Middle America and the Development of a Practical Rhetoric

William N. Denman

Edward Gale Agran. "Too Good a Town": William Allen White, Community, and the Emerging Rhetoric of Middle America. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998. 178 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $16.00 (paper).

William Allen White was more than just the editor of a small town, mid-western newspaper. He was a national figure of importance in the Republican Party, a strong supporter of Theodore Roosevelt, an active and partisan Progressive, a friend of many political figures, once a candidate for governor of Kansas, and a prolific commentator on the American political scene. With the exception of one recent biographical study (Griffith), he is largely forgotten today.

In the first third of the twentieth century, however, he was a major figure in the newspaper and political worlds, and earned the sobriquet of "The Sage of Emporia." He bought a struggling newspaper in his home town of Emporia, Kansas, in 1895, and over the next half-century "helped to forge a Middle American ethos" (174). How he forged this ethos is the subject of Edward Gale Agran’s interesting study of the development of a very practical rhetoric. While Agran, a historian, does not define rhetoric, he clearly uses the term to refer to the body of White’s writing and its persuasive power as a vehicle for his views of what a middle class ethos should be in twentieth-century America.

The idea of community is presented with discussion of a number of theoretical views that are designed to place White’s views and work in perspective. Concern with the nature of community began in the nineteenth century and grew throughout the early twentieth century, as life in America became more urban, centered in large, less homogenous cities.

The tensions that arose between a growing urban culture with its more artificial relationships and the older, small towns with their patterns of life centered around kinship and neighborhood ties was a central subject for White. He used Emporia as a model, as an exemplar of the ideal community. Many of the examples Agran provides reveal that White’s picture of Emporia is clearly seen through rose-colored glasses, as when he reported that in Emporia "men live equitably and peacefully and industriously. . . . There are no town factions, and nothing to quarrel about. Everyone pulls together" (110).

As Agran points out, White’s ideal citizenry "tended to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant," adhering to mainstream American values and norms (97). This was the middle-class audience White sought to arouse, sought to inspire with a sense of their responsibility to bring the dispossessed into the middle-class that he saw as the central element in the stability of any community. At base, Agran asserts, "White was a democratic elitist" (97). For all this elitism, White held to the Progressive view that societies could better themselves, that individuals had the power to work together to fashion a community that would reflect the essential values of middle America. His sense of what it took to have a solid, respectable, progressive community was shaken, but never broken. It was first challenged in the 1920s with the rise of a new, broader, consumer class, urban hedonism, the struggle over Prohibition, and a general sense of self-centeredness. The invidious racism of the time influenced his one venture into the political arena as a candidate when he stood as an independent for governor of Kansas in opposition to the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had come to dominate both major parties.

His view of the perfectibility of communities was buffeted again by the onset of the Great Depression. As a Republican, he initially supported Herbert Hoover but came to see his weakness in dealing with the economic crisis. He formed a friendship with Franklin Roosevelt and supported the New Deal, although he remained concerned with the centralization of executive power. His final contribution to America was his service as chairman of two national committees—the first, in 1939, urging repeal of the Neutrality Act and the second, in 1940, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which sought aid to Great Britain and France in their struggle against Nazi Germany.

White’s national reputation was enhanced in part by his novels, written early in his career, but more particularly by his many articles written for periodicals such as The Saturday Evening Post, McClure’s Magazine, Colliers, and Atlantic Monthly among others. His work in these publications brought him a national audience. He was also a noted public speaker with some appearances in Vital Speeches. A series of speeches given at Harvard University in 1939 was published as The Changing West: An Economic Theory about Our Golden Age. This volume illustrates clearly White’s feelings about the virtues of the American West, that region from Buffalo and Pittsburgh to the Pacific, but north of the Mason and Dixon line. He is full of praise for those who settled the West, brought prosperity to the region (no mention of Native Americans), and contributed politically to the nation as a whole. It is a view of America that is centered in the creed of community: people must first have "a neighborly faith in the decency of man; second, a never faltering vision of a better world" (White 137). That creed was at the heart of William Allen White’s message to his fellow Americans.

William Allen White appears to have been, as Agran portrays him, "an adept distiller of ideas" who took many threads to make his whole cloth. He explained America—or his vision of a middle-class America—to Americans. He was a spokesman for an ideal community grounded in a Progressive and perhaps naïve view of humankind and society. White played a central role in the emerging rhetoric of Middle America that most recently resonated in the speeches of President Ronald Reagan. Professor Agran’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of what we might call rhetoric in practice. It is an able discussion of the life-long attempt on the part of a prominent journalist and author to shape public concepts of the society in which his readers are living.

Works Cited