Carrie Amelia Moore Nation (Artist: White Studio c. 1903, gelatin silver print, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
Carrie Amelia Moore Nation (1846-1911), a.k.a Carry A. Nation, “The Lady with the Hatchet”
Though Prohibition is synonymous with the Roaring Twenties, the political movement that spawned it took nearly 100 years to catch on in the U.S.
Throughout the 19th century, the Temperance Movement spread across the country, using religious invective and the fear of social unrest to advocate for the abolition of alcohol.
Organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Prohibition Party, and the Anti-Saloon League ran grassroots campaigns, sending their most outspoken members on tours around the country to distribute pamphlets and stir up support for the cause.
The anti-alcohol movement’s greatest soldier was Carrie Nation, a 175-pound, six-foot-tall self-described “bulldog” of a woman who spent over a decade terrorizing bars across the country in the name of God.
In 1900, after a series of what she believed to be visions and divine messages to take up the temperance message, Nation upped the stakes, from singing hymns in protest outside local bars with her fellow WCTU members in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, to using brute force, first throwing bricks and finally settling on her weapon of choice: the hatchet, which she used to smash up wooden bars and break liquor bottles.
By the end of her run 10 years later, she’d become so synonymous with the weapon that followers could buy souvenir hatchets of their own and subscribe to her monthly magazine, The Hatchet.