William Allen White (February 10, 1868 – January 29, 1944) was an American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement.

[5]The Republicans sent out hundreds of thousands of copies of the editorial in support of William McKinley during the intensely fought presidential election of 1896, providing White with national exposure.

His Gazette editorials were widely reprinted; he wrote stories on politics syndicated by the George Matthew Adams Service; and he published many books, including biographies of Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge.

He won a 1923 Pulitzer Prize for his editorial "To an Anxious Friend", published July 27, 1922, after being arrested in a dispute over free speech following objections to the way the state of Kansas handled the men who participated in the Great Railroad Strike of 1922.

In his novels and short stories, White developed his idea of the small town as a metaphor for understanding social change and for preaching the necessity of community.

[6] While he expressed his views in terms of the small town, he tailored his rhetoric to the needs and values of emerging urban America.

The cynicism of the post-World War I world stilled his imaginary literature, but for the remainder of his life he continued to propagate his vision of small-town community.

Like most old Progressives his attitude toward the New Deal was ambivalent: President Franklin D. Roosevelt cared for the country and was personally attractive, but White considered his solutions haphazard.

He recognized the powerful forces of corruption but called for slow, remedial change having its origin in the middle class.

In his novel In the Heart of a Fool (1918), White fully developed the idea that reform remained the soundest ally of property rights.

White concluded that democracy in the New Era inevitably lacked direction, and the New Deal found him a baffled spectator.

[9] White helped Theodore Roosevelt form the Progressive (Bull-Moose) Party in the 1912 presidential election in opposition to the conservative forces surrounding incumbent Republican president William Howard Taft.

[10] White was a reporter at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and a strong supporter of Woodrow Wilson's proposal for the League of Nations.

According to Roger Bresnahan: White's finest hour came in his vigorous assault, beginning with Gazette editorials in 1921, on the Ku Klux Klan – a crusade that led him to run for governor of Kansas in 1924 so that his anti-Klan message would reach a broader state and national audience.

However, White was on the liberal wing of the Republican Party and wrote many editorials praising the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He got the support of Governor Walter Huxman and other politicians, and the result was the prestigious invitation to paint murals for the Kansas Capitol.

[1] : 37–39 The last quarter century of White's life was spent as an unofficial national spokesman for Middle America.

This led President Franklin Roosevelt to ask White to help generate public support for the Allies before America's entry into World War II.

Roosevelt spent several nights at White's Wight and Wight-designed home, Red Rocks, during trips across the United States.

During World War II, the William Allen White Liberty ship was launched from Richmond, California on May 8, 1944.

The town of Emporia honors him to this day with city limits signs on I-35, US-50, and K-99 announcing "Home of William Allen White."

From editorial "Mary White": A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep.

[22]From an editorial published in February 1943, shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt returned from the Casablanca Conference with Winston Churchill: We who hate your gaudy guts salute you.