CHAPTER XXVII
KANSAS JOURNALISM
Everything I had ever heard of Kansas, every one I had ever met from Kansas, everything I had ever imagined about Kansas, made me anxious to invade that State. With the exception of California, there was no State about which I felt such a consuming curiosity. Kansas is, and always has been, a State of freaks and wonders, of strange contrasts, of individualities strong and sometimes weird, of ideas and ideals, and of apocryphal occurrences.
Just think what Kansas has been, and has had, and is! Think of the border warfare over slavery which began as early as 1855; of settlers, traveling out to "bleeding Kansas" overland, from New England, merely to add their abolition votes; of early struggles with the soil, and of the final triumph. Kansas is to-day the first wheat State, the fourth State in the value of its assessed property (New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts only outranking it), and the only State in the Union which is absolutely free from debt. It has a more American population, greater wealth and fewer mortgages per capita, more women running for office, more religious conservatism, more political radicalism, more students in higher educational institutions in proportion to its population, more homogeneity, more individualism, and more nasal voices than any other State. As Colonel Nelson said to me: "All these new ideas they are getting everywhere else are old ideas in Kansas." And why shouldn't that be true, since Kansas is the State of Sockless Jerry Simpson, William Allen White, Ed Howe, Walt Mason, Stubbs, Funston, Henry Allen, Victor Murdock, and Harry Kemp; the State of Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Nation, and Mary Ellen Lease—the same sweet Mary Ellen who remarked that "Kansas ought to raise less corn and more hell!"
Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter. It is a prohibition State in which prohibition actually works; a State like nothing so much as some scriptural kingdom—a land of floods, droughts, cyclones, and enormous crops; of prophets and of plagues. And in the last two items it has sometimes seemed to actually outdo the Bible by combining plague and prophet in a single individual: for instance, Carrie Nation, or again, Harry Kemp, "the tramp poet of Kansas," who is by way of being a kind of Carrie Nation of convention. Only last year Kansas performed one of her biblical feats, when she managed, somehow, to cause the water, in the deep well supplying the town of Girard, to turn hot. But that is nothing to what she has done. Do you remember the plague of grasshoppers? Not in the whole Bible is there to be found a more perfect pestilence than that one, which occurred in Kansas in 1872. One day a cloud appeared before the sun. It came nearer and nearer and grew into a strange, glistening thing. At midday it was dark as night. Then, from the air, the grasshoppers commenced to come, like a heavy rain. They soon covered the ground. Railroad trains were stopped by them. They attacked the crops, which were just ready to be harvested, eating every green thing, and even getting at the roots. Then, on the second day, they all arose, making a great cloud, as before, and turning the day black again. Nor can any man say whence they came or whither they departed.
Among the homely philosophers developed through Kansas journalism several are widely known, most celebrated among them all being Ed Howe of the Atchison "Globe," William Allen White of the Emporia "Gazette," and Walt Mason of the same paper.
Howe is sixty years of age. He was owner and editor of the "Globe" for more than thirty years, but four years ago, when his paper gave him a net income of sixty dollars per day, he turned it over to his son and retired to his country place, "Potato Hill," whence he issues occasional manifestos.
Some of Howe's characteristic paragraphs from the "Globe" have been collected and published in book form, under the title, "Country Town Sayings." Here are a few examples of his homely humor and philosophy:
So many things go wrong that we are tired of becoming indignant.