12. The Saloon Wrecking Rampage
Carrie Nation captured national attention in 1901 by picking up a hatchet and wrecking a saloon in Topeka, Kansas. As she described it: “[I] smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; picked up the cash register, threw it down; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator, opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer. Of course, it began to fly all over the house.
I threw over the slot machine, breaking it up and I got from it a sharp piece of iron with which I opened the bungs of the beer kegs, and opened the faucets of the barrels, and then the beer flew in every direction and I was completely saturated. A policeman came in and very good-naturedly arrested me“. Wrecking saloons became Carrie’s thing, and she even coined a neologism that entered the contemporary lexicon: “hatchetation”.