Reading the American Past: Printed Page 79

DOCUMENT 20–1

Mary Elizabeth Lease Reports on Women in the Farmers' Alliance

Hard times in agriculture pushed farmers in the Midwest and South to organize a wide variety of local reform movements. Selling their crops in distant markets for prices that often seemed to be rigged against them, shipping their produce on railroads that manipulated rates to their disadvantage, borrowing money for land and supplies at what seemed extravagant interest rates — these and other common experiences bred a sense of helplessness that many farmers came to believe could only be overcome by cooperation and organizations such as the Farmers' Alliance, the Populists, and the Knights of Labor. Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Kansas schoolteacher who had lived for years on a hardscrabble farm, became a popular and charismatic speaker who encouraged farmers — and especially farm women — to come together in the Farmers' Alliance. As the following excerpt from Lease's speech to the National Council of Women illustrates, Lease believed farm women could help change America for the better.

Women in the Farmers' Alliance, 1891

It must be evident to every intelligent man and woman to-day that there is something radically wrong in the affairs of the Nation. It must be evident to every thinking man and woman that we have reached a crisis in the affairs of this Nation which is of more importance, more fraught with mighty consequence for the weal or woe for the American people, than was even that crisis that engaged the attention of the people of this Nation in the dark and bleeding years of civil war. We are confronted to-day by a crisis in which every instinct of common duty, of justice, and of patriotism demands prompt and decisive action.

Twelve years ago ... [a United States senator] said, “There is no use in any longer trying to disguise the truth. We are on the verge of an impending revolution. Old issues are dead, and the people are arraying themselves on one side or the other of a portentous conflict. On one side is capital, strongly intrenched and privileged, grown arrogant by repeated triumphs and repeated success; on the other side is labor demanding employment, labor starving and sullen in cities, resolutely determined to endure no further [the status quo] under which the rich are growing richer and the poor are growing poorer, a system that gives a [capitalist such as Jay] Gould or a Vanderbilt possession of wealth beyond even the dreams of avarice and condemns the poor to a poverty from which there is no refuge but starvation and the grave.” ...

What means it that [another United States senator] ... stood in the Senate a few days ago and bade this Nation beware of further ignoring the will of the people, and prophesied dark, disastrous days to come if the will of the people be longer defied? What means it that that grand old Governor of Iowa stood before the Republican Club of New York and prophesied that a storm would break over this country that would bring ruin, devastation, and bloodshed? What means it that John J. Ingalls [Republican Senator from Kansas], whom the women of Kansas had the pleasure of defeating (applause), — what means it that in his death-bed speech a few days ago he bade the House, the Senate, and the Executive beware of further ignoring and defying the will of the people, and told us most emphatically and plainly that there were two great dangers that menaced the safety, ay, threatened the very existence of this Republic to-day — a corrupt ballot and the tyranny of combined, incorporated, conscienceless capital? ...

Senator [William Morris] Stewart [of Nevada] tells us in a recent speech ... that every act of legislation since the close of the [Civil] war has been in pursuance of the policy of the combined bondholders to enslave the American people and contract the currency of this Nation, and [former president James A.] Garfield and [former Senator John Alexander] Logan [of Illinois] unite in telling us that whoever controls the money of the Nation controls the commerce, the industrial interest of the Nation.

My friends, the lash of the slave-driver's whip is no longer heard in this country, but the lash of necessity is driving thousands to unrequited toil. Conscienceless capital is robbing manhood of its prime, mothers of their motherhood, and sorrowful children of sunshine and joy. Look around you. What do you behold to-day? A land which less than four hundred years ago we received fresh from the hands of God, a continent of unparalleled fertility, magnificent in golden promise for all humanity, a land where we have all diversity of soil and clime, a land where the bounteous hand of Nature has given a wonderful heritage to each and every one of her children; and yet, in this land of plenty and unlimited resources, the cry of humanity is going up from every corner of this Nation. The plaint of motherhood, the moans of starving children! Capital buys and sells to-day the very heart-beats of humanity. ...

[T]o-day the American toiler in his bitterness and wrath asks us, Which is the worst, the black slavery that has gone or the white slavery that has come? Has the American laborer nothing to show for twenty years of toil? Oh yes: he can point to the rivers bridged, to the transcontinental railway connecting ocean with ocean, to wonderful churches and cathedrals; he can point to the most wonderful system of agriculture that ever brought joy to a hungry world; he can jostle his rags against the silken garments his toil has secured; he can walk shelterless and sad by the side of the home he has helped to build; he can wipe the sweat from his weary face and reflect that the twenty thousand of American millionaires who own one billion five hundred million dollars, gathered from the toils and tears of sixty-four millions of American people, have it in their power to name their Governors and our legislators and representatives and Congressmen — and they do name them, and they have named them for the last quarter of a century, and they have it in their power to fix the price of labor and to fix the price for every ton of coal.

For one hundred years the speculators, the land-robbers, the pirates and gamblers of this Nation have knocked unceasingly at the door of Congress, and Congress has in every case acceded to their demands. They have gotten money out of the public treasury amounting to tens of millions of dollars. They were permitted to tap the veins of trade and commerce and withdraw from the body politic the circulating medium which is the life-blood of the Nation, and our law-makers term these [acts] constitutional, and when for the first time in one hundred years farmers come timidly knocking at the doors of Congress asking for relief, a howl went up. ...

We are living in a grand and wonderful time; we are living in a day when old ideas, old traditions, and old customs have broken loose from their moorings ... ; we are living in a time when the gray old world begins to dimly comprehend that there is no difference between the brain of an intelligent woman and the brain of an intelligent man; ... we are living in a day and age when the women of industrial societies and the [Farmers'] Alliance women have become a mighty factor in the politics of this nation; when the mighty dynamite of thought is stirring the hearts of men of this world from centre to circumference, and this thought is crystallizing into action.

Organization is becoming the key-note among the farmers of this nation. The farmers, slow to think and slow to act, are to-day thinking for themselves; they have been compelled to think. They have been awakened by the load of oppressive taxation, unjust tariffs, and they find themselves standing to-day on the very brink of their own despair. In all the years which have flown, the farmers, in their unswerving loyalty and patriotism to [political] party, have been too mentally lazy to do their own thinking. They have been allowing the unprincipled demagogues of both the old political parties to do their thinking for them, and they have voted poverty and degradation not only upon themselves but upon their wives and their children.

But to-day these farmers, thank God! are thinking, and also their mothers, wives, and daughters, “their sisters, their cousins, and their aunts.” We find, as a result of this mighty thought in the hearts of the people, a movement of the great common people of this nation, and that is the protest of the patient burden-bearers of the world against political superstition, a movement which is an echo of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a movement that means revolution, — not a revolution such as deluged the streets of Paris with blood in 1793 [during the French Revolution], but the revolution of brain and ballots that shall shake this continent and move humanity everywhere. The voice which is coming up to-day from the mystic cords of the American heart is the same voice which Lincoln heard blending with the guns of Fort Sumter. It is breaking into a clarion cry which will be heard round the world, and thrones will fall and crowns will crumble, and the divine right of kings and capital will fade away like the mists of the morning when the angel of liberty shall kindle the fires of justice in the hearts of men.

An injury to one is the concern of all. Founded upon the eternal principles of truth and right, with special privileges to none, the farmers' movement could not well exclude the patient burden-bearers of the home. And so we find them opening wide the doors of this new and mighty movement, the Farmer's Alliance, admitting women into the ranks of the organization, actually recognizing the fact that they are human beings, and treating them as such, with full privileges of membership and promotion. And the women who have borne the heat and the burden of the day were not slow to accept the newly-offered privileges, undeterred by the fact that the new organization was political, though non-partisan, and they gladly accepted the privileges extended them, until we find to-day upwards of half a million women in the Farmers' Alliance, who have taken up the study of social and political problems, and are studying and investigating the great issues of the day, fully cognizant of the fact that in the political arena alone can these great problems be satisfactorily settled.

You will wonder, perhaps, why the women of the West are interested so much in this great uprising of the common people. ... I will tell you, friends: if you will refer to your old school-maps, you will find that that portion of our country now the valuable, teeming, fruitful West, was twenty-five or thirty years ago marked there as the “Great American Desert, the treeless plain.” About that time, the women of the East turned their faces towards the boundless, billowy prairies of the West. They accompanied their husbands, sons, and brothers; they came with the roses of health on their cheeks; they left home and friends, school and church, and all which makes life dear to you and me, and turned their faces towards the untried West, willing to brave the dangers of pioneer life upon the lonely prairies with all its privations; their children were born there, and there upon the prairies our little babes lie buried. After all our years of sorrow, loneliness, and privation, we are being robbed of our farms, of our homes, at the rate of five hundred a week, and turned out homeless paupers, outcasts and wanderers, robbed of the best years of our life and our toil. Do you wonder that women are joining the Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor? Let no one ... for one moment suppose that this Alliance movement is but a passing episode of a brief political career. We have come to stay, for we are advocating principles of truth, right, and justice. Our demands are founded on the Sermon on the Mount, and that other command, that ye love one another. We seek to put into practical operation the teachings of Christ, who was sent to bring about a better day. Then there shall be no more coal kings nor silver kings, but a better day when there shall be no more millionaires, no more paupers, and no more waifs in our streets.

From Mary E. Lease, “Women in the Farmers' Alliance,” Transactions of the National Council of Women of the United States, Assembled in Washington, D.C., February 22 to 25, 1891, ed. Rachel Foster Avery (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1891), 157–59, 214–16.

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