Why do high school history books mention Carry Nation and not other women (and there were many) who marched into saloons with hatchets, pokers, Bibles, and off-key accordians? And why is it that these history textbooks caricature her as a masculinized and menopausal megalomaniac rather than as a religiously inspired reformer who gave voice to the hopes of thousands of people longing for an alcohol-free promised land? The answer to the first question lies in Nation's own genius at self-promotion and her remarkably media-genic personality. She had undeniable charisma and a certain brilliance in making the most out of it. The answer to the second question lies in the even greater success of entrepreneurs who manipulated her public appeal to their own profit-making advantage by luridly packaging her personality and Crusade with brassy embellishments and blatant untruths. The commercial culture she sought to manipulate, in the end, got the best of her: retailers, reporters, and her so-called managers twisted her image to fit their own desires to turn a quick profit.

The message that Grace Fuller had awaited for years arrived at her cabin in the San Bernardino mountains. Here, she sought relief from the Southern California heat that aggravated her tuberculosis, for which there was no easy treatment in 1916. Her husband, Charles, had gone to church alone in Los Angeles to hear Paul Rader, the boxer-turned-evangelist. There, Charles converted to fundamental Christianity. Unable to contain his excitement, he informed her of his call to missions, probably Africa. Certain the heat would do her in, Grace's gratitude for Charles's religious experience was tempered by the idea of being a missionary. She thought to herseif, “I'll go with him anywhere in the world, but oh, my goodness, I hope it isn't to a hotclimate!”

In the years between 1830 and 1860, anti-Catholicism in America became unprecedentedly virulent. In 1834, the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground by an angry mob, touched off in large part by the anti-Catholic sermons of Lyman Beecher and rumors of convent abuses spread by Rebecca Reed. The following years saw several attempts by State governments to legislate against convents as well as numerous incidents of violence. In 1839, thousands of people in Baltimore rioted for three days and threatened to destroy a Carmelite convent. Five years later, rioting mobs in Philadelphia killed thirteen people and left blocks of Catholic homes and two Catholic churches smoldering in ruins. And, throughout the 1850's, a political party called the Know-Nothings convulsed the nation with its violent hostility toward Catholics. The worst incidents occurred in St. Louis, where ten people were killed in 1854, and in Louisville, where twenty were killed in 1855. The Know-Nothings diminished in popularity only with the turmoil of the Civil War.