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.The encounter wasbrief, terrible, and one-sided.The old champ went down, and wentaway to Arkansas. In the first week of June in the following year, five months after hav-ing suffered a stroke and sixty-four years after her birth, Carry Nationdied of nervous trouble at the Evergreen Hospital in Leavenworth,Kansas.She was asleep at the time and there was no flock of flutteringgentle-ladies at her bedside with hankies in hand and poetry books openacross their laps.Nor was there a friend of long standing to remark onthe trajectory of a life, to try to understand the connection betweenbeginning and end and make sense of the steps between.And there wasno one to say that, considering all she had been through as a child and ayoung bride, Carry Nation probably deserved more credit for her kind-ness and lucidity than she did blame for her outrageousness.She was buried, according to her own instructions, next to hermother, the former queen of England, in the small town of Belton,Missouri.But so controversial had Nation become that not until thefollowing decade would the people of Belton see fit to mark her grave,and even then it was done grudgingly, after much debate.The graniteshaft finally erected bore a sentiment that did not run to excess.CARRY A.NATIONFaithful to the Cause of Prohibition She Hath Done What She Could Nation remained controversial among members of the Woman sChristian Union as well.At the end of the twentieth century, whenPresident Sarah F.Ward published a history of the group s first 125years, Nation s name did not appear even once. 7The Wheeler-Dealerand His Menradually, almost imperceptibly, women were losing control.They were falling back to the periphery of the temperancemovement, becoming second-class citizens for a secondtime.They had had their day, had tried their methods, hadfallen short of their goals.The public schools were stillGteaching WCTU lessons, but not enough people seemedto be heeding them; national prohibition was no closer toreality than it had ever been, and state and local legislatorsseemed to be repealing antibooze bills as often as they werepassing them, finding that it was too much trouble to makethem work.More important, Americans were not only continuing toraise their glasses and empty their bottles, but were pickingup the pace.In 1878, per capita consumption of alcohol waseight gallons; twenty years later it stood at seventeen.Therewere more saloons than ever before, more rowdy patrons,more violent behavior and arrests for drunkenness, and moresuffering families.And so the men took over the movement once more, andnever again would they relinquish control.But they had paidattention to their predecessors and had learned from them;they would know what to do in the future and what to avoid.They would be more subtle in their tactics than Carry Na-tion; more single-minded in their approach, and less relianton education, than the Woman s Christian Temperance147 148 Chapter 7Union; and, unlike the Prohibition Party, they would work within theframework of the existing two-party system.They would seek guidanceand support from the Almighty, as the women had done for so manyyears, but no less would they align themselves with the power brokersof the earth.Yet they would not fail to give the women credit for what they had ac-complished, and would come to believe that their most important con-tribution might simply have been their persistence.True, many peo-ple of both genders laughed at Carry Nation and Frances Willard andMrs.George Carpenter and Elizabeth Jane Trimble Thompson andthe rest of them, but at the same time they could not help but ad-mire their dedication, not to mention the courage they displayed onan almost daily basis
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