Carry A Nation | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

foreign this is a this is something so this is like everything under the sun I'm
looking at that's very close yes I mean I've seen lawn mowers stock car whatever the it's a Soapbox
Derby car there are trunks there's some lawn for uh equipment this is Blair tar 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
uh and we do have the mail equivalent as well in the collection so 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 a hundred thousand 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 of the 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 corn cob 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 the end of her life in an asylum this is a time when it wouldn't take a lot to
put somebody in an asylum particularly a woman if they were thought not to be living up to 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 in the 19th century so Kerry never believed that she her
mother was really insane when Kerry 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 Moore's 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 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 Ramen 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 well you know I guess the idea here is
that women are 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
they could be used to feed children and their 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 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 Cura sorto 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
no bear it's only like no beer here near beer three miles so it's uh everybody knows where there's liquor
being served it's not a great Secret Kerry 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
Kerry 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
she is it's a 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 I mean though I'm gonna I'm just
gonna start throwing things uh 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 is 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 battle she'd also start hatcheting
the bar she could destroy the bars too if 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 hard 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 wrongs out of all the chairs three thousand dollars in
damage one man said he thought Judgment Day had arrived she called it a hesitation
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 why you could hear her talk it usually ended up with something like
and with these efforts we can carry a nation newspapers are 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 [Music] oh after Kiowa in Wichita bar owners knew
to prepare for her arrival when she arrived in Topeka four bars installed trapped 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 this alone 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 little ways I think that's what you preferred to do 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 and when you actually talk to her you most people found her very easy to talk
to if she was provoked she would get angry [Music] 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 yeah 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 riah rationale that we might have today behind her but she sort of understands
things that we know now to be very true in Topeka thuttershites 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 of her smashings and somehow the saloon owner would manage to make a profit out
of it somehow but 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 what is this tiny little is that a pin
that's a tiny little Hatchet it's a tiny little Hatchet yeah these 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 they think were 25 cents uh 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 uh even food when
she was traveling about the country and she was always replenishing her stock because she kept selling these pins
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 as part of the false teeth got caught and actually started she actually started choking
this one here that I always like to this was a sign that actually showed up in a lot of saloons all nations are
welcomed except Carrie this was not meant to be a compliment but she apparently felt 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 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 uh but yeah she is probably the best face 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 carry Nation to 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 bring me Mom on drink from having a victim your loving home Defender if you go into a saloon and after now
why he makes that fire a drink that he played by Ruffin foot greens and poop and anything that is rotten poisonous
and it will rock the man clean and will rock his foot we're rocking Stone we rock pictures and make it rockiness of
everything [Music] 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 this is
criminal.com you can get one before they're gone criminal is produced by Lauren Spore
Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers our intern is Matilda urfelino special thanks to Maya Goldberg safer
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at
thisiscriminal.com where 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 adzerk
for providing their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
radio [Music]

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.

Music in the episode “Down and Around” by Podington Bear “Cat's Eye” by Blue Dot Sessions “Peter Gray” by Podington Bear “Gears Spinning” by Podington Bear “Balti” by Blue Dot Sessions “Pretty Simple” by Podington Bear “Bliss” by Podington Bear

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://link.chtbl.com/n33u0HsA

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 73 originally published 8/18/2017 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-73-carry-a-nation-8-18-2017

Brief Summary

Carrie Nation's hatchet-wielding protests against bars made her a national figure in the prohibition movement.

Key points

Carrie Nation's Hatchet Crusade. Carrie Nation becomes a symbol of the prohibition movement, smashing bars and advocating for temperance.
The Fall of David Nation. Carrie Nation's marriage ends as she gains fame for her activism, leading to her husband's divorce filing.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I've come to save you from a drunkard's grave!

Carrie Nation's declaration as she enters a bar to smash it up.

8:55WatchDec 14, 2022

Tension

60/ 100Some tension

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