Overview

In 1895, a 27-year-old journalist named William Allen White returned to his home town of Emporia, Kansas, to edit a little down-at-the-heels newspaper he had just purchased for $3,000. ""The new editor,"" he wrote in his first editorial, ""hopes to live here until he is the old editor, until some of the visions which rise before him as he dreams shall have come true."" White did become ""the old editor,"" remaining with the Emporia Gazette until his death 50 years later. During his long tenure he gained nation-wide fame as an author, political leader, and social commentator. But more than anything else, he became the national embodiment of the small-town newspaperman and all the treasured virtues that small towns represented in the minds of Americans. Home Town News is both a fascinating biography and a compelling social history. As Sally Foreman Griffith shows, White's popular image--kindly yet crusading, fiercely independent yet deeply rooted in his community--doesn't do justice to the man's complexity. Shrewdly carving out a position of leadership in a faction-torn town, White carefully shaped his paper's vision of its community to promote local economic growth, Republican political control, and social harmony. With his emergence as a leader among Midwestern progressives, he carefully adapted the ideas and rhetoric of small-town boosterism to changing economic realities. The book uses White's career to help us understand the role of journalism--and the journalist--in turn-of-the-century American culture. Far from being a simple chronicler of daily events, the small-town newspaperman carried considerable weight in his community. He was a leading force in local business, a galvanizing influence in civic life, and a key political activist. As giant corporations came to dominate the national economy, the newspaperman played a pivotal yet ambivalent role in the resulting social transformation: he sought to preserve local autonomy even as his paper introduced his readers to mass-produced consumer goods. Home Town News also tells the story of Emporia, Kansas, during this period of social change. Its richly textured descriptions of small-town life take us beyond abstractions like ""modernization,"" ""progressivism,"" and ""boosterism."" As we observe the Emporia Street Fair of 1899, the heated controversy over the morality of a local doctor in 1902, and the elaborate campaign to build a Y.M.C.A. in 1914, we gain new insights into the processes that have shaped modern America.

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9780195055894

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Reviews

A readable, impressive, enjoyable and valued addition to the history of journalism, the story of a small-town editor and publisher catapulted to national fame after publication of an editorial dashed off in anger, 'What's the matter with Kansas.' --New York Times Book Review<br> [An] intriguing study of the role a small-town newspaper played in the social, civic, political, and economic life of the surrounding community in the nineteenth-century U.S....Griffith traces White's career in exhaustive detail, the growth of his fascinating personality, and the historical and cultural transformations that occurred in the practice and influence of community journalism. --Booklist<br>

<br> A readable, impressive, enjoyable and valued addition to the history of journalism, the story of a small-town editor and publisher catapulted to national fame after publication of an editorial dashed off in anger, 'What's the matter with Kansas.' --New York Times Book Review<br> [An] intriguing study of the role a small-town newspaper played in the social, civic, political, and economic life of the surrounding community in the nineteenth-century U.S....Griffith traces White's career in exhaustive detail, the growth of his fascinating personality, and the historical and cultural transformations that occurred in the practice and influence of community journalism. --Booklist<br>

<br> A readable, impressive, enjoyable and valued addition to the history of journalism, the story of a small-town editor and publisher catapulted to national fame after publication of an editorial dashed off in anger, 'What's the matter with Kansas.' --New York Times Book Review<p><br> [An] intriguing study of the role a small-town newspaper played in the social, civic, political, and economic life of the surrounding community in the nineteenth-century U.S....Griffith traces White's career in exhaustive detail, the growth of his fascinating personality, and the historical and cultural transformations that occurred in the practice and influence of community journalism. --Booklist<p><br>

Here, Griffith (History/Villanova) sees William Allen White's career as a window for understanding the role of journalism in American culture, and examines the small-town ethos served and promoted by White's Emporia (Kansas) Gazette from the mid-1890's through the 1920's. White was an enthusiastic booster of Emporia's local businesses, social order, and culture, and one who excoriated the mail-order companies and chain stores for draining away local money. He also used his paper to further the cause of temperance and condemn drunkenness, gambling, and sexual immorality. A supporter of the status. quo, the Gazette revealed names when a member of the working class strayed, but usually protected the gentry. By the 1920's, when articles and folksy short stories published in national magazines had made White renowned as the Sage of Emporia, he turned day-to-day operations of the Gazette over to younger hands - who made it considerably more cosmopolitan, less dependent on Republican Party patronage, and an advertising vehicle for national brands and the automotive industry. White never severed his small-town roots, however, continuing to laud the self-reliant, neighborly aspects of small towns even as he tried to make Emporia intellectually and materially up-to-date. According to Griffith, His boosterism prevented him from fully understanding how such efforts to keep abreast of urban trends undermined. . .the importance of local life. Assiduously documented; but Griffith fails to breathe life into White and into Emporia. Of interest mostly to historians, journalists, and Americana buffs. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Sally Foreman Griffith is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University. She won the Allan Nevins Prize for the dissertation that forms the basis of this book.

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