Thread by @marinamaral2

#OnThisDay in 1899, American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas. After that, a tornado hit eastern Kansas, which she took as divine approval of her actions.

"Men, I have come to save you from a drunkard's fate", that's what she said before she began to destroy the saloon's stock with a cache of rocks.

Nation continued her destructive ways in Kansas, her fame spreading through her growing arrest record. After she led a raid in Wichita, Kansas, her husband joked that she should use a hatchet next time for maximum damage.

Nation replied, "That is the most sensible thing you have said since I married you."

Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, Nation would march into a bar and sing and pray while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet.

Between 1900 and 1910, she was arrested some 30 times for "hatchetations,” as she came to call them. Nation paid her jail fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets. Engraved on the handle of the hatchet, the pin reads, "Death to Rum."

Nation was also concerned about tight clothing for women; she refused to wear a corset and urged women not to wear them because of their harmful effects on vital organs.

She described herself as "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like".

Suspicious that President William McKinley was a secret drinker, Nation applauded his 1901 assassination because drinkers "got what they deserved".

Near the end of her life, she moved to Eureka Springs, where she founded the home known as "Hatchet Hall". In poor health, she collapsed during a speech in a Eureka Springs park, after proclaiming, "I have done what I could." She died on 9 June 1911.
shrtm.nu/y9us

Side comment: now there's a cocktail club called Carrie Nation in Boston and I just love the irony.

Ps: please take me there.