July 24, 2017 • 28 mins
Several events in Carry Nation's early life catalyzed her temperance activism. Her marriages and her faith were particularly important in shaping the woman she became.
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Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today's subject,
(00:44):
it's a really complex woman. Uh. And most of the
time she is described as this sort of eccentric spitfire
who really really hated alcohol, and that is not inaccurate.
But her story is really a lot more complex than that.
And it is so complex in fact that uh, and
it is load with unique experiences. So we're doing a
two parter on her because as I dug into this research,
(01:05):
I kept finding more and more and going, really, oh,
we got to talk about that too. Uh. So as
you examine her life and I'm using the you in
the very casual as one examines her life, it becomes
a parent where her anti alcohol ideology comes from. But
it's also really pretty amazing just how passionate and devoted
to the cause she was. She's one of those people
(01:27):
that some people see as just a kuk and other
people see as, you know, really this amazing activist, and
the reality is, you know, sort of probably somewhere between.
She's all of the above, too many people, and and
it's really interesting life story to examine, but also sort
of a psychological examination. So, um, we're talking about Carrie A.
(01:50):
Nation and her autobiography was a big part of my
research in this, in addition to other writings about her,
and it's quite a read, so I couldn't help but
include a number of quotes for it, So just know
that you'll get a lot of perspective from her point
of view. Carrie Nation was born Carrie Amelia Moore in
Kentucky on November eighteen forty six, and then right out
(02:13):
of the gate, there's a discrepancy about the spelling of
her first name, to the point that when Holly sent
this outline. I was surprised at the spelling of it
her birth certificate. Her birth certificate listed it as Carrie
with an I E ending, but her father entered Carrie
with a hy as her name in the family Bible.
And this difference in spelling, as if you were looking
(02:34):
things up about her, you will see it spelled both ways.
And this would also be revisited later in her life. Yeah,
initially she went by the I E spelling, but she
changed it later and we'll talk about why. In eighteen
fifty four, George Moore moved his family to Missouri, where
they made a home in a farmhouse in Cass County,
and then the family moved to Texas six years later,
(02:56):
but after only a year there, they once again moved
back to their Missouri phone arm, but they were unable
to stay there. The Civil War was still underway at
that time. That was actually what had caused them to
leave in the first place. Uh and Cass County, in
other areas near the border between Kansas and Missouri were
evacuated by the Union, so George and Mary took their
children to Kansas City on November one, eighteen sixty seven,
(03:20):
at the age of one, Carrie got married to a
man named Charles Gloyd, but their marriage was really brief.
Gloyd was a doctor who had also served for the
Union in the Civil War, and he was an alcoholic,
and Carrie left him a few months after their wedding
because she loved him, but she was also pregnant and
she knew that he was not going to be able
(03:41):
to take care of a family because of how severe
his drinking problem was. So Carrie moved in with her
family and she had her daughter, Charlene, named after her father.
On September eighteen sixty eight, when the baby was only
six months old, Charles died. He is generally dis I'm
just having drunk himself to death. I never found any
(04:02):
additional details in terms of cause of death other than
just alcoholism. Terry's experience with Charles's alcoholism really was likely
the beginning of her vehemence stance against drinking, and it
really fueled the rest of her life. After Charles's death,
Carry liquidated her modest assets. They included a parcel of
land that her father had given her, as well as
(04:25):
Charles's medical equipment, and she had a house built and
hold in Missouri for herself. Charlene and Charles's mother. She
would later write that she didn't really love her mother
in law, but that she respected her and quote, I
wanted to be with the mother of the man I
loved more than my own life. Yeah. She talks about
her mother in law a lot in her autobiography, and
(04:46):
even though she says she didn't love her, she speaks
of her very very sweetly and clearly had a lot
of respect for the woman and really did care for her. Uh.
Cherry spent a year from eighteen seventy one to eighteen
seventy two earning her teaching certificate so that she could
support her child and her mother in law, and the
arrangement that they sort of had in the household was
that mother Gloyd was going to look after Charlene in
(05:07):
the house and Carrie would be the earner. After several
years of teaching and Holden's Public School, she was let
go when she and one of the school boards members
argued over the way she taught the children. And her autobiography,
she said that when she had the children read the
sentence I saw a man out loud, she had them
pronounced the word A with the short rather than the
(05:31):
long sound the way that you would in a conversation.
I saw a man, and that the board member was
insistent that she teached them to use a long a sound,
So I saw a man. So this particular sticking point
caused serious clashes between the two of them, and in
(05:51):
the end she got fired. Yeah, no reading about her
and as it went along. When I first read this,
I was like, Oh, that steaks. But I can see
her personality being one that really gave it right back
and probably was pretty dismissive of him as well. So
it seems like it was definitely a case of two
people with strong ideas, neither of which was willing to
give so less about how to pronounce uh and more
(06:15):
about being argumented in right. I think there was definitely
a do as I say, don't tell me what to
do situation going on. Uh. And after she lost her job,
Carrie was very aware of the precarious situation that her
lack of income created for her small family, and so
she made this decision that she was just going to
have to get married again. And she did not have
(06:37):
any gentleman in mind for this marriage, but she prayed
for God to deliver her an answer to the conundrum,
and when she met David Nation ten days after she
had made this decision and prayed on it, she believed
that their meeting had been divinely arranged. She married David Nation,
who worked as a journalist and a lawyer as well
as a preacher, at the end of eighteen seventy four,
(06:58):
and David, who was a ittawer, brought his own children
from his previous marriage into the family. They all lived
in Missouri for several years before moving to a cotton
plantation in Texas in eighteen seventy seven. Carrie's mother in
law from her first marriage also moved with them, and
she lived with them for fifteen years after Carry and
David married, all the way up until her death. That
(07:21):
marriage was really not a blissful one, uh In her autobiography,
Carry wrote that David lied and deceived her, although she
did not go into particulars, so we don't really know
what that was about. She also added, quote, my christian
life was an offense unto him, and I found out
if I yielded to his ideas and views that I
would be false to every true motive. And it's unclear
(07:43):
as well how her Christianity was at odds with David's
Christianity since he was a preacher, but she does mention
in her life story that she was a literalist when
it came to the Bible, which may have been too
extreme for her husband. She credited the adversarial nature of
her second marriage with making her the fighter that she was,
but it bothered her to have had two failed marriages.
(08:05):
Later in her life, she wrote, quote, the bitterest sorrows
of my life have come from not having the love
of a husband. But she also reconciled that sorrow with
her firm belief that if she had been happily married,
she would not have gone on to her important work
of activism. She said, quote, I know it was God's
will for me to marry Mr. Nation. Had I married
(08:26):
a man I could have loved, God never could have
used me. And we're gonna pause here for a word
from one of our sponsors, and when we come back,
we're going to talk about Carrie Nations daughter Charlene, and
how the two of them got along. Carrie's relationship with
(08:47):
her daughter Charlene was also not ideal, so at this
point where she and her husband, we're not getting along.
But she also had problems with her child when the
girl became ill with typhoid fever. It seemed that Carrie
blamed her daughter's physical weakness on her deceased father's drinking.
She recounted, quote, her case was violent and she was
delirious from the first. This my only child, was peculiar.
(09:10):
She was the result of a drunken father and a
distracted mother. The curse of heredity is one of the
most heartbreaking results of the Saloon. Poor little children are
brought into the world with the curse of drink and
disease entailed upon them. Carrie was also heartbroken when her
daughter made it clear that she was not interested in Christianity,
(09:30):
and Mrs Nation, according to her own account, prayed to
God to visit quote bodily affliction on her preteen daughter
as a means to quote make her love and serve God.
Soon after this prayer, Charlene developed an infection in her cheek,
which caused a hole to open up in it, which
left her teeth and her jaw exposed. And after having
(09:53):
been really very ill for nine days, Charlene began to
recover and most of the whole in her healed, although
she then developed lockjaw. Carrie eventually took her to a
series of doctors to repair the remaining damage, and eventually,
after a number of doctors performed surgeries to her jaw
that never achieved any real relief, she was sent to
(10:14):
a relative in New York, also a doctor. This is
a relative on her father's side, and that man took
skin from under the girl's chin and grafted it onto
the open cheeks, so he finally closed up that hole completely,
but her jaw remained unmoving. She was then referred to
a specialist in Philadelphia after she asked her mother to
pray for her jaw to heal, and slowly, over time
(10:36):
she was able to open her mouth. The text of
Nation's autobiography gets a little medically hazy here because she
asserts that portions of her daughter's jaw bone, which had
been removed surgically, had somehow grown back. Yes, she definitely
characterizes this whole thing as um some divine healing taking
(10:57):
place that scientifically is not really so parted uh. And
at this point Carrie had also been managing a hotel
for a while as a way to make money, and
while that enterprise had started out sort of hard, scramble.
She really built herself a very successful business and bought
her own hotel, which she also ran, and thanks to
that business success, she was able to pay for Charlenne's treatments.
(11:20):
And after Charlene recovered finally she went and stayed with
some of her father's family in Vermont for a while,
and then she returned to Texas and not long after
got married. The new couple lived with Carrie for a
year in the hotel before they finally moved into a
home of their own. During this period of her life,
Nation became even more devoutly religious. She describes attending a
(11:41):
Methodist conference in Texas where she felt profoundly moved During
a sermon, she wrote, quote, there was a halo around
the minister. I was wrapped in ecstasy. MY first impression
was that an angel was talking and that the house
was ascending to heaven. I felt my natural heart expanding
to it an enormal size. I looked to see what
(12:02):
impression was made on the people in the audience. I
saw one man nodding. I was surprised for no one
seemed at all astonished or delighted. And she spoke with
the other attendees after the service ended, because she wanted
to see if anybody else had the same experience she did,
and she found that she was the only one that
was so deeply affected by it. She decided in that
(12:25):
moment that quote, henceforth, all my time, means, and efforts
should be given to God. And she wrote pretty openly
in her life story about her religious devotion, drawing criticism
and that she was quote considered crazy. That's her freezing.
But she believed that the sensation that she felt that
Tracy just described where her heart was expanding, was in
(12:45):
fact because quote God was putting the whole world in
my heart, and she later referred to this experience at
the sermon as a quote transaction between my soul and God,
as well as her baptism of the Holy Ghost. Soon
after this, she was dismissed from teaching in the local
Methodist Sunday school because she was not actually Methodist, but
(13:06):
she soon moved on to teach in an Episcopal Sunday
school that too, ended poorly when she refused to teach
the Catechism because she felt it contained elements that contradicted
her literal reading of the Bible. As there were no
other churches in her small town, she began she began
teaching religion the way she felt proper and correct, using
(13:26):
the dining room of her hotel, and she had a
number of students, so she clearly wasn't the only person
who felt like she had had really like the strongest
sense of the way to teach children about the Bible.
But um she ended up having to leave her hotel
work and thus that that little sort of religious school
(13:46):
that she was running in the dining room when their
family relocated to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and her husband, David Nation,
worked as a preacher there and then also in Holton, Kansas.
But this was actually an issue of dismay for Carrie Nation,
and she felt that her husband was not truly religious
and that he absolutely should not be leading a congregation.
(14:07):
And she also argued with Medicine Lodgest church leaders for
very similar reasons. It kind of seemed like no one
in any church was quite religious enough for carry These
conflicts were really an ongoing source of stress for her,
and she often felt that her expressions of faith were
constrained by the structure of the church. She would sometimes
have outbursts where she would announce during services that the
(14:29):
congregation should sing different hymns than the ones selected by
the minister, believing that the Holy Spirit had conveyed to
her more correct information, and she would sometimes have passionate
outbursts during the sermons themselves. While she believed she was
worshiping in the truest way that she knew, most of
the other parishioners and church leaders found all of this
(14:49):
to be too disruptive. Yeah. I she was very much
at odds with pretty much everyone on the issue of religion,
which I'm sure was very frustrating for everyone involved. Well,
and I They're like, there are churches that do operate
in this way where if you feel called to say
(15:11):
something during the sermon, you say it. So it is
unfortunate that that that was not a church that existed
where she lived. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I feel like somewhere
out there was exactly the right place for her, but
she never found it in any of the places that
she lived. But despite all of these elements of discord
in her life, she really found great purpose in Medicine Lodge.
(15:33):
She became very deeply involved in charity work. She dedicated
her time to women's and children's causes. She also helped
to start a local chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union,
which had been founded in Cleveland, Ohio, the same year
that Carrie and David were married. Her work as the
Women Christian Temperance Unions jail evangelist with imprisoned men also
(15:55):
led her to conclude that the cause of most criminal
behavior was alcohol, so she used the w c t
U to organize temperance protests. She and other women would
gather outside of bars and saloons to pray and to
sing hymns. Sometimes she would walk right into the front
room of such places the bar was normally a back room,
and they would do their hymn singing there. In eight
(16:19):
Kansas had become the first state to make sale and
manufacture of alcohol illegal, and so at this point alcohol
sales were illegal in Kansas, with the exception of transactions
that were for medical purposes. That was of course used
as a loophole a lot. But of course making alcohol
illegal did not make people stop drinking it, and there
were a number of men only drinking clubs throughout the state,
(16:40):
and they really were not policed. So we're about to
get into the real beginnings of Carrie nations more aggressive
activism probably the things people associate most with her if
they have heard of her before. We're gonna pause really
quickly for another sponsor break before we do that. So,
(17:01):
even though Carrie Nation was vehemently against alcohol consumption and
the bars where it happened, she didn't wish for the
men who ran such places to get into legal trouble.
She truly blamed their behavior on alcohol and wanted them
to be saved, and that is why she opted to
try to save them with religion. It wasn't long before
her efforts achieved their desired effect. She would basically go
(17:23):
and preach to various people in these sorts of saloons
and watering holes. But eventually, uh the watering holes of
Medicine Lodge, Missouri were no more. They kind of started
to shut down, and she took a lot of credit
for that in her autobiography, claiming that because she administered
to these men, she shut the whole thing down. Nation
wrote to the county attorney and the state attorney many
(17:43):
times to report the sale of alcohol in Kansas. Several
of the imprisoned men she spoke with in her work
as a jail evangelists had mentioned getting illegal alcohol in Kiowa, Kansas,
so she implored in her letters that they considered the
broken families caused by alcohol. And after a long period
(18:04):
of writing all of these letters and seeing that nothing
was being done, Carrie Nation came to the conclusion in
June of nine hundred that if the authorities would not
stop the illegal saloons of Kansas, it was up to
her to enforce the law. This belief was bolstered by
what she claimed was a divine voice that spoke to
her one morning. The night before she had turned in
(18:24):
her frustration to prayer, saying quote, oh Lord, you see
the treason in Kansas. They're going to break the mother's hearts.
They are going to send the boys to drunkard's graves
and a drunkard's hell. I have exhausted all my means.
Oh Lord, you have plenty of ways. You have used
the base things and the weak things used me to
(18:46):
save Kansas. I have but one life to give you.
If I had a thousand, I would give them all.
Please show me something to do. And so the next morning,
that divine voice that we referenced a moment ago, according
to her, out told her to travel to Kiowa and
also said very clearly and very firmly, I'll stand by you.
(19:07):
She acted on this calling by traveling immediately to Kyowa,
and while driving in her buggy, she had a vision
of human like creatures with demon faces in her path,
but she called out to God for help and they fled.
Later on in her life, she interpreted the vision this way, quote,
I now know what those creatures were. They were real
(19:27):
devils that knew more of what I was going to
do than I did. The devil is a prophet. He
knew Jesus when he was here, and he knew that
I came to fulfill prophecy, that this was a death
blow to his kingdom. Until the next day, in Kayowa,
she entered a men's club carrying what appeared to be
several small, paper wrapped parcels, and she addressed the owner
(19:50):
of this establishment, quote, Mr Dobson, I told you last
spring to close this place. You did not do it.
Now I have come down with another remonstrance. Get out
of the way. I do not want to strike you,
but I am going to break this place up. As
it turned out, the parcels were bricks, which she began
hurling at the Saloons bar area. Nation was not a
(20:12):
petite woman. I don't know why I had sort of
thought in my head that she was. She was almost
because I think she gets characterized as a little old lady,
and so you think of her as a tiny, petite grandmother.
And she was formidable. She was almost six ft tall
and reportedly weigh a hundred and seventy five pounds, and
she was also very strong. She described a feeling of
(20:35):
invincibility as she hurled these bricks and said, quote, my
strength was that of a giant. She was. This is
not a situation where she just caused a little bit
of damage. This was a powerful woman literally throwing an
armload of bricks and she destroyed the place. And she
proceeded to then repeat this scene in two more Saloons
(20:55):
that day, and she drew a crowd as she made
her way through town, and finally, after hitting several places,
she addressed those who were gathered in the street, quote,
I have destroyed three of your places of business, and
if I have broken a statute of Kansas, put me
in jail. If I am not a lawbreaker, your mayor
and councilman are you must arrest one of us, for
(21:16):
if I am not a criminal, they are. As she
drove her buggy out of Kyowa, she dropped the reins
and stood up, calling out to the crowd peace on
earth could will to men. Her smashings had drawn enough
attention to the illegal dives as she called them, that
the men who ran them were brought to trial in
the months that followed, and all of them were found guilty.
(21:40):
But while Carrie clearly saw the entire chain of events
as a win for Temperance, not everyone thought she was
doing great things. The Kiowa paper ran an article that stated, quote,
the consensus of the public opinion in this city is
the old lady is of unsound mind and not accountable
for at least some of her actions, and that she
should be kept at home by her people. Nation made
(22:02):
a statement at a convention she hosted not long after
these events, making it clear that the Women's Christian Temperance
Union was not responsible for what she had done, and
that she had acted alone without their knowledge. Because while
many of the women in the Temperance movement supported Carrie Nation,
they as an organization understandably did not want to endorse
(22:24):
her actions. Yes, she uh describes in in her writings
meeting with another one of the leaders of the Women's
UH Christian Temperance Union, and and it basically being like,
you got to say we weren't involved in this, like
we we support you, but you got to say we
were no part of this business. And she very was
(22:45):
completely understood and was happy to oblige in that regard.
UH Nation was later sued for slander by county attorney
Sam Griffin. She had stated in the midst of all
of her her activists run through Kyowa that he took
bribes to let Saloons continue to operate, and he wanted
five thousand dollars in damages. Keep in mind, this is
(23:05):
five thousand dollars in nineteen hundreds, so that is a
lot of money. Her husband, David Nation, was her lawyer
in the case. There was a lot of rumbling that
she was going to get a different lawyer, but those
never panned out, and so her husband had to represent her.
And Carrie was actually found guilty, but the amount of
damages awarded was only one dollar, which Carrie later said
was all that Sam Griffin's character was worth. And this
(23:28):
is where we will leave Carrie Nation for today, and
we will pick back up next time when she really
gets into the smashing in earnest as if this previous
smashing was not enough, there will be a lot more smashing.
She is smash tastic and she calls them smashings, which
sort of becomes hilarious to me, and that's her name
for it. I'm trying to figure out if we have
(23:49):
enough thematically related episodes in our archive to make us
smashing things, uh, because I know now we have Carrie Nation,
and um, we have the riot Um where the apprentices
pulled down all of the houses the right. I gotta
think if we've got some others for a smashing things tag.
(24:12):
I'm sure we do destruction. Uh. So I have listener
mail and it's a gift and it is awesome. So
this is from our listener. She signs her name Chris,
but also Heather Christine. She says, Dear Holly and Tracy.
I feel like this letter should be addressed dear friends,
because I've been listening to your podcast for years now
(24:32):
and I feel like you're good friends that I see
on a regular basis. I'm so grateful for all the time, energy,
and creativity you both put into the show. I love
learning history. Because of the both of you, there literally
could be no greater compliment than that. It's so sweet,
so Chris says, I like to think of myself with
grand titles. I am a fiber artist and a toymaker,
and I love to loom and knit and crochet and teach.
(24:54):
Listening to your podcast brings out all of my skills,
So I wanted to send you something in return for
all of your effort. Open the little containers and then
open the little cakes to find the gift inside. Your
show inspired me with thoughts of cake and butter and
even fashion. I've decided to make a whole line of
cakes and put them on my Threadbare Bakery at Sea shop.
As I sit here writing this letter, it's hard to
find the words that I wanted to say to let
(25:15):
you know how much you are appreciated. What you do
is so important. I even get my husband and my
son to listen to your shows occasionally, and they both
always enjoy learning from you. Thank you for providing a
safe place for my family to learn from humanities, triumphs
and failures alike. So sweet, but oh my goodness, these things,
she said. Okay, Tracy, can you see this. I'm holding
this up to our camera since we are on a
little skype thing. It looks like a tiny cake. It's
(25:38):
a teeny tiny cake on a little teeny tiny cake
serving tray. But wait, it's a beautiful little crocheted cake.
There are two, so there's one for each of us.
And then you can take the cake out and then
you open up the cake. I know, it's amazing. Like
I took it out of the box and I was
delighted that it was a tiny cake. But then she
wrote that we had to open it and then inside
is a little bitty bom so sweet. That's beautiful, it
(26:03):
really is. This is like so up my alley. Tiny
things are like a drug to me. I love them
so uh and tiny little frilly things that look like dessert.
Oh my goodness, what a delight. So um that is Chris.
We will also put a link to her little Etsy
shops so you can see similar things that she makes.
In our show notes. Um, thank you, thank you, thank you,
(26:24):
thank you. This is the cutest thing. And today's my
first day back in the office after doing some traveling,
and this is like the best gift to come. While
we're on the subject of gifts. I do want to
report that my Kentucky Derby mint Julip glass did make
it back to Boston in one piece. They made the
(26:47):
you made it to Atlanta in one piece, and then
my one made it back with me in one piece.
I know. I feel like we've defied all the odds
of glass travel. UH. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
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(27:13):
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feet alongside all of our new episodes. We hope you enjoy.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today's subject,
(00:44):
it's a really complex woman. Uh. And most of the
time she is described as this sort of eccentric spitfire
who really really hated alcohol, and that is not inaccurate.
But her story is really a lot more complex than that.
And it is so complex in fact that uh, and
it is load with unique experiences. So we're doing a
two parter on her because as I dug into this research,
(01:05):
I kept finding more and more and going, really, oh,
we got to talk about that too. Uh. So as
you examine her life and I'm using the you in
the very casual as one examines her life, it becomes
a parent where her anti alcohol ideology comes from. But
it's also really pretty amazing just how passionate and devoted
to the cause she was. She's one of those people
(01:27):
that some people see as just a kuk and other
people see as, you know, really this amazing activist, and
the reality is, you know, sort of probably somewhere between.
She's all of the above, too many people, and and
it's really interesting life story to examine, but also sort
of a psychological examination. So, um, we're talking about Carrie A.
(01:50):
Nation and her autobiography was a big part of my
research in this, in addition to other writings about her,
and it's quite a read, so I couldn't help but
include a number of quotes for it, So just know
that you'll get a lot of perspective from her point
of view. Carrie Nation was born Carrie Amelia Moore in
Kentucky on November eighteen forty six, and then right out
(02:13):
of the gate, there's a discrepancy about the spelling of
her first name, to the point that when Holly sent
this outline. I was surprised at the spelling of it
her birth certificate. Her birth certificate listed it as Carrie
with an I E ending, but her father entered Carrie
with a hy as her name in the family Bible.
And this difference in spelling, as if you were looking
(02:34):
things up about her, you will see it spelled both ways.
And this would also be revisited later in her life. Yeah,
initially she went by the I E spelling, but she
changed it later and we'll talk about why. In eighteen
fifty four, George Moore moved his family to Missouri, where
they made a home in a farmhouse in Cass County,
and then the family moved to Texas six years later,
(02:56):
but after only a year there, they once again moved
back to their Missouri phone arm, but they were unable
to stay there. The Civil War was still underway at
that time. That was actually what had caused them to
leave in the first place. Uh and Cass County, in
other areas near the border between Kansas and Missouri were
evacuated by the Union, so George and Mary took their
children to Kansas City on November one, eighteen sixty seven,
(03:20):
at the age of one, Carrie got married to a
man named Charles Gloyd, but their marriage was really brief.
Gloyd was a doctor who had also served for the
Union in the Civil War, and he was an alcoholic,
and Carrie left him a few months after their wedding
because she loved him, but she was also pregnant and
she knew that he was not going to be able
(03:41):
to take care of a family because of how severe
his drinking problem was. So Carrie moved in with her
family and she had her daughter, Charlene, named after her father.
On September eighteen sixty eight, when the baby was only
six months old, Charles died. He is generally dis I'm
just having drunk himself to death. I never found any
(04:02):
additional details in terms of cause of death other than
just alcoholism. Terry's experience with Charles's alcoholism really was likely
the beginning of her vehemence stance against drinking, and it
really fueled the rest of her life. After Charles's death,
Carry liquidated her modest assets. They included a parcel of
land that her father had given her, as well as
(04:25):
Charles's medical equipment, and she had a house built and
hold in Missouri for herself. Charlene and Charles's mother. She
would later write that she didn't really love her mother
in law, but that she respected her and quote, I
wanted to be with the mother of the man I
loved more than my own life. Yeah. She talks about
her mother in law a lot in her autobiography, and
(04:46):
even though she says she didn't love her, she speaks
of her very very sweetly and clearly had a lot
of respect for the woman and really did care for her. Uh.
Cherry spent a year from eighteen seventy one to eighteen
seventy two earning her teaching certificate so that she could
support her child and her mother in law, and the
arrangement that they sort of had in the household was
that mother Gloyd was going to look after Charlene in
(05:07):
the house and Carrie would be the earner. After several
years of teaching and Holden's Public School, she was let
go when she and one of the school boards members
argued over the way she taught the children. And her autobiography,
she said that when she had the children read the
sentence I saw a man out loud, she had them
pronounced the word A with the short rather than the
(05:31):
long sound the way that you would in a conversation.
I saw a man, and that the board member was
insistent that she teached them to use a long a sound,
So I saw a man. So this particular sticking point
caused serious clashes between the two of them, and in
(05:51):
the end she got fired. Yeah, no reading about her
and as it went along. When I first read this,
I was like, Oh, that steaks. But I can see
her personality being one that really gave it right back
and probably was pretty dismissive of him as well. So
it seems like it was definitely a case of two
people with strong ideas, neither of which was willing to
give so less about how to pronounce uh and more
(06:15):
about being argumented in right. I think there was definitely
a do as I say, don't tell me what to
do situation going on. Uh. And after she lost her job,
Carrie was very aware of the precarious situation that her
lack of income created for her small family, and so
she made this decision that she was just going to
have to get married again. And she did not have
(06:37):
any gentleman in mind for this marriage, but she prayed
for God to deliver her an answer to the conundrum,
and when she met David Nation ten days after she
had made this decision and prayed on it, she believed
that their meeting had been divinely arranged. She married David Nation,
who worked as a journalist and a lawyer as well
as a preacher, at the end of eighteen seventy four,
(06:58):
and David, who was a ittawer, brought his own children
from his previous marriage into the family. They all lived
in Missouri for several years before moving to a cotton
plantation in Texas in eighteen seventy seven. Carrie's mother in
law from her first marriage also moved with them, and
she lived with them for fifteen years after Carry and
David married, all the way up until her death. That
(07:21):
marriage was really not a blissful one, uh In her autobiography,
Carry wrote that David lied and deceived her, although she
did not go into particulars, so we don't really know
what that was about. She also added, quote, my christian
life was an offense unto him, and I found out
if I yielded to his ideas and views that I
would be false to every true motive. And it's unclear
(07:43):
as well how her Christianity was at odds with David's
Christianity since he was a preacher, but she does mention
in her life story that she was a literalist when
it came to the Bible, which may have been too
extreme for her husband. She credited the adversarial nature of
her second marriage with making her the fighter that she was,
but it bothered her to have had two failed marriages.
(08:05):
Later in her life, she wrote, quote, the bitterest sorrows
of my life have come from not having the love
of a husband. But she also reconciled that sorrow with
her firm belief that if she had been happily married,
she would not have gone on to her important work
of activism. She said, quote, I know it was God's
will for me to marry Mr. Nation. Had I married
(08:26):
a man I could have loved, God never could have
used me. And we're gonna pause here for a word
from one of our sponsors, and when we come back,
we're going to talk about Carrie Nations daughter Charlene, and
how the two of them got along. Carrie's relationship with
(08:47):
her daughter Charlene was also not ideal, so at this
point where she and her husband, we're not getting along.
But she also had problems with her child when the
girl became ill with typhoid fever. It seemed that Carrie
blamed her daughter's physical weakness on her deceased father's drinking.
She recounted, quote, her case was violent and she was
delirious from the first. This my only child, was peculiar.
(09:10):
She was the result of a drunken father and a
distracted mother. The curse of heredity is one of the
most heartbreaking results of the Saloon. Poor little children are
brought into the world with the curse of drink and
disease entailed upon them. Carrie was also heartbroken when her
daughter made it clear that she was not interested in Christianity,
(09:30):
and Mrs Nation, according to her own account, prayed to
God to visit quote bodily affliction on her preteen daughter
as a means to quote make her love and serve God.
Soon after this prayer, Charlene developed an infection in her cheek,
which caused a hole to open up in it, which
left her teeth and her jaw exposed. And after having
(09:53):
been really very ill for nine days, Charlene began to
recover and most of the whole in her healed, although
she then developed lockjaw. Carrie eventually took her to a
series of doctors to repair the remaining damage, and eventually,
after a number of doctors performed surgeries to her jaw
that never achieved any real relief, she was sent to
(10:14):
a relative in New York, also a doctor. This is
a relative on her father's side, and that man took
skin from under the girl's chin and grafted it onto
the open cheeks, so he finally closed up that hole completely,
but her jaw remained unmoving. She was then referred to
a specialist in Philadelphia after she asked her mother to
pray for her jaw to heal, and slowly, over time
(10:36):
she was able to open her mouth. The text of
Nation's autobiography gets a little medically hazy here because she
asserts that portions of her daughter's jaw bone, which had
been removed surgically, had somehow grown back. Yes, she definitely
characterizes this whole thing as um some divine healing taking
(10:57):
place that scientifically is not really so parted uh. And
at this point Carrie had also been managing a hotel
for a while as a way to make money, and
while that enterprise had started out sort of hard, scramble.
She really built herself a very successful business and bought
her own hotel, which she also ran, and thanks to
that business success, she was able to pay for Charlenne's treatments.
(11:20):
And after Charlene recovered finally she went and stayed with
some of her father's family in Vermont for a while,
and then she returned to Texas and not long after
got married. The new couple lived with Carrie for a
year in the hotel before they finally moved into a
home of their own. During this period of her life,
Nation became even more devoutly religious. She describes attending a
(11:41):
Methodist conference in Texas where she felt profoundly moved During
a sermon, she wrote, quote, there was a halo around
the minister. I was wrapped in ecstasy. MY first impression
was that an angel was talking and that the house
was ascending to heaven. I felt my natural heart expanding
to it an enormal size. I looked to see what
(12:02):
impression was made on the people in the audience. I
saw one man nodding. I was surprised for no one
seemed at all astonished or delighted. And she spoke with
the other attendees after the service ended, because she wanted
to see if anybody else had the same experience she did,
and she found that she was the only one that
was so deeply affected by it. She decided in that
(12:25):
moment that quote, henceforth, all my time, means, and efforts
should be given to God. And she wrote pretty openly
in her life story about her religious devotion, drawing criticism
and that she was quote considered crazy. That's her freezing.
But she believed that the sensation that she felt that
Tracy just described where her heart was expanding, was in
(12:45):
fact because quote God was putting the whole world in
my heart, and she later referred to this experience at
the sermon as a quote transaction between my soul and God,
as well as her baptism of the Holy Ghost. Soon
after this, she was dismissed from teaching in the local
Methodist Sunday school because she was not actually Methodist, but
(13:06):
she soon moved on to teach in an Episcopal Sunday
school that too, ended poorly when she refused to teach
the Catechism because she felt it contained elements that contradicted
her literal reading of the Bible. As there were no
other churches in her small town, she began she began
teaching religion the way she felt proper and correct, using
(13:26):
the dining room of her hotel, and she had a
number of students, so she clearly wasn't the only person
who felt like she had had really like the strongest
sense of the way to teach children about the Bible.
But um she ended up having to leave her hotel
work and thus that that little sort of religious school
(13:46):
that she was running in the dining room when their
family relocated to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and her husband, David Nation,
worked as a preacher there and then also in Holton, Kansas.
But this was actually an issue of dismay for Carrie Nation,
and she felt that her husband was not truly religious
and that he absolutely should not be leading a congregation.
(14:07):
And she also argued with Medicine Lodgest church leaders for
very similar reasons. It kind of seemed like no one
in any church was quite religious enough for carry These
conflicts were really an ongoing source of stress for her,
and she often felt that her expressions of faith were
constrained by the structure of the church. She would sometimes
have outbursts where she would announce during services that the
(14:29):
congregation should sing different hymns than the ones selected by
the minister, believing that the Holy Spirit had conveyed to
her more correct information, and she would sometimes have passionate
outbursts during the sermons themselves. While she believed she was
worshiping in the truest way that she knew, most of
the other parishioners and church leaders found all of this
(14:49):
to be too disruptive. Yeah. I she was very much
at odds with pretty much everyone on the issue of religion,
which I'm sure was very frustrating for everyone involved. Well,
and I They're like, there are churches that do operate
in this way where if you feel called to say
(15:11):
something during the sermon, you say it. So it is
unfortunate that that that was not a church that existed
where she lived. Yeah. Uh, yeah, I feel like somewhere
out there was exactly the right place for her, but
she never found it in any of the places that
she lived. But despite all of these elements of discord
in her life, she really found great purpose in Medicine Lodge.
(15:33):
She became very deeply involved in charity work. She dedicated
her time to women's and children's causes. She also helped
to start a local chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union,
which had been founded in Cleveland, Ohio, the same year
that Carrie and David were married. Her work as the
Women Christian Temperance Unions jail evangelist with imprisoned men also
(15:55):
led her to conclude that the cause of most criminal
behavior was alcohol, so she used the w c t
U to organize temperance protests. She and other women would
gather outside of bars and saloons to pray and to
sing hymns. Sometimes she would walk right into the front
room of such places the bar was normally a back room,
and they would do their hymn singing there. In eight
(16:19):
Kansas had become the first state to make sale and
manufacture of alcohol illegal, and so at this point alcohol
sales were illegal in Kansas, with the exception of transactions
that were for medical purposes. That was of course used
as a loophole a lot. But of course making alcohol
illegal did not make people stop drinking it, and there
were a number of men only drinking clubs throughout the state,
(16:40):
and they really were not policed. So we're about to
get into the real beginnings of Carrie nations more aggressive
activism probably the things people associate most with her if
they have heard of her before. We're gonna pause really
quickly for another sponsor break before we do that. So,
(17:01):
even though Carrie Nation was vehemently against alcohol consumption and
the bars where it happened, she didn't wish for the
men who ran such places to get into legal trouble.
She truly blamed their behavior on alcohol and wanted them
to be saved, and that is why she opted to
try to save them with religion. It wasn't long before
her efforts achieved their desired effect. She would basically go
(17:23):
and preach to various people in these sorts of saloons
and watering holes. But eventually, uh the watering holes of
Medicine Lodge, Missouri were no more. They kind of started
to shut down, and she took a lot of credit
for that in her autobiography, claiming that because she administered
to these men, she shut the whole thing down. Nation
wrote to the county attorney and the state attorney many
(17:43):
times to report the sale of alcohol in Kansas. Several
of the imprisoned men she spoke with in her work
as a jail evangelists had mentioned getting illegal alcohol in Kiowa, Kansas,
so she implored in her letters that they considered the
broken families caused by alcohol. And after a long period
(18:04):
of writing all of these letters and seeing that nothing
was being done, Carrie Nation came to the conclusion in
June of nine hundred that if the authorities would not
stop the illegal saloons of Kansas, it was up to
her to enforce the law. This belief was bolstered by
what she claimed was a divine voice that spoke to
her one morning. The night before she had turned in
(18:24):
her frustration to prayer, saying quote, oh Lord, you see
the treason in Kansas. They're going to break the mother's hearts.
They are going to send the boys to drunkard's graves
and a drunkard's hell. I have exhausted all my means.
Oh Lord, you have plenty of ways. You have used
the base things and the weak things used me to
(18:46):
save Kansas. I have but one life to give you.
If I had a thousand, I would give them all.
Please show me something to do. And so the next morning,
that divine voice that we referenced a moment ago, according
to her, out told her to travel to Kiowa and
also said very clearly and very firmly, I'll stand by you.
(19:07):
She acted on this calling by traveling immediately to Kyowa,
and while driving in her buggy, she had a vision
of human like creatures with demon faces in her path,
but she called out to God for help and they fled.
Later on in her life, she interpreted the vision this way, quote,
I now know what those creatures were. They were real
(19:27):
devils that knew more of what I was going to
do than I did. The devil is a prophet. He
knew Jesus when he was here, and he knew that
I came to fulfill prophecy, that this was a death
blow to his kingdom. Until the next day, in Kayowa,
she entered a men's club carrying what appeared to be
several small, paper wrapped parcels, and she addressed the owner
(19:50):
of this establishment, quote, Mr Dobson, I told you last
spring to close this place. You did not do it.
Now I have come down with another remonstrance. Get out
of the way. I do not want to strike you,
but I am going to break this place up. As
it turned out, the parcels were bricks, which she began
hurling at the Saloons bar area. Nation was not a
(20:12):
petite woman. I don't know why I had sort of
thought in my head that she was. She was almost
because I think she gets characterized as a little old lady,
and so you think of her as a tiny, petite grandmother.
And she was formidable. She was almost six ft tall
and reportedly weigh a hundred and seventy five pounds, and
she was also very strong. She described a feeling of
(20:35):
invincibility as she hurled these bricks and said, quote, my
strength was that of a giant. She was. This is
not a situation where she just caused a little bit
of damage. This was a powerful woman literally throwing an
armload of bricks and she destroyed the place. And she
proceeded to then repeat this scene in two more Saloons
(20:55):
that day, and she drew a crowd as she made
her way through town, and finally, after hitting several places,
she addressed those who were gathered in the street, quote,
I have destroyed three of your places of business, and
if I have broken a statute of Kansas, put me
in jail. If I am not a lawbreaker, your mayor
and councilman are you must arrest one of us, for
(21:16):
if I am not a criminal, they are. As she
drove her buggy out of Kyowa, she dropped the reins
and stood up, calling out to the crowd peace on
earth could will to men. Her smashings had drawn enough
attention to the illegal dives as she called them, that
the men who ran them were brought to trial in
the months that followed, and all of them were found guilty.
(21:40):
But while Carrie clearly saw the entire chain of events
as a win for Temperance, not everyone thought she was
doing great things. The Kiowa paper ran an article that stated, quote,
the consensus of the public opinion in this city is
the old lady is of unsound mind and not accountable
for at least some of her actions, and that she
should be kept at home by her people. Nation made
(22:02):
a statement at a convention she hosted not long after
these events, making it clear that the Women's Christian Temperance
Union was not responsible for what she had done, and
that she had acted alone without their knowledge. Because while
many of the women in the Temperance movement supported Carrie Nation,
they as an organization understandably did not want to endorse
(22:24):
her actions. Yes, she uh describes in in her writings
meeting with another one of the leaders of the Women's
UH Christian Temperance Union, and and it basically being like,
you got to say we weren't involved in this, like
we we support you, but you got to say we
were no part of this business. And she very was
(22:45):
completely understood and was happy to oblige in that regard.
UH Nation was later sued for slander by county attorney
Sam Griffin. She had stated in the midst of all
of her her activists run through Kyowa that he took
bribes to let Saloons continue to operate, and he wanted
five thousand dollars in damages. Keep in mind, this is
(23:05):
five thousand dollars in nineteen hundreds, so that is a
lot of money. Her husband, David Nation, was her lawyer
in the case. There was a lot of rumbling that
she was going to get a different lawyer, but those
never panned out, and so her husband had to represent her.
And Carrie was actually found guilty, but the amount of
damages awarded was only one dollar, which Carrie later said
was all that Sam Griffin's character was worth. And this
(23:28):
is where we will leave Carrie Nation for today, and
we will pick back up next time when she really
gets into the smashing in earnest as if this previous
smashing was not enough, there will be a lot more smashing.
She is smash tastic and she calls them smashings, which
sort of becomes hilarious to me, and that's her name
for it. I'm trying to figure out if we have
(23:49):
enough thematically related episodes in our archive to make us
smashing things, uh, because I know now we have Carrie Nation,
and um, we have the riot Um where the apprentices
pulled down all of the houses the right. I gotta
think if we've got some others for a smashing things tag.
(24:12):
I'm sure we do destruction. Uh. So I have listener
mail and it's a gift and it is awesome. So
this is from our listener. She signs her name Chris,
but also Heather Christine. She says, Dear Holly and Tracy.
I feel like this letter should be addressed dear friends,
because I've been listening to your podcast for years now
(24:32):
and I feel like you're good friends that I see
on a regular basis. I'm so grateful for all the time, energy,
and creativity you both put into the show. I love
learning history. Because of the both of you, there literally
could be no greater compliment than that. It's so sweet,
so Chris says, I like to think of myself with
grand titles. I am a fiber artist and a toymaker,
and I love to loom and knit and crochet and teach.
(24:54):
Listening to your podcast brings out all of my skills,
So I wanted to send you something in return for
all of your effort. Open the little containers and then
open the little cakes to find the gift inside. Your
show inspired me with thoughts of cake and butter and
even fashion. I've decided to make a whole line of
cakes and put them on my Threadbare Bakery at Sea shop.
As I sit here writing this letter, it's hard to
find the words that I wanted to say to let
(25:15):
you know how much you are appreciated. What you do
is so important. I even get my husband and my
son to listen to your shows occasionally, and they both
always enjoy learning from you. Thank you for providing a
safe place for my family to learn from humanities, triumphs
and failures alike. So sweet, but oh my goodness, these things,
she said. Okay, Tracy, can you see this. I'm holding
this up to our camera since we are on a
little skype thing. It looks like a tiny cake. It's
(25:38):
a teeny tiny cake on a little teeny tiny cake
serving tray. But wait, it's a beautiful little crocheted cake.
There are two, so there's one for each of us.
And then you can take the cake out and then
you open up the cake. I know, it's amazing. Like
I took it out of the box and I was
delighted that it was a tiny cake. But then she
wrote that we had to open it and then inside
is a little bitty bom so sweet. That's beautiful, it
(26:03):
really is. This is like so up my alley. Tiny
things are like a drug to me. I love them
so uh and tiny little frilly things that look like dessert.
Oh my goodness, what a delight. So um that is Chris.
We will also put a link to her little Etsy
shops so you can see similar things that she makes.
In our show notes. Um, thank you, thank you, thank you,
(26:24):
thank you. This is the cutest thing. And today's my
first day back in the office after doing some traveling,
and this is like the best gift to come. While
we're on the subject of gifts. I do want to
report that my Kentucky Derby mint Julip glass did make
it back to Boston in one piece. They made the
(26:47):
you made it to Atlanta in one piece, and then
my one made it back with me in one piece.
I know. I feel like we've defied all the odds
of glass travel. UH. If you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
house to works dot com. We can also be found
across the spectrum of social media as missed in History,
So that's on Twitter, Facebook, uh, Instagram, Tumbler, Pinterest, basically
(27:13):
everywhere that you might want to engage with us. You
can as missed in History. If you'd like to learn
a little bit more about the world around you, you
can go to our parents site, which is how stuff
Works dot com. Type in almost anything in the search
bar and you'll get an array of topics and articles
and quizzes and all kinds of good stuff that you
can entertain yourself with while you learn. And you can
visit me and Tracy at missed in history dot com,
(27:36):
where there is an archive of every episode of the
show that has ever existed, as well as show notes
on the episodes that Tracy and I have worked on together.
We recently consolidated those so that the show notes are
on the same page as the actual show, so it's
easier than ever. So do come and visit us and
enjoy all of that stuff at missed in history dot
com and how stub works dot com. For more on
(28:02):
this and thousands of other topics, visit hawstaff works dot com.
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