Views West
by Murrel Bland
William Allen White was born on Thursday, Feb. 10, 1868, in Emporia, Kan. I will take some time to celebrate the birthday of the patron saint of community journalism on the anniversary of his birth.
For the past several years, I have journeyed to Mt. Oread as fellow members of the William Allen White Foundation gather for an annual meeting and the awarding of a national citation on or near White’s birthday. But this year, the trustees decided to move the meeting to late April.
White had a Kansas City, Kan., connection. He was married April 27, 1893, to Sallie Moss Lindsay, a schoolteacher, at 330 Waverly Ave. (It is now a vacant lot.) Sallie’s sister was Mary Lindsay Haynes, wife of Lacy Haynes. Lacy was the manager of the Kansas City, Kan., office of The Kansas City Star who was known as a political kingmaker.
My friend Dave Seaton, the retired editor of The Winfield Daily Courier, is heading up a committee that hopes to produce a feature-length documentary film that tells the story of White’s life and his influence not only on community journalism but also on this country as it matured in its second century. It will be a fitting tribute to White; his 150th birthday celebration will be in 2018.
Dave asked me to suggest some choice comments from White’s autobiography that could be used in the film. When White was a student at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1887, he was a freelance correspondent for several daily newspapers. He dug up the fact the Democratic candidate for sheriff, while a deputy, allegedly had been a ringleader in lynching three or four blacks; the candidate threatened to kill White.
White tells of his and fellow students’ civil disobedience in 1888.
“We once had a riot in front of the chancellor’s office when the regents were in session, roaring, clamoring, and hooting because they were trying to expel the editor of the college paper for criticizing a professor,” White wrote.
White writes that a group of his college friends, mostly members of the Phi Delta Theta social fraternity, “grew up” the most during the summer of 1889 when they camped out in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The others and the positions they achieved in later life included Vernon Kellogg, director of the Belgian Relief in World War I and secretary of the National Research Council; Henry Riggs, professor of civil engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Frank Craig, president of the Oklahoma Bankers Association; Herbert Hadley, governor of Missouri; William Franklin, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; Edward Franklin, professor of chemistry at Stanford (Calif.) University and president of the American Chemical Society; Frederick Funston, a major general in the U.S. Army; and Schuyler Brewster, attorney general of Oklahoma.
White was probably best known as an editorial writer. The first editorial that brought him national prominence was “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” written in 1896 and published in his newspaper, The Emporia Gazette.
“What’s the matter with Kansas? Nothing under the shining sun. She is losing her wealth, population and standing. She has got her statesmen, and the money power is afraid of her. Kansas is all right. She has started in to raise hell, as Mrs. Lease advised, and she seems to have over-production. But that doesn’t matter, Kansas never did believe in diversified crops. Kansas is all right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Kansas,” White wrote.
Probably White’s most famous editorial was a tribute to his daughter Mary White who died in 1921 following an accident when she was hit on the head by a tree branch when she was riding her horse.
“She was a continual bubble of joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mischievous without malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary White, but an easy girl to live with for she never nursed a grouch five minutes in her life,” White wrote.
“A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn,” White concluded.
White won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial “To an Anxious Friend.” That editorial is displayed in bronze on the wall of Stauffer-Flint Hall that houses the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at KU. White wrote it in 1922 in response to the threat of the Ku Klux Klan.
“You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor freedom of enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people—and, alas their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive,” White wrote.
“So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold—by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.”
White died on Kansas Day (Jan. 29) 1944 after suffering from cancer. I look at the challenges in Kansas and the United States today and only wish that White were alive today.
Murrel Bland is the former editor of The Wyandotte West and The Piper Press. He is a trustee of the William Allen White Foundation.