William
Allen White was
born in Emporia, Kansas, on 10th February, 1868. After graduating from
the Kansas State University he became a journalist. He worked for various
newspapers in
Kansas before purchasing the Emporia
Gazette
in 1895. White edited this small-town newspaper for the next forty-nine
years.
A staunch Republican, White gave his
support to William McKinley (1897-1901),
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and William
Taft (1909-1913). However, White, switched his support to Roosevelt
and the Progressive Party in the last
presidential election before the First World War.
During the war he backed Woodrow Wilson
and his policy of internationalism.
Wilson returned to the Republicans after
the war and campaigned for Herbert Hoover
against Franklin D. Roosevelt. However,
he did support most of Roosevelt's New Deal
legislation. White was an opponent of racial intolerance and played
an important role in limiting the influence of the Ku
Klux Klan in Kansas.
White published several books, including an account of leading politicians,
Masks
in a Pageant
(1928) and biography of Calvin Coolidge,
A
Puritan in Babylon
(1933). His memoirs, The
Autobiography of William Allen White,
that was published after his death, won the Pulitzer
Prize. William
Allen White
died in Emporia on 31st January, 1944.
(1)
William Allen White, letter to Herbert Bayard Swope (17th September,
1921)
An organizer of the Ku Klux
Klan was in Emporia the other day, and the men whom he invited to
join his band at $10 per join turned him down. Under the leadership
of Dr. J. B. Brickell and following their own judgment after hearing
his story, the Emporians told him that they had no time for him. The
proposition seems to be: Anti-foreigners,
Anti-Catholics, Anti-Negroes.
There are, of course,
bad foreigners and good ones, good Catholics and bad ones, and all
kinds of Negroes. To make a case against a birthplace, a religion,
or a race is wickedly un-American and cowardly. The whole trouble
with the Ku Klux Klan is that it is based upon such deep foolishness
that it is bound to be a menace to good government in any community.
Any man fool enough to be Imperial Wizard would have power without
responsibility and both without any sense. That is social dynamite.
American institutions,
our courts, our legislators, our executive officers are strong enough
to keep the peace and promote justice and goodwill in the community.
If they are not, then the thing to do is to change these institutions
and do it quickly, but always legally. For a self-constituted body
of moral idiots, who would substitute the findings of the Ku Klux
Klan for the processes of law to try to better conditions, would be
a most un-American outrage which every good citizen should resent.
It is to the everlasting
credit of Emporia that the organizer found no suckers with $10 each
to squander here. Whatever Emporia may be otherwise, it believes in
law and order, and absolute freedom under the Constitution for every
man, no matter what birth or creed or race, to speak and meet and
talk and act as a free, law-abiding citizen. The picayunish cowardice
of a man who would substitute Klan rule and mob law for what our American
fathers have died to establish and maintain should prove what a cheap
screw outfit the Klan is.
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