Mary Elizabeth Lease Quotes
An organized effort is making to deceive the people. There are two great enemies of thought and progress, the aristocracy of royalty and the aristocracy of gold.
Lease, Mary Elizabeth. "Wall Street Owns the Country." 1890. The Annals of America, edited by Mortimer J. Adler, vol. 11, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968, pp. 273-274.
The United States money was then on the Gold Standard. The country was growing and needed more money in circulation. But most of the gold that might be available was in England and English bankers could control much of the U. S. economy. The Populists and the Democrats wanted us to use silver to back U. S. money as there was plenty of silver in the United States. The Republicans would not relent and depression was upon the country. A half century later, it would be Republican President Richard M. Nixon, who took the United States off the gold standard. Lease was far ahead of her time.
At the time the Puerto Rican right wing distrusted the United States as too accommodating to labor, and the leftists saw American progressivism as a way of building an alliance between Puerto Rican and American labor movements.
Although Fiorello La Guardia proposed an aggressive reform program for New York City, he did not go far enough for some.
At the time, there was generally only a single newspaper in an area in New Zealand.
Clark, after becoming one of the richest men in America, wanted to go into National Politics, but most people hated him so he could never win elected office. At the time, Montana selected their Senators by a vote of the State Legislature. So Clark bribed enough members of the legislature to become the Senator. However, the bribery scheme became a public scandal and the Senate refused to seat him. So the legislature had another vote in the next legislative session and Clark won again, and that time no one had the evidence of the bribes. But then, more about Clark became known, and he just served the one term.
Essentially, she was telling all the political forces that they were in the wrong and had to compromise. One could not tell the King, Louis XIV, that he was wrong at that time and place, so she told him that he was poorly advised, but everyone, including the king knew what she meant.
Mary Elizabeth Lease was an American lecturer, writer, Georgist, and political activist. She was an advocate of the suffrage movement as well as temperance but she was best known for her work with the People's Party (Populists). She was born to Irish immigrants Joseph P. and Mary Elizabeth Murray Clyens (an anglicization of the Gaelic name Mc Giolla Chaillín), in Ridgway, Pennsylvania. She made her political debut in 1888 with the Union Labor Party or Socialist Labor Party and soon joined the Farmers' Alliance or Populist Party. She was referred to as the "People's Joan of Arc". In that party's 1890 campaign she made more than 160 speeches and claimed credit for the defeat of Kansas senator John Ingalls. She opposed big business and stated flatly that "Wall Street owns the country." She was called "Our Queen Mary" while campaigning with the Populists candidate James B. Weaver during his 1892 run for president, and also "Mother Lease" by her supporters and "Mary Yellin" by some of her enemies. 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. Lease died in Callicoon, New York.
