Gentleman from Kansas

William Smith Culburtson and William Allen White are townmates of Emporia, Kansas.

Though Mr. White edits in a city of 13,000 he is famed throughout the world. Though Mr. Culburtson has been Minister to Rumania since 1925 and is a world authority on economics he is insufficiently famed among his countrymen. They might have peered at him with profit, last week, as he was promoted by President Coolidge to be U. S. Ambassador at

Santiago, Chile, succeeding William Miller Collier of Auburn, N. Y. (TIME, June 25), and being succeeded at Bucharest by Charles Stetson Wilson, who has been Minister to Bulgaria since 1921.

Peerers at Ambassador Culburtson would have seen a very flower among U. S. diplomats, not a shirt-sleever, not a spat-wearing expatriate, but a comfortable man of kindly shrewdness, a man from Emporia who walked unruffled through Rumanian intrigue, won confidence, kept respect. Minister Culburtson was in Bucharest when the late Prime Minister Jon Bratiano heard from trustworthy sources of the effect produced upon U. S. public opinion by the tour of Queen Marie, and despatched the secret cablegram which resulted in Her Majesty's precipitant return.