Kansas State Quotes

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene

Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison.

When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing. I told him I wanted to be a real Major League baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be President of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.

Oh, Kansas isn’t the state of Kansas,” Maud said. “Kansas is just the place you’re stuck in, wherever that might be.

We the People - shelling the Vietcong

Something is very wrong with Bunce. She's collapsed in the back seat like a dead rabbit. But I can't really focus on it because of the sun and also the wind and because I'm very busy making a list. Things I hate, a list: 1. The sun. 2. The wind. 3. Penelope Bunce, when she hasn't got a plan. 4. American sandwiches. 5. America. 6. The band, America. Which I didn't know about an hour ago. 7. Kansas, also a band I've recently become acquainted with. 8. Kansas, the state. Which isn't that far from Illinois, so it must be wretched. 9. The State of Illinois, for fucking certain. 10. The sun. In my eyes. 11. The wind in my hair. 12. Convertible automobiles. 13. Myself, most of all. 14. My soft heart. 15. My foolish optimism. 16. The words "road" and "trip" when said together with any enthusiasm. 17. Being a vampire, if we're being honest. 18. Being a vampire in a fucking convertible. 19. A deliriously thirsty vampire in a convertible at midday. In Illinois, which is apparently the brightest place on the planet. 20. The sun. Which hangs miles closer to Minooka, Illinois, than it does over London blessed England. 21. Minooka, Illinois. Which seems dreadful. 22. These sunglasses. Rubbish. 23. The fucking sun! We get it - you're very fucking bright! 24. Penelope Bunce, who came up with this idea. An idea not accompanied by a plan. Because all she cared about was seeing her rubbish boyfriend, who clearly cocked it all up. Which we all should have expected from someone from Illinois, land of the damned - a place that manages to be both hot and humid at the same time. You might well expect hell to be hot, but you don't expect it to also be humid. That's what makes it hell, the surprise twist! The devil is clever!

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

The Kansas state motto, "Ad astra per aspera" - To the stars through difficulties.

The question is this—do poor, plainly guilty defendants have a right to a complete defense? I do not believe that the State of Kansas would be either greatly or for long harmed by the death of these appellants. But I do not believe it could ever recover from the death of due process.

There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....

This town was caught in a perpetual state of stagnation. The same three thousand or so people were still living the same small-town life. They thought they ruled the universe from the confines of this one-mile square, yet their world ended at the city limits.

Ad astra per aspera. It's the Kansas state motto," he said to Roger and me, "To the stars through adversity

Tom Jr. was steeped in Free Soil politics and was now chief justice of the Kansas State Supreme Court.

The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers in his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

I want to see this lady out the front gate and into her car and off the street and out of town and then removed from the county and then the whole state and finally relocated to the place they call Tornado Alley in Kansas.

Now then, Mr. Crab," said the zebra, "here are the people I told you about; and they know more than you do, who live in a pool, and more than I do, who live in a forest. For they have been travelers all over the world, and know every part of it." "There's more of the world than Oz," declared the crab, in a stubborn voice. "That is true," said Dorothy; "but I used to live in Kansas, in the United States, and I've been to California and to Australia--and so has Uncle Henry." "For my part," added the Shaggy Man, "I've been to Mexico and Boston and many other foreign countries." "And I," said the Wizard, "have been to Europe and Ireland." "So you see," continued the zebra, addressing the crab, "here are people of real consequence, who know what they are talking about.

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning. The

At the meeting, Jefferson addressed the chiefs as “my children” and said, “It is so long since our forefathers came from beyond the great water, that we have lost the memory of it, and seem to have grown out of this land, as you have done….We are all now of one family.” He went on, “On your return tell your people that I take them all by the hand; that I become their father hereafter, that they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.” But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River. The Osage chief stated that his people “had no choice, they must either sign the treaty or be declared enemies of the United States.” Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas. And it was in this place where Mollie’s mother and father had come of age. Mollie’s

I have said that there is no "average" American. That is due to the circumstance that the people of the United States differ from each as widely as the parts they live in. The New Yorker is a different specimen of man from the Westerner; the latter is entirely different again from the people of Texas. The Middle West, such States for instance as Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska or Iowa, have an entirely different psychology from that of Florida or Lower California. Their habits of life, their modes of thought, even their language is different. Still further, it must also be considered that millions of foreigners and descendants of foreign born people live in the United States and are part of the entire population that is known as "American". Add to this more than 10 million negroes, not to mention the score of different Indian (red-skin) tribes, who are the real, indigenous Americans. In this conglomeration of races it is impossible to speak of the "average" American, nor can any adequate estimate of American psychology be made on such a basis.

What’s the total area, in square miles, of the state of Kansas?” he whispered. “Um, around 82,200; why?

You do not cut a check in the state of Kansas to John Doe, executioner. The executioner is paid in cash so there's no trail to him

I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.

Did you know that the state song of Kansas is ‘Home on the Range’?

She leaned her uninjured shoulder against his plump, furry behind and shoved while she bitched to herself, "Four years at the military academy, two years at Kansas State University, survival camp in the swamps of Alabama, more schooling in Florida, and then torture endurance training with the Mossad and all so I could heave a bear's ass into a helicopter. Unfreaking real.

We’re all free agents in this noncoercive class system, and Brooks eventually concludes that worrying about the problems faced by workers is yet another deluded affectation of the blue-state rich.

The naming of a virus is a controversial matter. In 1832, cholera advanced from British India toward Europe. It was called ‘Asiatic Cholera’. The French felt that since they were democratic, they would not succumb to a disease of authoritarianism; but France was ravaged by cholera, which was as much about the bacteria as it is about the state of hygiene inside Europe and North America. (When cholera struck the United States in 1848, the Public Bathing Movement was born.) The ‘Spanish Flu’ was only named after Spain because it came during World War I when journalism in most belligerent countries was censored. The media in Spain, not being in the war, widely reported the flu, and so that pandemic took the name of the country. In fact, evidence showed that the Spanish Flu began in the United States in a military base in Kansas where the chickens transmitted the virus to soldiers. It would then travel to British India, where 60 percent of the casualties of that pandemic took place. It was never named the ‘American Flu’ and no Indian government has ever sought to recover costs from the United States because of the animal-to-human transmission that happened there.

A brick could be used to represent the state of Kansas. Both are flat, both are rectangular, both have tried to insert themselves up my anus, and both failed to penetrate me (though Kansas got pretty close).


While it is not likely that Democrats will start winning statewide elections tomorrow in Alabama, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, or Utah, they will never win if they don’t plant a flag and start organizing. My own state of Vermont is a good example. Forty-five years ago, Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Today, as a result of a lot of hard work by many people, it is one of the most progressive.

But within four years Jefferson had compelled the Osage to relinquish their territory between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River. The Osage chief stated that his people “had no choice, they must either sign the treaty or be declared enemies of the United States.” Over the next two decades, the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land, ultimately finding refuge in a 50-by-125-mile area in southeastern Kansas.

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but the chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning.

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

LYNCHING STATES Mississippi, 15; Arkansas, 8; Virginia, 5; Tennessee, 15; Alabama, 12; Kentucky, 12; Texas, 9; Georgia, 19; South Carolina, 5; Florida, 7; Louisiana, 15; Missouri, 4; Ohio, 2; Maryland, 1; West Virginia, 2; Indiana, 1; Kansas, 1; Pennsylvania, 1.

I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.

After you flew across the country we got in bed, laid our bodies delicately together, like maps laid face to face, East to West, my San Francisco against your New York, your Fire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansas burning against my Kansas, your Eastern Standard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Time beating against your Central Time, your sun rising swiftly from the right my sun rising swiftly from the left your moon rising slowly from the left my moon rising slowly from the right until all four bodies of the sky burn above us, sealing us together, all our cities twin cities, all our states united, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Here he was in little Olathe, Kansas. Kind of funny, if you thought about it; imagine being back in Kansas, when only four months ago he had sworn, first to the State Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its boundaries again. Well, it wasn’t for long.

The pheasant season in Kansas, a famed November event, lures hordes of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past week plaid-hatted regiments had paraded across the autumnal expanses, flushing and felling with rounds of birdshot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds.

The northern public immediately assumed that Douglas was handing Kansas to the South as another slave state because proslavery emigrants from Missouri were certain to dominate its politics. In the ensuing uproar the disintegrating Whig Party disappeared altogether, and a new antislavery Republican Party was born.

Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison. It scares me.

Terrific, Miss Knight. Simply terrific,' a smiling reporter said. 'They're going to love this story in Peoria. Why, you'll be famous everywhere - from New York to Hollywood, Florida to Kansas.' 'Kansas?' Theta whispered. 'Yeah. Big state in the middle of the country. Fulla corn, Republicans, and Bible salesmen, and not much else?

Draw your revolvers & bowie knives, & cool them in the heart’s blood of all those damned dogs, that dare defend that damned breathing hole of hell,” David Atchison, a former U.S. senator from Missouri, told cheering Southerners encamped outside Lawrence on May 21, “never to slacken or stop until every spark of free-state, free-speech, free-niggers, or free in any shape is quenched out of Kansas!” When

In a lonely grave, forgotten and unknown, lies “the man who saved a President,” and who as a result may well have preserved for ourselves and posterity Constitutional government in the United States—the man who performed in 1868 what one historian has called “the most heroic act in American history, incomparably more difficult than any deed of valor upon the field of battle”—but a United States Senator whose name no one recalls: Edmund G. Ross of Kansas. The

In the past few years, he’d worked as a part-time policeman in a string of Kansas cow towns. Each time he was sworn in, he made an effort to study the ordinances he was supposed to enforce, but he wasn’t much of a reader. In Ellsworth, he asked a lawyer for some help. “Wyatt,” the man told him, “the entire criminal code of the State of Kansas boils down to four words. Don’t kill the customers.” Most of the time, it seemed sensible to keep things just that simple. It

Colorado and Wyoming are America’s highest states, averaging 6,800 feet and 6,700 feet above sea level. Utah comes in third at 6,100 feet, New Mexico, Nevada, and Idaho each break 5,000 feet, and the rest of the field is hardly worth mentioning. At 3,400 feet, Montana is only half as high as Colorado, and Alaska, despite having the highest peaks, is even further down the list at 1,900 feet. Colorado has more fourteeners than all the other U.S. states combined, and more than all of Canada too. Colorado’s lowest point (3,315 feet along the Kansas border) is higher than the highest point in twenty other states. Rivers begin here and flow away to all the points of the compass. Colorado receives no rivers from another state (unless you count the Green River’s’ brief in and out from Utah).Wyoming’s Wind River Range is the only mountain in North America that supplies water to all three master streams of the American West: Missouri, Colorado, and Columbia rivers.

Here is the order in which he had numbered and arranged the fifty States of which the Republic was composed at this epoch: 1. Rhode Island. 2. Maine. 3. Tennessee. 4. Utah. 5. Illinois. 6. New York. 7. Massachusetts. 8. Kansas. 9. Illinois. 10. Colorado. 11. Texas. 12. New Mexico. 13. Montana. 14. Illinois. 15. Mississippi. 16. Connecticut. 17. Iowa. 18. Illinois. 19. Louisiana. 20. Delaware. 21. New Hampshire. 22. South Carolina. 23. Illinois. 24. Michigan. 25. Georgia. 26. Wisconsin. 27. Illinois.

In many of these subsidy programs, no jobs are created. Instead the state income taxes are given to companies that agree to move jobs from one state across the border to another, as AMC Theatres agreed to do in moving its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri, to Leawood, Kansas, just ten miles away. AMC will get to pocket $47 million withheld from its workers, a boon to its major owners: J. P. Morgan, Apollo Management, the Carlyle Group and the firm Mitt Romney cofounded in 1984, Bain Capital Management.

Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). (page 109)

In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state’s dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state’s progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present.

Every Slaveholding State,” John junior wrote in May, “is furnishing men and money to fasten Slavery upon this glorious land, by means no matter how foul.” The worst threat came from “Border Ruffians” based in neighboring Missouri who moved in and out of Kansas, harassing anyone who showed free-soil leanings. The Border Ruffians were particularly adept at voter fraud and intimidation. A territorial census in early 1855 found 2,905 eligible voters in Kansas. Yet proslavery forces “won” an early election that March with 5,427 votes.

Bleeding Kansas and the Caning of Charles Sumner   The reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act was intense, and in many ways violent. In the early nineteenth century, the two dominant political parties were the Whigs, who were anti slavery, favored strong central government, and were principally represented in the north and on the western frontier, and the Democrats, who were largely pro slavery, favored popular sovereignty and the rights of states to defy the rule of the federal government, and were predominantly represented by southerners.

Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy).4 It was the bargain of the millennium.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

But think back to those statistics from North Carolina. If you go from 400,000 traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot more motorists? The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventive patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was concentrated. Kansas City had been a coupling experiment.

I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chile, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn’t ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn’t difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation’s chickens and sends them as far away as Japan, The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by PACCAR. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today -- with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. [January 3, 2008]

From the days of the Assyrians and the Qin, great empires were usually built through violent conquest. In 1914 too, all the major powers owed their status to successful wars. For instance, Imperial Japan became a regional power thanks to its victories over China and Russia; Germany became Europe’s top dog after its triumphs over Austria-Hungary and France; and Britain created the world’s largest and most prosperous empire through a series of splendid little wars all over the planet. Thus in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, losing a mere fifty-seven soldiers in the decisive Battle of Tel el-Kebir. Whereas in our days occupying a Muslim country is the stuff of Western nightmares, following Tel el-Kebir the British faced little armed resistance, and for more than six decades controlled the Nile Valley and the vital Suez Canal. Other European powers emulated the British, and whenever governments in Paris, Rome or Brussels contemplated putting boots on the ground in Vietnam, Libya or Congo, their only fear was that somebody else might get there first. Even the United States owed its great-power status to military action rather than economic enterprise alone. In 1846 it invaded Mexico, and conquered California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming and Oklahoma. The peace treaty also confirmed the previous US annexation of Texas. About 13,000 American soldiers died in the war, which added 2.3 million square kilometres to the “United States (more than the combined size of France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy). It was the bargain of the millennium.

Bisceglia Pharmacy is a tiny, dusty relic tucked into a dying strip mall on the other side of the Kansas-Missouri state line. I see Liv’s doubt as we pull up to the pharmacy and there’s a dog chained up out front gnawing industriously on an old shoe. “Uh,” she says, stepping over the dog, who doesn’t stop his chewing to look up, “is this like...a licensed pharmacy?” “We’re in Missouri now, princess. This is what shit looks like here.” Liv shoots me a look as we walk through the door—which is propped open with a rabbit-eared television set—and into the dimly lit pharmacy. “You know, it’s not nice to be geographically snobby.” “I lived on the Missouri side of Kansas City until Mom died,” I tell her. “So I feel a little entitled to some trash talk. Also this place was my first job. So I’m double entitled

Meanwhile in Wichita, Kansas, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors who performs late-term abortions—only about 1 percent of all procedures but crucial when, for instance, a fetus develops without a brain—is shot in both arms by a female picketer. He recovers and continues serving women who come to him from many states. I finally meet Dr. Tiller in 2008 at a New York gathering of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health. I ask him if he has ever helped a woman who was protesting at his clinic. He says: “Of course, I’m there to help them, not to add to their troubles. They probably already feel guilty.” In 2009 Dr. Tiller is shot in the head at close range by a male activist hiding inside the Lutheran church where the Tiller family worships each Sunday. This is done in the name of being “pro-life.

Maj. Charles Abeyawardena, a strategic planning officer with the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, arrived in Afghanistan in 2005 to interview U.S. combat advisers and senior Afghan officials about their experiences. As an aside, he decided to ask low-ranking Afghan soldiers why they had enlisted. He said their responses echoed those usually given by American troops: it’s a solid paycheck, I want to serve my country, it’s an opportunity to do something new with my life. But when he followed up by asking whether they would stay in the Afghan army after the United States left, the answers startled him. “The majority, almost everyone I talked to, said, ‘No,’ ” Abeyawardena said in an Army oral-history interview. “They were going to go back and grow opium or marijuana or something like that, because that’s where the money is.

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the food maker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California's was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy water of far-flung irrigation.

On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools

Beginning in the fall of 2001, the U.S. military dropped flyers over Afghanistan offering bounties of between $5,000 and $25,000 for the names of men with ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban. “This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe, for the rest of your life,” one flyer read. (The average annual income in Afghanistan at the time was less than $300.) The flyers fell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “like snowflakes in December in Chicago.” (Unlike many in Bush’s inner circle, Rumsfeld was a veteran; he served as a navy pilot in the 1950s.)82 As hundreds of men were rounded up abroad, the Bush administration considered where to put them. Taking over the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and reopening Alcatraz, closed since 1963, were both considered but rejected because, from Kansas or California, suspected terrorists would be able to appeal to American courts and under U.S. state and federal law. Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, was rejected because it happened to be a British territory, and therefore subject to British law. In the end, the administration chose Guantánamo, a U.S. naval base on the southeastern end of Cuba. No part of either the United States or of Cuba, Guantánamo was one of the known world’s last no-man’s-lands. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo called it the “legal equivalent of outer space.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don’t have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults. Yung used murder rates—the statistic with the most reliable measure of accuracy and one that is historically highly correlated with the incidence of rape—as a baseline for his analysis. After nearly two years of work, he estimates conservatively that between 796,213 and 1,145,309 sexual assault cases never made it into national FBI counts during the studied period.

Here the mountains were like the walls of a great jail which shut in the combatants. After Appomattox it was as though mortal enemies had been locked in the same prison without taking away the deadly weapons they knew so well how to use. Perhaps in no other region of the United States except the Southern mountains were the lives and property of a great number of pro-Union civilians lost in the war. In Pennsylvania, Kansas and a few other border areas the people were subjected to occasional Confederate forays, but those areas were comparatively rich and the losses were soon restored. But in the highlands much of the modest and slowly-built-up accumulations of three generations were destroyed, impoverishing virtually the entire population.

One bright October morning in the year 1828, a lone lorn woman by the name of GUMMIDGE might have been seen standing at the corner of a wheat-field where two cross-roads met and embraced. She was weeping violently. Ever and anon she would raise her head and gaze mysteriously in the direction of a cloud of dust which moved slowly over the hill toward the town. Her name was FATIMA. FATIMA GUMMIDGE. "Sister ANNIE," she cried, "what do you see?" But sister ANNIE was far away. She was not there. She was attending an agricultural fair in the beautiful young state of Kansas. Thus gracefully do we introduce our heroine upon the scene. The reader will be able to judge, from this, whether we are familiar with the literature of our day, or not. He will be able to form a complimentary opinion of our culture. He will perceive that we are acquainted with the writings of Messrs. JAMES, and DICKENS, and BLUEBEARD. There is nothing like impressing your reader with an adequate sense of your ability for laborious research, when you are doing biography for a high-toned journal.

One voice was raised in dissent. A Springfield lawyer, a former member of Congress and longtime Whig named Abraham Lincoln, took up Douglas’s defense of Kansas-Nebraska at the Illinois statehouse in Springfield the day after Douglas spoke at the state fair. In the course of a three-hour speech, Lincoln proceeded to tear Kansas-Nebraska and popular sovereignty to shreds.

first outbreak in the States, the human race could have easily faced extinction. In 1918 the feat of traveling from Kansas to Moscow in less than one week was impossible. Yet, today a man can wake up in Chicago and before his day is over he can be in London. And should that same man, asymptomatic in the quiet incubation stage, harbor a deadly airborne virus while on his transcontinental flight, he just started the next pandemic. Needless to say, put all fear

A brick could be substituted in for Kansas as a US state, because they’re roughly the same shape, they have the same topography, and I just found Topeka without the aid of a microscope.


Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.

Keith went inside and into his pantry. He grabbed one of the four handle bottles of bourbon inside. He kept the stash for days like this, Sundays like this, when they wouldn't sell you alcohol. What did the state of Kansas expect people like him to do on Sundays? Kill themselves, he guessed.

Particularly galling was the way the Homestead Act was abused. Passed during the Civil War, it was supposed to make a reality out of Lincoln’s version of the free labor, free soil dream. But fewer than half a million people actually set up viable farms over nearly half a century. Most public lands were taken over by the railroads, thanks to the government’s beneficent land-grant policy (another form of primitive accumulation); by land speculators backed by eastern bankers, who sometimes hired pretend “homesteaders” in acts of outright fraud; or by giant cattle ranches and timber companies and the like who worked hand in glove with government land agents. As early as 1862 two-thirds of Iowa (or ten million acres) was owned by speculators. Railroads closed off one-third of Kansas to homesteading and that was the best land available. Mushrooming cities back east became, in a kind of historical inversion, the safety valve for overpopulated areas in the west. At least the city held out the prospect of remunerative wage labor if no longer a life of propertied independence. Few city workers had the capital to migrate west anyway; when one Pennsylvania legislator suggested that the state subsidize such moves, he was denounced as “the Pennsylvania Communist” for his trouble. During the last land boom of the nineteenth century (from about 1883 to 1887), 16 million acres underwent that conversion every year. Railroads doubled down by selling off or mortgaging portions of the public domain they had just been gifted to finance construction or to speculate with. But land-grant roads were built at costs 100 percent greater than warranted and badly built at that, needing to be rebuilt just fifteen years later.

Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for conduct during pregnancy, and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014 a law was proposed in the Kansas state legislature that would require doctors to report every miscarriage, no matter how early in pregnancy.

In terms of basketball, I went from the best program in the country at Kansas to the worst in the country when I transferred to Oregon State.

Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.

The veins of Kansans may bleed prisms of Jayhawk blue and red, Wildcat purple, or Shocker black and gold, but our identity as a buffalo state unites all Kansans. By what right though? Our iconic state mammal is extirpated in the wild, and for more than 125 years now we have chosen not to share our wild lands with the buffalo.

That’s Kansas. Or Missouri. One of those corn states.

One of the more remarkable demonstrations of this resistance occurred in September 2013, when a group of parents, with the help of a conservative legal institute, filed suit against the Kansas State Board of Education. Their goal was to overturn the entire set of state science standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade, arguing that those standards gave students a “materialistic atheistic” worldview that was inimical to their religion. Just as this book went to press, the lawsuit was dismissed.

He was gentle and kind, especially when no one was looking. He was like the quarter you found lying on the ground. Dirty, but the best-found money after you shined it all up, the state you’d been missing in your coin collection. Maybe Wisconsin? Or Kansas? The one damn quarter you’d been looking for everywhere, but had no idea it would turn up in the puddle next to your boot on a rainy day. Jake

Errors in Sampling Frames: The 1936 Presidential Election Our discussion of errors in sampling frames would not be complete without mentioning a classic example of sampling failure, the 1936 Reader’s Digest presidential poll. In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, completing his first term of office as president of the United States, was running against Alf Landon of Kansas, the Republican candidate. Reader’s Digest magazine, in a poll consisting of about 2.4 million individuals, the largest in history, predicted a victory for Landon, forecasting that he would receive 57% of the vote to Roosevelt’s 43%. Contrary to the poll’s prediction, Roosevelt won the election by a landslide—62% to Landon’s 38%. 8 Despite the extremely large sample size, the error was enormous, the largest ever made by any polling organization. The major reason for the error was found in the sampling frame. The Digest had mailed questionnaires to 10 million people whose names and addresses were taken from sources such as telephone directories and club membership lists. In 1936, however, few poor people had telephones, nor were they likely to belong to clubs. Thus the sampling frame was incomplete, as it systematically excluded the poor. That is, the sampling frame did not reflect accurately the actual voter population. This omission was particularly significant because in that year, 1936, the poor voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt and the well-to-do voted mainly for Landon. 9

What was it like before?” Sophia asked Enoch a few minutes later, after they had all got drinks at the drive-thru. The autopilot was back in effect and they were heading toward the relatively bright lights of Moab, still a couple of miles distant. She was thinking about the woman reading the book in the information center. About the whole idea of information centers. About information. “Depends on how far back you want to go,” Enoch pointed out. “Just saying that for everyone else in this car the post-Moab world is basically all we’ve ever known. Where people can’t even agree that this town exists.” “What was it like when people agreed on facts, you mean?” Enoch asked. He seemed a little amused by the question. Not in a condescending way. More charmed. “Yeah. Because they did, right? Walter Cronkite and all that?” Enoch pondered it for a bit. “I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I think that the main thing it conferred on people was social mobility, so that if you were a smart kid growing up on a farm in Kansas or a slum in India you had a chance to do something interesting with your life. Before it—before that three-hundred-year run when there was a way for people to agree on facts—we had kings and warlords and rigid social hierarchy. During it, a lot of brainpower got unlocked and things got a lot better materially. A lot better. Now we’re back in a situation where the people who have the power and the money can get what they want by dictating what the mass of people ought to believe.

April 21, 1897, by one of the most prominent citizens in Kansas, Alexander Hamilton. In an affidavit quoted in several recent UFO books and journals, Hamilton states that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men. He then saw an airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible—it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said. Upon seeing the witnesses, the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power, and the ship rose about three hundred feet above them: It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year-old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Hamilton was so frightened he could not sleep that night: Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Leroy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels, or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.

I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

By this time, everyone understood that [President] Hayes would adopt a new Southern policy. "As matters look to me now," wrote the chariman of Kansas' Republican state committee on February 22 [1877], "I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of yourselves." (p.581)

States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one. (The strain influenza puts on health care was driven home to me in a personal way on my book tour. In Kansas City, a flare-up of ordinary seasonal influenza forced eight hospitals to close emergency rooms, yet this was only a tiny fraction of the pressure a pandemic would exert.) This and similar problems—such as if a particular secondary bacterial invader is resistant to antibiotics, or shortages of such seemingly trivial items as hypodermic needles or bags to hold IV fluids (a severe shortage of these bags is a major problem as I write this)—could easily moot many medical advances since 1918.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner.

It seemed like the time to mention Abilene, where Bill shot Mike Williams. Mike was the only man Bill ever killed by accident, to Charley's knowledge. He was a policeman--they'd had an election and the winners hired their nephews as policemen, after Bill had made the place safe to be a policeman--and it was the luck of things that when Phil Coe came after Bill in the street, Mike Williams came around a corner and Bill shot him through the head, thinking it was one of Phil Coe's brothers. Then he shot Phil. The newspaper wouldn't let it heal. It brought Mike Williams back from the dead every week, like a blood relative. The editor called him a fine specimen of Kansas manhood, and declared a "Crusade to Rid Abilene and the State of Kansas of Wild Bill and All His Ilk." Those were the exact words, because for a while after that Bill called him "Ilk." It wasn't the newspaper that got Bill and Charley out of Kansas, though. It was a petition. It was left with the clerk at the hotel where they stayed, three hundred and sixteen signatures asking Bill to leave, not a word of gratitude for what he'd done. He sat down in the lobby with the petition in his lap, running his fingers through his hair. He read every name--there were six sheets of them--and when he finished a sheet, he'd hand it to Charley and he'd read it too. It was the worst back-shooting Charley had ever seen; they even let the women sign. Bill shrugged and smiled, but some of the names hurt him. He thought he'd had friends in Kansas, and looking at the names he saw they were all afraid of him. What ran Wild Bill out of Abilene was hurt feelings.

E. Raymond Hall, professor of biology at the University of Kansas, wrote the authoritative work on American wildlife, Mammals of North America. He stated as a biological law that, “two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.” Prof. Hall explains that human races are biological subspecies, and that the law applied to them, too: “To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.” In recent decades we have seen what Prof. Hall was writing about in the Balkans, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Eastern Congo. We call it “ethnic cleansing.” In Zimbabwe there is a systematic effort to rid the country of whites, and some observers do not rule out similar efforts in South Africa and Namibia. Is it utterly unrealistic to imagine ethnic cleansing in the United States? Prof. Hall’s forebodings do not appear outlandish in some of our schools, prisons, and neighborhoods. The demographic forces we have set in motion have created conditions that are inherently unstable and potentially violent. All other groups are growing in numbers and have a vivid racial identity. Only whites have no racial identity, are constantly on the defensive, and constantly in retreat. They have a choice: regain a sense of identity and the resolve to maintain their numbers, their traditions, and their way of life—or face oblivion.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind.

NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW with absolute certainty whether the 1918–19 influenza pandemic actually did originate in Haskell County, Kansas. There are other theories of origin, including France, Vietnam, and China. But Frank Macfarlane Burnet, a Nobel laureate who lived through the pandemic and spent most of his scientific career studying influenza, later concluded that the evidence was “strongly suggestive” that the 1918 influenza pandemic began in the United States, and that its spread was “intimately related to war conditions and especially the arrival of American troops in France.

The individual most responsible for the triumph of the documentary style was probably Roy Stryker of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), who sent a platoon of famous photographers out to record the lives of impoverished farmers and thus “introduce America to Americans.” Stryker was the son of a Kansas Populist, and, according to a recent study of his work, “agrarian populism” was the “first basic assumption” of the distinctive FSA style. Other agencies pursued the same aesthetic goal from different directions. Federal workers transcribed folklore, interviewed surviving ex-slaves, and recorded the music of the common man. Federally employed artists painted murals illustrating local legends and the daily work of ordinary people on the walls of public buildings. Unknowns contributed to this work, and great artists did too—Thomas Hart Benton, for example, painted a mural that was actually titled A Social History of the State of Missouri in the capitol building in Jefferson City.16 There was a mania for documentary books, photos of ordinary people in their homes and workplaces that were collected and narrated by some renowned prose stylist. James Agee wrote the most enduring of these, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in cooperation with photographer Walker Evans, but there were many others. The novelist Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White published You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, while Richard Wright, fresh from the success of his novel Native Son, published Twelve Million Black Voices in 1941, with depictions of African American life chosen from the populist photographic output of the FSA.

life in Kansas. Destructive twisters have devastated whole communities, including some that never fully recovered. Yet, there is also a legacy of rebuilding and rebirth, of neighbors and families helping one another. This story includes the many ways that people prepare for severe weather, such as the coordinated efforts of national, state, and local officials along with a host of institutions and private companies, to attempt to bring a level of predictability to the ever-unpredictable nature of storms. In a place where one is never truly out of harm’s way, it is perhaps inevitable that those who live in Tornado

Epidemiological evidence suggests that a new influenza virus originated in Haskell County, Kansas, early in 1918. Evidence further suggests that this virus traveled east across the state to a huge army base, and from there to Europe. Later it began its sweep through North America, through Europe, through South America, through Asia and Africa, through isolated islands in the Pacific, through all the wide world. In its wake followed a keening sound that rose from the throats of mourners like the wind. The evidence comes from Dr. Loring Miner. •

Indeed, over two-thirds of Kansas counties lost population between 1980 and 2000, some by as much as 25 percent. I am told that there are entire towns in the western part of the state getting by on Social Security; no one is left there but the aged. There are no doctors, no shoe stores. One town out here even sold its public school on eBay.

The state of Vermont is a favorite target of the latte libel. In his best-selling Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks ridicules the city of Burlington in that state as the prototypical “latte town,” a city where “Beverly Hills income levels” meet a Scandinavian-style social consciousness.

red-state blast by the Missouri farmer Blake Hurst that was originally published in The American Enterprise magazine. He and his fellow Bush voters, Hurst stepped forward to tell the world, were humble, humble, humble, humble! Most Red Americans can’t deconstruct post-modern literature, give proper orders to a nanny, pick out a cabernet with aftertones of licorice, or quote prices from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. But we can raise great children, wire our own houses, make beautiful and delicious creations with our own two hands, talk casually and comfortably about God, repair a small engine, recognize a good maple sugar tree, tell you the histories of our towns and the hopes of our neighbors, shoot a gun and run a chainsaw without fear, calculate the bearing load of a roof, grow our own asparagus . . . And so on.

The red-state/blue-state divide also helped conservatives perform one of their dearest rhetorical maneuvers, which we will call the latte libel: the suggestion that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism. While a more straightforward discussion of politics might begin by considering the economic interests that each party serves, the latte libel insists that such interests are irrelevant. Instead it’s the places that people live and the things that they drink, eat, and drive that are the critical factors, the clues that bring us to the truth. In particular, the things that liberals are said to drink, eat, and drive: the Volvos, the imported cheese, and above all, the lattes.*