CARRIE NATION WAS QUITE A WOMAN

One has to be an old-timer to recall the name Carry
Nation.

So who was she? Well, in a sense, one might say Carry was a "hatchet
lady," but she came honest to her trade . which was running whiskey
dealers out of business, although she probably did not start the
Prohibition campaign. She just kept it going longer, and in the end
did more for sobriety than overnight in jail ever did.

But it didn't commence with Carry so much as with the Women's
Christian Temperance Unions (later changed to Women's Christian
Temperance League) composed entirely of ladies and known as the WCTU.

Starting in Oregon shortly after the Civil War, it swiftly spread
across the country.

Born in 1866, and raised in Kansas, Kentucky and Missouri by a
strongly religious father and a half-mad mother, Carry initially
followed these same lines, marrying a drunkard, but leaving him after
months and going home to bear his child. Otherwise, her call to
abolish demon rum commenced in Kansas shortly after that birth.

She then married a much older lawyer and minister, he abstaining from
liquor, but also from sex. So with little to do, and drink being out
of the question, she decided that the good Lord had a much higher
mission planned for her, primarily a grass-roots campaign against
alcohol consumption.

Thus her "career" started in Medicine Lodge, Kan., a town and a state
legally dry since 1880. However, like most places in the United
States, drinkers in the back room of drug stores and barrooms
hoodwinked the law by "swilling" whiskey for "medicinal purposes."

For awhile,, Carry simply rebuked them by rising in church, and
identifying not only the miscreants who purchased and sold the liquor
. but those who drank "the medicine." Anyway, by this time her
fed-up husband had sued for divorce.

So from Medicine Lodge --where she had closed down liquor stores --
Carry acquired a hatchet, quickly discovering it to be an
"incomparably" effective bar-raiding tool. That hatchet sent shards
and splinters flying in all directions.

Thus this aging grandmother, wearing a black bonnet, with a raised
hatchet in one hand and an open Bible in the other, laid waste to
barrooms all over the West.

She destroyed the Senate Bar in Topeka, Kan., a favorite rendezvous of
legislators. Oddly, along the way she somehow became everyone's
favorite speaker, lecturing in her long black dress and bonnet, an
open Bible in one hand, a raised hatchet in the other.

When transportation financing grew tight, she occasionally went to
Vaudeville, appearing in a play titled "Ten Nights in A Bar Room." As
part of the act, she smashed everything on stage.

Thus her last hatchet job took place in January 1910 at Butte, Mont.
when she walked menacingly into a saloon, strolled up to a nude
painting on the wall and raised her hatchet. At that moment another
woman, the proprietress, threw her out. This would be Carry's last
hatchet job, and it had failed.

By now, discouraged, aging, tiring and dying, she hung up her hatchet,
and 18 months later at the age of 64 passed away in Butte. Her
tombstone reads, "She hath done what she could."

Eight years later -- I suspect in her honor -- Congress passed the
18th Amendment.