Carry Nation,
A Missouri Woman,
Won Fame in Kansas
BY DOROTHY J. CALDWELL*
On February 8, 1901, a crowd of some three hundred persons,
including newspaper reporters and seven policemen, waited at
Union Station, Kansas City, for Carry Nation, the famous Kansas
"smasher," to arrive for a lecture at the Academy of Music, Fifteenth
and McGee streets. Ticket sales for the lecture had been slow at
the Jenkins Music Company, the Jones Store and other downtown
business places because no one was certain that the unpredictable
Carry would actually appear. The train was late and reporters found
time to interview J. V. Moore, her brother, who worked for the
Rogers Livestock Commission Company at the stockyards. He said
that it had been his custom to drink a toddy or two with the
shippers, but since his sister's crusade he had given up toddies. He
was chagrined about the stories that his sister was crazy. He said
he had spoken to her about them and she laughed and commented
that she had enough sense to keep many a man out of hell.1
The Kansas City police and city officials were apprehensive
about the impending visit of the "Kansas cyclone."2 Benjamin E.
Sylvester, city license inspector, had planned to swoop down on
the hall and stop the lecture, using as his authority an ordinance
#Dorothy J. Caldwell is an associate editor of the Missouri Historical
Review.
i Kansas City Star, February 9, 1901.
2 Newspaper reporters often referred to her as the "Kansas cyclone." One
of the three books written about her is entitled Cyclone Carry. Carleton Beals,
Cyclone Carry (Philadelphia and New York, 1962) .
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