Today Mayor Bloomberg is testifying before the health committee of the City Council to defend his proposed ban on smoking in all bars and restaurants. While those in the opposition may restrain themselves, we would not blame them for addressing Mr. Bloomberg as “mother,” rather than as mayor. The appellation would be inspired by Mother Nation, the iconic little old lady who fought for temperance, sometimes violently, at the turn of the century at Kansas. Carry Nation was a feisty lady born at Kentucky in 1846. When she was nine, she moved to Western Missouri where she met her first husband. His death after two years of marriage was attributed to alcoholism.

Nation remarried and moved to Medicine Lodge, Kansas with her new husband, David, who established a law practice in the state. As her husband’s practice flourished, she became active in the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, using non-violent tactics, at first, to close illegal liquor outlets that were allowed to flourish under lax enforcement of state prohibition. During the spring of 1900, how ever, Nation’s efforts turned violent. She traveled to nearby Kiowa, Kansas where she and others used rocks and brickbats to smash three liquor-serving establishments. She then moved on to Wichita, where she destroyed the bar of the city’s finest hotel. After a three-week incarceration, she continued her campaign, becoming active in the Kansas State Temperance Union and organizing several hundred Kansas women into bands of “Home Defenders.” She would often tell women at meetings she conducted, “Oh, I tell you ladies, you never know what joy it gives you to start out and smash a rum shop.”

We suspect Mother Bloomberg would express similar sentiments with regard to his more figurative smashing of bars and restaurants where they still allow patrons to puff on the evil weed. Whether the death of her first husband was the factor that cemented Nation’s anti-alcohol sentiments is unknowable, but few question that she was sincere in her adamancy against the spirituous beverages. Likewise, Mother Bloomberg has his own past with tobacco, once having been a fiendish smoker and now having seen the light. Mother Bloomberg is a true believer, as Mother Nation was, but that does not mean that either was right-headed. While some may find comparing anti-smoking policies today to the prohibition of alcohol early in the last century a bit overblown, we do not. Now, as then, the prohibitionists are imbued with a sense of mission that bounds beyond public policy into the realm of the religious. Mother Bloomberg may not thump the Bible as Mother Nation did, but he believes in the moral rightness of his cause every bit as much.

It can be debated the effect secondhand smoke has on those unwittingly or unwillingly exposed to it — and Jacob Sullum presents, in the adjacent columns, a counterpoint to the usual prohibitionist arguments, and those put forward by the health department ads that have recently saturated the airwaves — but to Mother Bloomberg and his ilk this is beside the point. Nation once told the Kansas legislature that if the legislature didn’t shut down the booze joints, “then the women of this state will.” Similarly, Mother Bloomberg has made it clear that whether it is taxes, smoking bans, or saturation broadcasting, he will beat up on the smokers. Mother Nation told the assembly, “You refused me the vote and I had to use the rock.” We’ll see what the Council is made of. With alcohol, the nation eventually came to understand the folly of prohibition and the virtues of choice. We have no doubt that someday Mother Bloomberg’s campaign will come to be looked upon with the kind of bemusement with which we now look upon that of his famous forbearer.