Books: Country Editor

FORTY YEARS on MAIN STREET—William Allen White—Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

When a newspaper editor writes a best-selling editorial, that’s news. Such news was made 41 years ago when a 28-year-old, redheaded, roly-poly country editor named William Allen White of The Emporia Gazette wrote for his 485 subscribers a scorching editorial against Bryan’s Populists, called What’s the Matter with Kansas?* Famed Republican Boss Mark Hanna plastered the U. S. with it in the McKinley-Bryan campaign, offered its author his pick of a job; big city dailies did the same. Editor White turned down both offers, but did not drop out of sight. From then on he was No. 1 U. S. country newspaper editor and prairie philosopher. Forty Years on Main Street is a collection of his editorials, grouped by subject, covering the best of his output. The result is an interesting bit of Americana combining a Main Street diary, a graph of the devious political path of a Progressive of Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Class of 1912, and an all-but-extinct type of “personal journalism.”

Heroes of Editor White’s editorial page are his fellow-Emporians. They have their foibles but none worth getting really sore about. They need a scolding now & then, but what they need oftenest is a pat on the back, maybe some kidding. In his warm but unmaudlin obituaries, Editor White shows the full measure of their place in his half-Irish heart. Even outside Emporia, where all the worst sinners live, he can always find some good word to say for the dead. Only once in 42 years has a man died in the U. S. about whom he could not be generous. That was Publisher Frank Munsey, whose obituary stated briefly that he had “contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker.”

It makes little difference whether the editor writes about mince pies or big politics. “Public opinion is not molded by editors.” (Editor White figured that out before the election revelations of 1936.) And an editor with no inconsistencies is either a stuffed-shirt or a liar. In current footnotes he points out some of his own. He thinks he used to be too noisy boosting the wonders of Emporia and Kansas. He is “ashamed” that he called Bryan “a shallow fellow,” and Socialist Eugene V. Debs “a charlatan,” blushes over his flag-waving editorials during the Spanish-American and World Wars, would take back if he could an editorial upholding the guilt of Sacco & Vanzetti, “whose execution was a crime for which America lost prestige in the eyes of millions.” But he makes no amendment to his early stand among the first thin ranks to declare for U. S. recognition of Russia, and the innocence of Tom Mooney. Nor has he had a change of heart over twice bolting the Republican Party, once to join Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” campaign, again in 1924 to run independently on an anti-Klan platform for Governor of Kansas (“they call it Klansas,” he said) when he polled enough votes to break the Kansas Klan’s back.

Now at 69, “thumbing my nose at the future and throwing kisses at the past,” William Allen White gives no evidence that he ever worries about meeting the fate (fascist concentration camp) of Editor Doremus Jessup in It Can’t Happen Here, despite the Roosevelt Dictatorship predicted by his last Presidential candidate, Alf Landon.

*Other most-famed U. S. editorial of last century: Horace Greeley’s Prayer of Twenty Millions.