lived 1850-1933
called the "People's Joan of Arc".
campaigner for Populist Party in 1880s and 1890s.
also active in the Farmers' Alliance, the Knights of Labor, Socialist Labor Party.
Literary scholar Brian Attebery claimed Mary Elizabeth Lease to have been the model for Dorothy in L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That is related to the idea that the Wizard of Oz story is a parable of political anti-bank reform, in which the yellow brick road is gold-backed currency, the tin man is the industrial worker, the scarecrow is the apolitical farmer, and I assume the hidden hand of the marketplace is the wizard behind the curtain.
The Cowardly Lion is the usual type of politician elected in weak democracies such as the U.S. "Ain't it the truth, ain't it the truth"...
With achievement of solid social progress and the election of Teddy Roosevelt on a reform platform, she said,
"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. Note the list of reforms which we advocated which are coming into reality. Direct election of senators is assured. Public utilities are gradually being removed from the hands of the few and placed under the control of the people who use them. Women suffrage is now almost a national issue... The seed we sowed out in Kansas did not fall on barren ground."
She was said to have exhorted Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell", but she later said that the admonition had been invented by reporters. Lease decided to let the quote stand anyway because she thought "it was a right good bit of advice"
In the Populist Party's 1890 campaign she made more than 160 speeches.
Excerpt from one, "The Money Question", is available here:
She is credited with helping cause the defeat of Kansas senator John Ingalls.
William A. Peffer was elected on the Populist ticket.
In 1895, she wrote The Problem of Civilization Solved.
available online at
Excerpts:
... We need a Napoleon in the industrial world who, by agitation and education, will lead the people to a realizing sense of their condition and the remedies, and teach them that by wise legislation and access to the land they can attain such majesty and happiness as will fulfill the hopes of humanity and the promise of the ages.
But this can be done if all who believe in the principles of this great union of forces will gather in groups and bands, organize, educate, proselyte with earnest, fiery zeal....
[371] ... the reckless propagation of criminals and devitalized humanity. The pauperized class should be given an opportunity to work out their own fortunes under favoring conditions.
Our first care should be to send [unemployed] out under supervision of agents who could supervise large plantations, the tillage of which could be overseen and made profitable for them; having all their work planned for them by the agent, they would in time learn thrift and business capacity. Eventually they would become proprietors, reaping the incentive of all labor, just remuneration. The purchase of lands, medical inspection and government agencies would cost the state less than the never-ending expense now entailed for inadequate police protection arid the erection and equipment of buildings that are constantly over-filled by a constantly increased army of criminals.
Stem the current of corrupt humanity by removing the fount from which it flows, make the vicious and idle dependent upon their own efforts with the incentive of compensation, all the compensation that life holds if they succeed and the alternative of annihilation if they fail to put forth honest effort when the helping hand is extended, for while God was severe in his denunciations of those who oppress the laborer he was none the less severe in his denunciation of the idler. "If a man shall" not work neither shall he eat."
By ending class legislation in America we may mitigate their poverty, but the ever-increasing improvements in machinery, by the operations of which vast numbers of honest workmen only skilled in one pursuit are thrown out of employment, the poverty resulting from business disaster, and ending in hopeless self-destruction and loss of courage, the lack of business judgment that people our land with failures, are producing a class whose misfortunes must be met and mitigated. The deserving poor, the honest men and women who are willing to work but to whom work has been denied, can be rescued from their poverty not by legislating them away to the tropics but by legislating a way for them to reach the promised land...."
In 1896, she moved to New York City where she wrote for the New York World.
(see "Mary E. Lease and the Populists," Kansas Quarterly
In addition, she worked as an editor for the National Encyclopedia of American Biography.
(above info from Wiki "Mary Elizabeth Lease")
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Oddly (but it made sense once I investigated)
Edmonton Bulletin Nov. 24, 1892 wrote that Lease was expected to be "elected U.S. Senator for Kansas on the 'populist' vote, that being the name for the United States's third party."
But there seems no other report that she ran for public office herself at any time.
Mystery solved -- at the time Kansas Senators were not elected by voters...
"... The most promising opportunity opened up in late 1892, when Populists had considerable clout in the legislature and Lease was a serious candidate for U.S. Senate, a position then elected by legislative vote. letter -writing campaign in support of her candiadacy... and supported by publications such as the Farmer’s Wife. Lease maintained indifference...
Telling a friend “Some of my friends (the grangers) are discussing the eligibility of a woman [for the Senate]. Altogether I am weary. Still! Stranger things have happened, and there is no telling what God and a Kansas legislature will do.”
Populist leaders, pursuing “fusion” instead, chose John Martin, a leading Democratic ally.
Governor Lorenzo Lewelling appointed Lease to a far less important post as superintendent of charities, overseeing orphanages and insane asylums. It was, in effect, a “lady’s job.”" (Rebecca Edwards, "Mary E. Lease and the Populists", Kansas Quarterly, Spring 2012)
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see
Annie L. Diggs, "Women in the Alliance Movement,” Arena 32 (July 1892): 166.
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