Mary Elizabeth Lease
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Mary Elizabeth Lease (1850-1933) was an American lecturer, writer, and political activist. Most of her political work was done toward the cause of temperance. She was born to Irish immigrants Joseph P. and Mary Elizabeth (Murray) Clyens, in Ridgway, Pennsylvania. In 1895, she wrote The Problem of Civilization Solved, and in 1896, she moved to New York City where she edited the democratic newspaper, World. In addition, she worked as an editor for the National Encyclopedia of American Biography. Mary Elizabeth Lease was also known as Mary Ellen Lease. She was called "Queen Mary" (after the Queen Mary) by her supporters and "Mary Yellin" by her enemies. Lease died in Callicoon, New York.
At the age of twenty she moved to Kansas to teach school in Osage Mission (St. Paul, Kansas), and three years later she married Charles L. Lease, a local pharmacist. After unsuccessful farming ventures in Kingman County and in Texas, the Leases and their four children moved to Wichita, where she took a leading role in civic and social activities.
Lease was also involved in the Populist Party, gathering support for their cause. She famously advised Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." She believed that large business would make the people of America slaves, saying, "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."
By 1890, her involvement in the growing revolt of Kansas farmers against high mortgage interest and railroad rates had placed her in the forefront of the People's (Populist) Party, and she stomped all over Kansas as well as the Far West and the South for the cause. She was a powerful and emotional speaker; Emporia editor William G. Allen White, who did not share her political views, wrote on one occasion that "she could recite the multiplication table and set a crowd hooting and harrahing at her will." She made more than 160 speeches.
More an agitator than a practical politician, by 1896 Lease had become alienated from the Populist Party, and thereafter she turned to personal interests. She divorced her husband in 1902 and spent the rest of her life with one or another of her children in the East until her death in 1933.
Some claim Mary Elizabeth Lease to have been the model for Dorothy in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
