Book Review

Canada and the United States

In general histories, the place of journalism in America's past rarely receives more than passing mention of epochal communications developments or journalists involved in major events, leaving journalists outside the fabric of American culture. Two exceptions are New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who, because of his antislavery efforts, has received more attention from historians than any other American journalist; and William Allen White, the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette editor who, in Edward Gale Agran's words, became a "cultural icon" via rhetoric that imprinted him as a "middle-class icon" long before his death. Among the most respected of early twentieth-century journalists, White has been the subject of at least seven dissertations and seven biographies to date.

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Known for his Emporia Gazette editorials, White stands out because of writing that overflowed his own newspaper: more than twenty books (the first published in 1893, when he was twenty-five, and the last in 1946, two years after his death at seventy-six), "hundreds of articles" between March 1897 and July 1942 in more than thirty "popular magazines and erudite journals," and "hundreds of speeches" (p. 33). His multiple facets—including careers as journalist, fiction writer and "political broker" early in life and an ultimately "persistent . . . voice in national councils" (p. 33)—can diffuse focus and obscure precisely why scholars find him more fascinating than other American journalists.

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