Red Rocks: The Editor Who Talked to Presidents

For nearly half a century, the most influential small-city newspaper editor in American history worked out of Emporia, Kansas. William Allen White bought the Emporia Gazette in eighteen ninety-five when he was twenty-seven years old and ran it until his death in nineteen forty-four. In that time he became a confidant of Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in nineteen twenty-three, and made the Emporia Gazette required reading for anyone trying to understand the American Midwest.

His home on Exchange Street, which he called Red Rocks for the red sandstone that lines its first floor, is a two-and-a-half-story Tudor Revival house where presidents including Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover visited over the decades. The National Park Service declared it a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-six. The Kansas Historical Society now operates it as a state historic site. White once wrote that what a community does with its newspapers is what it does with its conscience. He lived that idea in this house for forty-five years.