William Allen White

Born: 1868
Died: 1944
Career Highlights: Owner and editor of his hometown paper, The Emporia Gazette, from 1895 until his death. Won a Pulitzer for his editorials and wrote the famous essay about the death of his daughter, "Mary White."

William Allen White was a country editor. But not just a country editor.
He was a country editor who was on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation, chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, regent of the Kansas university system, editorial board member of the Book-of-the-Month Club, friend of Herbert Hoover and Wendell Willkie, and biographer of Calvin Coolidge. He was a country editor who ran for governor of Kansas in 1924.
But William Allen White, who went to Haiti for President Hoover and to Europe for the Red Cross and who filed dispatches to The New York Times while on a trip to Moscow, loved Emporia, Kan., and the Emporia Gazette the most of all. Emporia was where he was born, where he owned and edited the newspaper for most of the first half of this century, where he died at age 75 in 1944.
He must have had more joy than any other person of his era. For nothing can be more fun and more wonderful — and, probably, have more impact — than writing editorials for a paper you own in a town you love and know. Unless it's doing all that while taking the occasional trip to London or Paris or Washington to see the world or dine with presidents or just have fun.
William Allen White knew every person, every horse, every dog in Emporia, and he probably wrote about each of them at one time or another. One editorial begins, "Parson T. F. Stauffer held his annual coming-out party for his straw hat yesterday afternoon." Another begins, "The editor of this newspaper desires to buy a horse."
But most of all, White knew right from wrong, and he praised the right and exposed the wrong. He knew that "the editor must be guide, philosopher, and friend to all — the rich as well as the poor. He must be executioner and undertaker, promoter and herald."
That is the credo that has guided those of us who have tried to emulate him in other small towns. Be neither a blind booster nor a common scold, favor no one and fear no one, report honestly and comment intelligently. Be true to yourself, your town and your readers. And, all the while, have fun, for as White wrote: "A newspaper has one obligation and one only, to print the truth as far as it is humanly possible, and to comment upon the truth as candidly and as kindly as is humanly possible, never forgetting to be merry the while, for after all the liar and the cheat and the panderer are smaller offenders than the solemn ass."
White would not compromise his beliefs, and paramount among those was his dedication to freedom. In 1922, he was arrested (but never tried) after he put a placard in his window supporting striking railroad workers. A worried friend wrote to him, and White wrote back in an editorial:
"So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold — by voice, by posted card, by letter or by press. Reason never has failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world."
White won the Pulitzer Prize for that editorial.
But the courage expressed in that editorial was nothing new. Twenty years earlier, soon after he bought the Gazette, he laid out his philosophy. "Nothing fails so rapidly as a cowardly paper," he wrote, "unless it is a paper that confuses courage with noise."
William Allen White, the greatest country editor ever, knew the difference.

Michael Gartner has been editor of newspapers large and small. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for The Tribune in Ames, Iowa.
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