Carrie Nation Had an Ax to Grind

Popular satirical cartoons like this spread Carrie Nation's fame and proved P.T. Barnum's point--"there is no such thing as bad publicity."

It was on this day in 1900 that Carrie Nation, a/k/a Carry A. Nation, all 6 feet, 180 pounds of her, stormed into a Kansas saloon shouting for the Lord and wielding a hatchet to break up the bar and smash the bottles.  Terrified customers fell over themselves trying to flee the carnage and the obviously deranged giantess.

The militant teetotaler had vandalized saloons before, hurling rocks through windows.  But her husband made an offhand comment that what she really needed was a hatchet.  She thought it was a brilliant idea.  And it was.  Within days news of her rampage spread across the country and she was suddenly famous.

Encouraged, she went on to smash more taverns.

She recognized the symbolic importance of the hatchet as a trade mark and later sold souvenir reproductions and post cards of herself with the “Tool of God.”  She even toured on the American vaudeville stage and in English music halls with the trusty blade.  She had to give that up, however when outraged Brits pelted her onstage with eggs.

She was born Carrie Amelia Moore in 1841 to a slave holding family with a small plantation in Gerrard County, Kentucky.  Thus, her background was very different from most of the women who later became Temperance leaders, who tended to come from comfortable Northern families with connections to abolitionism and other social reform movements, especially women rights.

Her family was beset by health woes, including several cases of mental illness.  Her mother suffered from periodic delusions that she was Queen Victoria.  Carrie herself, despite her robust frame, was often sickly.  With the continuing illness the family fell into poverty and want, although they retained at least some of their slaves.

By the time of the Civil War, the family was in Cass County, Missouri and were Southern partisans in a state racked by its own bloody civil strife.  Union troops forced them to vacate their farm.  Evacuated first to Kansas City, young Carrie volunteered as a nurse following a Union raid on Independence.

Union veteran Dr. Charles Gloyd may have looked handsome and dashing, but he was a drunken sot and Carrie left him--or was deserted by him--before the birth of their daughter.  Months later he was dead.

In 1865 despite her Rebel sympathies, Carrie met and fell in love with a Yankee Army doctor, Charles Gloyd.  The couple wed in 1867.  But Gloyd was a heavy drinker.  The marriage was not a happy one.  Before the birth of their daughter Charlien the next year, they had separated.  Gloyd died a few months later.  This tragic episode was the experience that eventually thrust her into the Temperance movement.

A widow with a small child, Carrie attended Normal School to get a teaching certificate that would make her able to hold one of the few jobs open to women.  After graduation she taught for four years in Holden, Missouri.  But she was fired for reasons not entirely clear, but which may have been related to erratic behavior.

A bride for the second time at age 28--Mrs. Carrie Nation.

In 1874 Carrie met and married David A. Nation, a preacher, lawyer, and occasional newspaper editor.  Nation was 19 years older than his 28-year-old wife and had the care of several children from a previous marriage.

The couple bought a cotton plantation in Texas, but was soon brought to ruin by their total ignorance of agriculture and the expense of field hands in the post-war south.  They kicked around Texas, David practicing law, Carrie managing hotels, a job at which she turned out to be successful.  In 1889 after David’s involvement in a Reconstruction era battle for control of local government known as the Jaybird/Woodpecker War, the couple fled to Medicine Lodge, Kansas.  David became preacher of the local Christian Church and Carrie managed the local hotel.

She also took up serious temperance work for the first time, founding the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).  She launched a personal campaign of persuasion and shaming against local saloon keepers, bar tenders, and public drunks.  She greeted them on the street and at the doors of their establishments with sarcastic comments like, “Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls!”  She also became a leader in a campaign to turn the state dry.

Could this 1877 pro-temperance cartoon staring a side-saddle Joan of Arc wielding an ax to "attack the enemy's works." have inspired Carrie?

A word about the Temperance movement is in order.  America was undeniably a hard-drinking country.  It always had been.  Partly this was because most water was not potable.  Beer and cider were the table drinks of even the most respectable families and served even to children since colonial times.  The wealthy always enjoyed the fine wines that they could have imported from Europe. 

Cheap rum flooded the eastern seaboard as a side effect of the infamous triangle trade—slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, sugar to New England distillers, rum back to Africa.  What didn’t get shipped, got drunk on and near the waterfronts where frequently “every other house was a tavern or rum shop.”

Whiskey, because it was an inexpensive way to get grain crops to distant markets in the pre-canal and railroad era, was a major national product, relatively cheap and soon the beverage of choice over wide swaths of the country, especially in the South and on the old frontier.

But drinking to excess was always a problem.  The famous stocks of colonial New England were most frequently filled by public drunks.  The problem of families being abandoned by drunken men was common.  The Temperance movement began to take shape at the turn of the 19th Century as a reform movement spearheaded by Protestant clergy.  At first it was about temperance—moderation.  It preached voluntary moderation in drinking.  It did not necessarily demand that all liquor consumption stop.

The movement took off with the waves of German and Irish immigrants swamping the slums of the big cities.  These people were rowdy, public drinkers—and Catholic.  In fact, Protestant ministers became evermore zealous and absolutist in direct proportion to the swelling of Catholics in their midst.

By the 1840’s a well-established web of social reform movements spread out from New England and New York across much of the country.  The same folks who advocated the abolition of slavery, prison reform, public education, and women’s rights were also frequently involved in the temperance movement.  After the Civil War, many former Abolitionists shifted their attention to alcohol.  In their minds the saloon was the den of vice that impoverished families.

By the time that the WCTU was formed in 1872, the movement was being spearheaded by reformist Evangelical women, who were evolving a program of governmental Prohibition coupled with the uplifting moral reform of Protestantism.  As even greater waves of dirty, drunken Papists and Jews washed up upon American shores, they became ever more determined.

Although her southern background and her husband’s Democratic politics were different than most leaders on the lecture platform, Carrie was ready to bring zealous, crusading Protestantism to even greater heights.

Then on June 5, 1899 she got her marching orders directly from God.  She later described the experience:

The next morning I was awakened by a voice which seemed to me speaking in my heart, these words, “GO TO KIOWA,” and my hands were lifted and thrown down and the words, “I’LL STAND BY YOU.” The words, “Go to Kiowa,” were spoken in a murmuring, musical tone, low and soft, but “I’ll stand by you,” was very clear, positive and emphatic. I was impressed with a great inspiration, the interpretation was very plain. It was this: “Take something in your hands, and throw at these places in Kiowa and smash them.”

Two days later she was heaving rocks through the window of Dobson’s Saloon in the town of Kiowa.  She went on to damage two more that first day.  After the Almighty showed his approval by having a tornado touch down nearby, she took the show on the road across Kansas.  She was frequently arrested, but undeterred.

She sometimes used the name Carry A. Nation--a pun on her name--and sold souvenir photos like this to support her and her work.

It was after a particularly wild raid in Wichita, her husband made the offhand remark that for maximum damage she should use a hatchet.  “That is the most sensible thing you have said since I married you.”  She went out and bought the hatchet.  The rest is history.

It is perhaps understandable that a year later he filed for divorce. 

Carrie continued chopping up saloons and taking to platforms to talk about it.  She was a strong advocate for total prohibition.  She became a celebrity and perhaps the most famous woman in America.

Enterprise, Kansas City Marshal William Benham looks like he was interpreted mucking out the stables in 1901 as he took Carrie nation, still struggling, to jail.  Brought to town by the mayor's own mother and backed by local ladies she had smashed a saloon and even charged Benham in rage with her hatchet when he tried to stop her.  The town was divided over her antics and the next day she was attacked by several women as she tried to go after a second saloon and had to leave town for her personal safety. 

She collapsed in 1911 giving a temperance address at a park near the home she built in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.  Transported by to Kansas for treatment, she died in a Leavenworth hospital and was laid in an unmarked grave in nearby Benton.  Some years later the WCTU paid for a monument.

What Americans Drank Before Craft Beers, Clever Little Chardonnays, and Flavored Vodka

Here, have one on me....

Well, it’s Flag Day, official birthday of the Stars and Stripes.  As good enough reason as any to celebrate.  Pull up a chair.  Let me pour you one—Bourbon.  Neat of course, straight out of the bottle and into the glass.  Two or three fingers, what the hell.  A little water back.

You see by some accounts it’s also the birthday of Bourbon whiskey.  Legend has it that on June 14, 1789 the Rev. Elijah Craig, a Baptist preacher in what was then Fayette County, Virginia and is now Scott County in north central Kentucky, poured the raw corn whiskey from his still into charred oak barrels to age, which would ultimately become a brown colored elixir. 

Craig was born in Orange County, Virginia somewhere between 1738 and 1743.  He was a moderately successful tobacco planter in 1761 when he was born again and became a Baptist along with several of his brothers.  Within a few years he was preaching, first in his own barn, then on the circuit before becoming the pastor of Blue Run Church, halfway between Barboursville and Liberty Mills.  Later he was appointed apostle the wide area north of the James River.

Rev. Elijah Craig, maybe inventor of Bourbon

But the Baptists, threatening to sweep the back country and frontier of Virginia, soon came under attack by the established Anglican Church.  Several times Craig and his brothers, who had followed him as preachers, were arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes to support the [Anglican] church and preaching without a license.

With the hold of the Anglicans weakened during the American Revolution Thomas Jefferson famously got the revolutionary Virginia government to adopt the principle of freedom of religion in the Declaration of Rights in 1776. Craig spoke to and converted ever larger crowds, often mixed Whites and Blacks, slave and free. 

But when the war ended elements of the Tidewater aristocracy pressed for the church, now re-established as the Episcopal Church to regain its privileges and tax support.  Craig was a leader of the western Baptists who fought for their religious freedom allied by James Madison and supported from afar by Jefferson.  He was a delegate to the Ratification Convention of 1788 and with Patrick Henry opposed the adoption of the Constitution without a Bill of Rights.  After securing religious liberty in the Virginia and Federal constitutions Craig was ever after a vigorous Jefferson Republican.

Meanwhile Craig’s brothers led the largest migration to the new lands beyond the mountains, the so called Traveling Church of more than 600 people who crossed into Kentucky County through the Cumberland Gap.  In 1782 Craig joined his brothers and bought a large tract of land near the settlement of Lebanon.  Within a few years not only had built up a church and a fine farm, but had established lumber and grist mills, a blacksmith shop and nail cutter, as well as general stores and taverns.  The distillery he established in 1789 was just the next logical step in the expansion of his holdings.  With a still Craig could convert the corn from his farms and mills to a product that could be hauled over the mountains and sold for cash back East. In the process Craig became a wealthy man.

But he shared his wealth.  He founded the first classical academy west of the mountains in Lebanon in 1787 and later donated the land and seed money for Georgetown College, the first Baptist college founded west of the Allegheny Mountains.  He also supported Baptist missionary efforts and the establishment of new churches. 

In fact, he gave so much of his fortune away that when he died in 1808 the Kentucky Gazette eulogized:

He possessed a mind extremely active and, as his whole property was expended in attempts to carry his plans to execution, he consequently died poor. If virtue consists in being useful to our fellow citizens, perhaps there were few more virtuous men than Mr. Craig.

But those killjoy historians point out that Craig was hardly the first man to make whiskey from corn rather than rye whiskey of the east.  And they are not even sure that he used charred oak casks, at least at first.

Indeed corn whiskey was being made all over the trans-Allegheny west, the source of hard money for pioneer farmers.  The stuff made famous by the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania from 1791-94 probably tasted more like lighter fluid than the aged whiskey we are used to.  It went directly into jugs from the still and was corked raw.   It was despicable stuff to drink, but thirsty Americans, evidently gluttons for punishment, did so any way.

This still at Mt. Vernon is probably very like the one Elijah Craig used west of the mountains.

Whiskey historians speculate that Scotch-Irish distillers, familiar with aging in a barrel, introduced the practice to the frontier before the turn of the 19th Century.  Craig may, or may not have been one of those to adopt the practice early.  At least he was wealthy enough to sit on his product for two to six years while the whiskey aged and mellowed in the barrels.  Smaller operators had to rush their product to market immediately.

Whatever the case, by the 1820’s many Kentucky distillers were producing aged whisky around Fayette, Scott, and Bourbon counties.  The stuff came to be called Bourbon.  Jacob Spears was the marketing genius who first slapped the Bourbon label on his bottles.

In the mid 1830’s the development of the sour mash process using material from an older batch of mash to start fermentation in the batch currently being made was introduced.  The process was said to “smooth and mellow” the flavor.  Dr. James C. Crow, a Scottish immigrant then employed as a master distiller for Glenn’s Creek Distillery in Woodford County Kentucky and/or his assistant Dr. Jason S. Amburgey is credited with invention of the process.  He later went work for two other producers using the technique.  Knowledgeable drinkers began calling his stuff Old Crow.  Eventually it was marketed under that name.  After disputes about authenticity, the brand finally came into the hands of the Jim Beam Company which sells it as a lower priced whiskey.

Virtually all Bourbons are now produced by the sour mash method.

Oh sure, they still drank rum by the gallon in the seaports, Eastern farmers and tradesmen drank Rye, and the rich imported wines and brandies.  Germans and other despised immigrants, gargled beer by the growler, But by the time of the Civil War real Americans with hair on their chests drank Bourbon neat, straight, or mixed with branch water.

Prohibition not only did damage to the Bourbon industry, it also changed American drinking habits, encouraging the spread of beer drinking and the use of gin and vodka in cocktails.  Scotch smuggled into the country by the  daring-do and Canadian blended rye which flooded the country supplanted Bourbon with many whiskey drinkers.

But well into the last decades of the 20th Century any saloon worth its name carried a long self of call-name Bourbons of distinguished legacy.  Now most of the joints I go into have replaced them with row after row of fancy Vodkas and designer Tequilas.  Most are hard pressed to keep one Kentucky Bourbon in stock plus the highly advertised Tennessee sipping whiskey Jack Daniels, once prized as a 90 proof but now watered to 80 proof and sold to be mixed with Coke. I’ve found saloons with no Bourbon at all.

And charming young bartenders are mystified by the simple order “Bourbon, neat, water back,” often serving it up on ice and/or mixed with water.  This is a sure sign that American civilization is doomed.

But there is dim hope.  Drinking fads change rapidly among highly prized urban hipsters eager to show off sophisticated tastes.  First, long neglected Scotch—the drink of Mad Men era dudes in shiny suites and skinny ties and of the Rat Pack began making a comeback with the snob appeal, expensive single malt brands.   Then the Japanese, who worship American culture and have a sharp eye for marketing opportunities, began distilling and exporting Bourbon style whiskey to the U.S. that critics in pricy men’s life style magazines praised.  Now craft distilleries are popping up in imitation of craft brewery pubs.  

Wondertucky, the local craft distillery product.  Nope, haven't tasted it yet.

Here in McHenry County local entrepreneurs in Woodstock are distilling and aging Wondertucky Whiskey—a tongue-in-cheek salute to nearby Wonder Lake, a village largely made up of converted summer cabins with poor and working class residents, many of them from Kentucky and Tennessee.  Believe me when I say that referring to the place as Wondertucky was never considered a compliment. 

Most tellingly Jim Beam, at best a mid-level quality Bourbon which is only 4 years old and which used to be most famous for their collector decanters is challenging the dominance of Jack Daniels among whiskey drinkers with a new series of TV ads featuring pretty, waif like Mila Kunis wandering among the aging barrels and branding “hers.”  A counter-intuitive choice for an industry that traditionally promoted whiskey as a man’s man’s drink.  But hey, she is easy on the eyes and may also bring women into the market.  In Chicago the ads are running heavily during Cubs games—big audience attractions where beer commercials once dominated unchallenged.  I suspect the ads will bring less sophisticated young drinkers into the fold and local salons may soon be thinning out all of those pricey vodkas to make room for some more Bourbon.

Mila Kunis, the unexpected but sexy face of Jim Beam.  She will probably sell whiskey.

Meanwhile finish that snort.  Let me pour you another.  We have some commiserating to do….