Interpreting Mary Elizabeth Lease

by Glenna J. Wallace

N. Scott Momaday tells of the plight of the Indian in 1900, stating that the death rate among Indians exceeded the birth rate. Given that set of circumstances, it would be natural for the Native American to be filled with despair, despondency, helplessness. It would be natural to assume a defeatist attitude, give up, succumb to the inevitable. Yet at that lowest moment Native American grandmothers did exactly the opposite: they resisted that set of circumstances; they refused to accept the inevitable; and they made a difference. How? They began to make cradles—cradles for the unborn. In other words, they took an active rather than passive approach and the unborn reaped the benefits of their actions. The names of those grandmothers have long been forgotten, but the benefits remain. And so it is with Mary Elizabeth Lease. Although not Native American, Mary Elizabeth Lease was of the same ilk.

Lease was born in 1850 to Irish immigrant parents who came to America during the Irish famine because America was the land of the bountiful. After marrying, Lease and her husband over a ten year period tried to make a living farming, but experienced first hand as numerous other farming families did that bountiful harvests are not synonymous with bountiful profits. Following the loss of their farm, Lease had a choice. In a time when women had little political voice, when women were paid less than men, when women did not have the right to vote, Lease spoke out. Figuratively she chose to make cradles for the unborn. She was active in the establishment of the Populist movement and politically became populism’s most powerful voice. And what a voice it was!

Known for her oratorical skills, she soon became known as Mary Yellin the hell raiser. She denounced Democrats and Republicans for betraying the farmers, censured the financial institutions and the railroads for strangling farmers and other American workers. The fiery, feisty woman unabashedly stated “You may call me an anarchist, a socialist or a communist, I care not, but I hold to the theory that if one man has not enough to eat three times a day and another man has $25,000,000, that last man has something that belongs to the first.” She went on to urge farmers to “raise less corn and more hell”, a phrase that became her fighting phrase, and a fighter she was. An advocate of women’s suffrage, Lease’s name is rarely found with Susan B. Anthony’s or Cady Stanton’s. Instead Mary Elizabeth Lease rarely has more than one line, if any, in most history books.

Like the Native American grandmothers, Lease’s name has largely been forgotten. But it shouldn’t be because she was a cradle maker for the unborn. Today our lives are more bountiful because of Mary Elizabeth Lease. Her story should be told, her cradles shared. N. Scott Momaday could have been writing about Mary Elizabeth Lease when he wrote:

This child who draws so near,
Who has no name, who cannot see,
Who waits in darkness to be born
Into an empty world,
I make a cradle for this child.

[Glenna J. Wallace is a Tribal Secretary with the Eastern Shawnee.  She participated in the 2003 and 2004 Chautauqua tour, "Changed Lives: Lewis and Clark Meet the West."]

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