The Plain Dealer and the Home Defender: Nick Chiles, Carry A. Nation, and Smasher's Mail

Abstract

In her short-lived newspaper The Smasher's Mail, Carry A. Nation included two accounts of how she began her business relationship with Nick Chiles, owner of the Topeka, Kansas, Plaindealer, newspaper.¹ The inaugural issue of Smasher's Mail in March 1901 said when Nation started her campaign against the saloons of Topeka (called "joints" in the vernacular of 1901), Chiles took a "deep interest in her work." When Nation was taken into custody on a charge of destroying private property and "the so-called Law and Order people" put her in the Shawnee County jail, Nation's former friends deserted her. Nation, a white woman, contacted Chiles, an African American man, to request that he post her bond, and he complied.