Nation, Carry A(melia Moore)

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NATION, Carry A(melia Moore)

Born 25 November 1846, Garrard County, Kentucky; died 2 June 1911, Leavenworth, Kansas

Daughter of George and Mary Campbell Moore; married Dr.Charles Gloyd, 1867; David Nation, 1877

Born into the antebellum American "paradise" of faithful slaves and bountiful nature, as Carry A. Nation describes it, this American symbol of rampant morality is perhaps our real Scarlett O'Hara, stripped of all romantic distortion. Complete with a noble, upright father, a mother sporadically deranged by the illusion that she was Queen Victoria, and a faithful mammy with a grip on reality, Nation emerged from the fancies of childhood and the Civil War, like Scarlett O'Hara, with God as her witness—but it was not physical hunger she vowed never to endure again. Instead, Nation was determined never to suffer the deprivation of love, which her first husband's addiction to drink had brought her.

Nation's autobiography, The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation (1908), her one contribution to American letters, chronicles Nation's mission to defend love and life in the American family from the demon rum. The book is not a simple autobiography, for Nation's material is not limited to the exposition of her life. Rather, the autobiography is an encyclopedic work that places itself somewhere beyond confession. Aside from the details of Nation's life, it contains pictures of social conditions in the South before and after the Civil War and the contemporary medical wisdom on the effects of alcohol and tobacco upon the human constitution. It contains tirades on the abuses of alcohol and tobacco, which outline the philosophical bases of Nation's crusade. It also contains discourses on Christianity, Judaism, the Masons, upper-class education of the time, and the position of women in society.

The book is permeated by a religious hysteria, but the reader will find that Nation's autobiography bristles with the unexpected. Despite the fundamentalist foundation for her crusade, for example, she reveals a profound reverence for sexual love and a desire for openness about sexuality. Nation is prudishly hostile to the exposure of the undraped female figure in public, but she expresses unexpected disapproval that children are not told the truth about procreation and that men do not pay sexual attention to their wives, perversely giving themselves freely to prostitutes whom, Nation claims with modern insight, they hate and who hate them in return.

Despite the fact that Nation is a true believer of the most single-minded sort, she expresses paradoxical respect and affection for both Jews and Catholics as individuals and in groups. She does not appear to have hopes of saving them as reasonably virtuous pagans, but actually grants them another window in her Father's mansion. Finally, Nation is completely cognizant of the insanity others attribute to her. However, when she finishes cataloguing the alcohol-induced human misery she has experienced, witnessed, and learned of, her extreme actions to destroy the bane of her existence do not seem insane. They appear, rather, to be lacking in modern insights into the social and chemical roots of alcoholism.

The autobiography exhibits two main qualities. It is a portal leading to increased appreciation of the complex social and moral 19th-century American climate. It is also a work that, in recounting Nation's thoughts about society and her suffering for her cause, has such a contemporary ring that it rescues Nation from the burlesque stereotype that has wrongly portrayed her as an undistilled essence of harridan.