Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease: The Populist "Joan of Arc"

Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease: The Populist "Joan of Arc"

Posted by: "Dick Eastman"

Sat Mar 20, 2010 4:07 am (PDT)

Here is a populist woman who understood that both silver and gold were unnecessary constraints harming the public. She backed Weaver against Democrat Bryan and against fusion between Populists and Democrats. Furthermore, the criticism she got from the Republican and Democratic media was totally unfair, because what she said about the Money Power was true and no media whore could report it accurately.

From various sources:

"An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold."

Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease (1853-1933)

"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master."

"Her tall form, gave her a chance to send her powerful voice to the farthest rim of the crowd. She spoke with a majestic force which enthralled the crowd." -- Boston Globe

"We want money, land and transportation. ... We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to loan-shark companies."

Wall Street Owns The Country
A Speech by Mary Elizabeth Lease (circa 1890)

This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs-that's what came of it. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them... We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out... We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.

In 1888, she began to work for the Union Labor Party and gave a speech at their state convention. From there she became involved in the movement that would become the Populist party. By 1890, her involvement in the growing revolt of Kansas farmers against high mortgage interest and railroad rates had placed her in the forefront of the People's (Populist) Party.

A reporter asked her how she became an orator, and she replied:

Brother, I don't say that I ever did. I was untrained in the arts of the public debater, unschooled in the methods of the political exhorter. If I succeeded in swaying my audiences I did not deserve the credit. That belongs to a hidden power that worked within me. I was merely a voice, an instrument in the hands of a Great Force.
Eastern reporters described her as "...untrained, and while displaying plenty of a certain sort of power, is illogical, lacks sequence and scatters like a 10-gauge gun." Lease was was accused of being overly vulgar and foulmouthed. She was described by a republican editor as "the petti-coated smut-mill [...] Her venomous tongue is the only thing marketable about the old harpy, and we suppose she is justified in selling it where it commends the highest price." She stumped all over Kansas, as well as the Far West and the South, making more than 160 speeches for the cause. She was a powerful and emotional speaker. Emporia editor William Allen White, who did not share her political views, wrote on one occasion that "she could recite the multiplication table and set a crowd hooting and harrahing at her will."

Mrs. Lease became a problem for the Populist organization in Kansas when it began to flirt with the idea of cooperating with the Democratic party for victory in the state. In the 1890 contest there had been no attempt a fusion on the state ticket. With three parties in the field, the Republicans carried all state administrative positions save one, although the Populists did gain control of the Kansas house, elected five of eight congressmen, and were triumphant in the majority of the local contests as a result of fusion or the absence of Democratic candidates. (continue on p.334)

...her determination to have women's suffrage and temperance as her main focus at the Populist party's next state convention

Literary scholar Brian Attebery claimed Mary Elizabeth Lease to have been the model for Dorothy in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

"India rich with every fertility of soil and climate, centralization of wealth, the curse of the money power, the incubus of bonds was loaded on India, and India went down as Persia and Spain, and Greece and Rome, as Turkey and Ireland went down, from the incubus of bonds, the curse of the money power."

Excerpt from a book I recommend to all populist reformers:

Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal; The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) p. 132

Walter T.K. Nugent writes, She was "responsible for far more of her share of references to Shylock, Rothschild, Jewish bankers, and British gold, and her prominence in the movement put their ugly onus ont he mass of Populists who had neve drempt of such things." Wallace T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (Chicago: University of Chicago PRess, 1963), p.83.]

Meanwhile farmers ikn western Kansas, the literary historian Vernon Parrington recalled, sat at night by their kitchen stoves "watching the year's crop go up the chimney." At a convention of the people" held in Topeka in August 1890 the Alliance founded the People's Party, and niminated canddiates to unseat the Republican state legislators who foted in John Ingalls as prelude to unseating "Mr. Republican himself.

The fall campaign -- a "pentacost of politics" composes a memorable set piece of the Populist revolt. It starred tow women orators, Annie Diggs and Mary E. Lease, the "People's Joan of Arc," who, in a voice that Kansas City Star called "a pure sweet contralto," telescoped the long fall from Gettysburg in the ear's recurring refrain" "It is no longer a government of the people, for the people, buy the people, but a goverment of Wall Street, for Wall Street, and by Wall Street. One of the first women lawyers in Kansas, a campaigner for woman's sufferage, prohibition, and freedom from for her ancestral Ireland, a member of the Knights of Lavor and the Farmers' Alliance, Lease was a charismatic platform speaker and bruising debator. ...

Lease against Fusion with Democrats and Bryan

The powers of goverment should be extended . . . to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land."

That Copernican sentence appeared in the preamble to the first platform of hte national People's Party. Since the war goverment had extended its power to protect injustice. In the Guided Age it was easier to credit the virgin birth than the govemnet could serve the general welfare. Republican goverment serviced business. The Democrats wanted a weak federal goverment so that the southern oligarcy cold maintain the institutions -- lynching, convict labor, fraudulent elections, disfranchisement, racial apertheid -- that alone gave it popular legitimacy. The Populist credo -- "Equal rights to all, special privileges to none." -- challenged the operational maxims of both parties. They ahd viewed with alarm the rise of the Farmers' Alliance. They had tried to co-opt it. They had waved the bloody shirt in front of it. Yet they could not stop this social movement from birthing a political insurgency. In a fully mobilized electorate blood needent run in the streets to pub a bottom rail top. Americans cold vote themselves a fairere society. They party of green and the party of hate now faced a party of hope.

The Western Populists and the southern populists, in Omaha convention assembled, formed up the party and unvelied its platform of Juyly 4, 1892. They nominated a Union general for president and a one-legged Conferearated major for vice president. Although planks in the Omaha platform were calculated to appeal to the northern working man, the general, the former Greenback presidential candidate James b. Weaver of Iowa, wisely focused his campaign on the regions of agrarian discontent -- the West, were he was well received, and the South, where he was not. Democratic paoers accused him of wartime cruelties against Tennessee civilian Tennessee civilians. Mobs harassed and egged on him. Mrs. Weaver was made "a regular walking omlet by the Southern chivalry" of Macon Georgia.. That according to Mrs. Lease, who, as the Populists' most gifted orator, stumped with Weaver. Newspapers extended no chivalry to the "short-haired woman" from Kansas who "with a nose like an ant-eater and a voice like a cat fight," hinting that she was sleeping witht he general if not with both Weavers. After learning that Tom Watson had to be resced from an Atlanta Mob, Weaver canceled the rest of his campaign in the South and with his retreat ended Populism's dream of erasing the Mason-Dixon line in politics. In November Grover Cleveland swept the "Solid South," Weaver attracting only a third of the vote in Alabama.

(end of excerpt -- its 3:50 a.m. and I just can't keep my eyes on the page to type it)

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We jeered the Democrats and Republicans- -those bloodsuckers. We chanted the populist rallying cry, "Equal justice for all! Special privileges for none!" Lease spoke extemporaneously but was careful to check her papers for statistics and quotes--so she couldn't be criticized for getting them wrong. She worried about the farmer who only gets 6 cents for corn that sells for 50 cents in Chicago--and for the starving children in Chicago whose families can't afford that. She complained that distillers can borrow money at 2% interest, but farmers must pay 10%. She protested that the masses pay three quarters of the taxes while owning only one quarter of the wealth. Women's suffrage was not a primary goal of Lease's, but it was important enough to her that she quit the party when the first act of a new party blending Populists and Democtrats (the Fusionists) was to drop the women's suffrage plank from the platform.

Like most women active in politics in the late 19th century, Lease started as a temperance activist and continued to discuss it during her career. Prohibition came in with the 18th amendment, only to be repealed later.

Lease and the Populists advocated for a graduated income tax which eventually came to pass as an amendment to the constitution. They also wanted a direct election of Senators--this also happened by amendment.

New York World
11 August 1896

MARY E. LEASE.

The Crowd Liked Her Dununciation of Cleveland and Whitney

Every Reference to Wealth and Its Owners Received with Wild Delight.
ATTACKED THE ENTIRE SOCIAL SYSTEM.

Charmed by the seductive oratory of Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Lease, the free silver mass-meeting at Cooper Union last night nursed itself into all the semblance of a socialistic gathering. ... Every mention of gold or wealth was greeted with shouts and jeers, and the names of Whitney and Cleveland, of Vanderbilt and Rothschild were hailed with hisses and cat-calls.

. It was very warm in the hall, and Mrs. Lease felt it. She was dressed in a light, lace-trimmed waist and black satin skirt, and her hair was neatly coiled. A winning smile was upon her face, and again and again she bowed to the plaudits of the crowd.

"I accept this splendid greeting from this splendid audience," she began, and the crowd howled appreciation of the compliment, "in evidence that there is no Mason and Dixon's line between the East and the West. I accept it as an evidence of the fact that the people of the East and West are battling for a common cause against a common foe. Not since the bleeding years of the war have party lines been so nearly obliterated, and the obedience to party leaders so refused as at the present time. The heart of the nation is aroused, and Principle and not Pelf is the watchword. The great heart of the nation beats response to patriotism, and the nation is safe."

At this point Mrs. Lease took the opportunity offered by the cheering to wipe a fugitive drop from her ear. Moistening her lips, she broadened out her confident smile and went on.

"We stand to-day at the beginning of one of those revolutionary periods that mark an advance of the race. We stand at a period that marks a reformation.

"All history is illustrated by the fact that new liberties cannot exist with old tyrannies. New ideals ever seek new manifestations. The ideals of Christ could not live under the tyrannies of the Roman government. The ideals of the founders of this Government could not exist under the tyrannies of royal rule."

Striding to the edge of the platform, Mrs. Lease stretched out her hand, clenched the fingers and then roared with masculine energy:

"The grand principles of America and the brotherhood of man cannot live under old forms of tyranny--neither under the forms of Old-World tyranny nor of British gold."

The demonstration that followed this announcement was remarkable. Two thousand throats sent up a shout that showed the sentiment of the meeting, and it was at least two minutes before absolute quiet prevailed. When Mrs. Lease proceeded she spoke of the great prosperity this country had seen.

"Yet to-day," she cried, "our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums."

"Hooray!" yelled a man far back in the hall, "Hooray--ki- --yi!"

The crowd took up the cry, and back and forth the cheers and yells and cat-calls rattled.

"Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ..."

"Horray, horray!" yelled the man in the crowd again, and once more the hall resounded with the expression of the audience's temper.

"It makes it possible, too, " cried Mrs. Lease, shaking her shoulders fiercely, "for an American to pay $10,000,000 for the cast-off, disreputable rags of old world royalty, for the scion of a house that boasts the blood of a Jeffreys and a Marlborough. It is a disgrace to our nation.

"A condition by which the wealth accumulated by the common people is poured into lard tubs and oil wells, to enable Mr. Rockefeller to found a college and Mr. Whitney to buy a diamond tiara for his daughter is a disgrace to the country.

"Once we made it our boast that this nation was not founded upon any class distinction. But now we are not only buying diamonds for their wives and daughters and selling our children to titled debauchees, but we are setting aside our Constitution and establishing a gold standard to help the fortunes of our hereditary foe.

"To-day, a determined and systematic effort is being made by our financiers to perpetuate a gold standard. Every influence that moulds public opinion has been bought up, and the great dailies in the employ of the gold syndicate have fallen into line. The whole power of the government administration is being used to deceive the people. We hear sound money and honest dollar applied to the most dishonest money that ever cursed a nation or enslaved a people. What right has McKinley or Whitney to delegate our constitutional right to coin money to England or any other nation?"

"Hooray, hooray!" yelled the voice again. "Whitney's no Democrat!"

"Ha, hah! Ki-yi!" shrieked the crowd, with shouts of derisive laughter. Smiling in acknowledgement Mrs. Lease tried to attract the attention of a lemonade man. But the man passed onward with his bucket and she gulped in disappointment. In a swift aside she made known her need and an officious person in the front row hustled after the vendor. Then another officious one, all smiles and importance, handed up the drink, and all the meeting paused while Mrs. Lease moistened her throat.

"An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold. Long ago, the aristocracy of royalty came to a common plane with the common people by the discovery of gunpowder, and the two met on a common field. Where is the respect of old for royalty? Even the English speak of their sovereign, Queen Victoria as being made not of common clay, but of common mud. The aristocracy of royalty is dying out.

"But here in this country we find in place of an aristocracy of royalty an aristocracy of wealth. Far more dangerous to the race is it than the aristocracy of royalty. It is the aristocracy of gold that disintegrates society, destroys individuals and has ruined the proudest nations. It has called Rothschild's agent here to make the platform of the Republican party."

Here Mrs. Lease got down to train robbers and road agents, bandits, pirates, highwaymen and other non-political persons. When she was through with her James boys and Daltons [the author chooses not to quote Mrs. Lease's comments against Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Rothschild] she said that advancing civilization made the need of more civilized methods of robbery. Then as a gentle climax she called John Sherman a robber and likened all gold men to footpads.

"We have advanced scientifically, ethically and otherwise," she said, "but in finance we have followed the barbaric methods of our ancestors and the teachings of college-bred idiots who tell us that gold is the only desirable coin."

This bon mot was delivered fiercely, and was as fiercely applauded. "College-bred idiots" hit the crowd.

"By this" cried Mrs. Lease "we have arrived at a point when there is not enough money to carry on the business of the country. Go back with me a few years. When the war broke out the Government was compelled to beg for men and money. You responded nobly to that cry, but the men who had been crying 'on to Richmond!' refused to answer. They locked up their gold or sent it to Europe. They held their gold more sacred than your lives, your liberty, your wives and children, while the Government was compelled to mortgage itself to get that sneaking, cowardly yellow metal. And if war was to break out again to-morrow gold would disappear as suddenly again."

Mrs. Lease then took a shy at the "crime of '73." She told how the Government had made contracts on a bimetallic basis and then had changed it to a single standard. Lincoln, she declared, had called such acts as that a crime against posterity. Mentioning the bonded debt, Mrs. Lease called upon the reporters to hear her. During all the evening she made various flings at the press, but most of her speech was specially directed at the press seats. When she got down to the bonded debt she had the figures at her fingers' ends. When she rolled them off with the unction of a child who has mastered its a, b, cs, a man shouted:

"Make 'em take it down! Make 'em take it down!" He meant the reporters.

"Yes, yes," roared the crowd, "make 'em take it down!"

Mrs. Lease smiled happily and brushed away the perspiration ... and then she went at it again with the admonition that she might talk all night. Several persons arose hurriedly at this and went out, and an enthusiast on the platform said: "All right, go ahead."

Mrs. Lease was beginning on the debt again, when a woman in the third row cried out, "Let's wipe out the bonded debt." Just as appropriately she might have called: "Cut it bias," or "will it wash?" Mrs. Lease smiled a sickly smile at this evidence of womanly wisdom, and she was about to go on when the woman cried again: "Yes that's right. Wipe it off the slate."

"That's the sentiment," yelled a voice, and the crowd laughed.

"They say this question is so deep," said Mrs. Lease, when the woman had subsided, "that the common people are not fit to decide it. They say 'leave it to the financiers.' We have left it to them too long, and while we have been sinking into bankruptcy our financiers have been growing millionaires. "

After a few other remarks about gold and Great Britain and robbery Mrs. Lease made a ball of her handkerchief, dabbed her face once or twice and sat down. Great applause followed.

During the meeting resolutions were read by Secretary Barr. The resolutions applauded the work of the Democratic and Populistic conventions. ... They denounced also the application of the epithet 'anarchist' to them by the capitalists and agents of capital. The sudden affection for the laborer evinced by certain newspapers was also condemned as suspicious. Government ownership of telegraph and railroad lines was also advocated.

When the resolutions were read and put to vote many cried "No! no!" to them. At this a man in the back of the hall demanded a rising vote and almost precipitated a fight. He was subdued, however and the resolutions were declared adopted.

She was born to Irish immigrants Joseph P. and Mary Elizabeth (Murray) Clyens, in Ridgway, Pennsylvania. In 1895, she wrote The Problem of Civilization Solved, and in 1896, she moved to New York City where she edited the newspaper, World. In addition, she worked as an editor for the National Encyclopedia of American Biography

At the age of twenty she moved to Kansas to teach school in Osage Mission (St. Paul, Kansas), and three years later she married Charles L. Lease, a local pharmacist. After unsuccessful farming ventures in Kingman County and in Texas, the Leases and their four children moved to Wichita, Kansas, where she took a leading role in civic and social activities.

Lease became involved in the Populist Party, drumming up support for their cause. She believed that big business had made the people of America into "wage slaves."

In 1888, she began to work for the Union Labor Party and gave a speech at their state convention. From there she became involved in the movement that would become the Populist party. By 1890, her involvement in the growing revolt of Kansas farmers against high mortgage interest and railroad rates had placed her in the forefront of the People's (Populist) Party.

Between 1890 and 1896 she toured all over the country and became one of the decade's most prominent women. She was bitterly assailed in the Republican and Democratic press, accused of being a "virago" and "petticoated smut-mill." She is undoubtedly one of the 'harpies' mentioned by William Allen White in his 1896 editorial, "Whats the Matter with Kansas?"

Lease was a bitter opponent of Populist "fusion" with Democrats. She spent much of the 1890s fighting fusion arrangements in Kansas. At the 1896 Populist convention she and other anti-fusionists, like Tom Watson and Ignatius Donnelly, Minnesota editor of The Representative, lost, and the party nominated William Jennings Bryan. Lease reluctantly went out on the stump for Bryan, to her later regret. She spent much of the campaign in Minnesota, through Donnelly's arrangements. ... Soon after 1896, Lease divorced her husband and moved to New York City with her four children. She worked as a lawyer and lecturer for many years. When Eugene Debs ran for president in 1908, Lease spoke on his behalf; by 1912 she became an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt and supported his bid to recapture the presidency, under the banner of the "Bull Moose" Progressive Party. Before she died, Lease witnessed the passage of many of her cherished goals: prohibition, woman suffrage, and several planks of the long-defunct Populist platform--including direct election of Senators and more federal regulation of corporations and railroads. These reforms had been picked up by the Progressive, Republican, and Democratic leaders, but Lease counted them as part of the Populist legacy. "In these later years I have seen, with gratification, that my work in the good old Populist days was not in vain. The Progressive party has adopted our platform, clause for clause, plank by plank."

There is no book-length biography of Mary Elizabeth Lease. Sketches of her life and anecdotes and quotations from her political speeches are found throughout the literature on the Populist crusade, beginning with John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (1931). A highly colored biography is in Gerald W. Johnson, The Lunatic Fringe (1957).
Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease (1853-1933), American lecturer, writer, and politician, gained national fame during the Populist crusade for reform in the 1890s. She was a zealous agitator for equality and opportunity.
Mary Elizabeth Clyens was born in Pennsylvania of Irish parents. She was reared and educated in Allegany County, N.Y. The family moved to Kansas, probably in 1870, at which time Mary Elizabeth was in Osage Mission, Kans., teaching in a parochial school. She married Charles L. Lease, a pharmacist, in 1873. The couple soon moved to Texas, where three of their four children were born. Returning to Kansas in the early 1880s, the family settled in Wichita.

In 1885 Lease was admitted to the bar and entered public life speaking on behalf of the Irish National League with a flaming tirade on the subject of "Ireland and Irishmen." In 1888 she spoke before the state convention of the Union Labor party, a forerunner of the People's party in Kansas, and was the party's candidate for county office long before women were eligible to vote.

Lease was an effective campaigner for the candidates of the Farmers' Alliance - People's party during the 1890 election, making over 160 speeches. During the campaign she was often mistakenly called Mary Ellen, and her enemies dubbed her "Mary Yellin." During one 3-hour speech in Halstead, Kan., she reportedly remarked, "What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell."

Lease was active in the presidential campaign of 1892, accompanying Populist candidate James Baird Weaver on a disastrous tour of the South. In Minnesota and Nevada she made eight speeches a day. When the Populists gained control of the administration of Kansas, she was named president of the State Board of Charities in 1893. She feuded with the governor and was removed from office but was reinstated by the Kansas Supreme Court.

In 1896 Lease was a leader of the antifusion faction in the Populist party, which fought a merger with the Democrats, who supported the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan. She lost the fight at the national convention but immediately joined the staff of the New York World to campaign against the Democratic candidate. Lease turned to writing articles and poetry for magazines and published a book, The Problem of Civilization Solved. She continued to champion reform - woman's suffrage, prohibition, evolution, and birth control.

The best published source on Lease is Dorothy Rose Blumberg, "Mary Elizabeth Lease, Populist Orator: A Profile," Kansas History 1 (1978): 3-15.

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Mrs. Lease, on June 3, made a grand speech of two and a half hours, before an immense crowd at Dodge Center. The next night she addressed an extemproized meeting at Kasson.... Steps should be taken to keep her in [Minnesota] until election day, if it is possible.
She makes hundreds of votes wherever she speaks. The only danger is of break-down. She is over-zealous and forgets herself in her earnestness. Our friends must not let her work herself to death. See that she is well entertained and has plenty of rest between speeches.
Ignatius Donnelly, The Representative, 10 June

One need talk with Mrs. Lease only ten minutes to observe certain things: She is self-confident, and also thoroughly impressed with herself. She enjoys the fire of hot opposition. She "poses" even in private conversation. ... Mrs. Lease is earnest, absolutely fearless, but uppermost in all her thoughts and deeds seems to be Mrs. Lease, and after that her cause....
When she makes a statement that needs backing she can give, off-hand, the section, clause, paragraph, and line of the Constitution; she can quote by the paragraph from this or that Supreme Court decision; she can repeat what this or that man said in the United States Senate thirty, forty, fifty years ago.... If you have only a few fundamental and even correct notions about the gold side of this money queson--all that is necessary for any ordinary and intelligent man to have--you had better keep away from Mrs. Lease, for she will throw you by a simple twist of her thumb--or perhaps I had better say twist of her tongue.
--Franklin Matthews, Leslie's Weekly, 10 September

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New York Tribune:

But there is this to be said, of which there can be no denial, that Mrs. Lease upon the political platform or stump, uttering invectives more than masculine, and appealing to the brutal passions of the mob rather than to the calm sense of reasoning men and women, must be treated the same as any other mob leader, male or female. She cannot shelter herself behind her sex while appealing to bloodthirsty passions and inciting lawless riot.

Mrs. Lease is representative of the party--we will not call it Democratic-- which presents Mr. Bryan as a candidate... . In the principles she avows, and the policies she advocates, in the coarse vigor of her speech and the startling aggressiveness of her manner, she is in the highest degree the best and truest exponent of the Bryan platform and party. In the extravagance of her language, the wantonness and recklessness with which she appealed to class hatred, pointing out by name as the proper objects of popular vengeance good and honorable citizens whose only offence is the possession of property accumulated honestly under the laws, she may have seemed to be in advance of her party. But only a step; just enough to bring out with clearness and distinctness the real spirit and purpose of the revolutionists and Anarchists who are bent on the destruction of public credit and the overthrow of social order. A step behind this raging virago, foaming with fury and blazing with wrath, is the wild mob of levellers eager for the general distribution of spoils; behind them the Terror, with its bloody bacchanals and merciless savagery. --New York Tribune, August 13, 1896

Be warned. Mary E. Lease had views on race that set her apart:

Lease's background as an unsuccessful tenant farmer and traces the beginnings of Lease's work as an advocate for farmers and for woman suffrage. ... Lease believed that the "redemptive power of farming" could cure many societal ills. Due to a lack of available farmland within the United States, however, Lease proposed a scheme to colonize tropical lands to the south. Lease proposed moving millions of white families to the tropics, almost the demographic opposite of migrations occuring today. These white families would not do the farming themselves, due to the damage that tropical heat could wreak on the Caucasian constitution. Instead, Lease suggested that families of negroes should farm while whites worked worked out of the direct sunlight.

Sociologist Edward Ross, known for coining the term "race suicide," spoke to the same set of anxieties. Rather than building actual farms, however, Ross hoped to change the "values of society itself." Ross urged immigration restriction, but he also framed race suicide as a byproduct of urbanization. The solution, yet again, was the small family farm, preferably on the frontier where the "American type" would best prosper. Ross built his analysis of race suicide on "the issues of economics, immigration, and urbanization, "

As a women lecturer for the Kansas Farmers' Alliance put it, “all things that are of interest to men are of like interest to women.” But Populism also provided a means for women to take steps towards independence, and to define and claim their rights as women.

The Farmers' Alliance offered women the same membership rights that men enjoyed, including the right to vote and stand for office within the organization. This stood in contrast to virtually every other major institution in American life. Notably, political parties barred women altogether, and the churches excluded women from being officers or serving in positions of authority.

women served as secretaries, treasurers, and other officers. Luna Kellie served as the secretary of the Nebraska Farmers' Alliance, and Bettie Gay held a prominent place in the Texas Alliance. The Populists also recruited a remarkable group of talented women as lecturers, writers, and newspaper editors. This included Marion Todd of Illinois and Annie Diggs of Kansas. Another Kansan, Mary Elizabeth Lease gained national prominence with her speeches before Farmers' Alliance and People's Party audiences.

Throughout, the Populist party was strongest in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, and North Carolina, although its influence was also felt in other southern and western states. Out of its ranks emerged many talented and colorful figures, among them Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota; Jeremiah Simpson, William A. Peffer, Mary E. Lease, and Annie Diggs of Kansas; and William V. Allen and William Neville of Nebraska. Among the prominent southern leaders were Thomas E. Watson of Georgia, Marion Butler of North Carolina, and James Harvey Davis of Texas.

From 1891 to 1903, fifty Populist party candidates, representing sixteen states and one territory, were elected to Congress, where they waged an educational campaign on behalf of the Populist program and spoke out on a wide range of issues, from the economic depression of 1893–96 to the nation's imperialist expansion. For many, the Populist movement remains a source of inspiration. As one historian has written: “The Populists’ message remains as relevant today as in the nineteenth century, and their vision of community still serves as a powerful critique of American society.”

Stiller, Richard. Queen of the Populists: The Story of Mary Elizabeth Lease. 245 pp. New York: Crowell, 1970. Juvenile.
Taylor, Betty L. "Mary Elizabeth Lease, Kansas Populist." M.A. thesis, U of Wichita, 1951. 58 pp.

Sarah Van De Vort Emery (1838-95) and her Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People (1887)

LEASE, MARY ELIZABETH CLYENS (1853–1933). Mary Elizabeth Lease, lecturer, writer, and political agitator, daughter of Joseph P. and Mary Elizabeth (Murray) Clyens, was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 1853. Her father and two brothers were killed during the Civil War, and she subsequently hated the Democratic party, which she considered responsible for the war. In 1868 she graduated from St. Elizabeth's Academy in Allegany, New York. Shortly after her graduation she moved to Osage Mission, Kansas, to teach at St. Anne's Academy. In 1873 she married Charles L. Lease, a pharmacist's clerk, and moved to Kingman County. They lost their farm there and in 1874 moved to Denison, Texas, where four of their five children were born, while Mary took in washing and studied law, her notes pinned above the washtub. Charles took a job at Acheson's Drugstore.

Through the influence of Mrs. Alex (Sarah) Acheson, Mary joined the temperance movement and began her career of political agitation. She was a naturally gifted speaker with an ability to make the mundane seem dramatic. She probably made her first political speech before the local Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Charles appears to have attempted to augment his fortunes by buying and selling lots in the infant railroad town. By the fall of 1883 the Leases had moved back to Kingman County, Kansas, though they continued to have real estate dealings in Denison for several years. In 1885 Mary was admitted to the Kansas bar and began her activist career in earnest, a move that resulted in her divorce from Charles in 1902. She made her political debut in 1888 at the state convention of the Union Labor party, ran for office on its ticket, and soon joined the Farmers' Alliance, or Populist, party. She was referred to as the "People's Joan of Arc." In that party's 1890 campaign she made more than 160 speeches and claimed credit for the defeat of Kansas senator John Ingalls. She opposed big business and stated flatly that "Wall Street owns the country." After she allegedly told Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell," she said a newspaper had made it up, but that it "was a good bit of advice."

In 1892 she traveled the West and South with Populist presidential candidate James Weaver, who noted that the laboring people "almost worshipped her." The next year she pursued a race for United States senator and was vice president of the World Peace Congress in Chicago. She was also appointed president of the Kansas Board of Charities, but had a falling-out with Governor Lorenzo Lewelling over political appointments. Lewelling had been elected to office by a Populist-Democratic coalition. Mary Lease opposed the coalition and refused to support "fusion" appointments. Lewelling tried to remove her from office, going as far as the Kansas Supreme Court, but failed. But despite her victory over Lewelling, she did severe damage to her party by refusing to align with Democrats. The Lease-Lewelling controversy, along with other inner tensions, weakened the People's (Populist) party, and they were defeated in the 1894 elections at all levels of government.

In 1895 Lease wrote The Problem of Civilization Solved. She moved the next year to New York City, where she wrote for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, campaigned against the Democrats, and, before fading from the political scene in 1918, lectured for the New York Board of Education. While in New York, she also worked as an editor for the National Encyclopedia of American Biography. Though she was raised a Catholic, she became a Christian Scientist as an adult. She belonged to the Daughters of Isabella, the Knights of Labor, the Prohibition Lecture Bureau, and the Citizens' Alliance. Mary Lease died in Callicoon, New York, on October 29, 1933.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gene Clanton, Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1900 (Boston: Twayne, 1991). Dictionary of American Biography. Denison Herald, June 25, 1972. Scott G. McNall, The Road to Rebellion: Class Formation and Kansas Populism, 1865–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). New York Times, October 30, 1933. Richard Stiller, Queen of Populists: The Story of Mary Elizabeth Lease (New York: Crowell, 1970). Who Was Who in America, Vol. 1.

Sherrie S. McLeRoy