The Sage of Kansas

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE--Macmillan ($3.75).

The issues and effort of the Civil War produced the moral writings of Emerson and Thoreau, Walt Whitman's best poetry, Abraham Lincoln's speeches, and Mark Twain's best book (Huckleberry Finn). They also proved that history's greatest democracy was not going the way of democratic Athens, for the war's dead were scarcely settled in their graves when the Robber Barons took over their country. They were able to do so because practically every American intensely admired them, and hoped to be a Robber Baron himself. The result of their enterprise was to speed up the development of the continent. But in one of the most beautiful lands on earth the Barons created in an incredibly short time one of the ugliest civilizations in history.

They left their stamp on the American character as a unit of all but boundless energy guided by an intelligence almost wholly practical and predatory. They also left a paradise for reformers, of whom the author of this book was for some 50 years one of the most conspicuous. The Autobiography of William Allen White tells how.

He was born in Emporia, Kans., three years after the Civil War ended. His mother was a "black Republican" (abolitionist). His father was a Copperhead Democrat in a town 80% of whose population consisted of Republican ex-servicemen.

Young Willie White was highly conscious of belonging to Emporia's "ruling class." So it is not surprising that about a quarter of his 669-page autobiography is a nostalgic recall of the golden goodness of 19th-Century, mid-American boyhood--the swimming hole, sleigh rides, girls, Indian scares, boy fights, boy jobs.

Willie to William. For Willie was not born a reformer. Kansas was a satrapy in the expanding empire of the Santa Fe Railroad, and coin from that corporation's treasure house financed individual political fortunes and augmented the general prosperity. Not until depression and the rise of Populism (whose grievances and politics were later to find expression in Roosevelt I's Square Deal and Roosevelt II's New Deal) did Willie begin to brood upon the other half at all. By then Willie had become William Allen White, owner and editor of the Emporia Gazette, which he was to make the loudest small-town editorial voice of the U.S. When Populists roughed up dudish Editor White on the street, he reacted in an editorial broadside, What's the Matter with Kansas? His answer: Populism. The editorial made Editor White a national figure and helped to elect William McKinley President. It also made Republican Boss Mark Hanna White's devoted patron, a circumstance which once gave President McKinley a bad turn. Hanna first introduced Editor White to the President by putting his hand on White's shoulder and saying: "This is my boy." McKinley batted a shocked eye. "Oh no, no, Mr. President," said Hanna. "I mean he's my spiritual son."

Road to Damascus. Editor White remained the Republican Party's spiritual son until he met Theodore Roosevelt--when he also discovered the New Testament. "I have no recollection that I ever traveled on the road to Damascus. But Theodore Roosevelt and his attitude toward the powers that be, the status quo, the economic, social and political order, certainly did begin to penetrate my heart. And when I came to the New Testament and saw Jesus, not as a figure in theology . . . but as a statesman and philosopher who dramatized His creed by giving His life for it, then gradually the underpinning of my Pharisaic philosophy was knocked out. Slowly as the new century came into its first decade, I saw the Great Light."

Editor White, a shrewd and earthy observer of men, did not follow Theodore Roosevelt blindly. But he followed him devotedly, in the Republican Party and out of it into the Progressive Party, and when that somewhat anomalous crusade turned into a group of generals without an army, White followed Roosevelt into enforced retirement. Editor White did not understand exactly what historical forces were moving him and thousands of others in the muckraking, reforming, progressive surge that washed the U.S. into the 20th Century. But he felt vaguely, as he rigged political conventions, ran errands between politicians, and fought to put his friends in office, that he was participating in a benevolent revolution that was sweeping the world.

"I think, looking back nearly forty years, to those days when Roosevelt and La Follette and a thousand little Roosevelts and La Follettes in state houses and legislatures, in city halls and country towns, were cleaning those dirty, economic and political stables of the ancient giants who followed the Civil War, we were part of a world movement. We were--all of us --doing and thinking what men all over Christendom were doing and thinking; we were trying to establish all over the civilized world more equitable human relations. We were trying to distribute the economic surplus of the machine age, and curiously, we thought that if we took the surplus away from the rich and gave it to the poor, we would be achieving our aims." He thinks that if the reform of Roosevelt I had succeeded, the revolution of Roosevelt II might never have had to occur.

Though the best chapters of his autobiography are about politics and politicians, Editor White did not spend all his life politicking. He was a hard-working editor and reporter. He was a successful author (The Real Issue, A Certain Rich Man, The Changing West). He enjoyed a rich and devoted family life. And he was for years the most colorful of local characters in that vast village, the U.S.

Tom & Huck. It is this incarnation of the U.S. small-town mind at its best--a kind of adult blend of Tom Sawyer's intelligence and Huck Finn's human decency-- that gave his life and gives his autobiography its special flavor. Moreover, he possessed as a birthright that ultimate skepticism which is the proportioning power of true wisdom.

In 1944 he died, where he had been born, in Emporia. Recalling, before the end, what had been one of the high points of his life, the Progressive Party nominating convention (1912), he could, nevertheless, write: "And now they are dust, and all the visions they saw that day have dissolved. Their hopes, like shifting clouds, have blown away before the winds of circumstance. And I wonder if it did matter much. Or is there somewhere, in the stuff that holds humanity together, some force, some conservation of spiritual energy, that saves the core of every noble hope, and gathers all men's visions some day, some way, into the reality of progress?"

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