Sarah Elizabeth Van De Vort Emery

• Sarah Van de Vort Emery
• Born: May 12, 1838
• Died: October 10, 1895

Greenback and Populist leader, was born in Phelps, near Geneva, New York, the seventh among nine children of Thomas Van De Vort and Ellen (Horton) Van De Vort. Her father, who operated a brandy and peppermint distillery, was a devout Universalist and a well-educated man interested in many of the reform movements of the Jacksonian period. In later years his daughter credited her father’s example and the Universalist philosophy of love with arousing her concern for the oppressed of the world.

While still attending local schools, Sarah Van De Vort worked for the Phelps temperance union and several charitable organizations. At the age of eighteen she began teaching in the district school and for several years alternated teaching with study at the Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. In 1866 she moved to Midland, Michigan, where she met and married a fellow teacher, Wesley Emery. It appears that the couple remained childless. They settled in Lansing, the state capital, and soon became active in reform politics.

While attending the 1880 Michigan state convention of the Greenback party, Sarah Emery later said, she decided that the “little band ... [was] surely ... the people chosen by God to perpetuate the principles established by our fathers, and, though despised and ridiculed, my lot must be cast with them.” In 1881 she was herself a delegate to the state convention—the first woman chosen. In 1884, having established a reputation throughout the Midwest as an effective speaker for the Greenback cause (which sought to relieve the problem of farmers’ debts, incurred during the 1873 depression, by inducing Congress to issue more money and thereby produce an inflation that would raise farm prices), she was part of the Michigan delegation to the Greenback Labor party’s national convention. The latter group comprised Greenback party members and urban labor associations.

Like many other reformers who subsequently became Populists, Sarah Emery in the 1880s was an active member, successively or simultaneously, of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Woman Suffrage Association, the Knights of Labor, the Union Labor party, and the Farmers’ Alliance. She also continued her church work, serving for years as Sunday school superintendent of the Lansing Universalist Church, and apparently made some sound investments, since she was able to leave the church a valuable piece of downtown property at her death.

As a representative of the Woman Suffrage Association, Emery was successful in persuading the Prohibitionist (but not the Democratic) state convention of 1886 to adopt a woman suffrage plank. In 1891 she was one of the suffrage leaders who argued, on behalf of a municipal suffrage bill before a state legislative committee, that depriving women of the right to vote was subjecting them to taxation without representation.

After the demise of the Greenback party, Emery retained her passionate interest in the currency question, and in 1888 she published her most notable contribution to the Farmers’ Alliance cause, Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People. The book traced the social and economic consequences of seven acts of Congress, including the 1862 law making greenbacks legal tender (not redeemable in gold) for everything but import duties and interest on the public debt. This created a demand for gold and drove up its price. Seven Financial Conspiracies... continued through later provisions for the resumption of specie payments to redeem government bonds, as well as other measures, and included the 1873 demonetization of silver. Emery showed clearly how each of these acts had benefited the “money power” that supported them, but she was less successful in demonstrating that they resulted from conspiracies between American and British financial interests. The book was widely distributed by the Farmers’ Alliance, reportedly selling about 400,000 copies, and made Sarah Emery’s name known in reform circles throughout the country.

In discussing the demonetization of silver, Emery revealed something of the motives that drove her and many more domestic women to the alliance cause. To this “crime of’73,” as she characterized the demonetization, she attributed not only the panic of 1873 itself with its bankruptcies but also the train of human disasters that followed— “murder, insanity, drunkeness, suicide, divorce and all forms of immorality and crime have increased from that day to this in the most appalling ratio.”

Many alliance women had received their first experience in cooperative endeavor through the Granger movement (which promoted state legislation for protecting farmers against economic abuses, also offering educational and social activities). These women often referred to their work as the home crusade, because they believed that preventing the American home from being destroyed by financial depression or chicanery was a necessary prelude to the achievement of both woman suffrage and prohibition. According to a contemporary authority on the alliance movement, Emery—a very tall and proportionately large woman, soft-voiced and sweet-faced —was the “placid, lovable, loving mother of all the other women in this great reform.”

When the People’s party (the forerunner of the Populist party) was formed in 1891—to represent agrarian interests and to advocate free silver coinage as well as government control of monopolies—Emery became associate editor of its national magazine, New Forum. She lectured in behalf of the party’s causes from the Midwest to the Pacific. In 1892 she was a delegate to the St. Louis Conference of Industrial Organizations, which rallied labor and other reform groups to the Populist banner. That same year she published a powerful antimonopoly work, Imperialism in America, Its Rise and Fall; the book proved valuable for the Populists’ 1894 campaigns.

Just at that time illness forced Emery to retire. She died in Lansing from cancer at the age of fifty-seven, survived by her husband and two brothers. A Lansing memorial service was held, and she was buried in the family plot at Phelps, New York.

Biographical sources include A. Diggs, “Women in the Alliance Movement,” Arena, July 1892; E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 3 and 4 (1887-1902). For a summary and critique of Seven Financial Conspiracies ..., see W. D. P. Bliss, ed., The Encyclopedia of Social Reform (1897). See also Notable American Women (1971) and L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976).