Carry Nation Tried to Save ‘Immoral’ Los Angeles

His ancestor made her name chopping up saloons with a hatchet. Earl Nation made his living with a scalpel, as a Pasadena area urologist.

Although Nation shares a surname with his great-great-aunt by marriage, “Crazy Carry” A. Nation, he insists his temperament is far more temperate than hers. “I don’t want anyone to think that her genes flow in the veins of my progeny,” he said. Moreover, he has been known to sip a vodka and soda at cocktail hour and a glass of wine now and then.

Both of them worked in the Los Angeles area -- Earl at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena until his retirement in 1990, Carry on skid row and in the red light district, where she used the power of her voice to convert and to cow in 1903.

Nearly two decades before Prohibition took effect in 1919, her name and likeness appeared, mockingly, on cocktail napkins, as well as on such items as sugar packets. The souvenirs condemned or honored her campaign against the evils of “demon rum,” tobacco, corsets, short skirts and masturbation.

With a Bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other, she crisscrossed the continent and part of Europe, including England and Scotland, in an unrelenting temperance crusade. An imposing woman -- 6 feet tall and 175 pounds -- she described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn’t like.”

In the first decade of the 20th century, she was jailed more than 30 times. She was beaten by the wives of saloon owners; teeth were knocked out, her eyes blackened and at least one finger was broken.

Born in 1846 as Carry Amelia Moore, she spelled her name Carrie for much of her life. But she officially changed it to “Carry A.” in 1903 because she believed God had chosen her to “Carry A Nation” to Prohibition. She registered her new name as a trademark in Kansas, where her campaign was most vigorous.

Her mother and her daughter had been committed to insane asylums. When she began writing her autobiography, “The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation,” in 1902 at age 56, she said it was to show people she was still sane.

Her great-great-nephew, Earl Nation, now 95, was born in 1910, the year before Carry died. But he remembers his grandfather’s tales of hiding in the barn to smoke a pipe whenever Carry visited the family farm in Texas.

“She would often yank a cigarette or pipe out of someone’s mouth, then slap them,” Earl Nation said.

His lifelong interest in history found an outlet with his many writings on Western history and speeches about his famous ancestor.

“She’s always been our family’s biggest celebrity, and curiosity too,” he said.

Kentucky-born Carry was the granddaughter of a Baptist minister who indulged in toddies and mint juleps. Her mother believed herself to be Queen Victoria. Her father was a teetotaler who indulged his wife’s hallucinations, buying her a carriage and hiring royally liveried footmen.

Carry was brought up by the family’s plantation slaves from Guinea, absorbing their lore and superstition. As a child, she spent hours lying on this or that grave in the family cemetery, Earl Nation says, reading the Bible aloud to the dead.

By the start of the Civil War, the Moore family had moved to Texas (where Earl Nation was born), lost its fortune and slaves, and returned to Missouri, where Carry nursed both Yankee and Confederate soldiers.

In 1866, she married physician Charlie Gloyd, a drunkard and a smoker. His vices would become the targets of her “hatchetation,” as she called it. Gloyd died a year later from alcoholism, leaving her destitute with a baby daughter.

As she prayed for a provider, it happened that the widowed David Nation, a lawyer, preacher and newspaper editor nearly 20 years her senior, needed a wife and mother for his six children. After a six-week courtship, the couple married. He gave her the surname that would go down in history.

In the 1890s, Carry Nation began what she referred to as her “divine call,” helping to lead the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas.

Beginning in 1900, Nation and her followers wreaked havoc in a number of saloons, wielding iron rods, rocks and axes. Though Kansas had been a “dry” state since 1880, the anti-alcohol law was rarely enforced. She and her fellow prohibitionists knelt in the dirt outside saloon doors, singing hymns beneath umbrellas they held to ward off the dishwater and tobacco juice hurled their way.

Her husband sued for divorce, accusing her of plotting his death, becoming a religious fanatic and deserting him. She accused him of being stingy. The divorce was granted in 1901.

She started her own publication that year, first called the Smasher’s Mail, then the Hatchet. The weekly tabloid had 15,000 subscribers.

When President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, she opined in print that he would have survived “had his blood not been poisoned with nicotine.” His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, she termed a “bloodthirsty, reckless, cigarette-smoking rummy.”

In 1903, she headed west for a two-week tour of Los Angeles. She appeared before sparse crowds at Chutes Park -- curiously, in the park’s beer garden theater -- and at Hazard’s Pavilion. She preached her gospel in Spring Street saloons, restaurants and Alameda brothels.

She was briefly jailed for violating a city ordinance: advertising with a banner strung across a wagon she paraded through the streets. At a Pasadena rally, someone dropped a $20 gold piece into the hat -- the single biggest contribution she said she had ever received.

After touring the Throop Polytechnic Institute in Pasadena (now Caltech), she ran into a group of young toughs smoking cigars. She grabbed one by the collar, pulled the cigar out of his mouth and tossed it into the street, saying, “This infernal smoking will drive me mad.”

In the red light district near the railroad stations on Alameda Street, Nation brought prostitutes to their knees, weeping in repentance.

At City Hall, she criticized Los Angeles as the most immoral city she had ever visited. She accused the police chief of insulting her by saying to her face that brothels and bars “are a necessity.” The City Council took offense too -- but at her. It passed a resolution of “full confidence” in the chief.

From Southern California she headed to San Francisco, where she was jailed for smashing up a saloon. She admitted she had gone “a bit overboard.”

In Sacramento, she barged in on the state Assembly at the Capitol, speaking for half an hour to cheers and applause.

She rebuked legislators for patronizing liquor joints. As she left, she handed out hatchet-shaped souvenir lapel pins.

Carry paid her fines for her many arrests with money from speaking fees and selling her pins.

She also funded women’s suffrage, Sunday schools and homes for abused and needy women. She went on her last march in 1911. Her last words before she was felled by a stroke in Arkansas were, “I have done what I could.” She died five months later and was buried next to her mother in Belton, Mo., a Kansas City suburb.

“My name has been bandied about a bit,” Earl Nation says. Sometimes when he accepts a drink from friends, they say, “What would Carry think?”