More than a hundred years ago, this small-town Kansas publisher let loose his pen to blast what he then saw as ruinous Populists attacking the solid reputation of his home state. In turn, it made his reputation within the Republican Party nationally and firmly established his Emporia Gazette as a small town force to be reckoned with.

In later years, White concluded that he had written in anger what he might have tempered with a bit of reflection. This is because he actually came to espouse many of the Populist ideas as part of his conversion to Bull Moose Progressive politics along with Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Even though he later reconciled with the Kansas Republican Party, he always thereafter maintained his independent streak.

This was especially the case in the late 1910s and early 1920s when Kansas [and Kansas City] was faced with the rise of union organization, on the one hand, and the Ku Klux Klan on the other. While White initially supported the formation of what was called the “Kansas Industrial Court” because he hoped it would arbitrate labor disputes fairly, he came to regard it as mostly an advocate for management at the expense of the working man.

On one occasion during the life of the Republican-sponsored court, White supported a strike by Emporia railroaders by placing a poster in the window endorsing their efforts so long as no violence accompanied the strike. Taking exception, his former good friend Gov. Henry Allen had a warrant for his arrest issued because he was theoretically inciting the strike by placing the poster in his newspaper office. White believed in settling strikes amicably and fairly, not by intimidation and force as the Governor wished to do.

With regard to the Klan, White gathered up his considerable reputation to run for Governor in 1924. It was not a contest he could win, but he believed it was a contest worth pursuing. The Klan had gathered over 40,000 members in the state and claimed the affection of tens of thousands more. In 1924, they held their national “Klonvention” in downtown Kansas City at old Convention Hall. The organization’s influence was sufficient in that year to deny Harry Truman re-election to the Jackson County Court as well.

In an editorial, White correctly labeled the Klan “an organization of cowards” because they hid behind bedsheets and hoods while seeking to intimidate and control persons [Blacks, Jews and Catholics] who comprised at least one-fourth of Kansas’s population and more than a third of Missouri’s at the time. “Any man fool enough to be Imperial Wizard [of the KKK] would have power without responsibility and both without any sense.” White was never one to pull punches. Like Harry Truman, White didn’t get elected Governor, but both successfully called out the Klan for what it was.

William Allen White gained his college education at the College of Emporia and the University of Kansas. He launched his journalism career in El Dorado, Kansas, but gained valuable experience under William Rockhill at the Kansas City Star from 1892 to 1895. In the latter year, he borrowed $3,000 to buy the newspaper in the town of his birth—the Emporia Gazette. Once he returned to that bucolic Kansas community, he never wandered again. That is not to say he always stayed at home. William Allen White became as frequent a guest in the White House and at public gatherings across the country as any newspaper editor in the country.

One of the regular features of the Emporia Gazette under White was the regular review of outstanding new examples of children’s books and literature. Fittingly, after his death in 1944, one of the first programs to identify such books in a state and encourage their regular reading by school children was named for him. The William Allen White Children’s Book Award is one of the most coveted in the country alongside Missouri’s Mark Twain Award today.

Also fittingly, his alma mater The University of Kansas renamed its School of Journalism in his honor as well. Indeed, to the extent that William Allen White is known today it is probably because of these two continuing institutions—the Children’s Book Awards and the School of Journalism.

On Tuesday evening, May 19, William Allen White will return to Kansas City to appear in the “Meet the Past” series at the Downtown Kansas City Public Library where an interview between the editor and Library Director Crosby Kemper will be taped by Channel 19 for future broadcast. The public is invited for the 6:30 p.m. event. Prof. Fred Krebs of Johnson County Community College will portray the “Sage of Emporia.”

Dr. Bill Worley, Instructor in History, MCC-Blue River

Source of quotations: Craig Miner, Kansas: The History of the Sunflower State, 1854-2000 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).