Mary E. Lease is a much more complicated figure than Kelley. Lease was an avid speaker and politician for the Populist Party and also spoke on behalf of the farmers of Kansas. She was not as popular as Kelley and was known as rash and some what vulgor in her speaches making over 160 in Kansas (Encyclopedia of World Biography). She was not well respected on either side, both the opposing side and her own. One of her quotes on how the farmers should reform their lives was this, "What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell." (Encyclopedia of World Biography). She never implemented anything more than that. She thought the answer to the farmer's plight was to rise against the monopolies that were controlling the US and enslaving the workers. Lease was very unsuccessful in creating any change, especially compared to Kelley who won the farmers fair fares.
The Industrial Revolution hurt farmers a lot in the 1870's. Because of Acts such as the Homestead Act, the western farm states were overproducing crops which made the prices plummet. On top of this, farmers had to pay the railroad companies in order to get their goods to people that wanted them, but what they had to pay for this transportation was absurdly high and the also had to pay for grain storage fares, which were rising drastically. As a result, farmers started to go into monstrous debt and could not get out, so people decided to do something about it such as Oliver Hudson Kelley and Mary E. Lease.
Olvier Hudson Kelley, born in Boston, January 7, 1826, moved to Minesota in 1849 to become a farmer (Encyclopedia of World Biography). Following the Civil War, he believed that the country needed to be rebuilt just as it was and got a job at the United States Bureau of Agriculture to preserve the farming that America had been built on and to help rebuild it. He traveled around the US and found that farmers were indeed in need of help in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and so he formed the Order of Patrons of Husbandry which was then formed into a society known as the Grange of which he was the first secretary(World History in Context).
Kelley's Grange would fight to get better fares for farmers in all of the western agricultural states through the Granger Laws (American History, “The Granger Laws"). The laws that Kelley wished to pass were met with heavy resistance from the railroad companies ending in large debates and court cases. After fighting for the laws, small farmers and Kelley's Order of Patrons of Husbandry got them passed in many of the Midwestern States which ultimately lowered railroad fares for western farmers.
These reforms were very successful and it made it so small business farmers could turn a profit. Though all the probelms for them were not gone, Kelley helped to sustain the farming world.
