What Kansas Means

There is a phrase that shows up in American political commentary whenever a politician or a policy is being described as out of touch with ordinary working people. The question asked is: what's the matter with Kansas? It comes from the title of a book published in two thousand four by a journalist named Thomas Frank, and it was itself borrowed from an eighteen ninety-six editorial written by a Kansas newspaper editor named William Allen White, who was attacking William Jennings Bryan and the Populist-backed free silver campaign. The phrase has drifted far from its origins and been applied in every direction since.

Kansas has a habit of standing in for something larger than itself. It was the first state to vote for Prohibition in its constitution. It was the state where the argument over slavery in the territories turned violent and tested whether democratic processes could hold against organized terror. It is where the legal challenge that ended school segregation began, where the great wheat variety that fed the industrial world was planted, where the cattle trade built the mythological West, and where an Abilene boy grew up to command the largest invasion in the history of warfare and then warn the country, from the presidential podium, against the institutions he had just helped build.

Kansas has also been misread consistently. The standard narrative, flatness as metaphor, the emptiness at the center of the country, the stereotyped religious conservatism, misses most of what is actually here. The state that produced the fiercest antislavery fighters of the eighteen fifties also produced the most radical farmer-labor politics of the eighteen nineties. The state that Prohibition associates treated as a testing ground also produced jazz clubs in Wichita and Kansas City that shaped American music. The land that looks empty at sixty miles an hour is doing something extraordinarily complex at the level of root systems, soil organisms, aquifer hydrology, and the grass-fire cycles that have shaped this ecosystem for longer than any human politics.

Drive across Kansas slowly. The story is not in the headlines. It is in the chalk escarpments of the Smoky Hills, in the wagon ruts still pressed into the pasture grass west of Larned, in the limestone Mennonite churches of Harvey County, in the red-winged blackbirds calling from every fence post between here and the Colorado line. The south wind is still blowing. It has always blown here. That is the point.