Kansas’ best-known journalist died on Kansas Day in 1944 (+video)

More than seven decades after his death, William Allen White’s influence lives on.

His house is a national historic landmark and his paper, the Emporia Gazette, is still family owned. A local school and an annual children’s literature award are named after the Sage of Emporia.

“Dip your pen into your arteries and write,” White advised would-be writers.

There was a time when White – who died on Kansas Day in 1944 – was one of the most recognized names from Kansas and an iconic voice for Middle America.

White was editor of the Emporia Gazette and known nationally for his distinctive writing style and common-sense journalism. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor.

2018 will mark the 150th anniversary of White’s birth, and from now through then, there will be more publicity and attention given to Kansas’ most famed journalist.

Efforts are already underway to raise $200,000 to fund a PBS-quality documentary on White’s life, and an application has been started to create a postage stamp commemorating his life.

This year, beginning at 2 p.m. each Sunday in February, there will be a series of programs at Red Rocks, the William Allen White historical home in Emporia.

“William Allen White is a Kansan through and through,” said Roger Heineken, administrative officer at Memorial Union at Emporia State University and a board member of the William Allen White Partnership.

“When he was famous, read and syndicated, he got many lucrative offers to move to the East Coast. But he realized that if he moved there, he would be a clone of every other journalist. He had more power from the Midwest, so he based his entire career here.

“I think it is fitting he … died on Kansas Day. Emporia’s most influential Kansan went out on the anniversary of our statehood. There seems to be a symmetry there that resonates with me.”

Two articles in particular skyrocketed White to national fame: an editorial published on Aug. 15, 1896, called “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” and his tribute to Mary White, his 16-year-old daughter who died in a horseback riding accident.

He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1923. The story began in 1922 when railroad workers were going on strike. White was concerned because one of the Santa Fe railroad’s largest work facilities was in Emporia. Striking workers came to White to make sure the Gazette would give them fair treatment and an opportunity to answer the railroad’s charges.

On July 27, 1922, in the editorial, “To an Anxious Friend,” White wrote in favor of the strikers.

The second Pulitzer came after his death when he was honored for his autobiography.

Growing up a Kansan

White was born in Emporia in 1868 and became a newspaper reporter at the El Dorado Republican. In 1891, he started working at the Kansas City Journal and not long after transferred to the Kansas City Star.

In 1895, he bought the Emporia Gazette and was its editor until his death on Jan. 29, 1944.

White’s writing covered almost every subject affecting American life from the 1890s through the first half of the 20th century.

“After World War I, we were deporting people who had thoughts that didn’t resonate with the majority,” Heineken said. “That was another free speech issue that White said if these people are espousing a belief that is not popular, that’s OK, as long as they are not espousing violence.”

He also supported the quest for civil rights. During the 1930s, White served on the national board of directors for the NAACP.

White was an inaugural judge for Book-of-the-Month Club.

“That meant he was giving the stamp of approval for literature in America,” Heineken said.

When White was starting his career at the Emporia Gazette, the print industry was notorious for yellow journalism. But White’s style of writing was different.

“White had some kind of instinct that seemed to be right on,” Heineken said. “He kept news on the news page and opinion on the opinion page. He guaranteed different points of view.”

He also nurtured up-and-coming early 20th-century journalists: Oscar Stauffer, who would later found Stauffer Communications; Rolla Clymer, longtime editor of the El Dorado Times; Whitley Austin, longtime editor of the Salina Journal; and John Redmond, longtime editor of the Burlington Republican.

White also nurtured two nephews of Marsh Murdock, founding editor and publisher of The Wichita Eagle: Brock and Murdock Pemberton.

Both would later move to New York. Brock became a Broadway producer and founder of the Tony Awards; Murdock was the first art critic of the New Yorker magazine and one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, the literary world’s most celebrated group of writers, critics and actors.

His most famous words

White’s writing was universal, seldom pretentious and often about real life.

Perhaps the column that touched readers most was one he wrote May 17, 1921, after his 16-year-old daughter died:

“The Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White’s death declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life. … She was proud of few things, and one of them was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair.”

The column contained less than a thousand words but was one of his best known and continued to be reprinted in textbooks, magazines and other publications decades after Mary’s death.

Another of his most famous editorials came in 1896, when he wrote an editorial asking, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” He told Americans that Kansas was losing population because people were fighting over issues instead of working for solutions.

More than a century later, the title of that column would provide inspiration for Thomas Frank’s best-selling book about conservative politics.

White never gave in to controversy. In the 1920s, he took on the Ku Klux Klan. Through his editorials, he played a role in the KKK party losing its hold in Kansas politics.

He entertained prominent Americans at his Emporia home at 927 Exchange St. His friends included Edna Ferber, Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair. Even Albert Einstein, on a train ride across the country, stopped at Emporia to chat with his friend but missed him by two hours.

Ferber would later write: “When your world is awry and hope dead and vitality low and the appetite gone, there is no ocean trip, no month in the country, no known drug equal to the reviving quality of twenty-four hours spent on the front porch or sitting room of the Whites’ house in Emporia.”

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt slept in an upstairs bedroom. Herbert Hoover posed with White on the family’s front porch in 1935.

At the Whites’ house, William Allen would sit in a hammock on the front porch.

“If somebody would walk by, he’d say, ‘Come on up,’ ” said Ken Wilk, the site administrator for Red Rocks.

“He was shrewd. He would talk to people and get their feelings on stuff and then worked that all into his articles.”

Wilk said more than 90 percent of the items on exhibit at Red Rocks belonged to the Whites. There is a World War I Prussian helmet that belonged to a soldier in the kaiser’s elite body guard, Grecian urns, a cheetah skin rug from Teddy Roosevelt, and original sketches by Prairie Print Maker Birger Sandzen.

The dining room table is set for guests.

“Just imagine when they had a dinner party,” Wilk said. “Who is the guest? Teddy Roosevelt.

“He spent a lot of time in this house and when the dinner was over, the gentlemen would get up and bring their brandy up here and smoke cigars, just sitting around and talking.”

For the nearly half century White lived in Emporia, he wrote 23 books and countless articles, traveled the world and became one of the nation’s most beloved writers.

His legacy continues through the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Even now, when there are some generations of Kansans who may not readily recognize his name, White is still relevant in 21st-century Kansas, Heineken said, because his words hold up through time.

Consider these words from his Pulitzer-winning editorial, “Letter to an Anxious Friend.”

“So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart,” White wrote nearly a century ago. “This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold – by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.”

This story was originally published January 28, 2016 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Kansas’ best-known journalist died on Kansas Day in 1944 (+video)."