The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of our young nation. Here is the third in a series of articles reporting, state by state, what the Louisiana Purchase represents now.
* * *
My state is among those along the Missouri River Valley that can call themselves plains or prairie. Neither geography has a lot of trees, by forest standards.
"Prairie" is tall grass, generally east of the 100th meridian (think Wichita), getting more than 20 inches of rainfall a year. "Plains" is short grass, generally west of the 100th meridian, with less than 20 inches of rainfall.
This means Kansas has equal parts farming and ranching, humidity and dry air, streams and deep wells.
You can also think of Kansas as central, at least geographically: Within our borders is the geographic center of the lower 48 United States and the geodetic center of the United States.
Kansas is even at the center of the North American continent.
Now, try thinking of Kansas as central to our beliefs about who we are in these United States. Having trouble? You're not alone.
Kansas, like many of the states that were part of the Louisiana Purchase, suffers from depopulation. As a Plains state, we suffered badly in the "Dirty '30s," when rain did not fall for six years (other states only had the Great Depression to suffer).
As an agricultural state, we don't have the glitz of dot.com, or film, fashion or publishing centers. Aircraft is our best-known industry.
We are close to rock bottom in arts funding.
We are ridiculed when our state Board of Education downgrades the teaching of evolution by not testing for it on state standards. (We've temporarily corrected that one.)
Bottom line: We are often thought of as the home of all those Dorothys, who would rather be anywhere else, so they can say, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
But as one of our native sons, Dr. Karl Menninger, wrote: "We live in a beautiful state, a state settled by brave, intelligent and far-visioned people, (even if) our intelligence and our vision do not seem to have prevented us from developing a vast inferiority, not a real inferiority but a feeling of inferiority."
Whenever I feel myself infected by this sense of inferiority, I tell myself: "Without Kansas, the world would not have the flyswatter."
"It happens first in Kansas"
The invention of what was once called the "fly bat" might not seem a huge accomplishment, but in my state, invention, purpose, causes and ideals often come together to bear such fruit and such deeds - positive, negative and slightly odd.
In fact, Kansas has a place in American history that moves well beyond the usual stereotype, the level landscape of farms and ranches. In 1922, our most famous journalist, William Allen White, wrote:
"Kansas is the Mother Shipton, the Madame Thebes, the Witch of Endor, and the low barometer of the nation. When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas. Abolition, Prohibition, Populism, . . . the exit of the roller towel . . . these things come popping out of Kansas like bats out of hell."
Nonetheless, the New Yorker printed a famous cartoon that showed a roadside sign reading:
You are now entering Kansas or some state very much like it.
But the historical reality of Kansas proves it to be one of few states - along with Massachusetts, Virginia, Texas and California - that is centrally emblematic of America.
As historian Carl Becker wrote in 1910: "The Kansas spirit is the American spirit double distilled. It is a new grafted product of American individualism, American idealism, American intolerance. Kansas is America in microcosm."
Becker and White came to their conclusions because Kansas has been in on the invention of so many things American:
* Trails west, because the first trail to the Southwest, the Santa Fe Trail, was surveyed from Kansas City in 1825, followed by other routes to faraway places such as the Oregon Trail and the Butterfield Overland (to California and the Gold Rush of 1849).
After the Civil War, the cattle trails brought beef to a meat-starved nation, and America's native hero, the cowboy, was born. So, too, was the first cowboy boot.
The important cattle towns were all in Kansas: Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Caldwell, Dodge City, Hays.
White also referred to social and political movements associated with Kansas.
* Abolition, because Free Staters (those who opposed slavery) in the Kansas territory included the likes of John Brown and James Lane (first to arm black soldiers in the service of the Union and friend to Abraham Lincoln). "Bleeding Kansas," as it was called, was the Civil War before the Civil War. After the Union victory, Kansas attracted veterans loyal to the Grand Army of the Republic and the Republican Party.
If you want to know why Kansas is Republican only - Charles Curtis, first American Indian to serve as U.S. vice president; Alf Landon, longtime Republican Party icon; Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th president; and Bob Dole, senator, perennial candidate for higher office and endorser of Viagra - you only have to look at who settled here after the Civil War.
* Prohibition, because Kansas became the first state to adopt a bone-dry liquor law, and it was one of the last states to abandon it. Our dry period: 1881-1949.
We're proud of our idealism. After all, we had to devise a disincentive to those rowdy cowboys. More seriously, the post-Civil War era was, indeed, alcoholic, with the focus on men. Temperance and women's rights went hand in hand, and Kansas had a strong tradition for both.
Kansas, like other Western states entering the Union after the Civil War, was targeted for social reforms because it was in the process of writing its constitution.
Thus, Kansas women were given more property rights than their Eastern counterparts. Early on, Kansas allowed for women's suffrage in municipal elections.
As a result, Dora Salter of Argonia was elected in 1887 and became the first female mayor in the United States. The next year, Oskaloosa elected women to fill all its City Council seats and the post of mayor, leading a local headline to shout:
"HOW WOMEN LOSE SELF RESPECT ARGONIA, SYRACUSE AND OSKALOOSA UNDER FEMALE GOVERNMENT."
By 1900, 15 Kansas towns boasted female mayors. Soon after, Prohibition also gave the country Carry A. Nation (whose efforts indeed helped carry a nation to Prohibition in 1920).
Nation smashed saloons all over Kansas to make her point; she was never jailed for long, because she only destroyed property that was, technically, illegal.
If we are proud of our ideals in Kansas, we were also studied in our hypocrisies. As White wrote: "Kansans will vote dry for as long as they can stagger to the polls."
* Populism, because in the 1890s, Kansas was the first state to elect officials from America's largest third-party movement. These radical farmers would have agreed with a political cartoon of the times:
A cow straddles a map of the United States, positioned so that its mouth is over Kansas, where farmers in overalls are working like crazy to feed it, and its udders swing over New York City, where tuxedoed, cigar-smoking bankers milk the cow for all it (and the nation) is worth.
Farmers and industrial workers hoped for the regulation of banks, utilities and railroads, for eight-hour workdays, for a graduated income tax, for child labor laws. Of course, all these reforms came about with the election of Teddy Roosevelt, the Trust Buster, Progressive Republican.
Teddy's biggest fan? William Allen White, of course.
Also in the early part of the 20th century, Kansas was home to the largest circulation socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, of Girard.
Emanuel Haldeman-Julius went from that newspaper to create the first mass-market paperback books, the Little Blue Books - the motto was "A University in Print" - to educate the working classes.
The landmark desegregation case
So, in spite of its conservative, Republican norm, Kansas has been home to almost every radical movement in American history.
"Free state" Kansas became the primary destination of the first mass migration of blacks out of the South when Reconstruction failed.
The "Exodusters" - a play on the Exodus and on the prairie's dirt - remembered John Brown. They knew, too, that Kansas had been the first state to ratify the 15th Amendment, which gave voting rights to blacks, in 1867.
The first black woman admitted to the practice of law in the United States was Lutie Lyle of Topeka in 1897. And two generations later, in 1939, Wichita's Hattie McDaniel was the first black woman to win an Academy Award.
In the early 1950s, Kansas was targeted by the NAACP in the fight to desegregate schools. Those well-educated Kansas blacks with Exoduster roots organized themselves in Topeka and struggled all the way to 1954's Brown vs. Board of Education, Topeka, to help strike down Plessy vs. Ferguson's "separate but equal" Supreme Court decision.
These important American social and political movements, and their intersection with Kansas, may seem to dwarf my early assertion of pride in the flyswatter. But that invention comes out of yet more Kansas reform.
In public health, Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine, he of the "roller towel" cited in that White quote, took over as secretary of the State Board of Health - just as the germ theory became popular medical knowledge.
Crumbine's campaign against the housefly in 1906 (the year of the invention of the flyswatter, if you are taking notes) was followed by his equally successful forays against the roller towel (1907, which let many people wipe their hands on the same cloth) and the common drinking cup (1909).
The Dixie Co. began making paper cups, and the whole new idea of disposable dinnerware enters American culture.
Kansas was also the first state to pass food and drug and water and sewage acts, and by 1920, its citizens could boast the highest longevity of any state in the Union.
The pioneering efforts of Dr. Karl Menninger in the mental health field reflected his belief in Kansas as a supportive place for his radical idea: an open-air sanitarium for the mentally ill.
He founded the Menninger Clinic in 1925, where he changed both public attitudes about, and clinical practices for, the mentally ill.
I know that by now my state pride may be overdone.
But the relating of all these causes, ideals and inventions has a purpose. These Kansas firsts contain enough specifics to allow for some generalizations.
Kansas, as central, was at a crossroads geographically and politically, from the trails to the coincidence of statehood at the beginning of the Civil War. As a decidedly Republican state, and then a Progressive Republican state, Kansas tended to be in the forefront of those states willing to put the public good before individual rights, hence the racial history, the experiments with social causes such as Prohibition, the good record for education, for women's rights and opportunities and, finally, for the innovations in health.
If these days we are thought of negatively, at least we are thought of, in our firsts and our lasts.
Think of us always, or at least the next time you see a cowboy boot, a flyswatter, a desegregated school, a campus-style mental health facility, a woman in political office, a mass-market paperback book. Such are Kansas' contributions to American life.
- Thomas Fox Averill is writer-in-residence and professor of English at Washburn University of Topeka. He is editor of "What Kansas Means to Me: 20th-Century Writers on the Sunflower State," and the author of two novels, "Secrets of the Tsil Cafe" and "The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson."
On the Web
Readers can find all the articles in our series on the Louisiana Purchase, which runs periodically until May, by going to the Web site www.sptimes.com/lapurchase There are links to the installments and interactive features.
