ime of the campaign of 1890 she was a tall,
mannish-looking, but not unattractive woman of thirty-seven years,
the mother of four children. She was characterized by her friends as
refined, magnetic, and witty; by her enemies of the Republican party
as a hard, unlovely shrew. The hostile press made the most of popular
prejudice against a woman stump speaker and attempted by ridicule and
invective to drive her from the stage. But Mrs. Lease continued to talk.
She it was who told the Kansas farmers that what they needed was to
"raise less corn and more HELL!"

Wall Street owns the country [she proclaimed]. 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 ....
Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the
output of a system that clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.
The parties lie to us, and the political speakers mislead us. We were
told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop and that was all
we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the
sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us
to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef,
and no price at all for butter and eggs--that's what came of it....
The main question is the money question.... We want money, land, and
transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we
want the power to make loans directly from the Government. We want the
accursed foreclosure system wiped out. Land equal to a tract 30 miles
wide and 90 miles long has been foreclosed and bought in by loan
companies of Kansas in a year.... The people are at bay, and the
blood-hounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware!

A typical feature of this campaign in Kansas was the contest between
Jerry Simpson and Colonel James R. Hallowell for a seat in Congress.
Simpson nicknamed his fastidious opponent "Prince Hal" and pointed to
his silk stockings as an evidence of aristocracy. Young Victor Murdock,
then a cub reporter, promptly wrote a story to the effect that Simpson
himself wore no socks at all. "Sockless Jerry," "Sockless Simpson," and
then "Sockless Socrates" were sobriquets then and thereafter applied to
the stalwart Populist. Simpson was at this time forty-eight years old,
a man with a long, square-jawed face, his skin tanned by exposure on
shipboard, in the army, and on