Chapter 17

On the Extreme Particularity of Kansas

Kansas is the child of Plymouth Rock.

—William Allen White

Kansas had better stop raising corn and begin raising Hell.

—Mary Elizabeth Lease

I WAS in Denver with Topeka as my next stop. I didn’t know a soul there and so, after some hesitation, because I hated to disturb a busy man whom I had never met, I sent a telegram to Alf M. Landon, explaining what I wanted. A reply came back so fast that it seemed to bounce: CALL ME ON ARRIVAL UNNECESSARY FOR YOU TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF. So I telephoned Mr. Landon when I got there and he asked if I would come over that evening and “meet some of the fellas.” What followed was one of the best bouts of talk I have ever had in America.

In fact there was good talk everywhere in Kansas. Landon thought that perhaps I was getting too one-sided a picture, and he telephoned the university at Lawrence, so that I could meet several folk with other views. Then I had a productive meeting with the then governor, Andrew Schoeppel (a former Walter Camp All-American by the way), and a group of railroad men, packers, and agriculture officials. I spent most of one afternoon with a political journalist of radical tincture, W. G. Clugston, the author of Rascals in Democracy, and with Dr. Karl A. Menninger, the psychiatrist whose Topeka clinic is one of the best known in the country. Then William E. Long, head of the Industrial Development Commission, filled in his side of the picture for me, and two of his assistants had the courtesy to drive me into Kansas City.

A word further on Mr. Landon. I have seldom met anybody more likable. Certainly he is a conservative, and I think his views on foreign policy are mostly wrong. But anybody who calls him a mossback or a Bourbon is grossly misinformed. He was overwhelmingly defeated by Roosevelt in 1936, even losing his own state, but FDR would have beaten anybody overwhelmingly in that year. Landon still has a strong influence on the Republican party in the Middle West, chiefly through his close relationships with members of the state organizations. This influence may not always be attuned to the times. But again, do not underestimate him. Raymond Swing, no less, once called him as attractive a man as he had ever met in American public life,¹ and in 1924, believe it or not, Landon bolted the GOP and voted for Wheeler and LaFollette!

One thing surprised me. William Allen White, the late editor of the Emporia Gazette who was one of the soundest as well as most delightful Americans of modern times, seemingly has less of a reputation in Kansas than out. Several times I heard him sneered at as a “pseudo-progressive” and so on; perhaps this was no more than an ex post facto sprouting of local jealousies. But I heard intelligent liberals say seriously that the “decline and fall” of Kansas could be dated from the appearance in 1896 of White’s most famous editorial, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” which was, it is true, an explosive outburst against the ragamuffin radicals, and which appealed to the conservative class against them. But to argue that this editorial was the cause of subsequent reaction in Kansas (and the state isn’t always so reactionary) seems jejune and silly. The text of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” may be found in White’s posthumous Autobiography, which is a wonderfully meaty lot of reading matter for the money. Anyway, no matter what his political reputation may be within Kansas, he wrote “Mary White,” and that will keep him alive anywhere in the world where people admire the human heart and effective prose.

Of course I asked everybody I met the single simple question, “Who runs Kansas?” No question could be more innocent, and it never ceased to perplex me that so many people found in it overtones of the sinister. It seemed to embarrass them, and their answers usually showed bad conscience, not merely in Kansas but almost everywhere. Either they would deny being “run,” or that they “ran” anything, or would retreat into a cloud of cliches; they appeared to think that it was indecent to pry further. After I left Topeka the Daily Capital and other newspapers printed pious editorials denouncing me even for having asked the question, and replying that “ the people” ran Kansas. Of course. But what I wanted to find out was, “Who are the people?” The conventional answer, as given by one paper, “Old John Q. Public in the ballot box,” simply isn’t good enough, as any intelligent citizen should realize. Then John Harris, publisher of the Hutchinson News-Herald, came to my defense, more or less:

John Gunther, the writer who has a genius for grinding a plausible chapter out of a 24-hour visit [sometimes it’s a shade longer, Mr. Harris] spent a day in Kansas recently…. The question he had in particular to ask was “Who runs Kansas?” To which two of the state’s better-known papers immediately donned their haloes, picked up their golden harps, and made melodic reply.

One hates to inject a sour note into such heavenly music, but from this bassoon comes a singular word, NUTS !

Kansas, Mr. Gunther, is much like other states. That means it is populated by human beings. Most of them are politically so disinterested that what dominating they require is so gentle they don’t know what is being done to them. The dominators are a self-perpetuating group from both parties who through recent years have been of such uniform mediocrity that no one of them has emerged as a boss. The group sways … to the pressure exerted periodically by organizations representing, respectively, some 25 percent of the farmers, a few of the senior unions, the professional drys, the large industries and utilities, certain reactionary newspapers and the organized oldsters.²

The first thing I saw in Kansas, even before the airplane landed, was a huge establishment belonging to International Harvester. The second was a lonely little Salvation Army parade, grinding its way through the hot streets of Topeka. Both these details are, as we will see, not without significance.

Backdrop to the Sunflower State³

To understand why people say, “Dear old Kansas!” is to understand that Kansas is no mere geographical expression, but a state of mind, a religion, and a philosophy in one.

—Carl Becker

In the strict topographical sense Kansas is the heart of the United States, as well as being a kind of gravity point for American democracy. The geographic center of the nation is in Kansas; so is the geodetic center, from which official latitudes and longitudes are reckoned. The state is a huge “tilted slab,” sloping downward from the west. People customarily think of it as totally flat and unvaried; actually the highlands near the Colorado border reach 4,135 feet. In shape it is an almost perfect parallelogram, “with one corner nibbled off by the Missouri River.”⁴

Kansas (the name means People of the South Wind) is bounded neatly by Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri, and because most of the chief roads and railroads go east and west, the pull of Colorado on western Kansas, and of Missouri on the east, is very strong. The pressure from north and south is much less. The Kansas puritans “get along fine with Oklahoma,” I heard it said—though of course they are apt to think that Oklahoma is noisy and on the brazen side. When I asked Kansans about Nebraska they looked puzzled and were almost inclined to say “Where’s that?” There are few first-class roads leading up to Omaha, and Nebraska as a whole seems almost as distant as Montana.

Kansas is, in a way, unique in the United States, because it has no real metropolis, though Wichita has 115,000 people and Topeka 68,000; this serves to increase the enormous influence—on eastern Kansas in particular—of Kansas City, Missouri. This great and extraordinary city, while not the capital of its own state, is in effect the capital of another, a situation without parallel in the country. A minor illustrative point: part of the University of Kansas is not located in Kansas itself at all, but in Kansas City, Missouri. For a word on Kansas City, Kansas, the singular community across the river from Kansas City, Missouri, see Chapter 22 below.

Where did Kansas come from? From New England and the South, in a proportion of three or four to one. The abolitionists pumped in, armed with “Beecher’s Bibles” (rifles) and the printing press, an equally important weapon, to keep the state free; they waged their own pre-Civil War with the Southerners already there. Everybody knows the story of John Brown of Osawatomie. After the war, emigration from the North continued; any federal veteran was entitled, after 1865, to settle on 160 good acres of Kansas land, and there came—as in Nebraska—a great influx of Grand Army of the Republic officers and men. The first New England stock became diluted with that of Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois.

Nevertheless southern influence has always remained fairly strong, though not so strong as in Missouri, say. As of today, there are Jim Crow theaters in Topeka. The remarkable thing is that Kansas did become so homogeneous. It is an extraordinarily well-integrated state, overwhelmingly “Nordic,” middle class, and Protestant. One factor making for homogeneity was of course the ineffable richness of the land. The soil of Kansas absorbed, colored, and made virtually identical the Methodist preachers from Iowa small towns, the younger sons of the Salem clipper captains, workmen from the Susquehanna, and even Ozark crackers from Arkansas. The Kansan is, as has been well said, the most average of all Americans, a kind of common denominator for the entire continent.

Only two “foreign” groups of any consequence exist today, the Mennonites and the Volga Germans, though there are a few Mexican workers in the railway yards. There is no great Scandinavian element as in the states to the north. The Santa Fe Railroad (which dominated the state for more than a generation) brought in the Mennonites, and the Union Pacific the Volga folk. Both groups were brought over as a result of direct negotiation in Europe by the railways, which badly needed population to fill out their vast land grants; out of population would come crops, and out of this, freight. The passenger fare was made as temptingly low as $11.00 from New York to Kansas, to suck the emigrants in. The Mennonites, a tightly knit and curious community, came originally from both North Germany and the Crimea. They disbelieve in most forms of political participation, and until about twenty years ago many refused to vote. Most Mennonites are farmers; they are in particular great producers of Turkey wheat.

The various processes of assimilation, of wresting a commodious life out of soil, of chaining new communities to the plains, weren’t always easy. On one occasion⁵ a Russian grand duke came to Kansas to hunt buffalo. The lieutenant governor, honoring him at an official banquet, pointed to a banner on which was emblazoned the state motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, and explained, “Duke, them there words is Latin, and they mean to the stars after a hell of a lot of trouble.”

Kansas Puritanism, probably the most intense in America, derives from the abolitionist tradition, the New England background, and a touch of fundamentalism from the South. Not only did Kansas help to produce John Brown; it produced that hatchet-carrying granny and holy crone on broomstick, Carry Nation. The state is, of course, “dry.” I will describe later why I print “dry” in quotation marks. Gambling is forbidden, and so for a time were cigarettes and even the sale of cigarette paper. In some directions the Puritan impulse was less cranky; for instance one famous Kansas crusade was against the old-fashioned roller towel, and the state was the first in the union to pass an effective Blue Sky law.

When we reach New England we will find that plenty of Puritans are radical. Kansas is a strongly conservative state, yes, and it is ordinarily overwhelmingly Republican; nevertheless a considerable base of progressive legislation does exist. It is certainly nowhere near so radical as North Dakota or even Minnesota, but also it is nowhere near so reactionary as Indiana. There is very little complacency in Kansas. Of course reformist legislation and “radicalism” are, as we know, strictly and specifically dependent on the price of crops. Very few farmers are radical when wheat hits $1.80. But let agricultural prices drop sharply, and the Kansas (and Iowa) man of the soil can become, almost overnight, a flaming and embittered opponent of the existing order.

Kansas was the original home of Populism, and it was one of the first states to demand direct election of senators. It does not have the initiative and referendum, but a good many other Populist planks are in the statute books today—put in by Republican legislatures for the most part! A real estate mortgage law protects farmers from being dispossessed for a full eighteen months after notice of sale; municipal ownership of utilities is widespread; schoolbooks are free.

Does “Bleeding Kansas” still bleed? Will it still rise to fight injustice? I asked this question generally, and one answer I got was, “Oh, we still have a hemorrhage once in a while.”

John Steuart Curry, whose death in 1946 at the age of forty-eight removed from fruitful activity a first-class American painter, and a Kansan born and bred, was once commissioned to do a set of murals for the Topeka capitol. The work covered a span from Coronado (the first white men to see Kansas were the Spaniards) through John Brown to twentieth century farmhands destitute and miserable. The panels were never finished, and Curry refused to sign them. Official criticism had been that they were “far too blunt.”⁶

Why—a remarkable fact about the United States and one which is worth underscoring from time to time—are even the American underpossessed (except in times of acute economic crisis) inclined to be so stubbornly conservative? One answer is of course that they don’t really consider themselves “underpossessed.” Another, applicable all over the Middle West, is the extreme social fluidity of America and a consequent progressive dimming out of categories; the hired hand marries the farmer’s daughter. Another, which has particular reference to Kansas, is Puritanism. The poor man goes to heaven easier than the rich.

Folklore and the Kansas Jayhawk

Almost for the first time in this book we mention now the tall tale; most of these are based on an exaggerated prowess by frontiersmen struggling against nature, and no country is so rich in them as the United States. Kansas of course provided an apt background for tall tales; the early cattlemen ended their long hell-for-leather treks at towns like Dodge City and Abilene. In Chapter 15, I mentioned that Wyoming has been called a child of the transcontinental trails. But look at Kansas! Not only did the Santa Fe and Oregon trails make their historic junction in Kansas; the state was crossed by the Pony Express, the Osage Trail, Pike’s Route to Pawnee Village, Holladay’s Overland Line, the Santa Fe Cutoff, and Butterfield’s Overland Dispatch Line, to say nothing of the Texas cattle trails. “Home on the Range” was originally a Kansas song.

The Kansas equivalent of Paul Bunyan is Lem Blanchard.⁷ Once in mid-July when the corn was growing at its fastest Lem climbed a stalk, the better to survey his field; after looking into the next county, “he was horrified to find that the stalk was growing upward faster than he could scramble down.” In one version, the denouement is that Lem is rescued by a balloonist; in another, his neighbors, having at last located him on high, shoot him to save him from slow death by starvation.

There were grasshoppers in Kansas as big as mules, who after devouring the corn crop “insolently pick their teeth on the barbs of the wire fence.” There were farms so large that, “by the time the mortgage was recorded on the west side, the mortgage on the east had come due.”

But most Kansas legend centers on the Jayhawk—the wondrous native bird that flies backward, and so doesn’t care where he’s going, “but sure wants to know where he’s been!” The Jayhawk has, of course, no wings; he wears bright yellow slippers, and his yellow beak is very large. A Kansas primer begins with this:

I am a Jayhawker.

I do not have wings.

I can sing.

I can run.

I can laugh.

I was born in Kansas.

All boys and girls who were born in Kansas are Jayhawkers.

Are you a Jayhawker?

Then there are many Jayhawker songs, like:

I’m a Jayhawker boy from the Jayhawker state;

I wear Jayhawker hats on a Jayhawker pate;

I ride a Jayhawker horse in a Jayhawker way;

In the Jayhawker state I have settled to stay.

The Kansas historians have much grave fun with this famous animal. In The Mythical Jayhawk, by Kirke Mechem, secretary of the State Historical Society, one may find passages like, “There was an epoch when the Jayhawk flew in our troubled atmosphere. It was a bird with a mission. It was an early bird and it caught many a Missouri worm.… Geologists are familiar with the representative of the class Aves called Jayhawkornis kansasensis…. The brow of those of the commonest size is two palms across from eye to eye, the eyes sticking out at the sides, so that when they are flying they can see in all directions at once…. The theory that the Jayhawk is a Phoenix has divided scientists into two schools of thought, both fiercely incognito.” Mr. Mechem’s monograph also includes a blank space under the notation, “Invisible Jayhawks on Their Way to Plant Volunteer Wheat.”

The Jayhawk folklore has, as is quite proper, moved up to date with the times, and many are the B-29 pilots near Wichita who have miraculous adventures with these monsters. Of course they can easily outfly any B-29, and some have jet-propelled motors and retractable yellow-claw landing gear.

Kansas Has Statistics Too

Here we really get into the booster area. No state is prouder of itself than Kansas, and I have seen no propaganda in any other quite so handsomely prepared as, for instance, the folio-size booklet Let’s Look Into Kansas issued by the Industrial Development Commission. One of its mottoes is “Kansas—Where East Meets West, and Farm Meets Factory”; another is the dubious pun, “Resourceful Kansas.” From documents issued by this commission, and from other sources, the reader who does not object to handouts (I love them myself) may glean much curious material. For instance Kansas possesses the only pipe organ factory in the western United States, and a law has been on the books for a quarter of a century (of course it is never enforced) “making it a felony to fly the Russian flag within the state.” Kansas has a State Beautification Project, and it contains, near Atchison, a huge limestone cave, air cooled and capable of storing 50,000 tons of food or anything else—come an atomic war—that the government might want to keep there.

What is the average American proud of in his state? I picked up an official set of postcards, bound with a slip INVESTIGATE KANSAS, They show “The Beautiful Musical Tower in the Center of the Topeka, Kansas, Two Million-Dollar Senior High School Building (Educational Advantages Offered in Kansas Rank Among the Best in the Nation), Topeka’s Nationally-Known Rose Garden in Gage Park (Is Typical of Similar Scenes in City Parks Throughout Kansas), A Portion of the 206 Million-Bushel Wheat Crop (Kansas, Greatest Wheat-Producing State, Raises About One-Fifth of the Entire Nation’s Crop), Assembly Lines of a Kansas Airplane Factory, and Well-Improved Farms Dot the Kansas Landscape (Attesting to the Fertility of the Soil and the Importance of Agriculture.”

Agriculture is important—yes. But more striking because far more unexpected are the state’s industrialization and mineral resources. The Boeing plant at Wichita (employment 52,000 at peak) built more B-29’s than any other three similar plants, and the Sunflower Ordnance Works at De Soto make the ticklish explosives that go into rockets. Actually Kansas produced, from Pearl Harbor through August, 1945, more than four billion dollars worth of industrial goods—without a single strike. One sizable booklet (Kansas Buyers Guide, 131 pages) itemizes some Kansas-made things; I looked at the listings under J, an unlikely letter I thought, and found glass jars, concrete jetties, janitor supplies, pumping jacks, jewelry, “jail and cell-work—steel,” and expansion joists. Another pamphlet lists more than a hundred “industries applicable to Kansas,” among them air-conditioning units, dehydrated alfalfa, dog food, grave markers, and bows and arrows.⁸

The notion that Kansas is nothing but a vast prairie boiling with wheat and corn is, to Kansans, laughable. What lies underneath the land is almost as important as what grows on it. For instance Kansas is the fifth petroleum-producing state; every “major” operates in it except Humble—Magnolia, Texas, Continental, Gulf, Shell, Sinclair. It actually outranks thirty-nine other states in mineral output, with an annual production worth 175 million dollars which is five times that of Alaska. Take salt. Kansas has 5,000 billion tons of salt reserves, enough to cover the entire state with a layer 17 feet thick, or to build a wall around it 1,000 feet wide and 200 feet tall. “There is enough salt in Kansas to supply the entire United States for 500,000 years” is a statement in one publication. Then too it has the largest natural gas field in the world (though Texas may dispute this); it is the third state in zinc and lead production and among the first three in cattle; it is first in flour milling and among the first in number of tractors on farms, carbon black, “tame hay,” and railroad mileage; it produces coal, various clays, volcanic ash, chalk, and such rarefied items as tripoli, chat, and diatomaceous marl.

Kansas flaunts statistics in other realms too. It has the most college students per capita of any state, and it claims “the nation’s best public health record.” It has forty daily newspapers, which makes it the first in America in newspapers per capita, and it is fourth in percentage of high school graduates. It maintains five different schools on the university level, and it has unique publishing houses like that of Haldeman-Julius at Girard. It has produced (or strongly influenced) a considerable number of writers—for instance Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Ed Howe the rustic philosopher,⁹ Professor Carl Becker, Langston Hughes and Claude McKay among Negroes, and in a different literary category Charles M. Sheldon, whose In His Steps is by far the greatest best seller in American history.

Also—to move into another field—Kansas is the home state of two men well known for being good citizens. Milton S. Eisenhower, president of Kansas State College, and his brother Dwight.

Very Well: What Does Run It?

Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter.

—Julian Street

(1) The congeries of forces generally alluded to by Mr. Harris above, agriculture in particular.

(2) The Capper interests. Senator Arthur Capper is eighty-one; his views on some subjects are roughly those of Beowulf or General Grant; after the November 1946 election he became chairman of the powerful Agriculture Committee of the Senate. But Capper’s position in Kansas does not rest on his Washington reputation—and a quite lively reputation it is in some respects. It rests on his formidable power in local journalism.

A well-informed man in Kansas is, I heard, one who reads a Capper daily, a Capper weekly, and a Capper monthly. The range and influence of this press is astonishing; yet few folk outside Kansas or professional farm groups have ever heard of it. First, Capper is publisher of the leading Topeka daily, which is both the “official” state and county paper, the Topeka Capital, and he owns the local radio station. Second, he publishes Capper’s Weekly, with a circulation (as of the date I was in Kansas) of 353,000. Third, he publishes two monthlies, Household and Capper’s Farmer, with circulations respectively of 1,850,000 and 1,250,-000; the advertising rate for a full page in Household is $7,500, which should make several national (= eastern) magazines take notice; a coupon on one of its advertisements recently brought 52,000 replies. Fourth, Capper publishes a group of farm weeklies in various sections of the Middle West and East Central states, like the Michigan Farmer (circulation 142,000), the Ohio Farmer (152,000), the Missouri Ruralist (116,000), the Pennsylvania Farmer (141,000), and of course the Kansas Farmer (106,000). Altogether, the venerable senator’s publications are believed to have a minimum of 400,000 readers in his home state alone. I asked a man who knows him well what Capper himself felt about all this. Answer: “He sits on the fence, with ears to the ground on both sides.”

As interesting an afternoon as any I had in forty-eight states was one spent in Topeka with a group of Capper editors. We didn’t talk politics much, but what these folk didn’t know about agriculture could be locked up in the inside of a penny.

(3) Alf M. Landon among Republicans and Harry H. Woodring, who for an unhappy period was Mr. Roosevelt’s secretary of war and who is a former governor, among Democrats.¹⁰

(4) As far as big business is concerned, oil and the utilities. Once, according to a story possibly apocryphal, a division of the university made a survey recommending that a severance tax be placed on petroleum. The next year appropriations for this department of the university mysteriously disappeared from the budget.

(5) The great insurance companies, who are of course intimately involved with agricultural finance.

(6) The Methodist church.

(7) Closely allied with this, the do-gooders in general who, a Kansan worthy told me, “were a fine collection of wonderful old ladies, who will chew your eyes out.”

(8) To an indeterminate degree, the Masonic orders.

(9) The noon-day luncheon clubs. It has taken this book far too long to get around to more than general mention of such universal American institutions as the Kiwanis, Lions, and Rotary. Generally, they fit in with the local chamber of commerce, which means that they tie up with the banks, department stores, utilities, and so on, throughout the state.

(10) Obscure and complex social pressures. Suppose a young politician’s wife wants to become a member of the local country club. The young politician is not likely to affront wantonly the insurance executive who, it happens, is chairman of the membership committee. Suppose a farmer takes a strong public stand for municipal power. He may not find himself such a jolly good fellow at the next meeting of the local Grange. Or suppose the pastor of some small church, mildly liberal, says that maybe the Russians had something worth fighting for, since they fought so well. The local bank may not actually buy advertisements in a county newspaper to denounce such an obvious miscreant, though such things have happened; what is more probable is that the pastor’s wife will be snubbed, and his children pointed out as “different.”

(11) The Legislative and Research Council. This, a bipartisan group of about thirty members, led by the president of the local senate and the speaker of the house, works after the adjournment of the legislature; it devotes itself to research on impending problems, and is a kind of permanent connecting link between the widely spaced legislative sessions; no major laws are likely to pass the new legislature without its approval. Kansas is the innovator of this sensible device, and eleven other states have so far copied it.

(12) Finally, and above all, the Kansas City (Missouri) Star. This potent newspaper, one of the most distinguished in the United States, has more influence in Kansas than in its own state, and its Kansas circulation, around 170,000, is as big as that of any three Kansas dailies put together. Not only is Kansas a “colony” of Kansas City, Missouri; it is the “colony” of a newspaper, something that exists nowhere else in the entire country. The head of the Kansas Department of the Star, Lacy Haynes—incidentally, Will White’s brother-in-law—was for years a king-maker, and it is hard to name any Topeka politician, Democratic or Republican, whom he didn’t help to put in office, or keep from getting it.

Politics and Prohibition

Oh, they chaw tobacco thin

in Kansas.

Oh, they say that drink’s a sin

in Kansas.

—Kansas folksong

By all odds the leading Kansas issue is prohibition. Here too the influence of Missouri is paramount, inasmuch as it is almost universally accepted in eastern Kansas that “Missouri keeps us dry, so that we have to go there to buy our liquor.”

In fact, during the whisky shortage in 1945 and 1946, it was almost as easy to buy good Scotch and bourbon in dry Topeka (though at higher prices) than in wet Kansas City. Cars and trucks shuttled day and night across the border; Topeka and other Kansas towns bloomed with bootleggers, speakeasies, bars, and it was said that to keep liquor from being run into the state “at least 1200 federal agents would be necessary.” Hundreds of Kansas liquor dealers (in a dry state!) actually posted retail licenses on their walls; the sixty-six-year-old state prohibition law became, in short, a joke. This was too much for the Alcohol Tax Unit of the United States Treasury, and late in 1946 an attempt began to clean it all up—through the familiar device of prosecuting bootleggers for tax evasion. On one occasion, federal agents made an exhibit of a thousand cases of hard liquor they had seized—and invited the state authorities to come and look. Meantime, Kansas county attorneys and so on were promised actual “bonuses” for bringing prohibition violators into court, viz., they were bribed by the state itself to enforce the law.¹¹

All this became the pivot of the 1946 gubernatorial campaign. Harry Woodring ran for governor on a platform urging repeal of the prohibition act. The Anti-Saloon League, the WCTU, the State Temperance Society, and similar organizations went into ferocious action, and he was soundly beaten.

The most revealing sidelight on law enforcement I heard was that “If you get caught with a quart, you get six months; two quarts, three months; a five-gallon jug, a week; a case, a day; a truckload, nothing.”

There have been crazy politics in Kansas on other levels. Does anybody these days remember John R. (“Doc”) Brinkley? A notable character, Doc Brinkley was the great goat-gland specialist; his treatments, which cost up to 750 dollars, restored waning virility to the credulous. For a time the goat population of Kansas abruptly declined—so anyway people told me in Topeka—as Brinkley’s expanding and lucrative practice demanded the sacrifice of more animals. The Doc entered politics in 1930, and, in a three-cornered race, only narrowly missed being elected governor.¹² Also he was, I believe, the first American demagogue to use radio for political purposes in a big way. Kansas eventually ran him out of the state for malpractice. He moved to Del Rio, Texas, and then across the border to Mexico, where for a time he maintained what he called the most powerful radio station in the world. Brinkley died some years ago. Whether or not he used goat glands on himself is unknown.

Life of the Kansas Land

Really Kansas is two states, or maybe even three. One line of division is of course that which cuts through the Dakotas and Nebraska too, the 98th meridian. Western Kansas is short-grass country, sparsely settled, with scanty rainfall and big mechanized farms, based on wheat. The east is moist, with thick alluvial soil; here we touch the corn belt. In between is an area more difficult to define, “central” Kansas, which is mostly (of course I am oversimplifying) alfalfa and grazing country.

South of Kansas is cotton, and north is spring wheat; Kansas grows neither, and its two great crops are of course winter wheat and corn. The gist of the Kansas “story” is, in a way, a struggle between wheat and corn, although plenty of farmers grow both. Corn is cultivated in every county now. It doesn’t, however, come anywhere near the importance of wheat in the state’s economy, and Kansas is the greatest wheat state in the union by far.

Wheat, as we know, is a crop not without risks; also, in Kansas at least, it used to be called a “lazy man’s crop.” In the old days you planted it in September, whereupon there was nothing to do until you harvested it the next summer, whereupon you paid off the bank. Not now. Wheat farmers are busy all the year. They have hogs, soy beans, sheep, lespedeza, and sorghums like feterita, to lessen their dependence on wheat, and to provide an income the year around. Above all, land planted in wheat (until it starts to “joint”) may be used for grazing; the wheat is green before the snow comes, and then again in spring; a most remarkable thing in this part of the world is that the more you pasture wheat, the better will be the wheat produced; it does wheat good to be eaten as it grows!—almost as cropping a beard in an adolescent makes the beard stronger. This technique of growing livestock on growing wheat means, in effect, that the wheat farmer gets two wheat crops a year, one in the form of meat.

I asked the Capper editors what distinguished Kansas farmers as against those of any other state. They replied: (1) aggressiveness; (2) willingness to experiment; (3) the gambling instinct, imposed of necessity by the risks of wind and rain; (4) modernity. It may seem a poor figure, but at least one-third of Kansas farms are electrified.

But now we are very close to the Middle West—that broad thick mattress of corn and hogs, great cities, the Mississippi basin, and reputed isolation. Let us proceed.

¹ In two remarkable articles in The Nation printed during the 1936 campaign. These got Mr. Swing into trouble, because eastern radicals who had never been west of the Mississippi River couldn’t bring themselves to believe that Landon’s record was so liberal.

² This small episode is described in Facts You Should Know About Kansas, a brochure by W. G. Clugston.

³ Kansas has six other accepted nicknames—Central, Cyclone, Squatter, Garden, Grasshopper, and Jay hawker. A good many American states have, like this, more than just one nickname; for instance Mississippi has six in all, Connecticut three besides Nutmeg and Constitution, and Arizona five aside from Valentine and Baby. See Odum, Southern Regions, p. 540, a book of which I shall make much mention later. For nicknames Odum draws on State Names, Flags, Seals, Songs, Birds, Flowers, and Other Symbols, by George E. Shankle.

⁴ William Allen White’s introduction to Kansas, in the American Guide Series, p. I.

⁵ Paraphrased from Clugston, op. cit. p. 5.

⁶ The Diego Rivera murals in Rockefeller Center, New York, once similarly provoked a public storm.

⁷ My source for these stories is Kansas in the American Guide Series, pp.

⁸ A complication is of course discriminatory freight rates. Kansas City is the second largest livestock city in the world. But its hinterland has no leather industry whatever, because freight rates are so high. A Californian, I heard, could come into Kansas, buy live hogs, ship them back, slaughter them in California, and ship the processed meat back to Kansas and still sell cheaper in Topeka than Kansas City can.

⁹ For the doings of Howe’s son Gene see Chapter 47.

¹⁰ I inquired naively who were other Democrats in Kansas, and had the reply, “Go to the federal building.” In other words most federal appointees during the last twelve years-like postmasters for instance-have naturally been Democratic. The precise inverse of this exists in the South and Texas as we shall see. Also I heard, “We sometimes have Democratic governor? especially if we’re split ourselves, but we never let ’em have a second term. I asked where the New Dealers mre. Reply: “Deep in hiding.”

¹¹ See columns by Doris Fleeson in the New York Post, January, 1946. A detail is that, on one occasion, “some righteous members of the liquor syndicate forced hijackers to return their booty because the victim, a night club operator, had paid his protection,” i.e., paid the police. Negotiations for this deal actually took place in the county jail, with “the county paying the expense of a long-distance call to Kansas City to close the transaction.”

¹² The background of this bizarre episode, including details of tawdry political interlockings and the role played in exposing Brinkley by the Kansas City Star, may be found in Clugston’s Rascals in Democracy, pp. 148 et seq.