WPA Writers’ Program — American Guide Series2.0

Unlike most volumes in the series, the Kansas guide opens not with an official preface but with a signed essay. “The Contemporary Scene” was written by William Allen White, the Emporia editor whose Gazette had made him one of the most quoted voices in American journalism, and his few pages set a tone of plain candor that the rest of the book tries to keep. First published in September 1939 under the sponsorship of the State Department of Education and issued by Hastings House, the guide presents a state that the nation tended to picture only in shorthand — wheat, weather, and the flat horizon — and quietly argues that the shorthand misses almost everything.

Part I, “The State and Its People,” ranges past that first impression. After White’s opening come chapters on the natural setting and conservation, the archeology and the Indian peoples who preceded statehood, and a history that runs from the Santa Fe trade through the violence of Bleeding Kansas and the cattle-town years into the modern farm economy. Further chapters take up agriculture, transportation, industry and labor, folklore, education, religion, sports, journalism, literature, art, music and the theater, and architecture — a social portrait broader than the guide’s practical purpose strictly required.

Part II turns to eighteen cities and towns. The list reads like a map of the state’s legends and its working life at once: the free-state memory of Lawrence, the cattle-trail fame of Dodge City, the meatpacking and rail yards of Kansas City and Wichita, the Swedish settlement of Lindsborg, and the territorial capitals and county seats in between. Part III, the longest section, lays out thirteen numbered motor tours and their lettered branches, threading the state from the Missouri line to Colorado and from the Nebraska border down to Oklahoma, with the practical, mile-by-mile detail that made these guides genuinely useful on the road.

A closing set of appendices adds a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Read today, the Kansas volume is both a working period guidebook and a record of how the state understood itself at the end of the 1930s — a place that, as White’s opening essay insists, was never quite as plain as the rest of the country assumed.

The volume appeared in 1939, at the end of a hard decade in which drought and dust had driven thousands of families from the land, and something of that strain shows beneath its even prose. Yet it is finally a hopeful book, written by Kansans intent on showing their state whole — its colleges and county fairs, its grain elevators and Civil War memories, its long flat roads — rather than as the punch line the rest of the country had made of it.