Carry Nation Smashed the Bar at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, KS - Dec. 27, 1900

Carry Nation destroyed the Carey Hotel's bar as a Temperance protest on this day in 1900. There's more detail in the July 24 and 26, 2017 episodes of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to this Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, I'm Holly
Fry and I am sitting in for Tracy V. Wilson
this week. It's December and on this day in nine hundred,

(00:25):
Carrie Nation smashed the bar at the Carry Hotel in Wichita, Kansas,
and I will tell you why she did that. Nation
was born Carrie Amelia Moore in Kentucky on November. On
November one, eighteen sixty seven, at the age of twenty one,
Carrie married a man named Charles Gloyd, but she left

(00:46):
Gloyd just a few months into the marriage when she
found out she was pregnant. She believed that Charles could
not support a family because he was an alcoholic, and
Charles died shortly after the baby was born. Carrie next
married a journalist, lawyer, and preacher named David Nation, who
she believed had been sent to her by God after
she prayed for a solution to her problem of being

(01:08):
a single mother with no income. The marriage was not
very happy, though, according to Carrie's autobiography, the biggest conflict
was that she was much more devout than her preacher husband.
Carrie's faith continued to grow throughout her life. At a
Methodist conference in Texas in four she was deeply moved

(01:28):
during one of the sermons, later writing of the experience, quote,
my first impression was that an angel was talking and
that the house was ascending to heaven. I felt my
natural heart expanding to an enormous size, and this moment
led her to the decision that she should devote her
entire life to God. Carrie became involved in charity work

(01:50):
in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where she and David had moved,
working with women's and children's causes, and starting a local
chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. It was through
her volunteer work offering religious counseling to imprisoned men that
Carry determined that most criminal behavior was linked to alcohol,
which only intensified her fervor for temperance. She began to

(02:13):
organize protests, which consisted of groups of women like herself,
gathering outside or just inside of bars and saloons to
sing hymns and talk about God. Nation did not want
the men who ran those bars and saloons to get
into legal trouble. She literally blamed drink and not them
for their sins, and so she tried to counter the

(02:35):
lure of alcohol with the promise of religious salvation. She
also wrote to the county attorney and state attorney many
times to report the sale of alcohol in Kansas, and
sometimes got her information on illicit alcohol sales from the
men that she ministered to. In jail. In June of
nineteen hundred, Carry heard what she believed to be a

(02:56):
divine voice speaking to her, promising to stand by her
in her fight against alcohol, and directing her to go
to Kiowa, Kansas, a place that she knew illegal alcohol
sales were taking place. Carrie Nation traveled immediately to Kiowa,
walked into a men's club carrying a number of small parcels,
and told the owner, quote, Mr. Dobson, I told you

(03:19):
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. And
then she hurled her parcels, which were in fact paper
wrapped bricks around the bar, making good on her promise
to destroy the place. This was the first in a

(03:41):
long series of bar smashings performed by Carrie, but one
of the most famous was the assault on the Carrie
Hotel on December, a bar that she selected as a
target because of an indecent painting that was hanging above
the bar. She went at the place with a cane
that she had re enforced by strapping an iron rod
to it, and she did thousands of dollars of damage

(04:04):
in the process, and that resulted in her arrest. Her
time in jail did not deter carry nation. She continued
in her mission to destroy establishments that served spirits or
alcohol of any kind, and she became quite famous in
the process, particularly for her use of a hatchet as
a means of destruction, something that she adopted during one

(04:26):
of her many smashings, which she started to call hatchetations.
She went on to start to temperance newspapers, and she
made public appearances both in the US and abroad, always
with her trusty hatchet and Bible, always speaking about the
importance of temperance and selling souvenir photos of herself holding
that hatchet and Bible along the way. Carrie died in

(04:49):
nineteen eleven after collapsing during a speaking engagement. She did
not live long enough to see the Eighteenth Amendment passed
in nineteen nineteen, which outlawed alcohol sales nationally. She also
did not live to see its repeal in n three,
which ended prohibition. If you would like to learn more
about Carrie Nation and her life, which is quite fascinating, uh,

(05:11):
there is a two part episode by Stuff you Missed
in History Class in the archives. You can find that
in July. I want to thank Chandler Mays and Casey
Pegram for their work on the audio for this show,
and I want to thank you for listening. You'd like
to hear more, you can subscribe to This Day in
History Class on I Heart Radio's app, at Apple Podcasts

(05:31):
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Tomorrow, you should come
back because we're going to talk about an important moment
in early film history.