Young Kansas Editor

VOLUME 177

NUMBER 3

MARCH, 1946

89th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

WHEN I arrived at Emporia at the end of May in 1895, to take charge of the Gazette, I had a dollar and twenty-five cents in my pocket. It seemed ample at the time.

For I was happy. I still can remember with what joy I rode across Kansas that May afternoon into the sunset and through the long twilight. We came by way of Ottawa and I still retain the picture of the ride through the Marais des Cygnes valley. The grass was lush. The trees were in first foliage. The prairie flowers were abloom in the pastures and in the wood lots. Mostly blue flowers, they were. The streams were full. The ponds were full. The hour filled me with a delight that I have held through nearly fifty years. I have forgotten what visions of conquest I had. I only remember that the road across eastern Kansas into the sunset and through the twilight was ineffably beautiful and gave me a deep joy.

This also I remember: when I stepped off the train at Emporia it was into a considerable crowd of idlers who in that day came to the station to see the two plug trains come in from Kansas City. The announcement had been made that I had bought the Gazette from W. Y. Morgan. I was a fairly familiar figure on the streets of Emporia — what with my student days and my occasional sorties into the town as a gay young blade who danced in Jay’s Opera House. And also I was spotted when I made the many visits to Emporia to buy the Gazette. I knew many of the faces that greeted me.

I had a moment’s indecision: should I lug my heavy baggage uptown to the boardinghouse where I was expected, and establish a reputation as a frugal, thrifty young publisher, or should I establish my credit in the community by going in a hack? The hack was a quarter. I decided, as a credit-strengthening act, to take the hack. I piled in. I never regretted it. I was never the kind who could have made my money by saving it. But if the crowd had known that when I paid the hackman I had just a dollar left, a fact which was nobody’s business, the opinion of the town would have been divided about me. As it was, no question arose in the mind of the town about my financial ability. A good front is rather to be chosen than great riches.

I was twenty-seven years old. Just ten years before that May evening that landed me in Emporia, I had left Emporia to take a job in a printing office. In those ten years I had learned the printer s trade .and had made a living at it. I had become a reporter. I had been in charge of the circulation of a small daily. I had earned my way, at least partially, through college by writing. I had managed a weekly newspaper, the El Dorado Republican, hired and fired the help, solicited the advertising, written most of the editorials and all of the locals. I had made twenty-five hundred dollars a year for the publisher, Bent Murdock, and left his credit Al.

I had written for the Kansas City Journal and for the Star, and had published a book which had sold out in sixty days. My stuff— prose or verse — had been copied across the country. I had had a little nibble of fame. I was not afraid of the EmporiaGazette. I was not uneasy about the mortgages on my mother’s property. I had fitted myself to do everything, from sweeping out to writing the editorials and keeping the bank account, that I could ask any other man to do. So I was not afraid to plank down twentyfive cents to the hackman and go on a dollar over Sunday until the money from the Gazette began to come in. Which is another way of saying that I was a brash youth with a lot of assurance, who took considerable satisfaction, even pleasurable delight, in getting in a tight place and wiggling out. I never played poker, but I did enjoy throwing dice with fate that May evening as I rode regally through Emporia with the top of the hack down, a dollar in my pocket, and in my heart the sense that I had the world by the tail with a downhill pull.

Copyright 1946, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16. Mass. All rights reserved.

2

I HAD crossed the Rubicon — that border line in this world between the hired man and the boss. I waked the next morning, which was Sunday, scared. I had the key to the office in my pocket. After breakfast I went to look at it, all alone. Here’s what I saw: a room twenty-five by sixty with a smaller cubbyhole, ten by fifteen, subtracted from that floor space. In the cubbyhole were three chairs and a pine board table built into the wall. There I and the two reporters were supposed to do our writing, to keep the books, and get out the copy generally for the paper. It opened into the street. The walls of the cubbyhole were covered with theatrical posters and campaign pictures of statesmen pasted on the wallpaper; a few photographs of local celebrities and crooks were tacked above the desk. There was a swivel chair — presumably mine. A second chair had a cane bottom and arms, and the third was a common kitchen chair. The oilcloth on the floor had been scuffed into holes beneath each chair. So much for the editorial department.

The rest of the sixty by twenty-five floor space was the composing room and printing office. In the middle stood the cylinder press on which the Gazette was printed: a Cottrell equipped with a water motor which in drouthy seasons was disconnected and replaced by a colored man who turned a crank. Half a dozen racks for type cases were strung along the walls of the room, and three composing stones stood in the center of the floor. A heavy lead roller, weighing seventy-five pounds, stood on one end of the largest composing stone. That was the proof press. And that was all of the machinery that went with the Emporia Gazette.

I wonder if God has yet forgiven me for my sinful pride in it all. I knew what everything was — how good it was, or how bad from misuse or wear and tear. As a printer, I looked over the various cases and was pleased to find they were full. There had been much thrift in the organization of the shop. The floors were swept and everything was in order, which was another good omen. I must have spent an hour there, gloating over my treasure.

The foreman, Jack McGinley, a six-foot, 240pound, curly-headed, black-eyed Irishman, with a goatee and m ustache, showed up in mid morning, and he and I talked until noon about the paper, the payroll, and business prospects generally. Jack was a dozen years older than I and a good printer, who had at one time owned his own paper. I did not know it then, but he was a periodical drinker and sacrificed his position on the right-hand bank of the Rubicon to his lip for liquor. He took me in hand like a father and I have never had a wiser, more loyal friend than he. He came to be my refuge in many a storm. Why he liked me, I do not know. He had every reason to dislike me, for I was younger than he, and the boss. I seemed to have smart city ways; very likely I was most opinionated. But he realized early how much I trusted him.

J he paper was supposed to have between seven and eight hundred subscribers. Jack told me that there were only four hundred eighty-five in the town of Emporia and fewer than a hundred more in the county, and that the county collections were far in arrears. Jack seemed to have helped Mr. Morgan with the books. In the seesawing and horse trading, Mr. Morgan had given me certain of the May bills and the arrears in certain other collections. It was a fair trade. Jack knew about it and helped me to straighten out the accounts. He and I, being somewhat of the same blood and both of an ardent nature, dropped our guards in that hour alone in the office, and when noon came we stood at the front door. I offered him my hand. He looked me over from head to foot, quite formally, a heavy-set young fellow whose pudgy hands had never known toil heavier than typesetting, a youth with evident, even maybe a little conspicuous, modesty in his voice and mien to hide an inner self-esteem. Jack surveyed that figure with intuitive Irish appraisal, then smiled a beaming, possessive, fatherly smile and said: — “You’ll do. I guess we’ll make it!”

I hope I blushed when I thanked him and we shook hands warmly. The binding tie was welded.

My wife and my mother did not come to Emporia until the end of the first week. Sunday afternoon I wrote my salutatory editorial. Reading it after nearly half a century, I was amazed to find that it stands up. It still represents my ideals, realized with such a sad and heavy discount in approximate. But what I wrote I tried to do. Here it is: —

ENTIRELY PERSONAL

June 3, 1895
To the gentle reader who may, through the coming years during which we are spared to one another, follow the course of this paper, a word of personal address from the new editor of the GAZETTE is due. In the first place, the new editor hopes to live here until he is the old editor, until some of the visions which rise before him as he dreams shall have come true. He hopes always to sign “from Emporia” after his name when he is abroad, and he trusts that he may so endear himself to the people that they will be as proud of the first words of the signature as he is of the last words, He expects to perform all the kind offices of the country editor in this community for a generation to come.

It is likely that he will write the wedding notices of the boys and girls in the schools; that he will announce the birth of the children who will some day honor Emporia, and that he will say the final words over those of middle age who read these lines.

His relations with the people of this town and country are to be close and personal. He hopes that they may be kindly and just. The new editor of the GAZETTE is a young man now, full of high purposes and high ideals. But he needs the close touch of older hands. His endeavor will be to make a paper for the best people of the city. But to do that he must have their help. They must counsel with him, be his friends, often show him what their sentiment is. On them rests the responsibility somewhat. The “other fellows will be around. They will give advice. They will attempt to show what the public sentiment is. They will try to work their schemes, which might dishonor the town.

If the best people stay away from the editor’s office, if they neglect to stand by the editor, they must not blame him for mistakes. An editor is not all wise. He judges only by what he sees and hears. Public sentiment is the only sentiment that prevails. Good sentiment, so long as it does not assert itself, so long as it is a silent majority, is only private sentiment. If the good, honest, upright, God-fearing, law-abiding people of any community desire to be reflected to the world, they must see that their private opinion is public opinion. They must stand by the editors who believe as they do.

It is a plain business proposition. The new editor of the GAZETTE desires to make a clean, honest local paper. He is a Republican and will support Republican nominees first, last, and all the time. There will be no bolting, no sulking, no “holier than thou” business about his politics — but politics is so little. Not one man in ten cares for politics more than two weeks in a year. In this paper, while the politics will be straight, it will not be obtrusive. It will be confined to the editorial page — where the gentle reader may venture at his peril. The main thing is to have this paper represent the average thought of the best people of Emporia and Lyon County in all their varied interests. The editor will do his best. He has no axes to grind. He is not running the paper for a political pull. If he could get an office he wouldn’t have it. He is in the newspaper business as he would be in the drygoods business — to make an honest living and to leave an honest name behind. If the good people care for a fair, honest home paper, that will stand for the best that is in the town — here it is.

In the meantime, I shall hustle advertising, job work and subscriptions, and write editorials and “telegraph” twelve hours a day in spite of my ideals. The path of glory is barred hog-tight for the man who does not labor while he waits.
WILLIAM A. WHITE

I slammed it on the copy hook when I left the office that Sunday night and the next morning came down to take charge. Nothing new confronted me except the sense that I was actually boss, not a sub-boss for someone else, which was more frightening than exhilarating. But I had this comfort that first day. I met scores of my father’s old friends who had known him twenty-five years before in Emporia. They were mostly substantial citizens, many of them old-line, anti-Populist, silk-stocking Democrats. And they heartened me. Mr. Morgan took me up and down Commercial Street, introduced me to all the merchants and most of the lawyers and some of the doctors. I picked up local items as I went, talked advertising to advertisers, and did a good day’s work. We had two reporters, one of whom helped keep the books, and we all solicited advertising. The total payroll of the office was forty-five dollars. I had to find that much money before the next Saturday night.

The ravens brought it. It may be well to give the reader something of the economic picture of the times, to set down what the wages of skilled labor were in Emporia in 1895. Jack, the foreman, got twelve dollars; later a raise to fifteen. The best printer got eight dollars a week, and four girls set type at from two fifty to four dollars a week, according to their skill. The office devil got two fifty and Mr. Morgan told me he was due for a raise to three dollars the first of July. The reporters got eight and ten dollars each.

But living costs were low. A frying chicken cost fifteen cents, steak ten cents a pound, bacon eight and nine cents, flour two dollars a hundred, sugar twenty pounds for a dollar. Sallie and I paid eighteen dollars a month for a six-room house. It did not have a sign of a pipe or a wire in it, neither for water nor for light. We laid aside five dollars and no more for our grocery and incidental budget, and lived within it. We kept no maid, but we could have got one for from a dollar and a half to three dollars a week. Those wages and those commodity prices represented a hang-over from the old days when communities, even homes and certainly farms, were self-sufficient, when craftsmen in many trades set their wages on the basis of a self-sufficient home, a small farm and garden, cows and chickens and pigs as one of the props of every family.

But the world had moved in the quarter of a century before 1895. Railroads and other machines had wiped out all but the skeleton of the old self-subsistent civilization, and the catastrophic maladjustment between the two epochs was evident all around Emporia, and particularly on the farms. Unemployment had beaten down the price of corn, wheat, hay, hogs, and livestock until farming was unprofitable. The protest of Populism was the political phase of the unpainted farmhouses and barns one saw all over the Midwestern country, the run-down fences, the fallow, weedy fields; and in towns, the vacant stores and bankruptcy sales. And one of the town banks, though I did not know it at first, was slowly sinking into insolvency.

Yet in the big houses, ten or twenty of them, people lived well. The bankers and some of the doctors and lawyers drove spanking teams to carriages that cost as much as three hundred dollars. The Whist and High Five clubs, attended by the best people, had gay parties. Dances were given with some style and éclat, perhaps in the third-floor garrets of the baronial rococo mansions built in the seventies, or maybe in the skating rink or the hall of some fraternal insurance society. People who had money were living well in Emporia, others hanging on by their eyebrows. And Populism was raging across the state, across the Missouri valley and through the South.

3

DID NOT realize during those first days in Emporia why our town was divided, as were most towns in the Western world, into bank factions — factions deeply divided, bitterly feudal. But now I see across the years that those two factions in Emporia — the faction gathered about Major Calvin Hood and his bank and the faction gathered around Charley Cross and William Martindale and their bank — arose and thrived as local clans bound by purely monetary interests, and somewhat made necessary by the fact that storekeepers, professional people, and owners of little industries around the town could not live without credit. This, the banks furnished. The use of credit was made widely necessary by this transition from a simple self-supporting and self-sufficient economy to the new economy in the machine age. Capital, as represented by the banks, was still tribal, feudal, competitive. All over this part of the world in the nineties the economic scenery of the world was changing. Factions, feuds, internal bitternesses, wicked and sometimes bloody rivalries were fostered at the front doors of the banks in towns and cities across the land — at least across our Western land.

I only know about that.

So when Mr. Morgan took me up and down Commercial Street and Fifth and Sixth Avenues, calling on our friends and customers, I went unwittingly wearing the collar of the Emporia National Bank, Major Hood’s bank, the bank which Plumb and Hood founded twenty-five years before. This civic brawl, typical of the day and time, was a sad reality in the life of a young editor who took his pen in hand that Sunday afternoon to write his salutatory to the town of his birth.

That night, in the Emporia Republican, “our loathed but esteemed contemporary,” a two-line item appeared thus: —

Will A. White, of Kansas City, has bought the Gazette from W. Y. Morgan. Next!

Editor Eskridge of the Republican was a man in his sixties who had served the town in the legislature, who had secured the location of the State Normal in Emporia, who was an acknowledged leader of the Republican Party in Kansas and vice-regent of the Santa Fe Railroad, which named a town for him on one of its branches in an adjoining county. He was a dignified man with a rather large head, who covered the bald frontal area of his skull with long hair from the side and dyed it, and who always wrote the resolutions at the Republican County Convention. He was of the samurai caste in Kansas Republicanism, receiving remuneration as needed for his paper’s payroll from the Santa Fe, and was a spokesman of the other bank, the Cross-Martindale bank. When it was closed, a few years later, a sheaf of the old editor’s blank notes, accommodation paper, was found in the bank, which they slipped into the note case to polish up the record for the National Bank Inspector.

He did not realize it, but I was the young bull who had come to horn the old one out of the herd. Toward the end of his career, as was the fashion of the day, he devoted much space to abusing me. The Gazette never replied. Not a line in our paper indicated that we even knew he was on earth, and that — his reporters told ours — galled him more deeply than anything we could say. He was used to every form of abuse but contempt.

My wife and my mother came to Emporia the week-end after I arrived. Sallie came down to the office daily and we worked together — she on society items and other local items, I writing the editorial, soliciting advertising, taking care of the bank account. Soon we invited Lew Schmucker to quit his job as a railway postal clerk and come to the Gazette as bookkeeper, reporter, and advertising salesman. To him, it was a dream come true, for he had always wanted to be a newspaperman. So we jogged along for six months or so, with nothing more serious to cloud our happy lives than a weekly overdraft at the bank Monday morning, which was wiped out by Wednesday evening.

Then one Saturday night we rocked the town with laughter in one of those sheer accidents which the devil, in his ingenuity, sometimes contrives for newspapers alone. Sallie had made the announcement in the society column of the wedding of Hortense Kelly, daughter of a Methodist elder, a man of great political power in the state, and George Crawford, son of a former Governor and brother-in-law of Arthur Capper, of the Topeka Capital. It was quite a wedding. For a week, at odd times, Sallie had been at the Kelly home with the other young women of the town, helping to draw blue or pink baby ribbon through the bride’s trousseau, and was an intimate of the house. Saturday morning she wrote a funny story about John Martin, the laundryman who had taken his son, Charley, to Kansas City. Charley came home saying that his father had given him a dollar to call him Uncle instead of Papa when the girls were around. She had prefaced her story about John Martin with the quatrain: —

And then, the devil only knows why, the make-up man on the paper put a separating dash between that quatrain and the John Martin item and tacked the verses on at the end of the Kelly-Crawford wedding, which concluded thus: —

This marriage unites two of the oldest and most important families in Kansas, the Crawfords and the Kellys.

Then followed: —
And this is the sorrowful story . . ,

When old Jack saw it after the last paper was out and the carrier boys were gone, he began to roar with laughter and within ten minutes the barbershops of the town were churning with hilarity. In an hour the town was giggling its head off. In three hours the town was divided. Nine tenths of the burghers thought we did it on purpose and that it was a dirty shame. The other tenth realized that it was one of those devil’s accidents which come to newspapers in spite of all their care. But on the whole it was good medicine for the Gazette. It had never made such a deep and widespread impression on the town as that which came in that item. As for Sallie, she went to bed in tears, and when she tried to explain to the Kellys, she was greeted by cold, rebuking unbelief. If the Gazette gained circulation and attention, it was the woman who paid, and paid, and paid.

4

IT IS a lovely thing in youth to have “the valor of ignorance,” to have no other cares but a weekly overdraft at the bank, to be overwhelmingly in love, and to be able to laugh at the accidents of fate and turn the barbs of misfortune with the armor of an invulnerable self-confidence. We two — Sallie and I — walked to and from work every day, chattering, honking our laughter, billing and cooing like birds — perhaps equally brainless, which was a good thing also, for we did not realize how precarious was our lot.

Times were unbelievably hard that first summer. The overdraft began to mount Friday, sank into a dark abysm Saturday night, and, strain as we would Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we rarely got it entirely wiped out. Once in a while Major Hood at the bank would call me in and remonstrate. Twice that summer we had to give our note for fifty or a hundred dollars to cover the deepening overdraft. But we went on cutting our paper dolls at the office most happily. I printed two stories in the Gazette for filler, which the Sunday editor had rejected on the Star.

One story was called “The Court of Boyville,” the other was the story of “Aqua Pura,” both of which appeared later in a book. But from the Gazette they were copied and got around the country. So sometime in the winter or early spring of 1896, we had two offers from legitimate book publishers, asking if we had any other stories like that, enough to make a book. We had! We chose Way and Williams, Chicago publishers, largely because they were Western, and we turned down Henry Holt & Company chiefly because they were Eastern. We were loyal Westerners without much sense. So we began gathering up our stories for The Book. A five-hundred-dollar advance came from the publishers with the contract, and we slapped that advance on one of the mortgages. Which made us still happier and more carefree. And we screamed our delight like jays as we went about our work and through the town. That five hundred dollars seemed to cheer the Major up. At least it strengthened our credit and we could deepen the overdraft a little when we had to, but we could not get rid of it.

Let me paste in a picture here of Major Calvin Hood, our banker friend, known in the town as the “Little Major.” Major Hood was in his late fifties then, a slight little figure beginning to bend just a bit at the shoulders. He had sharp brown eyes, a clear skin, gray hair thinning at the brow, and gray whiskers always immaculately trimmed. But behind the barrier of those whiskers he kept a hard, cruel mouth, rapacious and hungry. Yet he smiled easily, laughed gently, very gently when he smiled — the refinement of his face appearing. He was another man. It was this man who always headed the subscription for every good thing. It was this man who lent students money, who bought beautiful pictures for his home when he went to New York, and good ones too, who patronized the arts in Emporia, gave generously to the library, kept a box at the Emporia Opera until he fell out with the owner of the theater, had a spanking team of well-matched sorrels hitched to a magnificent phaeton which adorned the streets. Compared with all other carriages in the town, the “Little Major’s” equipage was a Rolls-Royce beside a T Model. He was generous to his friends and ruthless to his enemies. He had a thin, long-fingered, bony hand. I never saw a palm that cupped so deeply, nor a palm that seemed so dry and crinkled. His voice was soft and he always cleared his throat with a little “ahem” when he spoke of interest, which he could compound in his head quicker than another banker could look it up in his interest book. Yet he was loyal to his friends, who were loyal to him, and for twenty years he treated me as his son.

He was a type, a product of his day, the banker who was a free man, who ran his own bank in his own way, deferring only slightly to the nonsense of the Federal bank inspectors. In his town and county, that typical banker was the sheik of the village. In his state, the “Little Major” was one of fewer than a dozen men who, with the railroad attorneys and the old heel-walking captains of industry who owned the packing houses, were the ruling class of our state. Every state had its rulers like these. Although he was known in Emporia as the “Little Major,” the pioneers knew that the “Little Major,” when he set up his bank in Emporia, used to carry tens of thousands of dollars in a money belt buckled around him when he went down into the wilds of Texas, carrying a pistol almost as large as himself, bought cattle, and sometimes pulled the pistol and stood off bandits with a nerve of steel. Only his enemies saw that side of him — or his friends, when they were in trouble and needed him. He and his kind have disappeared, as have the Mound Builders. The banker of today, hag-ridden by the Comptroller of the Currency, walking between the state laws and the Federal restrictions, like “Eugene Aram . . . with gyves upon his wrist,” is another creature, certainly neither the residuary legatee nor the heir-at-law of the “Little Major” and the Mound Builders.

Yet, in his suzerainty over the business world around him, Major Hood was typical of the banker in that day of metamorphosis when the old selfsubsistent economy of America had passed and a new order had come, all confused because it was uncharted, highly competitive in everything, yet more or less manacled by trusts which were themselves somewhat competitive, and by a growing subconscious feeling among men in control that their competition was wasteful and that some kind of amalgamation was necessary. The Major — in little — was Jim Hill, Jay Gould, Henry Villard, Andrew Carnegie, John W. Gates, the elder Morgan, Old John D. Rockefeller, and all the heads, organizers, and owners in trust of the nation’s industrial and financial institutions.

The “Little Major,” there in the back room of his bank, spinning his web (his enemies used to call him the “Old Spider”), dominating the politics, controlling the business, bossing his church, financing and directing the local college, was my friend, loyal, generous, and understanding. I had no sense that he was corrupting our newspaper. When we talked over local or state politics, I had the feeling that we were two free men. He never gave orders and, in many minor matters, I suppose he took advice. It was years before a major matter threatened a division between us. I just happened to think his way most of the time in those first years as a young editor, and maybe sometimes, because I was young and he was old, he deferred to me. Certainly he was an easy boss. I doubt not that they all were easy bosses in the big world which he symbolized in little. They too went with the current of the times, walking sturdily on their heels or stealthily on their toes, thinking they were going their own way. They were really guided, guarded, led unconsciously in the pell-mell rush of the times.

5

THE first real knock-down-and-drag-out fight I had in Emporia was with the Grand Army of the Republic. The Union veterans literally packed and controlled the Court House. They had majorities in the City Council and on the School Board. The Republican County Convention and the Kansas State Republican Convention were their private parade grounds. When I came to town I determined to cut down extra words in the Gazette and boil down the items to the bare bone. The G.A.R. had two Posts in Emporia and every week their notices came to the newspaper office in the form of a military order. It took twelve lines to say that P. B. Plumb Post of the G.A.R. would meet in its hall, as usual, Wednesday night. I cut the twelve lines down to exactly that many words — eliminating all the military phraseology, the names of the Commander and the Adjutant and the Corporal — and the G.A.R. blew its head off and boycotted the Gazette.

I explained to the people that I was not refusing to give the news of the G.A.R. meeting, but was refusing to clutter up the paper and take the space that real news would occupy by printing every week a lot of military jargon. And the boycott disappeared impotently after a few weeks. My competition, the old editor of the opposition paper, faunched wildly because I was insulting the men who had saved the Union and had struck the shackles from four million slaves, but little good it did him. We stressed local news and printed a number of items that ordinarily would not have been printed in a strictly conventional newspaper. We were chatty, colloquial, incisive, impertinent, ribald, and enterprising in our treatment of local events. Looking back over it now, I can see that much of it was based upon a smart-aleck attitude, but the people liked it. Circulation grew. The Gazette was generally abused in conservative households. A few prudish people sighed that they could not allow the Gazette in their homes on account of their children, which I felt was silly. So did Sallie.

Editorially, from the very first week the Gazette was a conservative Republican newspaper. I had no use for the protective tariff, but I tolerated it because I wished to advocate the gold standard. Kansas was sadly bitten by the fiat money theory. Senator Plumb, who had bossed the state and led it politically in the seventies and eighties, had been for the free coinage of silver. He owned silver mines in Colorado. Most of our Kansas statesmen toyed with the freesilver idea. They hoped to beat the Populists by making fun of pure fiat money, and at the same time by advocating free coinage of silver, which was 40 per cent fiat. So, when the Gazette advocated the single gold standard, it was politically a pariah in Kansas. It is not unlikely that occasional editorials in the files of the Gazette, speaking well of the theory of protection, were my defense weapons against attack upon my gold standard flank.

But I set no great store by the editorial page. I believed that local news, if honestly and energetically presented, would do more for subscriptions and more for the Gazette’s standing in the community than its editorial page. Indeed I believed then and believe now that a newspaper that prints the news — all of it that is fit to print — can take any editorial position it desires without loss of prestige or patronage. People choose their paper not because of its politics but because of its integrity, its enterprise, and its intelligence. They want an honest paper, well written, where they can find all the news to which they are entitled.

Except for occasional boycotts, which were noisy but highly incompetent, our editorials never got us in trouble. It was the news items that brought in irate subscribers. Our policy, for instance, was to drop the word “lady” and substitute the word “woman.” A lady who had paid a fine for streetwalking came in to protest not the publication of the news of her fine, but the fact that we called her a woman, and she assured us that she was as much of a lady as any of the other girls in this town. And from that hour to this, the Gazette has referred to all females as women, except police court characters, who are designated as “ ladies.”

One time a colored man who had been in the penitentiary twice for crimes of violence threatened that if his name ever appeared in the Gazette again, he would cut my heart out and show it to me. He was known as Razor Billings — commonly accounted by the orderly colored people of the town as “a bad nigger.” He got in trouble again. We used his name. The next morning I knew he would appear. So did the two reporters and the people in the back room. He was a big, lean, lantern-jawed chimpanzee of a man whose wild, bloodshot eyes had a lot of white in them, a loud-talking person. He began bellowing as he left the sidewalk. I had wrapped a lead window weight in a newspaper rather deftly, waiting for him, just in case. He did not know what it was. It lay on my desk and my hand toyed with it.

He began shouting to work up his temper as he stood there before me. I looked through the door into the office and my eye caught sight of the monumental figure of Jack McGinley wrapping in his apron a steel sidestick from the forms, which weighed ten pounds at least — a deadly weapon if there ever was one. Billings could not see Jack, though Jack was less than ten feet from him. Jack was “ reinforcements.” I got suddenly brave and assumed a cold, deadly manner which belied my inner fear and trembling agitation. With my hand toying with the window weight and with Jack armed to the teeth with the sidestick, I exhibited a courage that I certainly did not feel. But it was terrible and deadly enough so that I made Mr. Billings sit down while I read him a riot act, then made him get up and walk out of the office. As he got to the sidewalk, I followed him to the door and then, with the window weight unsheathed, herded him verbally down the street. As I turned to go back, Old Jack put his arm around me and said: —

“I said you would do, and you’ll do!”

And after that we had a good laugh, which was 98 per cent hysterical. Jack went back to his work and I sat down at my desk, with my window weight before me as I went on with my morning’s job, whatever it was. Of course through Jack, through the reporters, through the printers, the story of Razor Billings’s rout from the Gazette office spread over town that day. It gave me a reputation for physical courage that I certainly did not deserve. I was scared stiff throughout the whole interview. But we went on printing whatever news came up, and in our own way.

6

THE campaign of 1896, in which I had a minor and not particularly creditable part, for I only aroused bad blood and bitter feeling, was the first national campaign in the United States in which the debtors were for the most part on one side and the creditors on the other. No one can doubt that labor sympathized with Bryan, even though it was persuaded, more or less with crass coercion, to vote against him. It was our first class election. McKinley’s victory was due to the fact that he could unite to a political solidarity the American middle class.

In Emporia, the day after election, the Populists and Democrats, for all their county and state victories, were sad, disgruntled, and discouraged. I felt at once that the pressure of opposition to me, to which I was extremely sensitive, for all the success of my editorial, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” was relieved overnight. It was then in their national victory that the Republicans of our town rallied to me. As a national figure, I had their respect, and my ancient competitor, Governor Eskridge, who had before McKinley’s nomination been a free-silver leader, could not quite claim a share in the Republican victory.

All of which was rather unfair, for I am sure the Governor, despite his free-silver heterodoxy, was at heart a better, more loyal party man than I. For in my heart partisanship, in the sense that it really governs men’s thinking and directs their conduct, to me seemed always a political folly. I have always believed that parties are but a means to an end. A good partisan believes that partisanship is an end in itself. Nevertheless I crowed editorially in the election for my party, and was much more bitter on our editorial page than I was in my heart. Probably my bitterness was to convince myself that I was right. But it did not work. Politically I was a poor sinner in the temple, wearing the broad phylacteries of a Pharisee and ashamed of my pride.

Perhaps if I had known the real significance of that election, perhaps if I had realized that it was the beginning of a long fight for distributive justice, the opening of a campaign to bring to the common man — the man lacking the acquisitive virtues, the man of one talent — a larger and more equitable share in the common wealth of our country, I should have been more consciously ashamed of my political attitude than I was. For I was constitutionally and temperamentally, by blood and inheritance on both sides of my family, a friend of the underdog.

But somehow in those days, I was blind to the realities. My college education, my reading in sociology and in science, to keep abreast and be worthy of fellowship with Vernon Kellogg, did not teach me to see the truth all about me in those days of the middle nineties. I saw the mange on the underdog and did not realize its cause. Perhaps if Bryan had won and the underdog had been fed up a little and had been top dog, I should have respected him more heartily. I wonder. I doubt it. Perhaps I shrink from the truth even now, looking at those days across the years.

But one incident of that hour of triumph in November, 1896, has stuck vividly in my memory. It was a sunny winter day. The Gazette office door was open. In walked Frank Frazier, an old banker friend from El Dorado. He was a cynic. It was said of him in El Dorado that he never made a loan without assuming that his debtor was a dead-beat and letting the debtor know it. He had a wire voice — not high, but low and deadly. He was my father’s friend and was one of those who represented the Santa Fe in Butler County politics and kept entirely out of the limelight. He stood looking at me the way he appraised his customers in the bank, with a cocked eye, hard, mean, for a few moments without speaking, then began abruptly: —

“Well, so you think you are a hell of a fellow. Maybe you are. At least you rung the bell in this election. Now let me give you one thing. Your father was my friend. I want to help you. I owed him something for things he did for me. And here’s what I am paying you on that debt!”

He paused for a moment to gather himself, and said: —

“ Young man, around town they say you are paying your bills. Major Hood says you have been getting out of the red recently. I guess you’re on the upgrade. Now here’s your inheritance from your father. I’ll tell you, if for the next five years you will run your paper so straight and square and necessarily mean that you’ll make every faction in this town hate you and every man in this town fear and despise you, then you’ll know that you never can have any hope to run for office. You’ll know you can’t be elected to anything any time, and so you’ll keep away from running for office. It kills any editor. Editors who take offices lose their influence and wreck their business. You’ve got to take the veil of absolute chastity, so far as political office goes. Boss it, if you can, but don’t ever let them talk you into running for anything. And if you’re mean-honest for the next five years, your paper will make money and you’ll know you can’t get an office. That, by God, is because I owed your father, not money, but many kindnesses.”

He stared at me for a moment, and then the fat, chunky, hard-featured little county boss waddled, like the apparition of a pothellied god, out of the office without another word. But what he said sank deeply in my heart.

In midautumn after “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” came the publication of The Real Issue, my book of Kansas stories. It had the tremendous lift of the campaign editorial. But the campaign editorial could not have given the book the kinds of reviews that it had from the kinds of reviewers who praised it. For the book had nothing to do with the politics of the campaign of ‘96. The stories in the book were stories of Kansas life, mostly under three thousand words. Probably the average length was two thousand. The stories were modeled on those of Kipling, Davis, and Frank Stockton — on an American last but with a little of the French influence, Maupassant, Coppée, and Daudet; tear-jerkers most of them, though some were just ebullient Kansas spirits.

Before the book had been out a month, a letter came from McClure’s Magazine asking for the right to publish the story called “The King of Boyville,” and ordering half a dozen others at five hundred dollars each. It was enough to lift one’s hair and fit one’s head into the dimensions of something approaching success. But the real thrill came in the late autumn. I went into the corner bookstore where Vernon Farrington and Frank Miller, who drove the oil wagon, and John Van Schaick, a young college professor, were loafing in what the bookstore called its “Amen Corner,” when they yelled at me: —

“Hey, Bill, did you see the review of your book in Life?” And, “My God, man, you’ve hit it!” And, “How did you wangle that out of them?”

I bought Life, which was then a critical journal with a humorous slant, and hurried with the magazine unread to Sallie, who was in the office. We walked out, to be free of the flings and arrows of Lew Schmucker and the other reporter, and read it as we walked home on the sidewalk. It was a beautiful review written by Robert Bridges, who for years was one of the editors of Scribner s Magazine in its best days. He was the top-ranking literary critic of the country. Even a pleasant notice from Mr. Howells did not go so far or mean so much as the review7 by “Droch,” which was Bridges’ literary nom de plume. Our eyes filled with tears and our hands met in a passionate grip as we walked along under the falling leaves of the elm trees, along Sixth Avenue, toward home. It was a moment in life never to be forgotten. It was indeed the journey’s end of our struggles and hardships. We had entered into a new life. We were breathing another atmosphere. The printer, the reporter, the editorial writer on the Star, the country editor wrestling three days a week with his payroll, with his petty cares and troubles—all these skins which I had worn were cast aside, I was a young author.

7

IT WAS on my first trip to Washington that Congressman Charles Curtis introduced me to the man who, more than any other in my twenties, thirties, and forties, dominated my life. Curtis said one day, after he knew that he was probably licked in the Emporia Post Office fight: —

“Will, there’s a man down in the Navy Department that has been asking for you— a young fellow named Roosevelt. He read ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas?’ He knows about your book. He heard you were in town and he wants to meet you.”

So we arranged an appointment. I met Theodore Roosevelt. He sounded in my heart the first trumpet call of the new time that was to be. I went hurrying home from our first casual meeting, in the office of an assistant of the Navy Department, to tell Sallie of the marvel of the meeting. I was afire with the splendor of the personality that I had met, and I walked up and down our little bedroom at the Normandy trying to impart to her some of the marvel that I saw in this young man.

We were to lunch together the next day at the Army and Navy Club. It was a rather somber old barn in those days, that club, and we sat there for an hour after lunch and talked our jaws loose about everything. I had never known such a man as he. He overcame me. And in the hour or two we spent that day at lunch, and in a walk down F Street, he poured into my heart such visions, such ideals, such hopes, such a new attitude toward life and patriotism and the meaning of things, as I had never dreamed men had.

We had this in common: neither of us could work up any enthusiasm for McKinley. I remember the first shock of pain with which he revealed not only his scorn for McKinley and his kind, but his disgust with the plutocracy that Hanna was establishing in the land. For Hanna, he had a certain large, joyous tolerance as a man, but for the government he was maintaining, for the reign of privilege he was constructing, for the whole deep and damnable alliance between business and politics for the good of business, Roosevelt was full of vocal eloquence and ironic rage. That was the order which I had upheld, to which I was committed, to which I had commended my soul. Yet so strong was this young Roosevelt, — hard-muscled, hard-voiced, with hard, wriggling jaw muscles and snapping teeth even when he cackled in raucous glee, — so completely did the personality of this man overcome me, that I made no protest and accepted his dictum for my creed. Presently we launched out into heaven knows what seas of speculation, what excursions of delight, into books and men and manners, poetry, and philosophy—“Cabbages and Kings”! After that I was his man.

It was not the ten years between us. It was more than the background of his achievements in politics. It was something besides his social status, which itself might have influenced me in those days, something greater even than his erudition and his cultural equipment, that overcame me. It was out of the spirit of the man, the undefinable equation of his identity, body, mind, emotion, the soul of him, that grappled with me and, quite apart from reason, brought me into his train. It was youth and the new order calling youth away from the old order. It was the inexorable coming of change into life, the passing of the old into the new.

I Avas only functioning after the manner of my kind. All the youth of that day was leaving the nineteenth century and hurrying into the twentieth. And this was one of the episodes of a spiritual migration as definite, and yet as marvelous, as that which came when our grandfathers and fathers poured over the Alleghenies into the Mississippi valley and built their homes there in the last half of the old century. We were building our homes too — mansions not made by hands. And so came the new order.

To think that the difference in the size of a dollar, a mere dollar, measures so much of the difference between the world of the 1890’s and the world of today is a doleful thought. We should like to think, being men who have put a life of aspiration and struggle into the generation, that we have done something for humanity. That new world, which came into being with the new century, seemed while we were making it to be a IICAV heaven and a new earth. The thing that happened was the shrinking of the dollar, and with that shrinking came the enlargement of our needs. Maybe the miracle of change was something like this: our dollar would buy less; our lives required more. Hence, the world turned inside out and upside down.

Theodore Roosevelt and I, walking that summer day under the elms on F Street in Washington, going from the lunch at the Army and Navy Club, visioned a vast amount of justice to come in the cruel world. Much that we visioned has come.

A few months later he sent me his book American Ideals and Other Essays. I read it with feelings of mingled astonishment and trepidation. It shook my foundations, for it questioned things as they are. It challenged a complacent plutocracy. I did not dream 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. But that book was filled with an unsettling arraignment of the more predatory representatives of our American plutocracy. As a defender of the faith, I had met my first heretic.