Vino

An interview with Carry Nation

Editor’s note: This interview with the infamous, sometimes axe-wielding prohibitionist crusader was conducted by an unnamed female reporter and appeared under the above column header (“Concerning Woman”) in the July 27, 1920, edition of The Duluth Herald. We reprint it here for its historical interest and inherent comedy. The photo and headline at right accompanied the original article, which is available thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society newspaper archive.

“There’s nothing that God and me can’t subdue,” said Mrs. Carry A. Nation this morning with a ring of earnestness in her voice and an uplifted arm that brought swift reminder of lurking Biblical quotation.

Mrs. Nation came to the city this morning and stopped at the McKay hotel only long enough to visit the bar, to discover as she said “a filthy place, pictures of naked women and a boy of about twenty-one smoking cigarettes,” and waiting only long enough to announce her disapproval of such things she took her way hence. She stopped at The Herald office for direction to a place that she might stay where there was no bar and she was sent to the Y.W.C.A. where they took Mrs. Nation in. After emerging from a bath, she consented to an immediate interview. Every interviewer since Mrs. Nation has appeared on the national horizon who has met her has had his little fling. It is easier to write a facetious interview than a serious one. But no ray of humor makes up a part of Mrs. Nation’s credo. She has an earnestness of purpose and a serious outlook that puts to momentary shame anything less intense.

Mrs. Nation was asked about the work that brought her to the Northwest. “I’m on a chautauqua circuit now,” she said. “I used to be such a notorious character that nobody wanted Carry Nation on a chautauqua. But it’s different now. I’ll speak at Two Harbors tonight, and here in Duluth tomorrow night. I’ll talk on ‘Where I Smashed, Why I Smashed and What I Smashed.’ It will be a regular smashing lecture.”

Even her last statement was said seriously. Mrs. Nation talked as frankly and freely finished dressing and the job wasn’t all done even at the end of the interview.

She has a pet scheme of founding a college at her home in Arkansas and she wished to sell her fruit farm to put the money into the prohibition college upon which she has set her mind. “We will educate the young people and send them out, two and two as the Savior did,” said Mrs. Nation, “to teach the great cause of prohibition. Not only the prohibition of drink but of tobacco using, of all the evils of the flesh and most of all, prohibition against the secret orders.”

“The Masons, too?” queried the interviewer.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mrs. Nation just as earnestly, and she spoke firmly with uplifted arm and made the statement that heads the interview. “There’s nothing that God and me can’t subdue. No ma’am!”

Mrs. Nation feels that the Mason swears away his right as an individual and the lodge members are led as in a herd. She thinks the things they vow just approach the unspeakable and anything that a man can’t tell his wife must be pretty bad. The secret orders must go, says Mrs. Nation, and she offers to present any Mason with one hundred dollars if he can give an affidavit that what she will tell of the Masons tomorrow evening in her lecture here is not true.

“I am a believer in the individual,” said Mrs. Nation, “and no man who swears he will have his tongue torn out by the roots nor his breast cut and heart taken out, or his body slashed and his vitals burned to ashes, is keeping the rights of the individual.”

“Why does he say that he will have done all those unpleasant things,” asked the interviewer.

“Rather than tell the truth about his lodge,” said Mrs. Nation, snapping her lips tight shut. “He vows that all that may happen to him before he’ll even tell his wife what happened at the lodge? Yes, ma’am!”

Mrs. Nation has five grandchildren. “Are they going into the temperance work?” inquired the interviewer.

“Bless you, no!” said Mrs. Nation. “They’re going into matrimony.”