Also prominent in the early post-war period were Marshall M. Murdock, founder of the Wichita Eagle in 1872, Preston B. Plumb of the Emporia Kansas News, and Sol Miller of the Troy Kansas Chief. But these names are of minor importance in comparison with that of Edgar W. Howe, author of The Story of a Country Town and of numerous other books that have won for him a national reputation in addition to his fame as a journalist. Howe's newspaper career began in 1873, when at the age of nineteen he became editor and publisher of a newspaper in Golden, Colorado. Four years later he moved to Atchison and began publication in that city of the Daily Globe, which under his editorship and proprietorship was a potent force in Kansas journalism for more than a third of a century. Retiring from active newspaper work in 1911, Howe edited and published for several years a magazine called E. W. Howe's Monthly. He died at Atchison late in 1937.
Another Kansas editor and publisher of national reputation is Arthur Capper, who like Ed Howe entered newspaper work at the age of nineteen. Beginning as a typesetter on the Topeka Daily Capital, he worked upward on that journal through the successive stages of reporter, city editor, and Washington correspondent, to become its publisher and proprietor. In 1893 he assumed editorship of the North Topeka Mail, a weekly newspaper later consolidated with the Kansas Breeze, which was founded in 1894 by T. A. McNeal and edited jointly by McNeal and Capper. The latter soon established other publications, including Capper's Weekly, Capper's Farmer, and the Household Magazine.
As publisher of the Capital, Capper soon became closely identified with the Republican party in Kansas politics, and as that party's candidate he was elected Governor in 1914 the first native Kansan to hold this office. After serving a second term as Governor, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1918 and subsequently reelected in 1924, 1930, and 1936.
Capper has been fortunate in his editorial assistants, such as the late Harold T. Chase and T. A. McNeal. Chase was editorial writer for the Capital from 1889 until shortly before his death in 1936, and his scholarly and keenly analytical writing received more than Statewide recognition. The association with T. A. McNeal, from whom Capper purchased the Kansas Breeze in 1895, has continued since that date. Tom McNeal is now (1938) the dean of Kansas editors. A native of Ohio, he came to Kansas in 1879 and was part owner of the Medicine Lodge Cresset for fifteen years. He served a term as mayor of Medicine Lodge, was later a member of the State legislature, and for six years held the office of State printer.
Unlike many of his journalistic contemporaries Frank P. McLennan, Capper's most prominent rival in the Topeka newspaper field, never aspired to public office. He came to Emporia from Ohio in the iSyo's; published the Emporia Daily News with Jacob Stotler and Alexander Butts for several years, and then purchased the bankrupt Topeka State Journal at public auction in 1885. McLennan successfully conducted the Journal as an independent newspaper for nearly half a century. He also served for many years as vice president of the board of directors of the Associated Press, once remarking that he regarded that position as preferable to the office of United States Senator. He died in Topeka in 1933.
Capper was succeeded as Governor of Kansas in 1918 by Henry J. Allen, a Wichita publisher whose attempt to regulate labor disputes through the Kansas Industrial Court attracted national attention. Beginning as editor of the Manhattan Nationalist in 1894, Allen later acquired and operated several daily papers in smaller cities of Kansas. He published the Wichita Daily Beacon from 1907 until 1928, when he sold it to Max and Louis Levand. Shortly after the death of Frank P. McLennan in 1933, Allen became editor of the Topeka State Journal.
J. A. Wayland, who founded the Appeal to Reason at Girard in 1897, was a political journalist of a type seldom found in Kansas, where editors have been prone to promote themselves for public office and to align themselves with the dominant political group. Wayland was an ardent Socialist, and his Appeal to Reason, backed by a fortune acquired in Texas real estate speculation, soon became a national organ of the underprivileged. Wayland later leased the paper to Fred Warren, who continued its publication until 1912. E. Haldeman- Julius then took it over, changing its name to Haldeman-Julius Weekly in 1922, and later to the New Appeal and to its present title, the American Freeman.
For several decades, no name in the annals of Kansas journalism has been better known to the American public than that of William Allen White, "the sage of Emporia." Born in that city in 1868, White was reared in Butler County and learned the printer's trade in the office of the El Dorado Republican. In 1891, soon after graduation from the University of Kansas, he joined the editorial staff of the Kansas City Journal, and was later employed on the Star in the same city. In 1895 he purchased the Emporia Gazette, which he has owned and edited ever since.
With the publication in 1896 of his famous Gazette editorial, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" White achieved national renown almost overnight. Appearing in the midst of a heated Presidential campaign, it assailed the Populist movement then sweeping the Middle West and was given such widespread prominence by the Republican campaign managers that it played an important part in the election of McKinley.
Like Ed Howe of Atchison, White is no less well known as an author than as a journalist. A dozen books of fiction, biography, social and political commentary have appeared from his pen in the past forty years. He has also played an active part in politics and public affairs as an independent "progressive."
Not a few editors and writers who have risen to prominence elsewhere in the country began their careers in Kansas newspaper offices. Wesley Winans Stout, who in 1937 succeeded George Horace Lorimer as editor of the Saturday Evening Post, is a native of Junction City who left college in his freshman year to work on the Wichita Beacon and was later on the editorial staff of the Kansas City Star. Walt Mason, characterized by William Allen White as "the poet laureate of American democracy," wrote the first of his now widely syndicated "prose poems" as a staff worker on the Emporia Gazette, to which he had come after serving an apprenticeship on the Atchison Globe. Edwin S. Beck, a son of the pioneer Holton editor Moses M. Beck, has been managing editor of the Chicago Tribune since 1910. Will T. Beck, a younger son, has continued publication of the Holton Recorder, which his father purchased in 1881.
The Kansas City Star, although a Missouri newspaper, has often been a potent factor in molding public opinion in Kansas. The late William Rockhill Nelson, founder of the Star, soon learned that Republican Kansas offered a more fruitful field for his political theories than traditionally Democratic Missouri. Nelson's successors have continued his editorial policies, and the Star has been identified with the liberal element in Kansas Republicanism.
The indomitable spirit of the pioneer editor still prevails in Kansas journalism. Recent years of unprecedented drought and agricultural depression have not daunted the State's press. And, as has been demonstrated in recent political campaigns, Kansas editors have lost none of their traditional trenchancy. More than 700 newspapers and other periodicals, published in Kansas in 1937, included 61 dailies, 497 weeklies (five of which were published by Negroes), 71 monthlies, and 21 quarterlies.
Realizing that the most accurate and complete history of any community lies in its newspapers, Kansas editors have cooperated with the State Historical Society in preserving their issues for students of Kansas history. The periodical section of the society possesses the most complete files of the State's newspapers in this country. In many instances the society's file of a paper is the only one extant. In January 1937 the State Historical Society had 44,307 bound volumes of Kansas periodicals.