Radical American prohibitionist Carrie Nation; she claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by vandalizing bars with her hatchet
When Carry Nation walked into the Kiowa, Kansas bar, she caught everyone off guard. The formidable woman, dressed in black, had a divine mission. But as soon as she entered the saloon, chaos ensued.
“I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer,” she recalled. “I threw over the slot machine…and got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beers flew in every direction and I was completely saturated.”
Although she was arrested shortly after, she was unbothered. The Carry Nation treatment had just been delivered to the bar, and Carry Nation had once again gained notoriety for her temperance cause.
During her years as an advocate against alcohol in the late 19th century, Nation became known as a bold and seemingly unstable reformer who would stop at nothing to save people from drunkenness.
With her knack for spectacle and public relations, Nation transformed a reformist agenda into a theatrical performance, and herself into a formidable reforming presence. Even though she died nine years prior to the implementation of Prohibition, Nation’s resounding voice resounded in the United States’ ban on what she deemed a hazardous scourge.
