Charles Delgadillo and James Stacey, eds., "Heartland Utopia: William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town" (UP of Kansas, 2026)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dan Moran
Guest: Jason Stacy, co-editor (with Charles Delgadillo) of Heartland Utopia: William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town (University Press of Kansas, 2026)
Date: March 9, 2026

This episode dives into the work of William Allen White, a once-famous Kansan journalist, editor, and author whose reflections on small-town Midwest shaped American ideals before fading from the modern public consciousness. Through his fiction and editorials—collected in the new anthology Heartland Utopia—White presents a nuanced, aspirational, but never uncritical vision of the “ideal Midwestern town.” Stacy and Moran explore White’s values, style, his position in American letters, and why his writing remains unexpectedly resonant today.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Who Was William Allen White? (01:39–07:08)

• White's Background
  • Born 1868 in Kansas to a politically mixed household (father: Democrat, mother: Republican—who witnessed the Lincoln-Douglas debates) ([01:45]).
  • Dropped out of two colleges, entered journalism, and in 1895 bought the Emporia Gazette ([03:23]).
• Rise to Fame
  • Wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” in 1896—a scathing anti-populist editorial adopted by the McKinley campaign, making White nationally prominent (“the Voice of Main Street”) ([05:45]).
  • Maintained his identity as a Kansan editor, reinforcing his authenticity and connection to “small town America.”

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White’s Character & Style (07:08–10:44)

• Cultural Persona
  • Host Dan Moran compares White to Jimmy Stewart’s archetypes: “he definitely came across to me as kind of like...Jimmy Stewart would play him” ([07:08]).
  • Stacy affirms: “I think William Allen White helped set that mold...as an American Everyman” ([07:26]).
• Utopian Vision
  • The anthology curates White’s thinking on “the small Midwestern Town” (5,000–15,000 people) as the “apotheosis of the American project,” blending ideals and realistic critique ([08:26]).
  • For White, the small town was an inspiration and a model of mutual obligation and community, even as he saw its limitations.

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Community, Modern Alienation & Nostalgia (10:44–15:22)

• Role of Community
  • White famously writes: “the job of a man is to live happily and usefully and to be as kind and brave and wise as he can” ([10:44]).
  • Stacy: “for White, happiness came through community...a community where you could go to the city council meeting and yell at your alderman and then see that person the next day in the supermarket” ([10:53]).
• Modern Disconnection
  • Moran: “...impossible...not be reminded every five pages of what we've lost. ...We have social media but no society...” ([12:28]).
  • Stacy notes White’s “ambivalence about cities” and preference for the practical, interconnected obligations of the small town ([12:48]).
  • White’s comparison piece, “Emporia and New York” (1907), humorously contrasts different scales of community and the sense of belonging ([12:48–15:22]).

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Style, Accessibility & Comparison to Orwell (15:22–20:33)

• Lucidity and Middle-of-the-Road Politics
  • Moran compares White’s style to George Orwell’s, calling it “lucid” and politically broad: “today you can hand this book to people of wildly different political ideas...just the way today...both want to claim Orwell” ([15:22]).
  • Stacy agrees: “White is writing in a newspaper...the tone of the everyday for everyone,” and his “middle of the road inclination” allowed for broad appeal ([16:06, 16:54]).
• Political Positions
  • White was a progressive Republican, supporter of reforms like the FDA, and a fierce anti-Klan activist (“organized a kind of desperate third party campaign to at least platform anti Klan sentiments”) ([18:23–20:33]).
  • Critiqued both left-leaning populists (for their “stridency”) and right-leaning radicalism.

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The Anthology’s Structure & Modernism’s Challenge (20:33–25:30)

• Collection Design
  • Divided into two halves, representing White’s “before and after” the modernist turn post-WWI ([20:42]).
    • Pre-1920: Utopian, optimistic.
    • Post-1920: Defensive, responding to modernist critiques such as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street ([22:09]).
  • White’s review “The Other Side of Main Street” defends “flyover country” against modernist denigration ([24:51–25:30]).

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Essential Texts & Representative Selections (25:30–36:39)

• Must-Include Editorials
  • “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (1896) and “The Other Side of Main Street” (1921). White’s reinterpretation of Lewis’s Main Street defends the warmth and goodwill of the American small town:
    • Quote: “goodwill in the American country town is institutionalized...men feel the strength of it, take courage from it, give themselves to it more or less, and thus grow in stature by what they give...this conviction...distinguishes Americans from the rest of mankind” ([29:10]).
  • Defending sentimentality: “Damn sentimentality, if you will, but don't deny its presence and power in American life” ([30:03]).
• Notable Short Stories
  • “City of Aquapura,” “The Homecoming of Colonel Hicks,” and “The King of Boyville” illustrate the challenges and triumphs of Midwestern community formation ([47:51]).

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White’s Sentimentality & Literary Context (36:39–38:05)

• Contrast with Irony & Modernism
  • Moran contrasts White’s sincerity with H.L. Mencken’s famous irony, noting that White’s worldview is “completely without irony” ([36:39]).
  • Stacy suggests that the cultural transition of the 1920s gave rise to modern irony, whereas White embodies an earlier, earnest ethic ([37:10–38:05]).

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The Country Newspaper & White’s Observational Power (38:05–41:19)

• On Local Journalism
  • White cherished the local newspaper’s role in binding the community: “all of God's beautiful, sorrowing, struggling, aspiring world is in the country newspaper. And again, like, without irony” ([41:08]).
  • Revealing small-town secrets with humor: “the Methodists don't really like the tenor in their choir...and that's the kind of thing we know—but I’ll tell you...” ([38:34]).
  • The loss of such local journalism is palpable in today’s disconnected landscape.

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Civic Education and the “Moron Majority” (41:19–47:31)

• From “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” to “What’s the Matter with America?”
  • In 1922, White worries about the “moron majority”—not as a nativist, but as a critic of the country’s lack of civic education ([41:44]).
    • Stacy: “he is not arguing against...immigrants...but critiquing our education system...it’s an argument for robust civic education” ([44:36]).
  • Both left and right have found fault and insight in this essay, which remains relevant as debates over civics continue ([46:33]).
  • Contrast to Mencken—where Mencken mocks the masses as irredeemable, White offers “a way to improve the situation” ([47:03]).

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Discovery Through Editing—Fiction’s Importance (47:31–51:17)

• On Including Fiction
  • Stacy describes initial debates over whether to include White’s fiction. Ultimately, he argues it’s essential for capturing “the maturation of the small Midwestern town” ([47:51]).
  • The stories “The City of Aquapura,” “The Homecoming of Colonel Hicks,” and “The King of Boyville” together trace a narrative of striving, belonging, and fulfillment ([48:42]).
  • The inclusion of fiction broadens our understanding of White’s heartland utopia.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “For William Allen White, happiness came through community...not a kind of abstract community, but...the daily interactions between people in a place where they could know each other.”
  — Jason Stacy ([10:53])

• “I think William Allen White helped set that [Jimmy Stewart] mold...What Jimmy Stewart is playing in the 30s had become a kind of received opinion as an American Everyman, based on some of the precedents that William Allen White...is first laying down.”
  — Jason Stacy ([07:26])

• “He is not arguing for the cessation of immigration...he is critiquing our education system...it’s an argument for robust civic education.”
  — Jason Stacy ([44:36])

• “Goodwill in the American country town is institutionalized in some organized way. The town's goodwill touches every family...This belief...that you can get something for nothing by giving something for nothing distinguishes Americans from the rest of mankind.”
  — William Allen White, quoted by Jason Stacy ([29:10])

• “Damn sentimentality, if you will, but don't deny its presence and power in American life.”
  — William Allen White, quoted by Dan Moran ([30:03])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:39–07:08 — White’s biography and why he mattered
• 07:08–10:44 — Jimmy Stewart archetype; White’s ideal of the small town
• 10:44–15:22 — Community as happiness; loss of connection in modernity
• 15:22–20:33 — Clarity of prose; White’s politics; anti-Klan activism
• 20:33–25:30 — The anthology’s structure; White vs. modernism (Main Street)
• 25:30–36:39 — Key texts: “The Other Side of Main Street”; sentimentalism
• 36:39–38:05 — Mencken and the rise of irony
• 38:05–41:19 — The country newspaper’s role and decline
• 41:19–47:31 — What’s the Matter with America?; civics and democracy
• 47:31–51:17 — Happy editorial accidents; the necessity of White’s fiction

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Tone and Takeaways

• The conversation reveres White’s sincerity, balance, and devotion to community, contrasting it to later, more ironic literary modes.
• Both editors and host emphasize the continuing relevance of White’s questions about civic life, belonging, and how public discourse shapes the soul of the nation.
• Listeners come away with both a nostalgic sense of what White’s world offered and a clear-eyed view of its continued influence—and its limitations.

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For anyone seeking insight into the American character, the Midwestern mythos, or the roots of political moderation and community, this episode is essential listening—and Heartland Utopia is essential reading.

Transcript

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[Jason Stacy]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dan Moran]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dan Moran. Charles Delgadillo is a lecturer in history at the California State University, Pomona. Jason Stacy is a distinguished research professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Together, they've edited a collection of pieces by William Allen White titled Heartland William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town, just published in 2026 by the University of Kansas. Jason, welcome to the New Books Network.

[Jason Stacy]

Thanks, Dan. Glad to be here.

[Dan Moran]

So let's start by at the first step, tell our listeners about William Allen White.

[Jason Stacy]

Well, William Allen White used to be a household name in the 20th century. He was a syndicated columnist that most Americans would have heard of. And he not only published newspaper editorials that appeared in other newspapers, but he was a well known author of contemporary pieces in magazines like Saturday Evening Post or the Atlantic. And he also wrote some popular books, especially before the 1920s, that were well known. But he's really dropped out of public consciousness, especially in the 21st century. So this let me give you a little background on William Allen White and try to give you a sense of his significance in the 20th century. He's a native Kansan, and he spent most of his life and career in Kansas, specifically the city of Emporia, Kansas. He was born in 1868, so in the years immediately following the Civil War. And he was born to two transplants to Kansas from the Midwest. But of course, in 1868, most everybody in Kansas was a transplant who was an American. And Kansas itself had only been a state for a little over a decade. By 1868, as a young man, he apprenticed as a printer, learned that trade, and was raised by a father who was a Democrat and a mother who was a Republican. And his mother got to see the Lincoln Douglas debates as a young woman and was convinced by Lincoln and would not give up her Republicanism. And as we talk about in the introduction, William Allen White's father died when William Allen White was pretty young. And so he moved towards his mother's Republicanism, which was probably a good idea in Kansas, because in the aftermath of the Civil War and into the 20th century and frankly into today, Kansas is a stronghold of Republican politics. Politics. He did spend a little time at college, went to two different colleges, but dropped out of both of them and went into the newspaper business and eventually was able to scrape together enough money with some support from the Republican Party to buy a newspaper called the Emporia Gazette, which was the main paper that he edited throughout his life. He bought the Gazette in 1895 as a young man, and he was still editor of the Gazette when he passed away in 1944. And he could have lived his life as just a Midwestern small city editor of the city's newspaper. And what's interesting about the Gazette is it started out as a populist newspaper. Now, for your readers who may have a vague memory of, or your listeners may have a vague memory of populism, this was a 19th century movement in favor of farmers rights. And it swept the country politically throughout the 1880s and 1890s. And in fact, in 1896, the Democratic Party itself nominated William Jennings Bryant, who spoke the language of populism. And the Populist party went ahead and nominated William Jennings Bryant for the same ticket. Now, Bryan didn't win in that year, but populism was very popular in 1896, one year after William Allen White purchased the Gazette. But White was not a populist. In fact, he was strongly against populism. And so when he bought the Gazette and he turned it into an anti populist paper, it ruffled a lot of feathers. And in 1896, still a young man, he wrote an editorial after getting in a fight with a group of populists on the streets of Emporia, verbal fight. He went back and he wrote an article called what's the Matter with Kansas? And it was a dashed off screed by an angry young man against populism that happened to be published in the midst of the presidential campaign of 1896, when populism was really at its height and the Republican Party, specifically the campaign of William McKinley, picked up this editorial and reproduced it and spread it as campaign literature. And it made this young editor famous. And from then on, William Allen White really had a kind of national presence as a voice of reason in the Midwest out of Little Emporia, Kansas, and eventually took on the moniker of the Voice of Main Street. And it's after 1896 that he had this national reputation. He met presidents, he hobnobbed with important political figures. But he was smart enough to know that staying in Kansas, staying in Emporia, staying the editor of the Gazette, really became part of his public identity. And so he stuck with that position because it lent some authenticity to. To his ideas about the small town America. I could go on about his biography, but maybe that'll sort of launch us.

[Dan Moran]

Yeah, that's great. As I was reading, and I must tell the listeners that I had never read a word of White's until I read your anthology. And I read every word. I think it's a terrific, terrific book. But one of the things about his character, I know they didn't physically resemble each other, but he definitely came across to me as kind of like if this were going to be a film, Jimmy Stewart would play him.

[Jason Stacy]

You know what? I think that's really good, Dan. And so let's talk about Jimmy Stewart a little bit. Right. So Mr. Smith goes to Washington, or of course, It's a Wonderful Life that he had managed to cultivate a kind of slightly befuddled, very honest, very moral, regular guy. And as a cultural historian, I can't help but make these leaps. I think William Allen White helped set that mold, and he wasn't the only one. But what Jimmy Stewart is playing in the 30s had become a kind of received opinion as an American Everyman, based on some of the precedents that William Allen White is first laying down, really in the first 10 to 15 years of the 20th century, through his editorials that are nationally syndicated and his other publications.

[Dan Moran]

That's great. That's great. Well, I'm glad I'm on the right track there. What did White write about and what did he care about?

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, like all newspaper editors, William Allen White is sort of writing on the latest news of the day. And so pick your topic. Roughly from 1896 to the mid-1940s, William Allen Wright is writing about it. But our focus in this book was to concentrate on his writing about the small Midwestern Town. And he's talking about. Pretty precise about what that means. He means a town roughly between about 5,000 people to about 15,000 people, right? So he argued in some pieces that a town can really kind of be too small to reach that critical mass of community. And then, of course, as some of the writings in this collection show, it can get too big and it can cease to have some of those elements that are important. But we tried to pull out those writings on the small town to make the argument that White actually has a vision, what we call a utopia, of what the small town could be and what was inherently good about it. And it was in the Midwest, and it was of a particular size. And for White, it represented the height of the American project. That those New England villages out in the east and those cowboy towns out in the west, those were very different things, but that the ideals of the American Revolution itself reached a kind of fancy word apotheosis with the small town in the Midwest. And it was. And this is why we called it a utopia. He implied that Emporia hit that ideal. But he writes a lot of critical things about Emporia, too. And so it was like a utopia, both an ideal and kind of nowhere. But it also represented, I think, for White, and I think he hoped for his readers a kind of inspiration about what is great about the country and how the country functions well based on this ideal he had. And so we were very careful in our curation in that we pulled out about 20 years of his editorials and some of his fiction to give a reader a sense of the contours of this ideal small town.

[Dan Moran]

For White, there's a moment where he says, quote, the job of a man is to live happily and usefully and to be as kind and brave and wise as he can.

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's right. And I think, notice all of those things wisely and bravely, that for White, happiness came through community. And that for him was not a kind of abstract community, but it was the necessarily daily interactions between people in a place where they could know each other. The way I always describe it, if I talk about White with my students is for William Allen White, he wanted a community where you could go to the city council meeting and yell at your alderman and then see that person the next day in the supermarket, right? And that allowed for him a kind of full growth of an individual in a place of other individuals. He talked about houses like that, too. He talked about a street where a street is a community of individual households that all have their particularities, their differences, frankly, their secrets, and also the right to privacy. But also all of these individual places of all of their differences have a kind of mutual obligation and reciprocity for each other. Because they all live on that street. And for him, Main street in Emporia, it was called Commercial street, had that same sort of function. Commercial street was a community of individual places that still made a functioning whole.

[Dan Moran]

It's impossible to read the book, or at least it was impossible for me to read the book and not be reminded every five pages of what we've lost. Right, because you're talking about how you can see the alderman and the next day at the supermarket. But today it seems like more and more people are so isolated. We have social media but no society, so to speak. Right. And the collection keeps reminding you of what happens when that goes away.

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, and that's right. And White, in his own Jimmy Stewart kind of way, is very ambivalent about cities. He writes an editorial that we included called Emporia and New York. And it's a very charming comparison between Emporia and New York at the time it was published in 1907. And he's got a number of funny stories in there. He talks about how the people in the little town of Emporia come into Emporia and think they're in the big city and they act a certain way. And the people in Emporia, when they go to New York, they think they're in a big city and they act a certain way. And everybody is trying to play up for the big city. But he also talks about some very practical things. About the ability to have a little bit of land where you can water the grass after dinner, a few rooms, so that if your family grows, you're able to grow in the house you're in. And most importantly, a kind of necessity of knowing your neighbors. Not because it's necessarily a good thing in itself, but that it's a very practical thing. And so maybe our disconnections that you point out today are because maybe some of those necessities have gone away. I don't want to speculate on it. I live in a town of 25,000. So it fits in about the range that William Allen White noted. And I've got all sorts of situations that would be familiar to White. For example, my daughter's boyfriend's mother was her first grade teacher and is now assistant principal at the middle school where one of my best friends teaches. And so those are the kind of things that when you're in the supermarket, you mind your P's and Q's. And when you call the school to complain, you know who you might talk to. And so it is a necessity here in little Edwardsville. But, you know, maybe there is increasingly places where it isn't. And so it isn't. And White points that out in Emporia, New York. It is not a screed against cities as much as it is an attempt to point out the particularities of each, how each functions in such a way out of the necessary structures around them, both population size and architecture and streetscapes. And also finally at the end, to point out that he's happy and in Emporia and he's going to stay.

[Dan Moran]

Yeah, 100%. Before we get into the individual pieces, I want to talk to you a little bit about White as a stylist and his actual nuts and bolts at the sentence level. As I kept reading this, I wasn't thinking so much about seeing Claire Lewis or Sherwood Anderson, although they come up. But I kept thinking about George Orwell, and I was wondering if that strikes you as a fire comparison. But I kept thinking of Orwell, and I especially kept thinking about the lucidity of the language and how today you can hand this. You could hand this book to people of wildly different political ideas and say, oh, yeah, he speaks for us. He's our guy. Just the way today you see the right and left both want to kind of claim Orwell. Like, am I off with that? Like, what do you make of the Orwell White comparison, if anything?

[Jason Stacy]

No, I think that's good. Let me talk about it in two ways, because I heard two similarities that you pointed out. First, the language. It's important to keep in mind that White is writing in a newspaper for much of this, much of his editorials here. And so he is speaking in the tone of the everyday for everyone. And so that requires a certain lucidity of language. And his fiction I would not call great art. I find his stories very charming. One of his stories in our book is the Court of Boyville, and I'm sorry, it's an attempt to point out, tell the story of a young boy named Piggy who's trying to impress a girl in his class. It's very charming.

[Dan Moran]

It's the Little Rascals. That's what I thought of.

[Jason Stacy]

It's a kind of Little Rascal story. That's right. And so I think the lucidity of writing compared, for example, to a Sinclair Lewis is a product of a different genre and a Different audience. But also you mentioned that like Orwell, you have both political sides of the partisan spectrum claiming him. And there is a little, seemingly a little bit for everybody in White. And I think that's right in a lot of these stories and editorials. And I think part of that comes out of White's own native political positions. And what I mean by that is White was a kind of figure that may not fit in today's political environment. So, for example, White would qualify, I would say, as a progressive Republican. And so he was a great supporter of Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt was one of his political heroes. And while he didn't necessarily get into the Theodore Roosevelt kind of bellicose warfare sort of stuff, things like the Food and Drug Administration were the kinds of reforms that made a lot of sense to White. And while he was an advocate of capitalism, as we would probably call it, he was a free trader. He also believed in what he would probably call common sense. And just like everything else, some things can go too far. And for that reason it made a lot of sense, for example, to regulate food and drugs for the safety of people, because what exactly is government for but to help take care of its citizens? And so I think a lot of the, what the adaptability of White for many different political proclivities comes from his frankly middle of the road inclination. And it's one of the reasons that for example, the populist party was so upsetting to him. Because while the populist party was an advocate for poor farmers, he saw a lot of its proposals, and most importantly its temperament as disturbing to a kind of good public order and peace. But also he was a strident critic of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which as some of your listeners may know had a real resurgence in the 1920s, had a parade in Washington D.C. were prominent in midwestern states like Indiana. And in fact, when both governors in a campaign, both candidates for governor in a campaign in Kansas in the 1920s had connections to the Klan, White organized a kind of desperate third party campaign to at least platform anti Klan sentiments. And we've got a number of his editorials against the Klan in there. And so you can look at populism in the 19th century, advocating for the poor, advocating for state regulation as kind of a left leaning ideology. And certainly you can look at the Ku Klux KLAN in the 1920s as a right leaning ideology, but their stridency and radicalism in White's terms were off putting to him. And so he wrote against both of them.

[Dan Moran]

Let's Give our listeners a sense of the aim of the collection and how you try to meet it with the individual pieces. Like. Like. Like talk about, like, what you've collected and how you divided it into two halves.

[Jason Stacy]

Okay, so we'll start with the two halves. And these are. These two halves are not a division that White wouldn't necessarily recognize. And so we try to make clear in the introduction. And readers should be aware that this is a curation that we lent to his writing. But we saw what we thought was an important turn in his writing from the end of the First World War into the 1920s. Probably his happiest days of writing, when the American zeitgeist seemed to be with him, ran from roughly 1896, the appearance of what's the Matter with Kansas? That popular article, to about 1920. And after that, we see in American popular culture generally a turn for what historians or literary critics often call modernism, an advent of modernism. And a lot of modernist writing was quite upsetting to Too White. And so a good example would be one we talked about earlier, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. So while Main street was written during the 1910s, it was finally published in 1920 and was a very, very popular book. And Main street is the story of a young couple who moved to the husband's hometown. He is a doctor, and the hometown is a fictional town called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. And his wife, Carol Kennicutt, university educated, just finds her life shrinking and kind of undermined by this rural community that is described in very stultifying, repressive, boring terms. And much of the book is her attempt to change the town and then escape the town. And that story ultimately ends unhappily with her returning to the town. And this was not only a very popular book, but as I've argued in other writings, began a kind of shift in popular conceptions of small towns. Not as comforting places of small r. American republicanism, but instead repressive places that the smart people need to escape. And I think to a certain extent, that myth still has some valence today. And White found this turn quite upsetting. And in fact, one of the editorials we include, the Other side of Main street is White's review of Sinclair Lewis's book trying to point out or trying to rescue some of the things that he celebrates before the 1920s. And so we have these divisions, which is a kind of before and after. And that turn really comes in the 1920s. So in the 1910s, we have white writing these utopian, optimistic, funny stories about the small Midwestern town and also working closely with Theodore Roosevelt and seeing a kind of optimistic future for the United States after the First World War, after the Versailles Treaty talks, after the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, with the advent of modernist sensibilities in the 1920s by authors like Sinclair Lewis, and then the rise of. Or the reappearance of political movements like the Ku Klux Klan, we see White really fighting a kind of defensive position against those changes in his writing. So that's why we divide it into those two halves.

[Dan Moran]

That's funny, because many times in the margins, I would note he's defending what people call in air quotes, flyover country.

[Jason Stacy]

Yes, yes. And that is very much the second half of.

[Dan Moran]

So anybody assembling a book like this has to make a lot of big decisions. And I thought to myself, you know, I started realizing that I didn't know, like, Way wrote novels, he wrote so much. Right. So everyone's going to make decisions. And I thought, okay, if you're assembling, if you're putting together a Hemingway collection, you know, you have to include Big Two Wide River. If you're doing Orwell again, you have to do Shooting an Elephant. So what's a. What's one of the pieces in here? Or maybe two of them that you. That the two of you thought this is going in like, this is an absolute. We don't even have to discuss this one.

[Jason Stacy]

Good. Okay, so let me give you an example of one.

[Dan Moran]

I'll.

[Jason Stacy]

I'll start with the. With the Other side of Main street that we already talked about. And if you wouldn't mind, Dan, could I just read a couple sections that would be great just to give your listeners an idea of kind of where he's coming from. So one thing to keep in mind is the Other side of Main street is published in 1921, and it is a review of the book Main Street, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. And if I could just give a little background of how I first discovered this editorial. I was working on a book on Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon river anthology, and I was really trying to trace the history and the legacy of the book. And I was working in the 1920s when masters had a bit of a Renaissance. Spoon river anthology was published in 1915, but in the 1920s, it had a bit of a Renaissance and was seen as a collection of poetry that began what came to be known as the Revolt from the Village. And Sinclair Lewis was framed as one of the inheritors of Master's revolt against the Village. And There we get those kind of modernist sensibilities that I was talking about. And as I was researching that 1920s, I stumbled across White's the Other side of Main Street. And exactly as you read it, Dan, it had that feeling as if he was trying to defend flyover country from what he saw were attacks on it. And I came to realize that these modernists who are supposedly revolting against the Village are reacting to a paradigm that had been set before them. They're actually arguing against an ideal Midwestern town themselves. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to put together a collection that showed readers what that ideal was that modernists are trying to react against? And that's the Other side of Main Street. The Other side of Main street. And White's writing in general, for me, kind of captures that period roughly in the late 19th through the 19th century through the first 20 years of the 20th century. A kind of a solidification of the ideal of the Midwestern town that then is revolted against throughout the rest of the 20th century. Okay, so here is White in the Other side of Main street, reviewing Lewis's book. And I'll just read a sentence of this and then I'll jump over. But this section is called Step across the Street, Please. And he says, Mr. Lewis seems to be dealing with facts, but he has only the facts about the east side of Main street, the side containing the hardware stores, the grocery stores, the pool hall and the drugstore. He omits the facts about the pleasant west side of Main Street. And I'll jump ahead a little bit. Here's the west side of Main Street. Collective mark the American small its own. The farmer is still an individualist. He is as independent as a hog on ice. He still retains his suspicious, his suspicions, his reservations, his self sufficiency, and he votes them in politics. So does your urbanite. Broadway is hard. It has no neighbors. Death, poverty, grief, tragedy. Visit the city, and no friends hurry in to heal the wounds. But goodwill in the American country town is institutionalized in some organized way. The town's goodwill touches every family. Men feel the strength of it, take courage from it, give themselves to it more or less, and thus grow in stature by what they give. The big growth of curious emotional kindness in the heart of the American country town dweller has sown the seed of our natural national belief in fairness. This belief more than any other, this belief that if you are good to somebody, somebody will be good to you. This conviction that you can get something for nothing by giving something for nothing distinguishes Americans from the rest of mankind. And it is not the product of our great cities, and not primarily is it a farm product. It is made in our country town.

[Dan Moran]

In that same essay, I remember he compares Main street to another novel called the Brimming Cup. The Brimming Bowl. Yeah. And there's a quotation from there that I thought was really great where he says, you know, people might think that other portrayals of the real Main street are sentimental. But he says, quote, damn sentimentality, if you will, but don't deny its presence and power in American life.

[Jason Stacy]

That's right. That's right. And that's one of his critiques also of these modernists, is that there's a kind of pretentious coldness that they use to interpret humanity, which White seems to be arguing is, at best, half of humanity. Sentimentality is as much part of who we are as cold reason. And he has a funny story about. I think it's in the other side of Main street that we're in the middle of a sentimental prohibition where even the slightest tear is clamped down on as somehow illegitimate for good art.

[Dan Moran]

Yeah. And that's so true even when you think of artists today, like any creative writing teacher will say, well, sentiment, emotion is good. Sentimentality is bad. But when you read White, that kind of opened my eyes and I'm like, yeah, like we are sentimental creatures. And he owns it.

[Jason Stacy]

That's right, he owns it.

[Dan Moran]

So let's talk about some representative examples. You said that was a representative example of a book. I want to throw out some titles to you and get your takes on them, and you could let our readers know about them. Tell us about an essay called the Coming of the Leisure Class.

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, yeah, that one's a fun one. So that's a classic William Allen White editorial or article for a national magazine. Now I have to check my own book to see which magazine to remember.

[Dan Moran]

I got it right here. It's Saturday Evening Post, 1905.

[Jason Stacy]

Good. So let's talk. So 1905. Let's talk about Saturday Evening Post. So Saturday Evening Post, throughout much of its history, is the quintessential middle American, middle class publication that many people in the house can read. It's not a magazine just for a husband. It's not a magazine just for a wife. And it's a magazine that your kids can pick up and you're going to be okay with it. So, of course, the best thing to remember about Saturday Evening Post is that's where most of Norman Rockwell's paintings first showed up. So if you know Anything about Norman Rockwell paintings. It captures the tone of the Saturday Evening Post. And the Coming of the Leisure Class is one of those kind of classic writings for a national audience that White composes to give a particular kind of impression of the small Midwestern community. And the story is about a young man who comes to Emporia named Beverly Amadin. And he is a little bit mysterious, but he's kind of a. Maybe a city feller, certainly a cosmopolitan. And he throws the whole town into disarray. I think White describes him as the first person to wear a white flannel suit in town, to wear a panama hat. He somehow isn't at work during the day, and he takes the girls on carriage rides out in the country. He tries to start a polo club with the horses in town, but since they're all dray horses or are used to working, they're not very good at playing polo. He tries to start a golf club in town, but only the professors at the local college will try to do it with them. And he keeps coming into the newspaper office where White and his friends are, and he button holes the editor of the society section of the paper and tries to give them his latest take on what's going on in quote, unquote, society. And, of course, the whole point of Little Emporia having society pages like the New York pages is funny in itself. And so, you know, this is a classic example of White's attempt to present a charming but also truthful conception of the small town for Americans before the 1920s. And I argued in the introduction that the audience for these kind of national magazines for White aren't necessarily small town dwellers. So if we think of the 1905, the United States has already seen enormous urban growth in the last generation. And many of our middle classes are living in what we would now call suburbs. But they're accessed through the streetcar lines, not the national highways, as you see after the Second World War. So in the Chicagoland area, some of these early suburbs would be places like Oak park or Evanston, which were. Which were adjacent to the city but reached through the streetcar. And so I argued in the introduction, writing in places like the Saturday Evening Post, White is trying to present to, if not city dwellers, at least urban dwellers, individuals who may not live in small towns, to give them an impression of a kind of charming, all American place where the problems are as small as the place itself. And that somewhere in the country these very simple things are still very important. And I think there was a kind of need among these readers for that kind of, let's call it a Jimmy Stewart sense of what America truly is. And I think also articles like the Coming of the Leisure Class set the paradigm that in the 1920s, modernists like Sinclair Lewis are going to react against. It's a kind of romanticized, idealized small town. And I think it's primarily to be consumed by people who maybe grew up in small towns but don't live in them anymore.

[Dan Moran]

It's completely without irony, which is what you maybe think of. So you think about. You said at one point when we started that William Allen White was a household name. So was H.L. menken. But they are as far away as stylist and as people. As you can imagine, where so much of Macon is acerbity and his irony. But that whole essay, the Coming of the Leisure Class, it's all today that couldn't be written without some kind of layer of irony or some kind of zinger or some kind of dark underbelly. But there is no dark underbelly.

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, I think that's right, Dan. I think that's very good. And take a look at when each of those individuals is working. So Camino Leisure Class comes out in 1905. H.L. mencken's heyday is the 1920s. Right. When that kind of acerbic, ironic, urbane, cosmopolitan effect was very, very popular. I mean, Sinclair Lewis sold tons of books. And so Mencken in many ways becomes a kind of white during the 20s. Both are newspaper editors, both are nationally syndicated, both are published in national magazines. Both are, in hindsight, very reflective of their moment. And when H.L. mencken is having his acerbic, ironic moment, William Allen White's is in the past.

[Dan Moran]

Yeah, yeah. They make great companion pieces, so to speak. Let's do another piece. There's a piece in there from Harper's, 1916, called the country Newspaper. And that made me. I'm just old enough to remember, I live in New Jersey, but in a smaller town. And every Thursday the local paper came out. And that was like a big thing. Like if the high school sports were covered in that paper. And that's all gone. So talk about that essay in here. The Country Newspaper.

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah. So White, perhaps for personal reasons, thought the town's newspaper was an essential part of that all important community. And so as an editor of a little town paper, he writes a lot about the importance of the country newspaper. And that is one of, I think, four or five editorials we have in here where he muses on what it is to edit a country newspaper. And one of the things he talks about is the newspaper not only publishes what's happening in the town to give the town a kind of sense of what it is and who it is and who everyone is in the town. It's kind of a touchstone for everyone. But he also talks about, in one of his national pieces about the secrets that they know about the town and that there are certain secrets that the newspaper does not tell. And then it's really funny in the editorial, he says, but I'll tell you. And so he's telling this national audience, and it's all things like, the Methodists don't really like the tenor in their choir, and they're trying to find a way to get him out. And this we know all the people who haven't made their payments to the bank and are therefore running for political office, so the banker can control that alderman to get such and such done for them. And it's very interesting, and we talk a little bit about that in the introduction, that it's that combination of White has of kind of trying to present this very sentimental, simple, charming conception of the small town by presenting, in this case its problems as really relatively bite sized. Right. That, you know, having a. Having a tenor who doesn't sing very well is not the end of the world. And it's not a great secret. But knowing that White was a pretty smart guy, I can't help but think that he's also sort of pulling a fast one in that by telling, these are the secrets that we know. But I will tell you, a national audience in this magazine, he is implicitly pointing out that there are some things that we know that we won't tell anyone, anybody.

[Dan Moran]

Right, right. He says in that passage, he says, quote, all of God's beautiful, sorrowing, struggling, aspiring world is in the country newspaper. And again, like, without irony.

[Jason Stacy]

That's right. That's right.

[Dan Moran]

Good. So let's jump to another one. So you mentioned the editorial what's the Matter with Kansas? That was from 1896. And then later, 26 years later, 1922, he writes an essay for Colliers titled what's the Matter with America? So he goes from what's the matter with Kansas to what's the matter with America? So according to White, what was the matter with America in 1922?

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, it's a good question. This is actually a very complicated editorial for us to read. And so the essence of what White was talking about in what's the Matter with America is what he called the moron majority. The Moron majority. And that the problem with the United States in 1922, according to White, is that, well, people that he called morons had the ability to control the political system because there were more of them. That. And then he went into some really tricky stuff. He's primarily pointing to places like Pennsylvania, or during this period, even Illinois, whose cities had grown to such an extent that the population in those cities could sway the state legislature and the governor's mansion. And then he gets very, very tricky in that he characterizes who is in these cities and how they're voting. And he is overwhelmingly talking about immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe whose immigration to the United States had been going on for nearly two generations all the way back to the 1870s. And it's important to keep in mind in 1922, this kind of ambivalence about immigrants and the second generation of those immigrants was quite common and culminated in 1924 with the Immigrant Origins act, which set quotas on immigration from certain regions, closing off Asia and setting quotas from southern and eastern Europe. These were not removed until 1965 under the Lyndon Johnson administration. And so, on the surface, this looks like, first of all, a kind of arrogant, smart person talking about a moron majority and an anti immigration activist arguing about these new immigrants have ruined the country. But once you read into the editorial, realize that White is not arguing for the cessation of immigration and he is not arguing against the individuals who have come from other countries, but he is critiquing our education system.

[Dan Moran]

System.

[Jason Stacy]

He is arguing that our education system are overwhelmingly focusing on useless facts, pounding geographical, mathematical and historical information into people's brains. And on top of that, they are learning in the world that America is a place where if you've got the money and can purchase the politician, what else is money for anyway? And so that they're getting bad lessons about how to have a democracy out in the world, and they're learning useless information in the schools. And it's an argument for robust civic education. It's an argument that says we still do it in the small towns because we have to. Because if you know the guy who's using money to buy the politician, you're also gonna see that person at the supermarket. But in the cities, that's very difficult to happen. And so where civic education tends to happen on the ground in the towns, we need a strong, a robust civic education system throughout the whole country to help Americans understand that democracy is in their hands and it is dependent upon the values they hold. No one else is going to make it for them. And so it's an article that, back to your point, what are both sides going to get out of this? This might be an article that both sides would hate, but it is more than just being the simplistic kind of partisan article that we would normally expect this kind of writing to be. And it is classic White making a very interesting kind of middle ground argument and saying that we can overcome the moron majority by educating them in civics.

[Dan Moran]

And there's still a cry across the country for greater civic education in middle and high schools. That has not gone away. That's what I kept thinking as I read the article.

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I think both sides of our political spectrum might argue that there's a moron majority today. It's a perennial American question about how do we have democratic practice when we may not agree with the majority of people who are voting.

[Dan Moran]

Yeah. And that's what Macon called the Bourbon.

[Jason Stacy]

That's right. I think it's an important difference between Mencken and White. Whereas now, of course, I'm going to be sympathetic to White. But, you know, Mencken saw what he called the Bourbon as irredeemable, laughable, and he enjoyed his critique. White actually proposes, whether you agree with him or not, a way to improve the situation.

[Dan Moran]

Yeah, that's true. That's true. So, last question for you. What's one of the pieces that you discovered when you were going through so many things that White had written that really put a light bulb over your head and said, we have to include this, something that either you had forgotten about or you came across for the first time? What are these happy accidents of an editor?

[Jason Stacy]

Yeah, I guess I would go to the fiction. I was surprised that White wrote fiction, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed his fiction. And there was some back and forth with our peer reviewers, whether we should include the fiction. One of our peer reviewers was relatively adamant that we should stick to the editorials. And we came to the conclusion that not only does White's utopia come through in the fiction in a different and I think, equally compelling way, but also his fiction was very important to him. And to leave it out is to, I think, give in what is already a curated collection an even more limited perspective of the breadth of his writing style. And so we put three short stories at the very beginning of the book that we think captured a kind of trajectory of what White saw as the maturation of the small Midwestern town. It starts with. Let me just take a look here. It begins with the City of Aquapura, which was a fictional town founded in Kansas with the highest of ideals. And they suffered a drought and everybody left except the mayor and his daughter. And he kept hanging on for the water to return. And then there was a deluge of rain and flooded them all out. The second story was the homecoming of Colonel Hicks. This was also published in 1896, and it tells a very different story. It's about a Kansas couple who are now senior citizens. Their children have left the house and gone off on their own, and they've lived a relatively hard life and they fantasize about going back to the Ohio. They left as young people, like probably White's parents did, and they take a trip finally back to Ohio. And while they're there, all they do is talk about Kansas. And so here you get the contrast, right? You get Aquapura and the kind of disaster of the beginning, and then you get the homecoming of Colonel Hicks and the kind of successful beginning of it. And then finally, the third is the king of Boyville with Piggy, who is now living in this very stable, small town community with a functioning main street. His dad owns a. His dad's a grocer, owns a grocery store, and he goes to school every day. And it's a safe, comfortable school. And he tries to figure out a way to impress this girl he likes in class. And so with these three, you get kind of a narrative or as I said, a kind of arc in White's idea of how the Midwestern town came about, some of the struggles that it had to go through and some of its great attributes when it reaches that point that he thought was a kind of fulfillment of an American ideal heartland utopia.

[Dan Moran]

William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town is available everywhere. And it's a great read, highly recommended. Jason Stacy, thank you for coming on the New Books Network.

[Jason Stacy]

Thanks for having me, Dan. It was a lot of fun.

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