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January 2011

Of course White did support his personal friend Herbert Hoover against the only too urban Al Smith in 1928—though, again, the Democratic platform (aside from the Prohibition issue) was in far closer accord with White’s basic views than was the Republican. Subsequently, White expressed editorial displeasure over Hoover’s support of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, his veto of the Muscle Shoals bill, his failure to act on relief problems that grew huge in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash—three matters on which the Democratic candidate in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, took the stands White favored. But it was still Hoover whom White supported that year.

The crowning example of White’s sophistry, in the liberal view, was his behavior during the presidential campaign of 1940. England stood alone against a seemingly invincible Hitler. A powerful minority of isolationists, including most Republican members of Congress, was doing its level best to slow America’s rearmament, prevent American aid to Britain, and, in effect, appease Hitler. White, acutely aware that U.S. survival as a free society was at stake (“… a free country and a free people … [cannot] live beside Hitler’s world enslaved,” he editorialized), had stepped entirely out of character to accept the chairmanship of the national Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which engaged in a battle for public opinion against an isolationist America First Committee. The aid-Britain committee gained immensely in prestige and persuasiveness from White’s heading of it. He deserved and received profoundly grateful appreciation from FDR and others at the time; and his contribution continues to loom large in historical perspective. It was, however, a sadly flawed contribution.

Such words reflected young White’s upbringing in the 1870’s in the frontier village of El Dorado, sixty miles west of Emporia, where, as he once wrote, “beyond the school house, and up to its very door, stretched westward to the Rockies the illimitable prairie.” In that place and time it may really have been true that the best man (the bravest, toughest, most intelligently industrious) usually won out in what was generally a free and fair economic competition. The editorialist’s words faithfully reflected, too, the economic theory taught during his student days at Kansas University.

To the twenty-eight-year-old William Allen White, the hungry farmers spearheading the Populist movement in the bitter campaign of 1896 “were trying to tear down the tabernacle of our national life. ” When some of them taunted him on the street, he responded with the stinging editorial below. Its callow savagery made the young editor nationally famous in a matter of days.

Today the Kansas Department of Agriculture sent out a statement which indicates that Kansas has gained less than two thousand people in the past year. There are about two hundred and twenty-five thousand families in this state, and there were ten thousand babies born in Kansas, and yet so many people have left the state that the natural increase is cut down to less than two thousand net.

This has been going on for eight years.

If there had been a high brick wall around the state eight years ago, and not a soul had been admitted or permitted to leave, Kansas would be a half million souls better off than she is today.…

White’s first burst of fame, coming to him as spokesman for plutocracy and reaction, gained review attention and initial sales for The Real Issue when it was published in November, 1896. But as the book then made its own way, it impressed readers with qualities notably different from those most evident in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”— qualities of human kindness, generosity, and compassionate understanding. Quickly it ran through four sizable printings.

By late spring of 1897, the young Emporian was well launched on a journalistic and literary career of national import. His books of fiction and nonfiction would thereafter be bought by a large public. His editorials began to be reprinted for the edification of millions. His articles and stories were eagerly sought by high-paying national magazines. Soon he was able to pay off his debts, expand the Gazette ’s plant as its circulation grew to more than two thousand, and invest in real estate, laying foundations for what ultimately became a fortune of a half-million or so.

This revolution of political attitude was encouraged by other personal contacts White made as a result of The Real Issue . In Chicago, where the book was published, he met socially Hamlin Garland, Clarence Darrow, Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley). In New York, where McClure ’s, Collier ’s, and the American magazines were published, he met and talked with Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and other creators of the journalism soon dubbed “muckraking” by T.R. himself. There thus developed an increasing tension between White’s “literary” and “political” impulses. An acute observer might have measured it on the editorial oaere of the Gazette .

My own father was one of the many physicians who did the little they could to help that day—which was also the day he got married. In an autobiographical fragment written half a century later, he told of starting out from his home on 138th Street for a haircut, noticing a black cloud toward the east, and climbing aboard a streetcar going in that direction.

“When I got to the end of the line, “he continued, “I saw what was one of the great tragedies of our time—the steamboat Slocum was on the beach at North Brother Island about Hof a mile from me—burning from stem to stern. There was a tug which had just tied up near me—the deck was piled three or four deep with dead women and children and I jumped aboard & tried to find any one who might be alive. The only one I found alive was a very small boy who was crying for his mother—the boy was not wet at all—someone must have handed him from the burning boat to someone on the tug or some row boat. I was on a coal barge looking over bodies when my father found me and chased me home.

“Remember,” Thomas Edison liked to say, “nothing that’s good works by itself, just to please you; you’ve got to make the damn thing work.” One hundred years ago this October, after trying to make the damn thing work for thirteen months, Edison invented an incandescent bulb that would burn for forty hours. It was a great moment; the news spread quickly; and most newspapers echoed the wonder of the New York Herald reporter who wrote of the “light-without-flame” giving “a bright, beautiful light, like the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn.”

But Edison knew his momentous discovery would remain simply a facile—albeit immensely impressive- trick unless he could produce the lamps cheaply, and somehow run power into people’s homes as efficiently as illuminating gas. There was no established technology for such a system; Edison would have to invent it all.

Newspaper editor William Allen White once observed that “in the country town we gain in contact with our neighbors. We know people by the score, by the hundred.…Our affairs become common with one another, our joys mutual, and even our sorrows are shared.…It all makes life pleasantly livable.” And for half a century, he was the country’s most influential spokesman for small-town America; his tragedy was that he never quite believed what he said.

Forty years ago, one of the most famous and widely admired men in America was William Allen White, editorpublisher of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette . The fact that today his name would evoke little or no response among most of his countrymen is both sad and significant. For White epitomized the smiling, neighborly, small-town, middle-class America—the America of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers—that as recently as 1940 was widely deemed the “real,” the “permanent” America, but must now be recognized as a temporary phenomenon, transitional from the old America of farm and village to the industrialized, urbanized nation of today.

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