Carrie Nation was apparently overjoyed by President McKinley’s assassination, because he was rumored to be a secret drinker.

Carrie Amelia Moore, a Topeka, Kansas, native who became famous as “Carrie Nation” in pre-Prohibition America, was a very large woman with an even larger distaste for alcohol. Nation didn’t just preach about the evils of drink–she used her hatchet just as readily as her mouth. At six feet and and one-hundred-eighty pounds, Nation cut a wide swath when she stormed into bars and, hatchet in hand, hacked the wood and glass until the police–sometimes seated at the bar–intervened. In its September 10, 1901 issue, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls one of Nation’s mad temperance missions, this one in Coney Island. It was one of the dozens of times before she passed away in 1911 that Nation was arrested for her “hatchetations.” An excerpt:

“Carrie Nation has packed her hatchets and handbags and linen dusters and has left Coney Island behind her. A trolley car bore her to a busier part of the greater city yesterday afternoon, and as one of the old time songs relates, she will never go there any more. Her last hours at the beach were passed in the Coney Island court, where she was arraigned before Magistrate Furlong on a charge of disorderly conduct. Policeman George Ryder described how the Topeka smasher had done things to a show case owned by Jacob Wollenstein at an amusement place on the Bowery. Ryder said she made things hum for a while and then Carrie’s turn came to tell her story. She ignored the charge and discussed the question of the sobriety of Policeman Ryder. She said all the cops were ‘snakes and vipers and were drunkards.’

Magistrate Furlong said nice things to Carrie, explaining how dangerous it was to attempt to run Coney Island and then suspended sentence. Van Driver Connolly expected to take the smasher to jail, but he was disappointed.”