THE SAGE OF EMPORIA

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.

But White, although he typified that older America, at the same time stressed in public performance his qualities as a unique personality. He impressed himself on the public mind as a genial, salty, humorous “character,” full of endearing if sometimes irritating quirks and foibles. He readily admitted that his general sagacity was all too often flawed by damned foolishness, yet he was proud of his reputation as the Sage of Emporia and was only too careful to nurture it.

In several points of personal taste and attitude he differed markedly from those whom in general he represented with great precision. He had, for instance, none of the typical mid-American’s passion for sports, either as spectator or participant—he was, in fact, invincibly sedentary (“the rocking- chair champion of Emporia’s country club,” he dubbed himself)—yet he gave full sway to his formidible capacities as a trencherman.

As a result, he was cherubic of countenance, roly-poly of figure, from his boyhood all through his half-century of national prominence. He poked a good deal of public fun at his own paunchiness in Gazette editorials, recounting episodes in which his considerable aversion to physical exercise was overcome by the need of swift movement for self-preservation. He had once “run like a whitehead,” he declared, when chased by a lady with a horsewhip (“how that fat man did run!”), because of sharp things he had said in print as a young newspaperman. In one editorial, headed “A Fat Man’s Hope,” he entered a plea with Emporia’s tailors for the making of elastic vests.

Very consciously and deliberately he made himself the spokesman for the American country town of his day—the town of one thousand to thirty-thousand population—having decided while on the Kansas City Star that big-city life, big-city journalism was not for him. He 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.”

Along with his beloved wife, Sallie Lindsay White, he chose Emporia as his home-town in 1895, not just because a newspaper happened to be for sale there at that time but because Emporia was a college town, the home of a state normal school, and was the right size, with approximately ten thousand people. Soon thereafter he and Emporia became so closely identified with each other as to seem to the general public virtually one and the same.

A price was paid for this identification: White’s fame inevitably faded as population and cultural emphasis increasingly were concentrated in urban centers. The language in which he expressed himself, largely determined by his own immediate environment, communicates imperfectly with Americans born and raised in the cities he eschewed. These urban masses have no living experience of the kind of community he personified; and the more sensitive among them, inclining in their circumstances to place the highest value on personal privacy, are likely to recoil in horror from the kind of neighborliness which the country editor glorified.

His story, nevertheless, has meanings relevant to present-day concerns. They are born of irony and paradox. The irony is that White’s giving up of himself to his immediate environment in so wholesale a fashion, his total loving identification with the neighborly small-town “average man” America of his time, was in itself contributory in some degree to the destruction of this environment, the death of this beloved America. The paradox is that this selfdestructive operation was caused by a grave defect in White that was also his greatest virtue and strength, namely, the warmth and responsiveness of his personality, his abnormal need to love and be loved by his fellow man.

Viewed in this way, his story becomes, on several levels, a cautionary tale for Americans.

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.

But these same words were like salt upon open wounds for men whose frugality, backbreaking industry, and (often enough) native intelligence exceeded by far those of the banker who extracted from them, in interest on money they had been forced to borrow, all or more than they could possibly make in a year when wheat sold at forty cents, corn at sixteen, steers three, hogs two and a half. To these men it was clear that White was either ignorant of economic realities or a hired propagandist for the “interests.” If the former, education should be forced upon him; if the latter, he should be chastised.

And so, on his way back from the post office to the Gazette with a bundle of mail under his arm, Will White found himself surrounded by a hooting, jeering crowd of older men—the youngest in his forties—who proceeded to lecture him on his editorial iniquities, ridicule his incredible naivete, and puncture his overblown assertions with sharp knives of factual argument. He tried to answer, realized he was making a fool of himself, and was reduced at last to helpless spluttering. According to his own later account, his plump face had become as red as a spanked baby’s bottom by the time he managed to break through the cordon and “stalk, as well as a fat man who toddles can stalk, down the street to the office.”

There he poured the wrath of his hurt pride into an editorial for Monday’s Gazette, a distillation of vitriol flung in the faces of the men who had taunted him. Entitling it “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” he spewed it out in the little time remaining before he boarded his westwarding train—and it became in cold type an outrageously funny and effective diatribe against Populism, certain leading Kansas Populists, and the Democratic candidate for President that year, William Jennings Bryan, nominated in a national convention dominated by Populists. The editorial was also viciously unfair, factually inaccurate, crassly assertive of the rich man’s divine right to rule America, and a malicious libel upon the state of Kansas, as White himself would later admit. It was destined to do untold harm to Kansas’ national image in the decades ahead. For “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”—initially printed in a paper with barely a circulation of five hundred—was within a few weeks known to almost every literate person in the land. It fitted perfectly the propaganda needs of the William McKinley presidential campaign, managed by Mark Hanna with unprecedentedly huge amounts of money; Hanna saw to it that reprints were broadcast by the hundred thousand across the land; and William Allen White became, abruptly, nationally famous.

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.

Simultaneously, and consequently to a considerable degree, came a shrinkage (“decay,” he always called it) of White’s conservatism. “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” brought him an invitation to speak at a McKinley victory banquet in Zanesville, Ohio. There he met Mark Hanna, whom he liked but found crude, ignorant, vulgar; and President-elect McKinley, whom he could not like, McKinley being a “cold fish.” A few months later, in Washington on political business resulting from his famous editorial, he met the young assistant secretary of the Navy in McKinley’s administration, Theodore Roosevelt. T.R., having admired The Real Issue and asked to meet its author, overwhelmed White with a warmth, charm, and force of personality greater by far than the young journalist had ever before encountered. Joined to it was a shocking “vocal eloquence and… rage” against what McKinley-Hanna represented and what White himself had theretofore subscribed to, namely, the “damnable alliance between business and politics for the good of business!” The experience was almost religious for White. T.R. “poured into my heart such visions, such ideals, such a new attitude toward life and patriotism and the meaning of things, as I had never dreamed men had,” to quote White’s posthumously published Autobiography. “After that I was his man.”

He could never have so assailed big businessmen five years before. He would be as incapable of so assailing ethnic minorities five years hence. And the event upon which he editorialized speeded this change of mind and heart.

For McKinley’s death placed White’s great and good friend T.R. in the White House. Soon opened the Progressive Era—the confidently forward-looking years of “practical idealism” and social reform when White’s literary and political impulses, his attraction toward power and his instinctive generosity, his private ambition and his commitment to the general welfare, were brought into their closest harmony. By 1905 he was writing Gazette editorials frankly confessing that the Populists had been far nearer the truth than he in 1896.

By 1906 he was inveighing, with the vehemence of a Populist of the 1890’s, against certain Republican politicians bought and paid for by the railroads. By 1909 he was editorializing that “the great trusts … are ready to go to any length … to cheat and swindle the people or their rivals or their laboring men” and that the “slaveholding oligarchy was never more solidly arrayed against the free people of this nation than is the bondholding aristocracy today.”

In 1910 he was as embittered against William Howard Taft’s conservatism as T.R. was; and two years later he joyously followed T.R. out of the Republican party to become one of the original Bull Moose Progressives. No man worked harder than he for Progressive Republicanism during the immediately preceding years. None did more for the New Nationalism thereafter.

By the demise of the Bull Moose, White was presented with a fairly clear-cut choice among three possibilities. He might declare himself politically independent, shift major emphasis from active politics to his literary career, and, as author and journalist, commit himself wholly to truth, justice, and beauty as he saw and felt them. He might join the Democracy of Woodrow Wilson who, after all, had adopted in 1916 much of the New Nationalism that T.R. was abandoning and who, like White, was “eager to see the rising power of industrialism checked, controlled and channelled to the common good.” Last, he might follow T.R.’s “leadership” back into the Republican party, which he had repudiated on grounds of principle in 1912, and whose organization, because of Bull Moose defections, was now more firmly in the hands of predatory big-business interests than it had been then.

Either of the first two choices would have jibed with White’s continuing progressivism. But the choice he made was the third.

Probably it was less a rational choice than a compulsive act, determined by basic character drives. Certainly a factor in it was his personal love for Roosevelt, his personal dislike of Wilson. Certainly, too, his attraction toward power and prestige, though he now recognized its moral dangers, remained as great as it had been a decade before. His close friends and associates were all of the “governing classes” (a favorite phrase of his) in his hometown, in Kansas, in the nation; by 1918 they were all again Republicans; and in his eagerness to please he could not bear to displease them—at least not to the point of possible enmity.

And so, hat in hand and rueful, he returned to the GOP. His misgivings were profound, his illusions few, as his autobiography indicates. He recognized that bribes subtle and tangible were offered ex-Bull Moosers for their return to the fold. “Harmony” became the watchword of Republican leadership.

Token concessions were made to progressive sentiments yet abroad in the land. (America was now at war: the reform movement was halted, even reversed, for the duration.) A goodly number of the Roosevelt men of 1912 and 1914 were permitted Republican nomination in 1918, and most of them, with full party-organization support, won election. But the main thrust of party policy and program remained unchanged by (as White wrote) a “chastened, weary, and disillusioned liberalism” whose “rise” in the Republican party failed to “curb greatly the activities of the greedy, egoistic forces in that party which controlled the organization. They treated us liberals … to liberal helpings of veal from the fatted calf; but, like the elder brother, they kept right on running the farm.”

But having returned to Republicanism, and perhaps because he returned so dubiously, White became at once addicted, as he had been a decade before, to strict party regularity at election time. It was as if he sought to overcome inner doubt through an unbroken outward assertion of belief. The effect, alas, was to widen his schism of the soul while (to the extent of his public persuasiveness) retarding or preventing developments which he as a progressive, as a liberal, personally favored.

He had approved the domestic policies of Wilson’s first administration. He approved Wilson’s conduct of the war. He strongly favored the League of Nations. He was appalled by the cynical “smoke-filled-room” convention in which Harding received the 1920 presidential nomination. Yet he editorially supported Harding’s candidacy in the Gazette, and far less lukewarmly than he afterward liked to remember; he repeatedly insisted publicly that the League was not an issue in that campaign (“The League is safe, whatever happens …”), though Democratic candidate Cox supported it strongly while Harding was deliberately vague; and subsequently—after Harding in the White House had scuttled once and for all U.S. participation in the League and had abundantly demonstrated what “normalcy” meant in practicehe found it possible to declare in a Collier’s article in 1922 that Harding had gathered around him “the best minds” in America and was “doing a better than fair job” as President.

Never afterward, with a single exception, did White fail to support the straight Republican ticket—local, state, national—in election years, despite his more than tacit admission in nonelection years that the Democratic party far more accurately expressed his domestic and foreign-policy views. The single exception was in 1924 when White himself ran for governor of Kansas as an independent. He knew when he filed that he had not the slightest chance of election, and his filing, along with the campaign he subsequently waged, was of a piece with the one strand of consistency that ran straight and true through all his public life, namely, his commitment to civil liberties in general and to the First Amendment in particular.

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 same story, with variations, was repeated in 1936. By then White had publicly proclaimed that “by and large, I am for the New Deal.” (“Much of it is necessary,” he told a college audience in 1934. “All of it is human. And most of it is long past due.”) He was hostile to the Liberty League of big businessmen who conducted a virulent campaign against the New Deal and FDR personally. He editorialized for the re-election of Nebraska’s Senator George Norris, who supported FDR that year. He admitted privately that the Republican presidential candidate, Kansas Governor AIf M. Landon, was in his opinion far less fit for the White House than its present occupant.

Yet his support of Landon’s candidacy was not limited to public endorsement: he contributed propaganda, composed in his own inimitable style, for Landon’s campaign use. (On the other hand, it should be noted that he had no illusions about Landon’s chances. When the North American Newspaper Alliance wired him a few days before the election asking him to write a by-line story for release if Landon won, White replied: “You have a quaint sense of humor. If Landon is elected I’ll write you a book about him, bind it in platinum, illustrate it with apples of gold and pictures of silver, and won’t charge you a cent.”)

It was during this campaign that FDR publicly embarrassed White by summoning the reluctant editor to the rear platform of the Democratic presidential campaign train when it paused in Emporia and there hailing him, before a large crowd, as “Bill White, who is for me three and a half out of every four years!” The crowd roared with a laughter not wholly devoid of derision (even overwhelmingly Republican Kansas went for Roosevelt that year). White retaliated by marching directly to his office, where he sat down and hammered out an ill-tempered editorial attacking the “waste” and “extravagance” of the Roosevelt administration and referring to FDR as “Mr. Smoothie … the old American smiler.”

White, of course, had a rationalization for this self-contradictory behavior. It was that his election-year party regularity gave him a decisive leverage within the GOP: it enabled him to exercise, in favor of what he really believed in, an influence he would have lost had he merely changed his party affiliation. This convenient rationalization, unconvincing to liberals across the land, was flatly rejected, and with at least as much anger as sorrow, by Kansans of liberal persuasion. These last saw not the slightest evidence that White had a liberalizing influence upon the Republican party. Instead, they saw abundant evidence of the value to the GOP of what they deemed his sophistry—his talent for making the dull seem interesting, for cloaking with sympathetic attractiveness what was nakedly repulsive, for (in general) making the worse seem the better cause. They concluded that he was the kind of “liberal” whose function is to focus upon himself popular energies that might be organized for fundamental change, this in order to dissipate them at the only times and places (notably polling booths in election years) at which they could become truly effective.

It was some fourteen months later, or five months after Pearl Harbor, that my wife and I drove down from our home in Manhattan, Kansas, to spend a weekend with the Whites in Emporia.

My contact with him was through his “literary” side. In that unpropitious season (I was awaiting the draft) I had published a first novel. White, as one of the original four judges of the Bookof-the-Month Club, had read it in galleys, had made a glowing speech about it at the annual meeting of the Kansas Authors Club, and had, he told me, pressed hard though in vain for its book-club selection. Of course we talked a good deal about literature and writing as a profession that weekend—good talk, with White and Sallie expressing judgments of contemporary authors that were both shrewd and sensitively appreciative.

But mostly we listened to White’s salty talk about his life and the many kinds of world he had known. It was a rich experience for my wife and me, and sad in some ways—though there was much laughter, with White’s blue eyes twinkling as he recounted one funny episode after another. He was not well. He hoped to live long enough to complete his autobiography, and seemed to me to be trying to justify his life as he reviewed it—trying to understand himself (no man had been less inclined toward introspection during his active years) and the meaning of what he had been and done and seen.

My most vivid remembrance is of his taking me through the office and plant of the legendary Gazette, remarking unhappily as he did so on the great changes in journalism since his young days. Typically he placed a great deal of blame for these changes upon the wicked performances of certain selfish, grasping, ruthless, power-lustful individuals—William Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, for example. But he also voiced the opinion that these individuals were but scum on a wave of technological change. He told of buying the Gazette, and of how little it had cost him—how it was still possible, in the 1890’s, for a man possessed of journalistic talent, a printer’s skills, and “a shirttail full of type,” to become a successful countrytown newspaperman. “Now, to buy this, it would cost you—.” And he waved his hand toward the Gazette office ceiling.

“When I took over here,” he went on, “I could personally perform every operation in the place—some of them not well, but I could do them. Now, when I cross this threshold”—he pointed to the metal-sheathed threshold of the door to the composing room—“I’m a stranger in a strange land. Utterly helpless.”

He regretted this, terribly; he hated to see human beings deprived of meaningful economic labor, work through which they could express themselves, and hated to see unique individuals supplanted by organization men. Hateful to him also was the urbanization which was the inevitable accompaniment if not of the essence of this “progress.” And actually tragic, in his view, was the death of scores of magazines and newspapers, several of which had been his own means to fame, simply because they had been rendered unprofitable by the “increased efficiency” of new, expensive technology and by the huge business and labor organizations that this technology implies. We shared, I remember, in that pre-television year, a terrifying vision of a future in which all communications, literary or journalistic, would be at the mercy of a very few big business managers having in their hands control of every means of publication.

Next day, as he lay in a hammock on his front porch after a typically hearty Sunday dinner, he suddenly, apropos of nothing at that moment, vouchsafed his standard justification for his virtually lifelong Republican regularity: “I could do so much more good inside the party than out.” He looked hard at me as he said it. I had then a fleeting, fluid impression—later fixed and somewhat solidified in my mind by my reading of his autobiography—that he knew precisely the kind of judgment a person like me made of him on this score, and that, deep down, he was more inclined than not to agree with it.

By using his very considerable persuasive powers against social ideas and impulses he believed to be right, and this at crucial moments, he had helped prevent a truly intelligent, humane, democratic control of the technology that grew by leaps and bounds through all the years of his life. Such control might have preserved, even enhanced, the kind of civilized community he stood for.

William Allen White died on the morning of Kansas Day, January 29, 1944.

Kenneth S. Davis, a frequent contributor to this magazine, is the author of numerous books, including FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, which was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Francis Parkman Prize. He is currently at work on a sequel. Portions of the above article were adapted for use in the author’s bicentennial history of Kansas.