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It is the kind of country in which the Ku Klux Klan loses and in which class arrogance on both sides of the fence is bad form. It has its poverty, but its freedom to discuss and to limit the rights of private property "gives even the most acutely underprivileged groups—Marx's proletariat—a sense that their case is not hopeless." It has its scandals and tragedies—Charley Cross, Emporia's leading banker, got his bank in difficulties in 1898 and rode to his farm on the edge of town to kill himself. "I wonder what he thought when he rode down Commercial Street for the last time." It has its twisted characters like Negro Tom Williams, Editor White's friend, who was thought to be dangerous because he talked wildly, but who was just a night owl seeing too much going on under Emporia's placid surface—"just interested in knowing why men strayed and women fell and how the devil kept his fires going."
But mostly it is made up of people like the Hiram Dales ("There are scores of people who have pinched more pennies in Emporia than the Dales"), Dan Hirschler, Belle Harris, Cass Friedburg, Warren Harding, Woodrow Wilson, people who become presidents, people who graduate from high school, give a concert, get married, celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, or just move from one house to another. And with all its injustices and monumental blunders, it has been flowering—"In my lifetime I saw unfolding before me the magnificent vision that humanity had been gestating since man came out of the forests—the golden age of applied science. . . . Why should I mourn the fact that I have come to the end of my length of days?" It is a country of machinery, of the highest approximation of economic justice ever achieved, of medicine, of education, where Indian relics of the Stone Age still lie beside the railroad tracks, and where, in spite of everything, society evolves to create more generous, kindly and decent people. "Has man wandering in this worldly wilderness ever devised a better system than ours for making the desert blossom as the rose?"
But the kind of U. S. of which Editor White is part and partisan, has typically refrained from looking beyond the seas. Yet now he does so and to him there is no wrench in doing so. He is not even surprised, as he well might be, to find William Allen White climbing through the ropes into the ring with Adolf Hitler. He has long been a one-man committee to defend the kind of democracy that he has known and in his view events have simply given his Committee a new title.