frances Elizabeth Willard — a former university professor and a born organizer (and ex-crusader) — who soon had chapters of the movement in every state. Willard herself was the child of rigidly puritan Methodist parents. On Sundays, “the activities of the otherwise industrious family slowed down almost to the point of immobility. Willard Sr. would not shave, black his boots, write or read a letter, even look up a word in a dictionary, receive or make a visit.”
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A tomboy, she developed “wild crushes on girls” as an adolescent, and her later friendships were exclusively with the same sex (an early engagement was rapidly terminated, and she never married). Needless to say, Frances Willard was brought up to believe that liquor was evil incarnate, promoting Godlessness and the “devil’s works.” The notion that liquor, in moderation, could be harmless, and even beneficial, was always anathema to the WCTU. Moderation was “the shoddy life-belt, which promises safety, but only tempts into danger, and fails
in the hour of need. . . . the fruitful fountain from which the flood of intemperance is fed. . . . Most men become drunkards by trying to drink moderately and failing.” When she began making Temperance speeches, Willard used a bung starter from a saloon as a gavel. She almost invariably dressed as a man, and her strict, humorless abstinence and crusading zeal marked her throughout her life.

She was one of the earliest activists to work for nationwide Prohibition, and it was under her leadership in 1875 that the WCTU petitioned Congress to do so. The WCTU’s leaflets were designed to teach children about the evils of drink from the earliest possible age. Sunday school literature included “Counting Fingers.” Its contents may seem laughably simplistic today, but in the 1870s, at a time when the WCTU was increasing its hold on such schools all over America, it had a huge impact on children — and on all God-fearing parents. The cover was an outspread hand, with numbered fingers, and its jingle was:

One, two, three, four, five fingers on every little hand. Listen while they speak to us; be sure we understand.

1-
THERE IS A DRINK THAT NEVER HARMS
It will make
US Strong.

2-
THERE IS A DRINK THAT NEVER ALARMS
Some drinks make people wicked.

3-
A DRINK THAT KEEPS OUR SENSES RIGHT
There are drinks that will take away our senses.

4-
A DRINK THAT MAKES OUR FACES BRIGHT
We should never touch the drinks that will put evil into our hearts and spoil our faces.

5-
GOD GIVES US THE ONLY DRINK — ‘ TIS PURE, COLD WATER.

Other effective children’s teaching devices were
APPLES ARE GOD’S BOTTLES
( “Do you want to open God’s bottle? Bite the apple with your teeth and you will taste the sweet juice God has put in His bottle for you.”) and
GRAPES ARE GOD’S BOTTLES
(in the same vein).

The WCTU’s first major triumph was to compel all public schools to teach a course on the evils of drink. Standard teaching practices included demonstrations of little scientific value but of startling impact.

Teacher would place part of a calf’s brain in an empty glass jar. After discoursing on the nature of the brain and the nature of alcohol, she would then pour a bottle of alcohol into the jar. The color of the calf’s brain would turn from its normal pink to a nasty gray. And that, the teacher would conclude in sepulchral tones, is what would happen to her pupils’ little brains if ever they drank Satan’s brew.

Along with the later secular Anti-Saloon League, the WCTU would be the formidable lobbying instrument that would in time make nationwide Prohibition inevitable. It was largely due to the WCTU that the Prohibition party made its ephemeral appearance on the political scene.

But twenty-five years later, while the WCTU was already hard at work, another woman was to lead a media blitz on the “devilish forces of liquor,” and for a while her exploits completely overshadowed the more serious, academically inclined WCTU.

In the portrait gallery of Prohibition eccentrics, Carry Nation, still a legend in Kansas (where a small museum commemorates her activities), stands out as the wildest, maddest, most frenzied crusader of all. Although she was nominally a member of the WCTU, hers was a one-woman war, and she was determined to wage it on her own terms.

Born Carry Moore in 1846, in Garrard City, Kentucky — a town famous for its revivalist meetings — she became a rebel and a misfit while still a child. She has been dismissed as a freak, her detractors noting her own family’s insanity. Her crusade against liquor, sex, and tobacco accurately reflected the tragic circumstances of her own disturbed emotional life. So unbalanced and out of control was she that in other circumstances, like some members of her mother’s family, she might well have been confined to a mental institution. Her own mother, committed to a psychiatric hospital in old age, believed she was Queen Victoria, and even had her long-suffering husband build her a gilded royal carriage, from which she airily waved a white-gloved hand at bemused slaves on her husband’s near-bankrupt Kentucky plantation.

A born rebel, Carry Nation was rejected by her eccentric mother, spending most of her time with blacks and slaves, and this closeness with them would remain with her all of her life. She became a firm believer in slave folklore, with special emphasis on clairvoyance and
ghosts. Her first vision — of her grandmother — occurred at the age of eight. Subsequently, as she noted in “The Use and Need of the Life of Carry Nation,” a largely incoherent record of her life, she frequently conversed with Jesus Christ and claimed her powers as a rainmaker had ended many a local drought.

The Civil War ruined the Moore family, turning them into wandering refugees who eventually settled in Cass County, near Kansas City. There, Carry, now a towering but plain and excessively bony 19-year-old — subject to fits, convulsions, and bouts of manic depression — fell in love with a handsome young doctor, Charles Gloyd, who married her in 1867 after a whirlwind courtship. Gloyd, she found out only on her wedding day, was an alcoholic. After the birth of a handicapped daughter, the couple separated, and Gloyd died shortly thereafter.

It was this first husband — a heavy smoker as well as a heavy drinker, and a Freemason to boot — who fired her rage against liquor, tobacco, and Freemasonry
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, in that order. For the rest of her life she would wage a relentless campaign against all three. As she later wrote:

I believe that, on the whole, tobacco has done more harm than intoxicating drinks. The tobacco habit is followed by thirst for drink. The face of the smoker has lost the scintillations of intellect and soul. The odor of his person is vile, his blood is poisoned. . . . The tobacco user can never be the father of a healthy child.

Despite her unfortunate marital experience — which left her with such a hatred of sex that she took to stalking terrified courting couples, cursing and lunging at them with her umbrella — she married again. This time she was convinced that “David Nation was the husband God had selected for me.” His family name may have had something to do with it. Anticipating the theories of French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan concerning the hidden meaning of words, she attributed considerable significance to the fact that as a married woman she would at last be empowered to “Carry a Nation.”

Her second marriage was almost as unsatisfactory, but for other reasons. A henpecked preacher, lawyer, and occasional journalist, Nation was a dismal failure. He farmed cotton for a while, then ran a small hotel. Eventually he established a small law practice in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where Carry, by now a WCTU member, was a
prison visitor. Her husband occasionally officiated as a preacher, but unsuccessfully, for his delivery was poor and his material stereotyped. His halting delivery was further marred by Carry Nation, sitting in the front row of the church, prompting, interrupting, and sometimes bringing his sermon to an end with a peremptory “That will be all for today, David.”

Kansas had been an officially dry state since 1880, but the local law was a joke, the state a drinker’s paradise, and the local politicians hand in glove with liquor vendors and saloon keepers. In the 1890s, the small town of Medicine Lodge had seven saloons. Periodically, the WCTU picketed them, in the manner of the former “crusaders,” and Carry Nation herself composed — and delivered — poems, half songs, and half hymns as the crusaders kneeled and prayed outside.
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But the propensity for violence in her huge frame (she was over six feet tall), together with her disturbed temperament, compelled more direct, physical action. Emulating her heroine, Joan of Arc, she claimed to have received a divine message from Jesus, the “big brother” she talked to regularly, and who now commanded her to act. Aged fifty-three, and with only one WCTU follower at her side, she burst into a Medicine Lodge drugstore illegally selling liquor, and, with a sledgehammer, smashed a keg of whiskey to smithereens, accompanying her action with a mixture of invective and appeals to the Lord. Understandably, no one dared confront her formidable, flailing rage.

It was the beginning of a whirlwind war: loading up a buggy with hammers and rocks, she drove to nearby Kiowa, another wide-open town, storming three saloons in a row in sudden hit-and-run raids. When she was through, Dobson’s Saloon, its largest, most famous establishment, was completely wrecked, littered with splintered furniture, broken bottles, and shattered kegs. She lobbed billiard balls into plate glass windows and expensive mirrors with devastating effect. The bartenders and clientele were mesmerized, powerless to react.

Back in Medicine Lodge, she bought a large hatchet — an instrument of destruction that was to become her emblem, and enrich the American vocabulary with the word
hatchetization
. Her message was now painfully direct: “Smash! Smash! For Jesus’ sake, smash!”

In a series of raids all over Kansas, she continued the good work, leaving in her wake wrecked cherrywood bars, smashed plate glass windows, and slashed, defaced paintings — “hatchetizing” kegs of rum
and whiskey and reducing heavy barroom furniture to firewood. Her raids were so sudden, her violence so frightening, that few dared face her directly.

Local authorities were in a quandary: though she was inflicting huge losses on saloon keepers, the saloons (or “joints”) were, after all, unauthorized. She was, admittedly illegally, destroying valuable property, but the property was part and parcel of an illicit activity. Consequently, she seldom spent more than one night in jail, and reveled in the publicity — posing, kneeling in her cell, conversing with Jesus, and clasping a Bible as press photographers crowded around her. The jailers became her friends, for she was also capable of considerable charm.

Kansas was soon too small for her. Soon she was showing up, always without warning, all over America, wrecking saloons in St. Louis, Cincinnati (where she refrained from hatchetization; the joints, she claimed, simply too numerous), Philadelphia, and New York. She became, overnight, a media star. Songs were written about her, and saloon keepers, dreading her hit-and-run tactics, securely padlocked their establishments until she was known to have left town.

At intervals, back in Kansas, she published “The Smasher’s Mail,” a wildly intemperate news-sheet full of invective against President Mc-Kinley and all other drinkers, smokers, and Freemasons. After McKinley’s murder, she even wrote a disjointed editorial reviling both McKinley and his anarchist assassin. A series of lucrative lecture appearances had to be canceled because her audiences turned against her for condoning the President’s murder. But she continued to raise funds, selling autographed postcards of herself by mail, as well as miniature hatchets.

Her outrageous conduct caused the WCTU, which had earlier provided her with legal and financial assistance, to keep her, increasingly, at arm’s length. In the end, when her money ran out, and the media finally lost interest in her, she no longer destroyed
real
saloons but reenacted her raids on stage, reciting her poems and spouting her rage. In one play specially written for her, she “hatchetized” a bar, breaking 29 bottles.

An unscrupulous agent, who drank but concealed the fact from her, booked her for a series of appearances in England. The visit was not a success. Her lectures were ill-attended, and when she attempted
to “hatchetize” some pubs, she was promptly fined. She was unaware that she had become a figure of fun — a female Professor Unrath out of Josef Von Sternberg’s film classic
The Blue Angel
. After a final mental breakdown, she died in a mental institution, aged 65. As newspapers later gleefully recorded, Prohibition agents carried out a raid on a huge still that bootleggers had installed on what had once been Carry Nation’s family farm.