Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease

• Mary Elizabeth Clyens Lease
• Born: September 11, 1850
• Died: October 29, 1933

Populist orator, born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, was the daughter of Joseph P. Clyens, an Irish patriot who brought his family to the United States to escape British authority in the late 1840s, and Mary Elizabeth (Murray) Clyens, claimed by her daughter to be the niece of the bishop of Dublin and a well-educated woman who had some knowledge of Greek, Latin, and French. Mary, the third of four daughters and the sixth of ten children, was raised on a farm in Ceres Township, McKean County, Pennsylvania. She attended parochial schools and managed to graduate from St. Elizabeth’s Academy in Allegany, New York, in 1865, at the age of fifteen in spite of the family’s poverty following her father’s death in the Confederate Andersonville prison during the Civil War.

She worked as a schoolteacher in the East for two years, before emigrating to Kansas in search of higher wages. Settling at Osage Mission, in Neosho County, Kansas, she found employment at St. Anne’s Academy, a Catholic girls’ boarding school, where she taught until she married Charles L. Lease, a local druggist, in January 1873.

Standard historical accounts assert that the Leases then homesteaded in Kingman County, Kansas, living first in a dugout and then in a sod house, but Mary Lease never claimed to have done so, and the documentary record indicates that the Leases moved from Osage Mission to Denison, Texas, in the summer of 1874, in spite of the fact that Charles Lease had been elected mayor of Osage Mission in the spring. Perhaps the move was financially motivated, as he was trying to find a likely spot to open his own pharmacy. Three of their four children were born in Denison: Charles Henry (born in 1874), Evelyn Louise (1880), and Grace Lena (1883); during the next decade she bore two more children, both of whom died in infancy. Charles Lease went to work in the local pharmacy and Mary Lease began attending Woman’s Christian Temperance Union meetings, at which she made her first speeches. She was not entirely unaware of her own oratorical ability. At Osage Mission she had given a dramatically effective and well-received performance in a play, “The Coming Woman or the Spirit of ‘76,” which depicted what the United States would be like if it were run by women rather than men.

But the early 1880s were boom years in Kansas, and in 1883 the Leases returned to live in the small town of Kingman, establishing a land claim outside of town that they neither lived on nor farmed. In 1884 they moved to Wichita, where their last child, Ben Hur, was born in 1885.

Mary Elizabeth Lease thrived under the stimulation of an urban environment. She organized a women’s club, the Hypatia Society, which is still in existence; The Wichita Eagle published a few of her poems; and for a short time she served as president of the Wichita Equal Suffrage Association. She studied law at home and received a certificate admitting her to the Wichita bar in April 1889. In 1885 she made a statewide speaking tour for the Irish National League. She helped to form the Union Labor party, heir to the soft-money doctrines of the earlier Greenback party; she also joined the Knights of Labor and the Kansas Farmers’ Alliance.

A speech in support of woman suffrage to a state convention of the Union Labor party enhanced her reputation as a politician, and she made a speaking tour of the state during the campaign. After the election of 1888 she took over the party paper for six months, changing the name from the Union Labor Press to the Wichita Independent. The Union Laborites won only twelve percent of the Kansas vote that year, but the party’s drive was a harbinger of the deep discontent that was spreading across the state.

The period of abundant rainfall that had spurred immigration into western Kansas ended abruptly in 1887. Farmers who had heavily mortgaged their land to finance agricultural expansion—at interest rates as high as eighteen percent—faced staggering debts. To drought and indebtedness were added other problems: high freight rates for shipping produce east, monopolistic practices by grain-elevator operators and other middlemen, a long-term deflation in currency that led to falling agricultural prices over a thirty-year period, and a political system that ignored the farmers’ plight.

In increasing numbers farmers from the Plains and the South turned to politics as the only hope for finding relief from their economic distress. As mortgage foreclosures increased and wagons painted with the slogan “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted” rattled eastward, an anger rose that produced an evangelical political crusade. Kansas farmers organized the state People’s party, soon to be known as the Populists, in 1889, and ran candidates in the state elections of the following year. In that campaign Mary Elizabeth Lease made over 160 speeches, her fame growing as she crisscrossed the state in the farmers’ cause.

At the Populist camp meetings that dotted the plains of Kansas in the early 1890s, Lease rained fire and brimstone on her opposition. Kansas editors retaliated in kind, calling her, among other things, “the Kansas Pythoness” and “a miserable caricature upon womanhood... a petticoated smut-mill… a lantern-jawed, eagle-eyed nightmare.” Republican editor William Allen White complained that “she had no sex appeal—none!” yet he admired her voice which, he called “hypnotic.” When she rose to speak—nearly six feet tall, slender and dignified in her perpetual black Victorian gown—the angry-farmers of the People’s party idolized her. “Our Queen Mary,” they called her.

“She was, actually, fundamentally an actress and she became the subject that she was talking about,” her biographer Dorothy Rose Blumberg has said of her, “so that when she spoke of the sorrows and tragedies of the farmers, there was a total empathy between herself and her audience. She was telling them what they knew, but she told it in such a fascinating manner that it lifted the whole gathering to tremendous heights of enthusiasm.” Her legendary challenge to “raise less corn and more hell”—whether she actually said it, or not—became the ultimate political slogan of their movement. Journalists nicknamed her “Mary Yellin,” which was transformed into Mary Ellen, a misappellation still repeated by American historians.

As the Populist tide rose, Lease became a national leader of the People’s party. She made speaking tours of the Far West and South and addressed the first Washington Convention of the National Council of Women on the subject of women in the Farmers’ Alliance movement. She participated in the February 1892 St. Louis convention that formally launched the national People’s party; at its presidential nominating convention held in Omaha that summer, she seconded the nomination of James B. Weaver for president.

In the fall of 1892 she stumped the country’s Populist strongholds with Weaver; enthusiastic crowds nearly overwhelmed them on the West Coast and in the Mountain States, but in Macon, Georgia, a Democratic crowd pelted her with eggs. Weaver received only twenty-two electoral votes, but the Populists took the Kansas state-house, and Lease was named president of the State Board of Charities, the first woman to hold that post. She was soon feuding with Governor Lorenzo D. Lewelling, who wanted her to appoint some Democrats allied with the Populists to the jobs at her disposal. Lease had an almost pathological hatred of Democrats and was incapable of cooperating with them. She blamed them for the Civil War and for the deaths of her father and two older brothers. Lewelling removed her from the Board of Charities in December 1893, an action later ruled illegal by the state supreme court.

The quarrel with Lewelling alienated Lease from the party leadership, but her popularity with the rank and file guaranteed her a place as a delegate at the presidential nominating convention in 1896. At this St. Louis meeting, she stood in the dark after the lights had mysteriously failed and railed against fusion with the Democratic party. But fusion forces prevailed and the Populists named William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate, as their nominee. Lease even spoke for him in the presidential campaign, referring to him as “God’s Great Messiah.”

After the campaign of 1896, Lease moved to New York City, where she spoke on the lecture circuit and became a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World. By 1900 she supported the Republican party and imperialism. In 1895 she had published a book called The Problem of Civilization Solved, which was a strange amalgam of Marxism and racism. Erratic in her opinions and loyalties, she considered herself a Theosophist in 1897 and a Christian Scientist a few years later. She joined the Socialist Labor party in 1899, lecturing for the party for six months; in the same year she participated in a spiritualist debate.

Her move to the East ended her marriage to Charles Lease, who did not seem to resent her activities and did an unusual amount of parenting for a man of his era. Their children accompanied her to New York City, and in spite of financial difficulties she put them through college.

As she grew older, Lease restricted her activities to a small law practice for low-income residents on New York’s Lower East Side and to giving adult education lectures for the city’s board of education. Her lecture topics included the five-year plan in the newly established Soviet Union, federal price fixing in the United States, and Einstein’s theories. She also claimed to have served as president of the National Society for Birth Control, but there is no documentary record of her having done so. After her death at eighty-three, caused by a leg infection and chronic nephritis, she was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, Flushing, Long Island.

Lease’s supreme talent was as an agitator and publicist, rather than as an original thinker. As a politician she was more of a liability than an asset—at least to the party in Kansas, largely because of her feud with the Lewelling administration. She was seldom capable of political compromise. She was extremely competitive and made enemies easily; whenever she joined an organization she immediately became the head of it. When she was no longer the head, she quit. Some of the antagonism she aroused resulted from the fact that many Kansas men thought that women’s place was in the home and that she was violating nature by undertaking traditionally masculine pursuits. She herself had a strong sense of equality as a human being—while living in Kingman she wrote a series of newspaper articles entitled “Are Women Inferior to Men?,” arguing that the human mind is universal and has no sexual identity. She said of herself, “I had one talent and I used it to the best of my ability.” Her value was as a political symbol of a great crusade that failed.

The major source of information for this article was an interview on February 8, 1981, with Dorothy Rose Blumberg, who has been engaged in intensive research on Lease since 1968 and who is writing Lease’s biography. A major published source of biographical information is Blumberg’s “Mary Elizabeth Lease, Populist Orator: A Profile,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains, Spring 1978. The Kansas State Historical Society at Topeka has a collection of Lease memorabilia. Other significant sources include W. A. White, Autobiography (1946); W. J. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists (1963); O. G. Clanton, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969); O. G. Clanton, “Intolerant Populist? The Disaffection of Mary Elizabeth Lease.” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Summer 1968; L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (1976); Who Was Who in America, (1942); Notable American Women (1971). The only published full-length biography of Lease is a juvenile, R. Stiller, Queen of Populists: The Story of Mary Elizabeth Lease (1970). See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, October 30-31, 1933.