Books: 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!"