But on that day, the political strife of the presidential campaign was far from his mind. The 28-year-old newspaperman wanted nothing more than to pick up the mail at the post office and catch the evening train to meet his wife in Colorado, where they would pore over proofs of his first book.
His reverie didn’t last long. As he approached the Gazette offices, the Republican editor was accosted by a group of Populists who harangued him about “some editorial utterances I had made,” White recalled in his autobiography.
“They were shabbily dressed, and it was no pose with them,” White wrote. “They were struggling with poverty and I was rather spick-and-span, particularly offensive in the gaudy neckties for which I have had an unfortunate weakness.”
White recalled that the men hooted and jeered at him and wouldn’t let him get by. “And my wrath must have flamed through my face,” he wrote, when he finally broke free and “stalked as well as a fat man who toddles can stalk” back to the Gazette.
What happened next made history.
Still steaming when he got back to the office, White wrote an editorial published Aug. 15 that excoriated Kansas Populists and their impact on the state’s economy. Families and capital were fleeing Kansas while neighboring states prospered. An “old mossback Jacksonian” who bemoaned the presence of a “bathtub in the State House” was running for governor. Kansas had become a laughingstock, White wrote, yet its leaders seemed hellbent on pursuing the disastrous polices that had led to economic stagnation and national mockery. The Free Silver doctrines embraced by Bryan, the Democrats and their Populist allies, White argued, would only make things worse.
“Go east and you hear them laugh at Kansas; go west and they sneer at her; go south and they ‘cuss’ her; go north and they have forgotten her. Go into any crowd of intelligent people gathered anywhere on the globe, and you will find the Kansas man on the defensive.”
The editorial’s headline said it all: “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”
Today, 124 years after its publication, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” might be described as the archetypal political “hot take” — written in anger and filled with insulting characterizations of political opponents. Republican political guru Karl Rove, in his book on the 1896 election, called it a “rhetorical bomb.” The headline was borrowed in 2004 by Thomas Frank, who used it for the title of his book exploring how conservatives have used cultural issues to separate working-class voters from the Democratic Party.
Unlike the ill-tempered outbursts that flood social media and are soon forgotten, White’s editorial earned its author lasting fame and raised him from an obscure small-town editor into a national figure. As Republicans prepare to hold their virtual convention this week, the editorial continues to resonate as an old-school example of the kind of political invective that President Trump hurls at his political enemies on Twitter.
That wasn’t what White and his wife, Sallie, expected after they saw the editorial in print. “Sallie was shocked. She feared I had gone too far,” White remembered. He shared her anxiety and wondered — as do many who push the button on a hastily composed digital screed — if the editorial represented “another of those foolish impulsive things that I do which seem all right at the time” but which he would later regret.
There was good reason for worry. Kansas was ground zero for the agrarian revolt of the late 1880s and early 1890s, driven by debt-ridden farmers. Four years earlier, Populist presidential candidate James B. Weaver carried Kansas and three other states. Kansas was home to Populist politicians like “Sockless” Jerry Simpson and Sen. William A. Peffer and firebrand orator Mary Elizabeth Lease. Populists were plentiful in Emporia, where they would take control of City Hall the following year, and in surrounding Lyon County, historian Sally Foreman Griffith has written in her book about White and the Gazette.
White’s “intemperate attacks on fellow Kansans damaged his efforts to present himself as genial and fair-minded and the Gazette as an unbiased observer of community life,” Griffith writes. At the paper, the foreman White left in charge while he was in Colorado hesitated to publish the editorial, while the Populist compositor who set it in type said later she “boiled with indignation” as she did so, according to Foreman.
Writing 40 years later in the New York Times about his political outlook as a young man, White described himself as a rigid ideologue who believed “that the law of supply and demand was like the law of gravitation; that wealth was was an evidence of virtue; that the acquisitive faculty was the only quality in the world having survival value.”
While “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” ruffled local feathers, it won raves across the country from Republicans alarmed by Bryan and his Populist allies. When they returned from Colorado, White and his wife discovered a large stack of letters — much of it in praise of the editorial. Among the fan mail was a letter from Republican House Speaker Thomas B. Reed of Maine.
“I haven’t seen as much sense in one column in a dozen years,” the usually hardheaded Reed gushed.
The editorial had been picked up by newspaper exchanges and won the notice of a Santa Fe railroad vice president, who in turn passed it on to conservative newspaper editors in Chicago, according to Griffith. The Gazette printed thousands of copies of the editorial, White wrote, and the Republican National Committee distributed it across the country. To answer the flood of mail arriving at the paper, White hired a part-time stenographer, prompting a colleague to “hoot and gibe” as White composed his answers. In Pennsylvania, the Scranton Tribune hailed it as “fresh and breezy” and “full of hard prairie sense.”
In Kansas itself, reaction divided predictably along partisan lines. The Populist Barbour County Index dismissed White as a “pimple on the face of society” and blamed Republicans for the condition of the state, while the Kansas Republican press reprinted and cheered it. “The state has been badly damaged by calamity cranks,” the Kansas City Daily Gazette declared as it welcomed White’s attack on Bryan as the kind of strong medicine needed “to puke and purge” the state of Populists.
Nevertheless, while McKinley defeated Bryan, White’s views failed to carry the day in Kansas. Bryan carried the state for the Democrats, but Kansas returned to the Republican column four years later. Only five times in the 124 years since White’s editorial was published — and not since 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson routed Barry Goldwater — has a Democratic presidential candidate won in Kansas.
After McKinley prevailed over Bryan and went to the White House, Republican grandees hailed White as a hero. Republican boss Mark Hanna introduced White to McKinley at the White House and arranged for him to meet Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy.
It was Roosevelt, White wrote, who turned him away from his doctrinaire view of politics. Until becoming acquainted with Roosevelt’s views, “I did not dream,” White wrote, “that anyone, save the fly-by-night demagogues of Populism, had any question about the divine right of the well-to-do to rule the world.”
White supported Roosevelt’s third-party presidential campaign in 1912 and continued in the years ahead to chart his own course. In 1924, unhappy with the unwillingness of the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor to challenge the rising power of the Ku Klux Klan, White ran as an independent for the state’s highest office.
The Klan, White had written before he entered the race, “is an organization of cowards.” He lost, but the Klan soon disappeared as a force in Kansas politics.
By 1936, White had come to have second thoughts about the sentiments that drove him to write the editorial that made him famous.
“I was a stiff-necked conservative,” he told the Inland Daily Press Association, according to the New York Times. “I had a notion that brains and money are synonymous.”
Read more Retropolis:
August 23, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/31mg1Hz
‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’ The words still resonate 124 years later. - The Washington Post
https://ift.tt/3d5QSDO
No comments:
Post a Comment