Annie Leporte Diggs

• Annie Diggs
• Born: February 22, 1848
• Died: September 7, 1916

Populist orator, political leader, and journalist, was born in London, Ontario, the daughter of Cornelius LePorte, a French-Canadian lawyer, and Ann Maria (Thomas) LePorte, an American, whose family could be traced back to the Revolution. In 1855 the family emigrated to New Jersey, where Annie was tutored by a governess, then attended public and convent schools. She worked briefly as a journalist in Washington, D.C., before moving to Kansas in 1873, where she obtained employment demonstrating pianos in a Lawrence music store. Annie LePorte quickly attracted a suitor, Alvin S. Diggs, a postal employee, to whom she was married on September 21, 1873. The couple had three children: Fred, Mabel, and Esther.

In 1877, in apparent response to widespread economic dislocation and a belief that social changes were required, Diggs plunged into a broad spectrum of reform activities. Over the next few years she joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she campaigned for woman suffrage, she occasionally worked as a free-lance journalist, and she urged the founding of cooperative colonies and the cultivation of silkworms. An advocate of liberal religion, she became a lay preacher in the Unitarian church and in August 1881 participated in the founding of the Kansas Liberal Union, a society of freethinkers. That winter she was elected vice president of the Free Religious Association at its Boston convention, which she attended. After a brief stay in the East to investigate social conditions, she returned to Kansas where she and her husband began publishing the short-lived Kansas Liberal.

Drought came to Kansas in 1887 and it brought with it a decade of hard times. Lack of rainfall, exorbitant interest rates on the heavily mortgaged farms, and high transportation costs brought ruin. Between 1889 and 1893, eastern banks and loan companies foreclosed on 11,122 Kansas farm mortgages. The newly revitalized Farmers’ Alliance sought relief in political action; in 1890 the Kansas (Populist) People’s party was formed. Devoting her journalistic talents to the farmers’ cause, Diggs wrote an Alliance column for The Lawrence Journal, then in March 1890 became associate editor of the Aliance Advocate, a reform weekly.

Diggs stumped the state for the Populists in the summer of 1890. A small, slender spokeswoman with a soft voice and well-reasoned argument, she quickly became a political force as an organizer and orator within the national movement. At regional meetings she lobbied for the formation of a third party on the national level and chaired the delegation from the District of Columbia at the Omaha convention of 1892, in which the northern and southern Farmers’ Alliances agreed to overlook sectional differences and enter national politics as the People’s party. Four years later, as a member of the national committee at the fateful 1896 Populist convention, she accepted the principle of fusion with the Democratic party, which had co-opted the Populist platform. She stuck with her splintered party after the defeat of William Jennings Bryan —the nominee of both the Democrats and the Populists—and by 1900 was known as the boss of the Kansas fusion forces. From 1898 to 1902, she held the patronage post of state librarian.

But populism could not contain her energies. In the 1890s she served first as vice president, then as president of the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association (1899); on the national level, she was a member of the organization committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1895). During 1899 she wrote a poem, “Little Brown Brother,” against American imperialism in the Philippines. In 1902 she went to England as a representative of the Western Cooperative Association of Kansas City, and for the next two years she remained abroad, traveling and writing. In 1905 she was named president of the Kansas Woman’s Press Association. Moving to New York City in 1906, she promoted civic reform and wrote two books: The Story of Jerry Simpson, a biography of the Kansas Populist (1908), and Bedrock (1912), a polemic advocating employment agencies for the young.

Diggs died at sixty-eight of muscular atrophy in Detroit, where she had moved in 1912 to live with her son. (Her invalid husband survived her.) She was buried in Lawrence, Kansas.

Diggs had a broad concept of social reform that envisioned a people’s republic of farmers and workers allied to govern the country in their own interests. After the collapse of populism she considered herself a socialist. She was more of a pragmatist than a Utopian, however, and correctly considered her labors as well invested in a seminal political movement that would achieve its essential goals under other banners.

In addition to her aforementioned two books, Diggs published many articles in such magazines as The Arena and Cosmopolitan. Some biographical material can be found at the Kansas State Historical Society at Topeka. She is briefly mentioned in W. J. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists (1963); O. G. Clanton, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969); and L. Goodwyn, Democratic Promise (1976). See also Notable American Women (1971) and Who Was Who in America (1942). An obituary appeared in The Detroit Free Press, September 9, 1916.