Carry Amelia Moore Nation example essay topic

As America moved to the cities traditions were changed or altered. These alterations included womens interests and their challenge to Americas traditional values. One such woman was Carry Amelia Moore Nation. The daughter of George and Mary (Campbell) Moore, was born on November 25, 1846, in Garrard County, Kentucky. A formidable woman, nearly 6 feet tall and weighing 175 pounds, she dressed in stark black and white clothing.

She was enrolled in Warrensburg Normal Institute and, after receiving a teaching certificate, taught school in Holden, Missouri, for four years. In 1877 she married David Nation, a lawyer, newspaperman, and sometime minister in the Christian Church. The Nations moved to Texas in 1879 and settled on a cotton plantation on the San Bernard River near Houston. After they failed to make the plantation a success, Carry supported the family by managing a hotel in Columbia.

The eventual sale of the plantation enabled them to buy a hotel in Richmond, which Carry ran with sporadic assistance from her husband, who practiced law and corresponded for the Houston Post. As a child she had undergone a dramatic conversion at a revival meeting, and during her stay in Texas she had numerous mystic experiences. She came to believe that she had been elected by God and that she spoke through divine inspiration. After the Methodist and Episcopal churches barred her from teaching in their Sunday schools, she started her own weekly class in the hotel. David Nation also became involved in the Jaybird-Woodpecker War after he denounced the Jaybirds in an article for the Houston Post. To escape assaults and intimidation, the Nations moved in 1889 to Medicine Lodge, Kansas, where David became pastor of the Christian Church.

In Kansas, as in Texas, Mrs. Nation was known for her char it to the poor. Having been a drunkard's wife herself, she was especially moved by drink-related poverty. But her fanatical views and eccentric behavior made her unpopular, and the abrasiveness of her exhortations to righteousness provoked the Christian Church to expel her from membership. In 1892 she joined the Baptist minister's wife in Medicine Lodge in organizing a local chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and was appointed jail evangelist.

In the name of home protection she began a crusade against alcohol and tobacco that lasted the rest of her life. Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a saloon and proceed to sing, pray, hurl biblical-sounding vituperation's, and smash the bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. In her book Nation says, Sometimes a rock; sometimes a hatchet; God told me to use these to smash that which has smashed and will smash hearts and souls. The sound of this loving deed will stir conscience and hearts... This was her reason for taking her hatchet to a saloon and smashing everything in sight until someone would listen to her. At one point, her fervor 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 challenged various people such as saloonkeepers, alcoholics, casual drinkers, and others that didnt care to hear constant singing and praying about temperance. Most of the challenge was from men though, because a majority of the temperance crusaders were women. Men looked at saloons as places for intimate conversations, a chance for good fellowship, advantages for employment, and friends in times of strikes. It was hard to try to influence people about temperance when most saloonkeepers wouldnt even let some crusaders into their saloons.

On January 1911, she collapsed during a speech in Arkansas and was taken to a hospital in Leavenworth, Kansas, where she spent the remaining months of her life in mental confusion. She died there on June 2, 1911, and was buried in Belton, Missouri. Carry Nation lived a life which influenced many people and her efforts helped the later enactment of national prohibition. Nation often described herself as a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what he doesn't like was a colorful member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and one of the greatest temperance crusaders.

Bibliography

Encarta Free Concise Encyclopedia. Nation, Carry Amelia Moore. [Online] Avaliable web February 10, 2000.
Kansas State Historical Society. Carry Nation's Hammer. The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation. 1905.