For William Allen White, the ideal Midwestern community was a utopian vision of what America could be: a prosperous, happy community built on equality, opportunity, and neighborly generosity. This anthology collects White's famous and obscure writings and presents him as the iconic voice of the Midwestern small town. William Allen White, the editor of the Emporia, Kansas Gazette, was an American institution. When he died in 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt commented that America had lost one of its "wisest and most beloved editors." White understood the value of his unique brand as "The Voice of Main Street," and would often preach his vision of the kind of nation the United States ought to be. From his view in Emporia, White's imagined Midwestern town was a dream for the nation to strive toward. He saw himself as a pioneer sowing the seeds of a great harvest to come, and he believed that the small-town civilization he venerated exemplified what was best in America. In Heartland Utopia, Charles Delgadillo and Jason Stacy have gathered nearly twenty-five years of White's fiction and nonfiction, focused on his idealized Midwestern community and how this utopian vision changed over time.
Charles Delgadillo is a lecturer in history at the California State University, Pomona, and the author of Crusader for Democracy: The Political Life of William Allen White, published by Kansas. Jason Stacy is Distinguished Research Professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. His books include Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town and Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism.
Introduction Part I. Rearguard Reformer The City of Aqua Pura (1896) The Home-Coming of Colonel Hucks (1896) The King of Boyville (1896) A Typical Kansas Community (1897) Patriotism and Things (1899) The Meaning of the Fair (1899) The Man on Horseback (1899) The Greatest of These (1900) Scribes and Pharisees (1905) The Coming of the Leisure Class (1905) Emporia and New York (1907) A Slow Process (1907) A Look Ahead (1910) Standing Together (1911) As a Town Thinketh (1913) The Country Newspaper (1916) The League and Things (1919) Part II. Mid-Victorian Modern We Who Are About to Die (1921) The Other Side of Main Street (1921) Will They Fool Us Twice? (1921) What's the Matter with America? (1922) Emporia and the Strike (1922) Blood of the Conquerors (1923) The Dawn of a Great Tomorrow (1923) A Brave Man (1923) A Holy American Day (1924) Klanism vs. Americanism (1924) Forward or Backward (1924) Forward or Backward (1924) At the Crossroads (1924) Annihilate the Klan! (1925) Lyon County (1926) Al Smith, City Feller (1926) The Country Town Issue (1928) The Country Editor Speaks (1929) If I Were a Dictator (1931) Index
"Heartland Utopia is a timeless (and increasingly timely) collection of writings about this country's middle part, a small town with national implications, reflecting White's own import and involvement with the political landscape of this country during the birth of our modern era. In turns pastoral story craft and scourging moral and political clarity, this is essential reading for anyone who wishes a clearer view of the small places in the United States from within, a perspective missing almost entirely from mainstream discussions about the political and economic landscape of the American countryside."-Ben Aguilar, Director of Operations at The Berry Center "This selection of famed Kansas journalist William Allen White's writings brings to life a small-town, heartland vision of democratic life in a modernizing America, one that had great purchase in the early twentieth century and that still has useful lessons for us early in the twenty-first. Delgadillo and Stacy ably introduce the collection, exploring the enduring value of White's ideals and probing their limitations."-James J. Connolly, co-author of What Middletown Read: Print Culture and Cosmopolitanism in an American City "In putting together this selection of William Allen White's lively essays and stories, Charles Delgadillo and Jason Stacey have done not just Kansas but the whole country and all of its distinctive small places a very great service. White's clear, vigorous, and entertaining defense of Emporia-his 'little utopia'-and of what the hyper-mobile classes would later call 'fly-over country' is an apology for small-town American life everywhere and for the neighborliness and local love it needs. This book is a pleasure to read."-Jason Peters, author of The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand "William Allen White was a voice and symbol of the small town American Midwest and a long-time champion of reason and civic-mindedness. We are blessed to now have a new volume of White's writings organized and edited by the two premier scholars of White, Charles Delgadillo and Jason Stacy. Bravo to them for their efforts and bringing this voice of middle American life to a new generation of readers."-Jon Lauck, coeditor of The Liberal Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest
