Diggs, Annie LePorte (1848–1916)

American politician and social reformer. Born Annie LePorte in London, Ontario, Canada, on February 22, 1848: died in Detroit, Michigan, on September 7, 1916; daughter of Cornelius (a lawyer) and Ann Maria (Thomas) LePorte; attended convent and public school in New Jersey, to which the family moved in 1855; married Alvin S. Diggs (a postal clerk), on September 21, 1873, in Lawrence, Kansas; children: Fred, Mabel, and Esther.

Annie LePorte Diggs was a poll watcher in a local prohibitionist campaign in 1877 and was drawn into politics through her interest in the temperance crusade in Kansas. In August 1881, she helped form the nonpolitical Kansas Liberal Union, an inclusive group that embraced Unitarians, Universalists, Free Religionists, Socialists, spiritualists, materialists, and agnostics. A few months later, she was elected a vice president of the Free Religious Association, succeeding her idol Lucretia Mott. With her husband Alvin, who shared her interests and liberal views, Diggs also published the Kansas Liberal from her home for a short time and, during the 1880s, worked for women's suffrage and for the establishment of a cooperative association for farmers and workers. She wrote a column on the Farmers' Alliance for Kansas' Lawrence Journal and then became an associate editor of the Alliance Advocate. Also instrumental in turning the Kansas Farmers' Alliance into the political People's (later Populist) Party, she became one of its most vocal advocates. Diggs spoke at the national Populist conventions of 1890, 1891, and 1892, and she worked alongside Mary E. Lease in the Populist election campaigns of 1894 and 1896. In 1894, as vice president of the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association, she helped mount an unsuccessful campaign for a woman suffrage amendment to the Kansas constitution. (She became president of the Association in 1899.)

In 1897, after her election as president of the Kansas Woman's Free Silver League and as part of the silver movement's takeover of the Populist Party, Diggs supported a "fusion" or joint ticket with the Democrats for the 1898 election. From 1898 to 1902, she was the state librarian under the fusion state administration. Her impressive leadership in guiding her ticket to nomination in the fusion convention of 1900 led the regular Democratic politicians to denounce her "petticoat domination" and refer to her as "Boss" Diggs.

In 1902, Diggs traveled to England to represent the Western Co-operative Association of Kansas City at the International Co-operative Congress. For a period of two years, she wrote articles and newspaper stories on reform movements in England and Europe. She returned to America in 1904 and was elected president of the Kansas Woman's Press Association. In 1906, she ended her work in party politics and moved to New York City, where she joined a civic reform bureau and authored two books: The Story of Jerry Simpson (1908), an account of a Populist hero, and Bedrock (1912), in which she proposed that a bureau of employment be established at every educational institution. In 1912, she moved to Detroit to live with her son and died there in 1916.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts