A woman stands on a wooden platform at a county fairground in Kansas, her voice carrying over the heads of farmers in dusty coats. The crowd leans in. She does not stop for the heat.
It is 1890.
She does not just address a handful of neighbors. She speaks across the plains, riding the rails from town to town through Kansas and beyond, giving what one tally counted as more than a hundred and sixty speeches in a single season.
She does not just complain about hard times. She names the machinery of them, pointing at eastern banks, at railroad freight rates, at the mortgage that swallowed a farm and left a family with nothing but the debt.
She does not just speak for the farmer. She joins a movement, throwing her energy into the People’s Party as it rose in the early 1890s, carrying the grievances of the rural West into a national fight over money, land, and power.
She does not just want to be heard. She wants the whole arrangement remade, pressing for the government to answer to the people who worked the soil rather than the creditors who held their notes.
Her Spark of Liberty was a voice raised for the people who fed the nation.
That voice was her instrument and her weapon. She had no fortune, no office, and no vote in most of the elections she influenced, since women in Kansas could not yet cast a ballot in general contests. What she had was the ability to stand before a tired, angry crowd and put their condition into plain words. She turned the labor of ordinary hands, the plowing and the harvesting and the mortgaging, into a political argument that reached the floor of Congress and the front pages of eastern newspapers.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
She was born in Pennsylvania in 1850, the daughter of Irish immigrants. Her father served in the Union Army and died during the Civil War, reportedly in a Confederate prison at Andersonville, an account long repeated in sketches of her life. She trained as a teacher and moved west, settling in Kansas, where she married and raised a family while the household struggled against the same debts that gripped their neighbors.
She read law while keeping house, according to accounts of her early years, and in 1885 she was admitted to the Kansas bar. She wrote and lectured on temperance, on Irish independence, and on the causes of the farm districts before she became a fixture of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party. During the campaigns of 1890 she emerged as one of the most sought-after speakers on the Populist circuit.
She is often credited with the phrase urging farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” though she is said to have denied coining it, and its origin remains disputed. What is documented is that she drew large crowds and sharp attacks from opponents who mocked her name and her sex in the press. In 1892 she seconded a nomination at the People’s Party national convention, and after Populist gains in Kansas she was appointed to the state board of charities, a post she held amid public quarrels with the governor.
Her politics shifted over the following decades. She broke with allies, moved to New York, and wrote and lectured on a range of causes including women’s suffrage and public health. She published a book in 1895 laying out her vision of national reform. In her later years she worked as a writer and remained active in reform circles until her death in 1933.
Her name was Mary E. Lease.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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