What’s the Matter With Kansas is a 2004 book by political analyst Thomas Frank. The premise of Frank’s work is that the Republican Party had created a coalition of economic conservatives and cultural conservatives, the latter of which consisted, to a large degree, of working-class whites who had once voted Democratic. According to Frank, it was traditional, country club Republicans, whom he calls Mods, who dominated the state, but that they have been replaced by cultural conservatives, so-called “Cons,” who focus on issues such as abortion and religion. According to Frank, the Cons have essentially persuaded working class voters to vote against their economic interests, to the benefit of the economic conservatives. Frank does not lay the blame entirely on Republicans, arguing that the mix of Blue Dog Democrats (they once existed), embodied by the Democratic Leadership Council, and decadent social liberalism, embodied by Hollywood and other bastions of Champagne Socialism, do not present Kansas voters with an attractive alternative. Frank compares the current politics in Kansas to the historic populism of the state, and laments how its working class has strayed so far from its roots.
The title of Frank’s book was not accidental. It was taken from a famous editorial written by a man who was to become one of the best-known journalists in the country, and who still remains one of the most celebrated that Kansas has ever produced, William Allen White. Ironically, White’s editorial castigated not conservatives, but Progressive policies that he felt were ruining his state. Written in 1896, during the heated election campaign between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, it has arguably stood the test of time to a far greater degree than has Frank’s book, written less than twenty years ago.
Who Was William Allen White?
William Allen White was born in 1868, and would live his entire life in Kansas. He attended the College of Emporia and then the University of Kansas, thereafter working as an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star. In 1895, White purchased a small-town paper, the Emporia Gazette, and settled with his family in that town. White might have lived his life as an obscure, country newspaperman were it not for the fame that he achieved with his editorial, What’s the Matter With Kansas, a fiery attack on the populist policies of William Jennings Bryan who had catapulted to the Democratic nomination based, in large part, on a legendary speech in which he espoused an economic platform to aid debt-ridden farmers by taking the United States off the gold standard and increasing the amount of money in circulation (19th Century Quantitative Easing?). Bryant converted this dry, economic argument into a battle-cry for the disadvantaged with the phrase: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
White’s editorial was so effective it was seized upon by Mark Hanna, who headed the McKinley campaign, and who saw to it that hundreds of thousands of copies were printed and distributed throughout the country. The editorial made White a national figure, and brought him to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who became a life-long friend. Initially a conservative, White drifted leftward for most of life, leaving the Republican Party to support the Bull Moose candidacy of his friend, Roosevelt, and supporting Woodrow Wilson thereafter. White ultimately returned to the Republican fold, condemning Al Smith as the candidate of “the saloon, prostitution, and gambling,” and he later supported the presidential runs of his fellow Kansan, Alf Landon, and that of Wendell Willkie.
Although White remained, throughout his life, the editor of his small-town Kansas newspaper, his columns were syndicated and reprinted throughout the country. He was so well known that he was given the nickname “The Sage of Emporia,” and he was considered to be the authentic voice of Middle America. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for his editorial, “To an Anxious Friend,” a full-throated defense of free speech that is as relevant today as his more famous editorial. In it, he recognized that free speech can result in the propagation of bad ideas as well as good ones, but that the latter will ultimately triumph over the former:
You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people - and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.
He noted that the more contentious the times, the more the need for free speech:
You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger. No one questions it in calm days, because it is not needed. And the reverse is true also; only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice.
White concluded his editorial by warning of the dangers of censorship and the virtues of free speech, in words that those who would regulate social media would do well to heed:
This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold - by voice, by posted card, by letter or by press. Reason never has failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.
By the time of his death, White was so famous around the country that, in 1940, he was asked by Franklin Roosevelt to chair the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, an organization dedicated to the provision of economic and material support for the allies, in order to further America’s interests. White’s stature was instrumental to the success of the Committee, which campaigned vigorously to build political support for the Lend Lease program. As one contemporary said: “No other man in the country, I think, would have had the public confidence which would have enabled him to so quickly get together so large and responsible a body of the citizens.” White ultimately resigned his position on the Committee; while he openly supported the Allies, he was against the involvement of American troops in the war, a position that put him at odds with other members. White died before the end of the war, in 1944.
What’s The Matter With Kansas?
The Kansas in which White began his career was one in a state of flux. With the completion of the trans-continental railroad in 1869, there had been a rush to settle lands west of the Mississippi. As but one example, the population of Kansas almost tripled in the following decade. When a drought in the region began in 1887, the initial prosperity gave way quickly. Land prices plummeted, and credit from eastern banks withered.
In response, farmers formed various associations to deal with issues affecting them, many of them succeeding the Granger movement. These organizations coalesced into a movement, which consisted of three groupings, called the Farmers’ Alliance. The Farmers’ Alliance sought to improve the economic conditions of farmers through cooperatives, education, and political advocacy. The movement challenged the monopoly and high fees of grain transport and storage companies, the high interest rates on loans, and the low crop prices. It also proposed a federal farm-credit and marketing system called the subtreasury plan. It supported government regulation or ownership of railways and telegraph companies, an increase in the supply of money, a graduated income tax and a decrease in tariffs, the abolition of national banks, and the establishment of subtreasuries—government warehouses in which farmers could deposit crops and borrow against the worth of the crop at a low interest rate.
Inevitably, the Farmers” alliance movement evolved into a political party – the People’s Party, or Populists. One state in which the Populist Party was particularly successful was Kansas. In 1890, the Populists took control of the Kansas legislature, and elected a U.S Senator as well as a member of Congress, Jeremiah Simpson, or “Sockless Jerry.” In 1892, the Populists’ candidate for Governor was elected, although control of the legislature was undecided after the election, as many results were disputed.
Both the Populists and the Republicans declared victory, and the conflict reached a crisis when the Populists locked themselves in the State Hall. Thereupon, the Republican broke down the chamber door with a sledgehammer. The Governor called out the militia and, after a three-day standoff, the Populists gave way, and the Kansas Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of the Republicans.
The editorial that was to give White national fame was written against this backdrop. White began his editorial by noting that the population of Kansas had been stagnant for a period of eight years, with new births barely exceeding the outflow of population. He noted that this was in stark contrast with the rest of the country.
In five years ten million people have been added to the national population, yet— instead of gaining a share of this say, half a million—Kansas has apparently been a plague spot, and, in the very garden of the world, has lost population by ten thousands every year.
At the same time, Kansas was also losing wealth, in stark contrast to the country. Other states around Kansas had all seen their economies prosper.
Not only has she lost population, but she has lost money. Every moneyed man in the state who could get out without loss has gone. Every month in every community sees someone who has a little money pack up and leave the state. This has been going on for eight years.
The editorial went on to note that, in contrast to neighboring states, there were no thriving cities in Kansas, and little investment. White concluded:
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 newspaper columns and magazines once devoted to praise of her, to boastful facts and startling figures concerning her resources, are now filled with cartoons, jibes and Pefferian speeches. Kansas just naturally isn't in it. She has traded places with Arkansas and Timbuctoo.
In the second half of the editorial, White diagnosed the problem. First, he catalogued the office-holders and candidates who populated the state government: a “Jacksonian” who complained there is a bathtub in the statehouse for governor, a “wild-eyed rattle-brained fanatic who has said openly in a dozen speeches that ‘the rights of the user are paramount to the rights of the owner’" for Chief Justice, “an old human hoop skirt who has failed as a businessman, who has failed as an editor, who has failed as a preacher” for Congress, and a “kid without a law practice” for Attorney General. What bound these candidates together was their hatred and demonization of business, their regulation, and their laws that interfered with the operations of the market. Mocking them, White wrote, sarcastically:
Oh this IS a state to be proud of! We are a people who can hold up our heads! What we need is not more money, but less capital, fewer white shirts and brains, fewer men with business judgment, and more of those fellows who boast that they are "just ordinary clodhoppers, but they know more in a minute about finance than John Sherman; we need more men who are posted," who can bellow about the crime of '73, who hate prosperity, and who think, because a man believes in national honor, he is a tool of Wall Street. . . . We need several thousand gibbering idiots to scream about the "Great Red Dragon" of Lombard Street. We don't need population, we don't need wealth, we don't need well-dressed men on the streets, we don't need cities on the fertile prairies; you bet we don't!
White specifically went after Bryan, quoting from his “Cross of Gold” speech: “The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class and rest upon them."
White’s response was devastating:
That's the stuff! Give the prosperous man the dickens! Legislate the thriftless man into ease, whack the stuffing out of the creditors and tell the debtors who borrowed the money five years ago when money "per capita" was greater than it is now, that the contraction of currency gives him a right to repudiate. . . . What Kansas needs is men who can talk, who have large leisure to argue the currency question while their wives wait at home for that nickel's worth of bluing.
White ended his editorial with an apparent reference to a hymn, From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, which extolled the beauty of the Earth, but faulted the sinfulness of those who inhabited it, primarily for their paganism: "Every prospect pleases and only man is vile." Presumably, White understood that his audience would be familiar enough with the hymn to know the lines that followed: “In vain with lavish kindness the gifts of God are strown; the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.”
White’s Editorial Today
As is evident from the above, in co-opting the title of White’s editorial, Thomas Frank turned the latter on its head. In offering nostrums as to how government intervention is in the economic interests of the residents of Kansas, Frank took his place among the very “clodhoppers” that White so effectively eviscerated.
It is a seeming cliché to suggest that an editorial is timeless, but, as the culture wars wage between Florida and Texas, on the one hand, and New York and California on the other, What’s The Matter With Kansas?, with names changed, could be issued tomorrow and be as relevant as it was over a century ago. One could argue that it identifies more accurately some of the problems in this country than the recent book that bears its name. The statistics concerning the loss of population and the loss of wealth that afflict our blue states mirror those cited by White. California’s population from 2020 to 2022 fell by 500,000. On a per capita basis, New York and Illinois had the steepest population decline of any state in the Union. The fastest growing states were Florida and Idaho. As to wealth, in 2022, it was reported that New York’s tax base declined by $19.5 billion, and California’s by $17.8 billion. San Francisco is gripped by a crime wave forcing businesses out of that city. These states are on the same path as was the Kansas of White’s era.
Despite these trends, some solutions offered by politicians in these states closely resemble those offered in 19th century Kansas. We have experienced a loosening of the currency. Student loan forgiveness and the stay of evictions are policies with which White would be familiar. The wealthy are perennial targets. Most recently, the newly elected Mayor of Chicago blamed business for the spiraling crime rate in his city.
Other solutions go beyond what progressives in White’s day would even have dreamed of suggesting. The left’s war on the oil and gas industry is hardly in the economic interest of Kansas taxpayers, and it is only a matter of time until the restrictions on farming, which have sparked protests in the Netherlands and around the world, will come to Kansas.
Perhaps the only change an editor might make to White’s editorial would be to its ending. White elected to end his editorial with the words of a hymn, one that has fallen into disrepute given modern sensibilities. Few journalists today are comfortable referencing religion in their political analyses. More to the point, it is unlikely that today’s readership would recognize the words to a hymn, no matter how well-known. But that would be a mistake. White’s choice was a subtle suggestion that the mania of many progressive ideas bordered on religion. One suspects that time would not temper his view, but that he would hold it even more today.
Excellent piece. I had forgotten about William Allen White.