Alcoholism & Temperance ● Alcoholism: an addiction to the consumption of alcoholic liquor. ● Temperance: a movement or effort to stop the consumption (drinking) of alcohol. The temperance movement was the movement to stop alcoholism in America. It was led primarily by women who feared that men who drank alcohol destroyed American society. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1873, drew a lot of support by linking the fight against liquor with the desire to protect home and family. Carrie nation or ‘Carrie Hatchet’ was one of the leaders of the WCTU. Primary source #1—The Use and Need of Carrie Nation by Carrie Nation (1904) [Carrie nation speaking] “Mrs. Elliott, a good Christian woman, came to my home crying and between sobs told me, that for six weeks her husband had been drinking at Durst’s bar, until he was crazy. She had been washing to feed her three children and for some days had nothing in the house but cornbread and molasses. She said that her husband had come in, wild with drink and run his family out and kicked over the table…. We walked down to Henry Durst’s place (a bar), a distance of half a mile… I began to throw [bricks] at the mirror of the bar and the bottles below the mirror…. From that I went to another saloon (bar), until I had destroyed three, breaking some of the windows in the front of the building …” This excerpt is from Carry A. Nation, The Use and Need of Carry A. Nation (Topeka: F.M. Steves & Sons, 1904), p. 49.
Transcript
Alcoholism & Temperance ● Alcoholism: an addiction to the consumption of alcoholic liquor.● Temperance: a movement or effort to stop the consumption (drinking) of alcohol.
The temperance movement was the movement to stop alcoholism in America. It was led primarily by women who feared that men who drank alcohol destroyed American society. The Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1873, drew a lot of support by linking the fight against liquor with the desire to protect home and family. Carrie nation or ‘Carrie Hatchet’ was one of the leaders of the
WCTU.
Primary source #1—The Use and Need of Carrie Nation by Carrie Nation (1904)
[Carrie nation speaking] “Mrs. Elliott, a good Christian woman, came to my home crying and between sobs told me, that for six weeks her husband had been drinking at Durst’s bar, until he was crazy. She had been washing to feed her three children and for some days had nothing in the house but cornbread and molasses. She said that her husband had come in, wild with drink and run his family out and kicked over the table…. We walked down to Henry Durst’s place (a bar), a distance of half a mile… I began to throw [bricks] at the mirror of the bar and the bottles below the mirror…. From that I went to another saloon (bar), until I had destroyed three, breaking some of the windows in the front of the building …”
This excerpt is from Carry A. Nation, The Use and Need of Carry A. Nation (Topeka: F.M. Steves & Sons, 1904), p. 49.
Carrie Nation with her hatchet in one hand and her bible in the other hand.
Primary source #2—Political Cartoons from the Anti-Saloon League:
“The Drunkard's Progress” (1846)
From the first glass to the grave: Step 1. A glass with a friend./Step 2. A glass to keep the cold out./Step 3. A glass too much./Step 4. Drunk and riotous./ Step 5. The summit attained. Jolly companions. A confirmed drunkard./ Step 6.
Poverty and disease./ Step 7. Forsaken by Friends./ Step 8. Desperation and crime./ Step 9. Death by suicide.
“I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet” (1895)
An 1895 political cartoon by Amelia B. Moore depicting American temperance activist Carry Nation glaring at a terrified bartender as she holds a hatchet in a saloon.
“Rescued” by The Anti-Saloon league 1896
Temperance Movement women photo
Photograph of women from the temperance movement, from c. 1890s movie Kansas Saloon Smashers.
Reform As early as 1873, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) called for the abolition (end) of the sale of alcohol. They were soon joined in the fight by the even more powerful Anti-Saloon League (ASL), but later expanded into a national organization that endorsed political candidates and lobbied (asked) for legislation against saloons (bars).
Through speeches, advertisements and public demonstrations at saloons and bars, prohibition advocates attempted to convince people that that eliminating alcohol from society would eliminate poverty and social vices, such as immoral behavior and physical violence.
By 1916, after the congressional elections that year, “dry” members (those who favored a national prohibition of alcohol) won a majority over “wet” (those who were against the ban on alcohol) in the U.S. Congress. On January 29, 1919, Congress ratified (approved) the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacturing, transportation and sale of alcohol within the United States. Later in 1919, the National Prohibition Act–popularly known as the Volstead Act was enacted in order to provide the government with the means of enforcing Prohibition.
New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach (right) watching agents pour liquor into the sewer following a raid, c. 1920.
New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Carry Nation, in full Carry A. Nation, née Carrie Amelia Moore, (born Nov. 25, 1846, Garrard county, Ky., U.S.—died June 9, 1911, Leavenworth, Kan.), American temperance advocate famous for using a hatchet to demolish barrooms.
Carry Moore as a child experienced poverty, her mother’s mental instability, and frequent bouts of ill health. Although she held a teaching certificate from a state normal school, her education was intermittent. In 1867 she married a young physician, Charles Gloyd, whom she left after a few months because of his alcoholism. In 1877 she married David Nation, a lawyer, journalist, and minister, who divorced her in 1901 on the grounds of desertion.
Carry Nation entered the temperance movement in 1890, when a U.S. Supreme Court decision in favour of the importation and sale of liquor in “original packages” from other states weakened the prohibition laws ofKansas, where she was living. In her view, the illegality of the saloons flourishing in that state meant that anyone could destroy them withimpunity. A formidable woman, nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 175 pounds, she dressed in stark black-and-white clothing. Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a saloon and proceed to sing, pray, hurl biblical-sounding vituperations, and smash the bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. At one point, her fervour led her to invade the governor’s chambers at Topeka. Jailed many times, she paid her fines from lecture tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets, at times earning as much as $300 per week. She herself survived numerous physical assaults.
Nation published a few short-lived newsletters—called variously The Smasher’s Mail, The Hatchet, and the Home Defender—and her autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation, in 1904 (rev. ed., 2006). Her “hatchetation” period was brief but brought her national notoriety. She was for a time much in demand as a temperance lecturer; she also railed against fraternal orders, tobacco, foreign foods, corsets, skirts of improper length, and mildly pornographic art of the sort found in some barrooms of the time. She was an advocate of woman suffrage. Later she appeared in vaudeville, at Coney Island, N.Y., and briefly in 1903 in Hatchetation, an adaptation of T.S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room: And What I Saw There (1854). Despite her campaign, the enactment in 1919 of national prohibition was largely the result of the efforts of more conventional reformers, who had been reluctant to support her.
