Carry A. Nation: Retelling the Life

Carry Nation was fifty-four when she "smashed" her first saloon. But we have known very little about what her life was like before she started her infamous hatchet crusade - until now. In this first-ever scholarly biography of Nation, Fran Grace unfolds a story that often contrasts with the common public image of Nation as "Crazy Carry," a bellicose, blue-nosed, man-hating killjoy. Using newly available archival materials and placing Nation in her various historical and cultural contexts, Grace "retells" the crusader's tumultuous life. The book narrates Nation's upbringing in antebellum Kentucky, the family's devastation after the Civil War, and her passionate romance and disappointing marriage with alcoholic physician, Charles Gloyd.By her early twenties, Nation was already a single mother and destitute widow. This experience threw her into a spiritual crisis that was only partly resolved when she married a much older David Nation. Their correspondence indicates it was a marriage of convenience. He needed a homemaker and she needed a provider. They were both disappointed. Marital tensions increased over their farm failure in Texas, her exploration into Holiness religion, and her necessary work outside of the home as a hotel manager, osteopath and preacher. When they moved to Kansas, an eruptive and radical place during the 1890s, Nation's personal disappointments were translated into an agenda for social reform by popular movements such as Populism, women's suffrage, and temperance.Frustrated by the rampant violations against the state's prohibition law and empowered by her sense of divine mission, she responded with rocks, crowbars, and hatchets. The apex of her hatchet movement was the 1901 Topeka crusade, after which David Nation divorced her on the grounds of desertion. Carry Nation spent her last two decades performing on multiple stages, serving sentences in various jails, battling other family members over the future of her unstable adult daughter, editing two newspapers, and founding several homes for battered, elderly and/or teenage women. This complexly woven and delightfully written biography restores a robustness to Nation's character that is lacking in the popular image of her.