Mary Elizabeth Lease

Political career

In 1885 Lease went on her first public speaking tour, raising money for the Irish National Land League. She also spoke at the Kansas state convention of the Union Labor Party. By 1888, she was active within the party, stumping for the 1888 campaign and editing the party newspaper.

Her work led her to the Farmer's Alliance and Knights of Labor, and in 1891, she was elected leader of a local Knights assembly.

She was involved in African American suffrage. From there she became involved in the movement that would become the Populist Party. She believed that big business had made the people of America into "wage slaves", declaring, "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."

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".

She was recognized as being a powerful orator who was adept at expressing the discontent of the people. Emporia Gazette 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 hurrahing at her will". While many considered her speeches inspirational, the fervor of her words and the vehemence of her conviction, made others hesitant to support her cause. Farmers and labor unions loved her, while the press and the major party politicians criticized her mercilessly.

Most went far beyond disagreeing with the content of Lease's arguments and resorted to ad hominem and misogynistic tactics, focusing their attacks on her looks, self-confidence, and her "unwomanly" argumentative behavior. One reporter 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." The Wellington Monitor called her “a miserable character of womanhood and hideously ugly of features and foul of tongue”. A Republican editor similarly characterized her 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."

Despite the abuse, Lease persevered, continuing to deliver her message throughout America. In 1890 she made more than 160 speeches for the Populist cause, campaigning throughout Kansas, as well as the Far West and the South.

This helped to elect William A. Peffer as Kansas senator.

Split with Populists

Lease was a leader of the anti-fusion faction within the party who opposed merger with the Democratic Party. She began drifting away from the Populist Party after Populist Governor Lorenzo D. Lewelling was elected into office. By November 1893, she was reported to have openly criticized the Lewelling administration, only to deny it in an interview several days later.

It would seem that the first interview reflected her true feelings. By December 1893, Lewelling attempted to have her removed from the board of charities, a position to which he originally had appointed her. Lease felt the attempt to have her removed stemmed from her determination to have women's suffrage and temperance as her main focus at the Populist Party's next state convention. Her public outrage at the attempt to remove her prompted other Populist parties to distance themselves from her.

By 1896, Lease had become alienated from the Populist Party, and historian Gene Clanton cites her split with the Populist Party as being a major contributor to the Populist party's defeat in 1894.

Despite her fallout with — and the eventual destruction of — the Populist Party, Lease felt that their work and efforts were ultimately rewarded with the election of Theodore Roosevelt and the national push for reforms that she had championed years earlier:

"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."

Later life

In 1896, she moved to New York City where she wrote for the New York World. In addition, she worked as an editor for the National Encyclopedia of American Biography.

She divorced her husband in 1902 and spent the rest of her life with one or another of her children in the East until her death.

Lease died in Callicoon, New York on October 29, 1933.

Synthetic food

In 1893 Lease predicted that by 1993 people would be eating synthetic food. She predicted that in one hundred years' time 'Agriculture will be developed by electricity, the motive power of the future. Science will take, in condensed form from the rich loam of earth, the life force or germs now found in the heart of the corn, in the kernel of the wheat, and in the luscious juices of the fruit. A small phial of this life from the fertile bosom of Mother Earth will furnish man with subsistence for days. And thus the problems of cooks and cooking will be solved'. This theory, it is suggested, remained a 'private fantasy' until 1930 when it found its way into the early science-fiction musical film Just Imagine.