Lorenzo D. Lewelling: A Quaker Populist

LORENZO D. LEWELLING: A QUAKER POPULIST By Peter H. Curtis* Lorenzo D. Lewelling, Kansas' first Populist governor, was born near Salem, Iowa, in 1846. His parents had come with other Quakers to the Salem area in 1837 in the first important Friends migration to Iowa.1 Both his parents died while he was young, and at a very early age he was on his own.2 As soon as the Civil War broke out he joined the Union army. "But fighting was against the Quaker creed, and his relatives secured his discharge."3 After his short-lived military career the youth worked at a variety of manual laboring jobs and in 1865 taught for a period at a Missouri school for blacks run by the Freedman's Aid Society.4 During this period he managed to put away enough money to enter Whittier College, at that time located in his home town of Salem, Iowa. He graduated from Whittier in 1870, and the same year married Angie Cook, a fellow Quaker who taught school nearby. In 1872 Lewelling and his wife were appointed Superintendent and Matron of the new Girls Department of the Iowa State Reform School. There they worked for fifteen years, dealing with everything from truants to fourteen-year-old prostitutes.5 Toward the end of these years Mrs. Lewelling died, leaving three young daughters. Sometime later Lewelling remarried, and in 1887 moved his family to Wichita, Kansas. Precisely how this Quaker from Iowa got involved in the People's Party we do not know. Certainly it was natural for someone whose religious background and life experience with the nineteenth century 's outcasts—blacks, itinerant laborers, delinquent girls—had given him a deep sympathy for poor people. Populism had a *Department of History, University of Indiana, Bloomington. 1.Louis Thomas Jones, The Quakers of Iowa (Iowa City, 1914), p. 43. 2.Most of this biographical data comes from Edith Connellev Ross, "The Administration of Lorenzo D Lewelling," in William E. Connelley, History of Kansas, State and People (Chicago, 1928), pp. 723-725. 3.Ibid., p. 723. 4.O. Gene Clanton, Kansas Populism, Ideas and Men (Lawrence, Kansas, 1969), p. 278n. 5.The Lewellings' work is described in Jones, p. 222. 113 114QUAKER HISTORY large component of idealism, a faith that demanded social justice and equal opportunity for all. Lewelling probably joined the party at its inception in early 1890, and by the end of that year was People's Party chairman for Sedgwick County (Wichita) .e Lewelling's chance for higher office came when the Populist state convention was held in Wichita in 1892. In his welcoming address he presented a devastating critique of the business "plutocracy " which controlled the country and advocated direct government action to aid the poor man and protect his rights. In part because of his speech, and in part because he was sympathetic to fusion with the Democrats, Lewelling won the Populist nomination for governor.7 He campaigned all over the state in an exciting election, and won with the votes of angry Populist farmers and urban Democrats. Unfortunately, Lewelling got little chance to implement his ideas during his one term in office. In a scene that belonged on a comic opera stage rather than in a state capítol, both the Populists and the Republicans claimed to have captured a majority of seats in the Kansas House of Representatives. Both sides then elected rival "legal" slates of House officers, and the great "Legislative War of 1893" was on. Violence was averted only by a ruling in favor of the Republicans by the state Supreme Court. Needless to say, after this impassioned conflict Lewelling found it almost impossible to pass any laws in the poisoned political atmosphere. Still, he did what he could. He wrote a letter to all police chiefs in Kansas suggesting that vagrants should not be jailed just because they were poor and looking for work. This so-called "Tramp Circular" brought Lewelling nationwide publicity and triggered scorn from Republican newspaper editors and anger among conservatives generally. Yet the Quaker governor received scores of congratulatory letters as well, many nearly illiterate, from unknown and poor Americans in many states.8...