Mary Elizabeth Lease

Mary Elizabeth Lease was a progressive political activist who fought big business, worked on behalf of the common man, and believed strongly in the importance of third parties in the U.S. political system. But there are also some really problematic parts of her story and ideology.

Research:

• Barnes, Donna A. “Farmers’ Alliance.” Texas State Historical Association. Jan. 1 1995. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/farmers-alliance
• Bauer, Pat. "Farmers’ Alliance". Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Sep. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Farmers-Alliance
• Bentson, Sarah. “Mary Elizabeth Lease.”       March 1, 2022.
• “Bryan’s Cross of Gold and the Partisan Battle over Economic Policy.” University of Virginia, Miller Center. https://millercenter.org/bryans-cross-gold-and-partisan-battle-over-economic-policy#:~:text=On%20this%20day%20in%201896,silver%20standard%20for%20U.S.%20currency
• “Concerning a Mortgage.” New York Times. Aug. 11, 1896. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1896/08/11/103382098.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
• “Farmers and Laborers.” Daily Kansas People. Aug. 13, 1890. https://www.newspapers.com/image/477977710/?match=1&terms=%22mary%20e.%20lease%22%20divorce
• “Furor Over Mary Lease.”  New York Times. Aug. 11, 1896. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1896/08/11/103382074.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
• Harper, Ida Husted. “THE LIFE AND WORK OF SUSAN B. ANTHONY, Vol. II.” Bowen-Merrill. 1898. Accessed online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31125/31125-h/31125-h.htm
• “Ingalls Knocked Out.” Daily Alta California. Dec. 7, 1890. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DAC18901207.2.2.4&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------
• Lease, Mary Elizabeth. “The Problem of Civilization Solved.” 1895. Accessed online: https://digital.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-gildedage%3A24027/print_object
• “Mary Lease Dead; Long Dry Agitator.” New York Times. Oct. 30, 1933. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1933/10/30/105813706.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
• “Mrs. Lease Is Not In It.” Akron Evening Times. Jan.5 , 1893. https://www.newspapers.com/image/228089290/?match=1&terms=%22mary%20e.%20lease%22%20supreme%20court
• McLeRoy, Sherrie S. “Lease, Mary Elizabeth Clyens (1853–1933).” Texas State Historical Association. Handbook of Texas Women. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/lease-mary-elizabeth-clyens
• “Mrs. Mary Lease Removed From Office.” New York Times. July 7, 1895. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1895/07/07/105980959.html?pageNumber=1
• Orr, Brooke Speer. “The ‘People’s Joan of Arc’: Mary Elizabeth Lease, Gendered Politics and Populist Party Politics in Gilded-Age America (American University Studies Book 14) .” Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers. 2014. Kindle edition.
• Press, Donald E. “Kansas Conflict: Populist Versus Railroader in the 1890's.” Kansas Historical Quarterlies. Autum, 1977. Vol. 43, No. 3. https://www.kancoll.org/khq/1977/77_3_dpress.htm#Ref42

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. I almost said I'm
Holly Friday. I don't know what that's about. I literally
had to pull myself back. But today we are talking

(00:23):
about Mary Elizabeth Lease, and I will tell you upfront
she is a mixed bag. In initial research on her,
what I kept finding was most biographical sketches describe her
in pretty positive terms, even though she was not universally beloved.
She was a progressive political activist. She fought big business,

(00:46):
she worked on behalf of the common man, particularly farmers,
and she believed really strongly in the importance of third
parties in the US political system. Oh that's true, and
it makes her sound pretty cool, but it leaves out
some really proba aboutic parts of her story ideology. Her
story which also plays out during the Gilded Age, when,

(01:07):
much like today, the difference between rich and poor in
the US very stark, very unbalanced, with just a handful
of people holding the vast majority of the nation's wealth.
But it also offers a glimpse into the repetitive nature
of politics and social structure in the US as a
lot of the issues she spoke about and advocated for

(01:28):
are things we were hearing about all the time in
the news today. There is also a moment in this
show where one of her detractors says something that sounds
like you heard it on a SoundBite from nineteen sixty nine.
It was took me so by surprise. So. Mary Elizabeth
Cliens was born September eleventh, eighteen fifty three, in Ridgeway, Pennsylvania.

(01:53):
Her father was Joseph P. Cleons and her mother was
Mary Elizabeth Murray Clients, and both of them were i
and had immigrated to the United States. Mary had two
older brothers who had been born in Ireland. They were
Patrick and Daniel. The family had left their home country
after Joseph had been involved in a conflict with British landowners.

(02:15):
He had lost his tenant property during the famine and
had also been instrumental in leading a revolt against the landowners,
and that had made him a wanted man. During the
US Civil War, which started when Mary was just eight,
her father, Joseph, and her two brothers served in the
Union Army Joseph was drafted, but her brothers volunteered. Both

(02:38):
of her brothers, one of whom was adopted, were killed
in action, and Joseph is said to have starved to
death while he was a prisoner of war. There is
we should note some conflicting information about all of this
because in some accounts, Joseph, Patrick and Daniel are said
to have received money to service stand ins for military survice.

(03:00):
We've talked about this practice on the show before, where
they would report in lieu of wealthy draftees who basically
paid them to say, go be me for this conflict. Mary,
after all of this had happened, believed that the war
was entirely the fault of the Democratic Party and that
it was the direct cause of her sorrow, and she
grew up with a deep disdain for pretty much all Democrats.

(03:25):
The Democrat Party at this point in history was generally
a party of wealthy, white slave owners. That's where we
are in the arc of political parties in the US.
So Mary Elizabeth attended Saint Elizabeth's Academy in Allegheny, New York,
and graduated in eighteen sixty eight at the age of fifteen.
She taught in a school in Pennsylvania for two years

(03:47):
before moving to Kansas in search of better wages for teachers.
She had already showed an interest in the labor movement
at that point, even as a team fresh to the profession.
She had tried to get a teacher's union together at
her first job, primarily because of poor pay clients. Got
a teaching appointment in a Kansas Catholic school, which was

(04:09):
Saint Anne's academy, and that was in the town of
Osage Mission in Kansas. Mary Elizabeth met a pharmacist clerk
named Charles L. Lease, and the two of them married
on January thirtieth, eighteen seventy three. According to Charles's account,
it had been Mary who pursued him. He had not
particularly been interested in courtship or marriage, and then she

(04:33):
kind of inserted herself into his life. Because Mary was
politically active before she met Charles, they had what was
probably sort of a unique marriage for the time, one
in which she and her husband were of differing political views,
although it seems that Charles was a lot less passionate
about his Democrat affiliation than Mary was about her ideologies.

(04:56):
Mary left her teaching job when she married Charles and
she became a homemaker. Although that role did not particularly
suit her, she started coming up with ways to stay
mentally stimulated, and one of them was that she started writing.
And among the works that she wrote during this time
was a play that was put on at one of
the local schools that imagined what the US might be

(05:17):
like if it had been run by women. Charles and
Mary Elizabeth moved to Kingman County, Kansas in early eighteen
seventy three. They got a plot of land through the
Homestead Act and they started a farm there. They had
borrowed money to set up the farm with everything that
it needed, but they found that things were really rough going.

(05:37):
After living a pretty comfortable life for their first several
months of marriage, they found themselves living in a dugout
house before they could get a sod house made. They
also realized that farming is very difficult work. They were
not good at it. They did not produce anything to sell.
They defaulted on their loans and the farm was repossessed.

(05:59):
Just a year after they had ventured into farming, they
had lost everything and moved to Denison, Texas. Yeah, I
get the vibe, because farming will come up again that
Mary had kind of a romantic idea of what it
was to be a farmer. Even as she became very
well acquainted with a lot of farmers, she really thought

(06:22):
that was going to be a great life. Mary was
pregnant when they made this move to Denison, and she
gave birth to their first child, Charles Henry, in late
eighteen seventy four. In Texas, Charles found work at a
pharmacy once again. This time he was working for Atchison's
drug Store, and to help make ends meet, Mary Elizabeth
worked as a washerwoman, and during this time she also

(06:44):
started studying law. Now this was not a case where
she attended law school. Rather, she apprenticed with the law
firm of Aldrich and Brown and she studied law there.
Apprentices who learned in this manner were allowed to sit
for the bar exam, and Mary is said to pinned
her law notes over her washtub, so as she did
her customer's laundry, she could also study. Attison's drugstore provided

(07:08):
the leases with more than an income for Charles. It
was owned by doctor Alexander Atchison, and he and his wife,
Sarah became a significant influence on Mary Elizabeth. Sarah Atchison
was active in the temperance movement, and she recruited Mary
Elizabeth into that cause. Mary Elizabeth joined the Women's Christian
Temperance Union and started giving speeches to promote temperance. She

(07:32):
was really good at this. Many years later, The New
York Times would write of Mary quote, she had a
resounding voice and a knack for forceful phraseology that carried
conviction and enthusiasm. So that voice and her use of
it would really define the rest of her life. Charles, meanwhile,
was trying to improve their finances by flipping lots. He

(07:55):
recognized that Dennison was growing, and so he would purchase
empty lots when they came available, and then he would
sell those lots at a markup as the town expanded.
In eighteen eighty Mary and Charles also had a second child, Evelyn,
and then a third child in eighteen eighty three. That
was their daughter, Grace. After almost a decade in Denison,

(08:16):
Mary and Charles moved back to Kingman County, Kansas. They
didn't completely leave Denison behind, though at least not financially,
because Charles continued to be active in the real estate
market there for years. They had decided to try to
farm again in Kansas. This time they went with the
route of renting a house with land instead of taking

(08:38):
on property. They didn't have a whole lot greater success
the second time than they had the first, though, although
they apparently did a little bit better in terms of
producing an actual corn crop, it still didn't make them
very much money. After they moved back to Kingman County,
the Leases had a son named Ben Herr. Biographer Brookspear

(08:59):
or theat we arised that he was named after the
character in the book, which came out in eighteen eighty.
Mary and Charles had two other babies during their time
in Dennison who did not survive their infancy. The family
moved from their failed second farm to Wichita, and over
time Mary used her growing circle in Wichita society to

(09:20):
talk to other women about things like temperance and suffrage,
and soon she was a leading voice in women's activism circles.
Mary became involved with the Knights of Labor, which had
been founded in eighteen sixty nine to advocate for reforms
in labor practices, including things like an eight hour workday,
ending child labor, and also ending the use of incarcerated

(09:42):
people as laborers as well as other reforms. Unlike a
lot of other organizations, the Knights of Labor also advocated
for women's suffrage and labor equality, and through this group,
Mary was engaged as a speaker, and that was something
that brought her in contact with a lot of other
activists of note, including Susan B. Anthony. Mary often invoked

(10:04):
her own experiences when she talked about issues like class
inequality in the ways that banking and industrial companies actively
harmed the nation's farmers with their policies. We'll talk about
another significant step and Mary's activism after we pause for
a sponsor break. In eighteen eighty eight, Mary's involvement in

(10:33):
activism kind of shifted into high gear when she attended
the Union Labor Party's state convention. She had been aligned
with the Republican Party prior to that, but the party's
stance on tariffs as good for the economy and their
lack of support for farmers had soured her opinion of
the organization. In contrast, the Union Labor Party wanted a

(10:54):
financial structure for the country that was beneficial to the
people actually doing the work, so it was very much
much in line with her ideology. Lease actually ran for
office as a member of the Union Labor Party. At
the convention in eighteen eighty eight, she was chosen as
the Union Labor candidate for superintendent of Sedgwick County Schools,
although neither she nor the other candidates that the Union

(11:16):
Labor Party put forth for various offices fared well at
all in the election. After the election, Lee stayed active
in the Union Labor Party and even edited its newspaper.
Before the end of the decade, though Mary moved to
the Farmers Alliance, which had started in Texas almost two
decades earlier. She wasn't eligible for membership in the Farmer's

(11:38):
Alliance because she was not considered to be part of
a farming family, but she was welcomed as a participant,
and her involvement really drove the membership numbers way up.
We've already said she was a compelling speaker, but she
also offered women in farm communities a glimpse at ways
that they could be politically active, and a lot of

(11:58):
that growth came from women joining the movement. The Farmer's
Alliance wasn't a political party. It was a protest group
and an agrarian movement. As Mary Leesa's involvement in activism
with the Farmer's Alliance was heating up, she gained a
very powerful enemy in Kansas Republican Senator John James Ingalls.

(12:20):
Ingles was anti suffrage, and he made statements about activists
that truly sound exactly like conservative rhetoric in the nineteen sixties.
This is what I mentioned at the top of the show.
He said of women's suffrage that it was quote that
obscene dogma whose advocates are long haired men and short
haired women, the unsext of both sexes, human capons and episscenes.

(12:45):
That sounds like he's like you hippies. Yeah, maybe without
the capons and epissenes part, it does sound like he's
talking about hippies. He and his wife made a lot
of public comments about Mary Lease being a ladylike and
insinuating that she was quite vulgar by the way. It

(13:06):
wasn't like she was out there swearing. She just was very,
very direct and very vocal, and that was not cool
for women in their eyes. Mary as a consequence, made
it her mission to publicly criticize Ingles for his stance,
and the entire Republican party along with him. The two
of them traded barbs in the press, and it made
big news every time one of them said something about

(13:29):
the other. And as this was all playing out, although
she was really busy as an activist and she was
still a full time mom, Mary was able to complete
her law studies and she passed the bar examine Kansas
in eighteen eighty nine, and at that point she and
another woman named Mary Merrill opened a law practice together.
During the eighteen ninety election cycle, Mary campaigned hard. She

(13:53):
made more than one hundred and sixty speeches. Ingles was
up for reelection, and she and the Farmer's Alliance were
focused on making sure he was defeated. In her speeches,
she talked about how he and other Republicans were ensuring
that wealth inequality was the standard, with a small group
of men controlling most of the money in Kansas. Some

(14:15):
of her rhetoric regarding Ingles would be perceived as dangerously
close to a threat of physical violence today, likening their
vote to pulling a trigger to take out the mark.
When Senator John Ingalls was ultimately defeated in the election,
which took a long time due to legal tie ups
over certification. Mary openly stated that she was the reason

(14:38):
why he had lost. This was probably true, at least
to a degree. One of Lisa's most famous speeches during
this time is often referred to by the title wall
Street owns the Country, although you will sometimes also see
it referred to by other names. And in this speech
she denounced the entire setup of the USA economy. This

(15:01):
is a really good example of the kinds of things,
she said, so I want to include a lot of it.
That speech opens with quote, this is a nation of inconsistencies.
The Puritans, fleeing from oppression, became oppressers. We fought England
for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks.
We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws, and national

(15:24):
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.

(15:45):
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 and robes, and honesty in the political
parties lie to us, and the political speakers mislead us.

(16:06):
The speech continues by noting that farmers were told they
just needed to produce a good crop, but when they
all managed to do so, they were told they had
over produced and thus their various products like corn, beef,
and eggs would be devalued. She notes that they were
told that there was too much product, but according to
the statistics, there were ten thousand kids starving in the

(16:29):
US every year. She finished with a threat quote, 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

(16:50):
not pay our debts to the loan shark companies until
the government pays its debt to us. The people are
at bay. Let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us
thus far beware. There is also another quote that's attributed
to Mary during this phase of her activism, in which
she was alleged to have told farmers in Kansas to quote,

(17:12):
raise less corn and more hell. This is something that
still gets repeated today. But she did not say it,
And when asked about the quote, Mary said that no,
she hadn't said it, but she did think it was
pretty good advice. Mary's rhetoric and her speeches roused a
lot of people, but by its very nature it also
turned off a lot of people, even in the groups

(17:34):
she's most associated with. For example, the Daily Kansas People
and other papers ran an account of the Farmer's Alliance
picnic that was held in August of eighteen ninety that
described an estimated ten thousand attendees, but also notes after
mentioning that M. W. Wilkins and Mary E. Lease were speakers,

(17:54):
quote the speeches were of intolerable length and were not
very well received. Yeah. I ran across that after I
had seen several instances of people talking about the crowds
she drew and saying like there were instances where ten
thousand people at a time came to see her speak,
and it's like, well, they were there for a picnic,

(18:17):
and they also didn't all seem to really like it.
In eighteen ninety two, the Farmers Alliance, which had realized
that their political influence would always be limited if they
couldn't actually put candidates on ballots, formed the Populist Party officially,
and Mary was of course a major player in the
Populist Party, and it was within that group that she
got the nickname the People's Joan of Arc. When James

(18:40):
Weaver ran for president as the Populist candidate in eighteen
ninety two, Mary traveled the campaign trail with him, and
Weaver was amazed at the way that Lease was received
by people on the campaign trail. He described her in
the ways you would describe like a rock star walking
into an auditorium today. In eighteen ninety three, she briefly

(19:00):
ran for senator, but papers reported in January of that
year that she had chosen to withdraw from the race.
Some accounts noted that it was quote in the interest
of harmony. Her candidacy had caused so much debate even
among the people who supported her. There were concerns that
she would be polarizing in a way that would lose

(19:22):
the Populist Party votes, or that even people who agreed
with her politics wouldn't vote for her because she was
a woman. She was also relentlessly attacked by her rivals
who suggested that no woman would have the constitution to
handle public office. That same year, Mary also had a

(19:43):
very public conflict in Kansas after she became president of
the Kansas Board of Charities, and that was an appointment
she received just after she withdrew from the Senate race.
In this role, which oversaw a mix of asylums, homes
for the poor, and special schools, she ran into problems
in working with Kansas Governor Lorenzo Llewelling, who had actually

(20:06):
been the one that appointed her to that job. The
two of them butt heads over a number of things,
including connections to the Democratic Party. Llewellyn had run as
a Populist Democrat under the Populist Democrat coalition, and Lese
hated this. She did not believe in the two parties fusing,
and she was completely comfortable being very vocal about it

(20:29):
and also saying that she simply did not want to
work with anyone who had been elected as a fusion candidate.
She also got really mad when Llewelling appointed Democrats to
the Board of Charities, not only because of their political affiliation,
but also because she thought that she was supposed to
be the only one who could make decisions on who

(20:49):
was going to be on the board. Llewelling grew so
irritated and frustrated with Mary and her furious pronouncements about
his politics that he tried to have her moved from
her role with the Board of Charities. This proved to
be more difficult than he had anticipated, though. Mary fought
him tooth and nail in his efforts to take her

(21:11):
out of her position, and things got really ugly. Llew
Welling's office even circulated rumors that she and presidential candidate
Weaver had an affair on the campaign trail, and Lese
accused Llewelling of things like having taken bribes from the railroads.
The conflict ended up in front of the Kansas Supreme Court,

(21:31):
and Mary emerged victorious. Yeah, there were a lot of
other allegations in the midst of all of that mud slinging,
but those were like the two big ones. Although Mary
had been legally vindicated at this point, her political standing
really faltered in the wake of the Court's decision. People
really started to consider that she was so staunchly dug

(21:53):
in on her views that she could never compromise or
really work with others, and because she was seen as
one of the primary voices of the Populist Party, that
meant that shifting opinions about her also turnished the party's reputation.
This in turn led to poor support for the party
in the eighteen ninety four election, and the party was

(22:14):
unable to secure even a single office that it had
run a candidate for. Although the political party tried to
recapture its momentum, it kind of sputtered out before the
century ended. Coming up, we're going to talk about Mary's book,
which was kind of a rambling pastiche of socio political
ideas and spoiler alert, it's got some problems. We'll get

(22:36):
into it after we hear from the sponsors that keep
the show going. In eighteen ninety five, Mary published a
book titled The Problem of Civilization Solved Just Pretty Bold.

(22:58):
In it, she examines the rising numbers of the lowest
income classes in the United States and she explains what
she feels are the causes of this problem. She does
so this way, quote, the tide of poperism is steadily rising,
and we are rapidly approaching the condition of Europe in
the last century. Class legislation has done much to swell

(23:21):
the list of America's poppers, but Europe's system of dumping
its poperized class upon our shores has done more. An
ever increasing swarm of dependence are with us. The cause
can be traced to class legislation and militarism, the one
the curse of our free institutions, and the other the
bane of European civilization. The remedy lies not in doling

(23:45):
out alms to humanity until the recipients of charity become
chronic beggars, but in first removing the cause of extreme
poverty by giving every toiler access to the soil, making
the ballot the key to unlock the garner where his
birthright lies. The solution she puts forward in this writing
to pull people out of poverty is offering them land

(24:08):
to work on with the potential to earn its ownership. Quote.
A cabbage garden or potato patch with the incentive of
proprietorship and compensation, will keep drunkards from tippling, dead beats
from mendacity, criminals from crime, and prove not only the
source of health, happiness, and honesty as well as a
source of revenue to the commonwealth, but a panacea also

(24:31):
for tough sinners, where soap and water, sunshine and air,
work and play will take the place of the seven sacraments.
In the forty days, fast on fish and eggs, it
is time for earnest men and women to act. Never
were needs so pressing and deeds so necessary as today.
Gigantic want and gigantic wealth step side by side. But

(24:54):
the cry of the untaught, uncomforted millions, sending forth like
tortured beasts, and inner articulate cry from the depths of
their destitution and debasement, is unheeded, if not unheard. So
if all of this rhetoric sounds a little bit sketchy
to you, rest assured it gets a whole lot worse.
And it really gets outright racist and white supremacist. And

(25:18):
this is a racism that is completely slathered in white saviorism.
She notes that one of the things that is damaging
people is over population. So the population, by which she
really means the white population, should spread out by taking
land from other people. Note as we go into this
that this quote has some very outdated language. Quote the

(25:39):
homeless condition of the highly enlightened Caucasian and the debase
degradation of the Negro and Oriental calls in thundertones to
Heaven for a great readjustment of the social condition of mankind.
Europe and America are on the eye of a dire revolution,
before which all modern civilization may go down to ruin

(26:01):
in blood and fire, or perish more slowly beneath the
iron hoofs of Russian despotism. Between the dreaded modern goth
of Russian supremacy or Universal Empire, and the vandalism of
the British financial system which threatens to enslave the industrial world,
our civilization cannot long survive. The only hope of averting

(26:24):
this universal reign of terror lies in inaugurating the most
stupendous migration of races the world has ever known, and
thereby relieve the congested centers of the world's population of
half their inhabitants and provide free homes for half of mankind.
This can be done by colonizing the tropics in America

(26:45):
and Africa with fifty million white families as planters on
estates of two hundred acres each with three families of
Negroes or Orientals as tillers of the soil. Through all
the vicissitudes of time, the Caucasian has arisen to the
moral and intellectual supremacy of the world. Until now this

(27:06):
favored race is fitted with the stewardship of the earth
and emancipation from manual labor. The era has arrived when
the Caucasian must either sync to barbarism or become the
planter by occupancy of the tropics and the professional man
and business manager for the inferior races, the Oriental and
Negro are in a pitiable condition of ignorance, destitution, and

(27:30):
misery from a lack of proper encouragement and a just
and intelligent supervision of their efforts. Cannot the resources and
genius of Christendom rescue civilizations from its perils by tropical colonization.
She says a lot more. Of course, She mentions, for example,
how dangerous it would be if Russia were to diminish

(27:53):
Britain's power in India, even though she doesn't love Britain,
because that would undermine the art of Western supremacy. In
eighteen ninety six, Lese moved to New York City, where
she took on a number of roles that gave her
an expanded platform. She started writing for the New York
World and became an editor for the National Encyclopedia of

(28:13):
American Biography. Mary's advocacy had made her famous, and her
arrival in the city was reported in the New York
Times in an article that opened with quote, we noticed
that missus Mary Elizabeth Lease has arrived in this city,
and that she is to address public audiences on behalf
of mister Brian and the fifty three cent silver standard.

(28:35):
That Brian was William Jennings Brian, and while Mary certainly
didn't want to join the Democratic Party, she did support
Brian in regards to his stance on establishing a silver standard,
as famously stated in his Cross of Gold speech at
the Democratic Convention in eighteen ninety six. In it, Brian

(28:55):
concluded his argument for bimetallism with quote, having behind us
the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported
by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere,
we will answer their demand for a gold standard by
saying to them, you shall not press down upon the
brow of labor, this crown of thorns. You shall not

(29:17):
crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. So that article
in the New York Times that mentioned that they had
noticed she had arrived in New York was not complimentary
of Mary. It featured a quote that she gave to
the press, which was quote, we out West think it's
time for a financial system of our own without the
interference of European money lenders. Some people in the West

(29:41):
think the East is acting very selfishly. It is the
debtor party that is going to elect Brian and Sewell.
But the paper had dug up information on that mortgage
that Mary and Charles had defaulted on in Kansas, having
spoken with someone at the Jervis Conklin Mortgage trust company,
and the Times We're referred to this mortgage in question

(30:01):
as quote, a matter of legitimate public interest, and it
insinuates that Mary and other Populists were basically trying to
cheat the system by never paying back money they borrowed
and then claiming that this was because the odds had
been stacked against them. This is an example of how
the overall conflict regarding the Populist Party was playing out

(30:22):
on the public stage. Mary and other members of the
party were lobbying for legislation against predatory lending practices, while
their opponents responded that farmers had basically just been bad
at business. When Mary moved to New York with the
children in eighteen ninety six, she had done so without Charles,
and the couple started living separately. At that point. The

(30:45):
press had hinted for a long time that their marriage
must be trouble. There were insinuations the woman like Mary
couldn't be a good wife, along with other barbs at
both her and Charles. There had also been a distance
growing between them, some of which was just a matter
of logistics. Mary was in demand as an orator and
so she wasn't home a lot of the time, and

(31:07):
it does seem that her activism made Charles uncomfortable over time,
especially as her fame grew and she was often embroiled
in very public feuds with prominent people. The two of
them seemed to have maintained a pretty cordial relationship, although
they did divorce in nineteen oh two. In nineteen twelve,

(31:28):
Mary joined the Bull Moose Party, and she spoke at
rallies supporting Teddy Roosevelt's campaign that year. By this time,
she had nothing positive to say about the Democratic or
Republican parties. She called the Democrats a political putrescence, and
she referred to the Republican Party as quote the slave
of the money power. But she felt like Roosevelt aligned

(31:48):
with what she had advocated for as a populist, and
she even stated to the press that quote Rooseveltism spells populism.
But she didn't stick with Roosevelt, and by nineteen fourteen
she was critical of the party, claiming that it had
stolen its entire platform from the populists, and she claimed
that she had not been paid her speaker's fees by

(32:10):
Roosevelt's campaign. So she made a switch to supporting Woodrow Wilson,
but that didn't last, largely because he was really not
a supporter of women's suffrage. As the nineteen teens wound down,
so did Mary. She retired from political life by the
end of the decade, although she was still involved in
various reform movements, especially in support of women's interests. She

(32:34):
lived in Brooklyn until nineteen thirty, when she moved to
Long Eddy, New York, on the Delaware River. Mary Elizabeth
Lease died on October twenty ninth, nineteen thirty three, in Callicoon,
New York from complications of a leg infection. She was
eighty years old at the time, and as her obituary
in The New York Times noted, quote, the populists were

(32:56):
fighting for direct election of senators, postal savings bank, government
control of railways, federal supervision of corporations, the initiative and referendum,
the income tax, woman suffrage, prohibition, and free silver. She
lived to see every one of those planks except the last,

(33:16):
put into effect, to varying degrees of success. Right. That
is what is kind of a very abbreviated version of
Mary Elizabeth Lease, because she was so publicly active that
there is a lot of documentation of not only just
what she said, but how people perceived her, which was
not always great. We can talk about some of that

(33:38):
on behind the scenes, as well as that really problematic
yearn for colonization. But before that we'll have adorable kiddie talk.
This is from our listener Kelsey and it's a short email,
but it is adorable. Kelsey Rights just dropping a line

(33:59):
to issue a Mary Festive season and grace your inbox
with an image of my cat assistant Jack. He was
desperate to help with baking, but had to settle for
early morning coloring and podcast listening with gratitude for all
you do to educate and entertain us huddled masses and
bleak midwinter and all through the year. Jack is an
adorable orange creamsicle baby. Oh his little feats. He's so cute.

(34:21):
He's so cute. And I also want to give a
shout out to Catherine who shared her adorable orange tabby
on Twitter. And it's pretty insistent that he is not
one of the smart ones. But he's adorable and he
looks sweet as pie. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

(34:42):
If you would like to write to us, you could
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(35:02):
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