A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [7]
Had she lived to see the presidential election of 2008, Stanley Ann might have thought of it, too.
There is a cast of mind that some say is distinctly Kansan. A month before Barack Obama sewed up the Democratic nomination, Craig Miner suggested to me that Obama’s “kind of high-minded idealism” was a descendant of the “practical idealism” promoted by William Allen White, the reform-minded newspaper editor and politician from Emporia. Historically, the people of Kansas have been idealistic, progressive, and pragmatic. They tried to do things that other people just talked about, and they believed in the possibility of change. “Of course, Kansans disagree violently about what ‘better’ is,” Miner said. “They tended to extremes on the left and right—all of those based on believing strongly that you can make things better. So we had the biggest circulating Socialist paper in the United States, published in Girard, Kansas. You think of Kansas as a Republican state, and largely it was, but it was the very liberal wing of the Republican party, the Theodore Roosevelt Republicans.” The state experimented early on with corporate regulation in the form of one of the early railroad regulatory commissions. The state Normal School at Emporia minted teachers, dispatching them like missionaries to small towns. Kansas may have been, for a time, the state with the highest percentage of residents able to read and write, Miner said. Even Prohibition, pursued longer and more vigorously in Kansas than elsewhere, came from an idealistic impulse to fix problems such as crime and domestic abuse by tackling the underlying problem of drunkenness. “The rest of the country said, ‘You can’t do that. People won’t change,’” Miner told me. “I sometimes say Kansans are not the people who say, ‘I’m okay, you’re okay.’ They say, ‘You’re not okay, I’m not okay, and I know how to fix it. I can make some of this better.’”
Stanley Ann’s parents came from the Flint Hills, a two-hundred-mile-long band of grassland that is the largest unplowed vestige of the tallgrass prairie that once dominated North America’s midsection. Left behind when the inland seas disappeared, giving birth to the Great Plains, the hills were named by Zebulon Pike for the flintlike chert, a type of silica-containing quartz, in the soil, which makes it impossible to plow. The place is a rolling ocean of wildflowers and grasses—Indian grass, buffalo grass, eight-foot-tall Big Bluestem, “the redwood of grasses.” There are hundreds of wildflower species, one hundred and fifty bird species, ten million insects per acre. For at least eight thousand years, the region was occupied by Native Americans who hunted the abundant bison, elk, moose, and antelope. In the early nineteenth century, wagon trains came through, followed later by railroads. Settlers from the eastern United States put down roots around the trading post in Augusta, where Madelyn’s family would eventually settle, and along the Walnut River in El Dorado, where Stanley’s family came to live. The settlers tried planting corn, but it stripped the nutrients from the soil and died during repeated droughts. There were livestock epidemics and dust storms. In Augusta, on August 8, 1874, grasshoppers blanketed the ground, a foot deep in places. They ate clothes off clotheslines, mosquito netting out of windows, bark off trees, wooden handles of tools. Everything but the