Christ's Bulldog

CARRY NATION -- Herbert Asbury -- Knopf ($3).

She called herself "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like." Author Asbury calls her "the most industrious meddler and busy-body that even the Middle West, hotbed of the bizarre and the fanatical, has ever produced." However that may be, Carry Nation's early, morbidly religious life led naturally to a public career which made her name a U. S. byword.

In November 1846, she was born on a Kentucky farm. From her mother the girl inherited delusions of grandeur and, possibly, a syphilitic infirmity. Until the age of nine she fibbed regularly, stole money, perfumes and laces from relatives. Then "consumption of the bowels" drove her to bed, where she began memorizing the Scriptures. Recovering, she became no sinful "great lover" despite the boastful penitence which she later expressed. When young Doctor-Boarder Gloyd kissed Carry, 19, in a dark hallway, she twice shouted: "I am ruined!" She married this man. She blamed the failure of the union, and her husband's death, not on her own connubial shortcomings but on Masons, tobacco and liquor (the Doctor was, significantly, seldom sober). When her daughter's cheek was eaten away with a sore, Carry accused the child of impiety.

After Carry's second marriage, to Lawyer-Minister David Nation of Warrensburg, Kan., the daughter went insane and Carry Nation herself became very peculiar. Every night at bed-time Mrs. Nation told her troubles to God, dragging herself around the room on her knees. At times she felt herself suspended over a precipice by a heavenly hand; at other times she saw two snakes. She heard wings beating, saw angels and devils, met Jesus in the basement. A proud reminiscence: "I was often considered crazy on the subject of religion." At length she heard a voice exclaim from the heavens: "Take something in your hands and throw it at those places and smash them!"

"Those places" were "joints," for in 1880 Kansas had made the ordinary saloon illegal. Thus it was that Carry became the bartenders' terror of the '90s--height, 6 ft.; weight, 180 Ibs.; broad of beam, with hard muscles, calloused hands and beady, defiant eyes. She began by trying to wreck a Medicine Lodge grogshop with an umbrella. In later forays her weapons were bricks and stones wrapped in old newspapers. These she hurled through mirrors, lewd paintings, rows of glassware. With her famed hatchet she chopped up cherry bars, furniture, cash registers, beer kegs. Her battle cry to her followers was: "Smash, women. Smash!"

"God forbid," said one of Carry's victims watching her work, "that I should ever strike a woman." She once told how two men tried to asphyxiate her by blowing cigaret-smoke through a hotel keyhole. When one place she raided proved to sell nothing more potent than chili con carne, she asked God to forgive the owner for tempting U. S. appetites with foreign dishes. She objected to the tobacco trade-name "Bull Durham" because bulls were manifestly no tobacco users. When she was jailed, a follower wrote to the judge: "We now propose if Mrs. Nation is held longer, to raise the greatest army of women the world has ever known and wipe man out of existence."

Carry smashed a cigar-stand in Coney Island, acted in Elizabeth, N. J., in Hatchetation (originally Ten Nights in a Bar-room), lectured in a burlesque show in Springfield, Mass. Hearing President McKinley was shot, she lost favor by saying "I have no sympathy for this friend of the brewers." When President Roosevelt refused to receive her, she revealed that he was a cigaret-smoker, also that "Government, like dead fish, stinks worse at the head." In 1911 she died in Leavenworth Kan. "Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition; She Hath Done What She Could" -- so ran her epitaph.

The Significance. Nearly every action of Carry Nation's career provoked in the public mind a lurid distortion of the saloon of her times. She was one of Prohibition's prime instigators. Author Asbury has done her the justice of weighty, lively, analysis.

The Author. Herbert Asbury, 38, Missouri-born, is a descendant of Bishop Francis Asbury whose biography he has written, who founded the Methodist Church in the U. S. Author Asbury's own deflection from the faith of his ancestors is expressed in the title of another Asbury book: Up from Methodism. His father and five uncles served in the Civil War, himself in the World War. As a Georgian newsgatherer in 1914, he helped pass child labor laws. His study The Gangs of New York has been praised by gangsters themselves. He edited The Bon Vivant's Companion, an elegant liquor manual (1928). In aspect he is an extremely busy Manhattan journalist, with a great curiosity about the more flamboyant affairs of state.