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)
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.
General
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