- Raising Less Corn and More Hell: Two Disciples of Mary Ellen Lease
Today when such sons and daughters of mid-America as Robert Dole, Rush Limbaugh, and Phyllis Schlafly challenge “real” Americans to fight the evils associated with liberalism — welfarism, feminism, multiculturalism, secularism, among others — it is hard to remember that a century ago the plains states of North Dakota and Kansas produced such people as the subjects of these biographies. Kate Richards O’Hare and Elmer Smith were children of a different milieu and time, a daughter and a son of old-stock homesteading families who failed at family farming. Hard times, drought, locusts, bone-chilling winters, and sun-searing summers proved insurmountable enemies, as also did the town merchants, grain dealers, and bankers who demanded prompt and full payment for their services. Devout Christians, citizens who advocated republican civic humanism, practitioners of neighborly benevolence, and guardians of family values, the Richards and Smith families succumbed to more powerful forces that overwhelmed their way of life. Unlike Richard Hofstadter’s dyspeptic Populists who sought an outlet for their grievances in a chimerical pursuit of free silver and virulent xenophobia and anti-semitism, the Richards and Smith families, and more especially their daughter Kate and son Elmer, respected the dignity of each life, however mean. Their shattered dreams did not transform them into embittered Klan sympathizers or proto-McCarthyites. As these two slender biographies prove, Kate Richards O’Hare and Tom Smith behaved like old-fashioned radical democrats.
Not only were O’Hare and Smith political radicals, they also rebelled against conventional definitions of domestic life and, in the case of the former, [End Page 266] against normative gender roles. Their lives, as limned by Miller and Copeland, simultaneously followed and diverged from convention. Smith, for example, like the children of many hard-scrabble homesteaders, rejected a future as a farmer and moved to St. Paul (with his mother’s blessing to be sure) where he worked his way through Macalester College. Upon graduation in 1910, he entered the St. Paul School of Law from which he obtained a law degree. As a young lawyer-to-be without family or other connections to the legal profession, Smith moved to western Washington state, near the lumber mill town of Centralia, where his parents and siblings had relocated after failing as homesteaders in North Dakota. There he was admitted to the state bar in 1914 and opened a law office. Thereafter his law practice alienated the local business and political elite and impoverished himself and his family. The young Smith became known in the Centralia area as counsel for the despised and downtrodden.
Kate Richards O’Hare, like Smith, moved with her parents to Kansas City, after they, too, failed at homesteading. She received her secondary school education in the big city and after graduation followed a path common to women of her generation. As a good Christian she served an urban mission dedicated to saving “fallen women.” Kate also participated in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization which, as Mari Jo Buhle and Ruth Bordin have proved, amalgamated evangelical moral purity and secular social reform. 1 In these “female networks,” according to Miller, Kate “learned how to work with others, to organize events, to structure meetings, and to speak in group situations” (pp. 18–19). Yet Kate also traveled a road not taken by most women of her cohort. She chose her father, not her mother, as a role model and followed him into his machine shop where she served an apprenticeship, learning the skills that enabled her to become one of the few female journeyman machinists. Even after she left the machine shop to become a socialist, marry, and raise children, Kate rejected a conventional domestic life. Instead, she and...