Charles Delgadillo and James Stacey, eds., "Heartland Utopia: William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town" (UP of Kansas, 2026)

Mar 9, 2026

Jason Stacy, Distinguished Research Professor of history and social science pedagogy, discusses William Allen White, the Emporia editor who shaped the ideal Midwestern small town. He explores White’s cultivated everyman persona and lucid newspaper prose. Conversations cover White’s utopian vision of neighborliness, tensions between town and city, the role of the local paper, and the anthology’s two-part structure.

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INSIGHT

How A Small-Town Editor Became A National Voice

William Allen White became a national voice by editing the Emporia Gazette and publishing a famous 1896 anti-populist editorial called What's the Matter with Kansas?.
That pamphletization by McKinley's campaign turned a small-town editor into the claimed Voice of Main Street and anchored White's Midwestern authority.

INSIGHT

The Ideal Midwestern Town Is A Practical Utopia

White's ideal Midwestern town is a defined utopia: towns of roughly 5,000–15,000 people where daily acquaintance produces civic reciprocity and moral growth.
He imagines streets and Commercial Street as interconnected spheres where privacy coexists with mutual obligation, producing communal happiness.

INSIGHT

A Cultural Turning Point After World War I

The editors divide White's work into two halves around World War I because the 1920s modernist critique (e.g., Sinclair Lewis) marks a cultural turn against his small-town ideal.
White defends Main Street optimism in the 1910s and then spends the 1920s pushing back against modernist portrayals and movements like the Klan.

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For William Allen White, the ideal Midwestern community was a utopian vision of what America could be: a prosperous, happy community built on equality, opportunity, and neighborly generosity. This anthology collects White’s famous and obscure writings and presents him as the iconic voice of the Midwestern small town.

William Allen White, the editor of The Emporia Gazette in Kansas, was an American institution. When he died in 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt commented that America had lost one of its “wisest and most beloved editors.” White understood the value of his unique brand as “the voice of Main Street,” and would often preach his vision of the kind of nation the United States ought to be.

From his view in Emporia, White’s imagined Midwestern town was a dream for the nation to strive toward. He saw himself as a pioneer sowing the seeds of a great harvest to come, and he believed that the small-town civilization he venerated exemplified what was best in America.

In Heartland Utopia: William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town (UP of Kansas, 2026), Charles Delgadillo and Jason Stacy have gathered nearly twenty-five years of White’s fiction and nonfiction focused on his idealized Midwestern community and how this utopian vision changed over time.

Charles Delgadillo is a lecturer in history at the California State University, Pomona, and the author of Crusader for Democracy: The Political Life of William Allen White, published by Kansas.

Jason Stacy is Distinguished Research Professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. His books include Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town and Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism. You can hear another interview with him about his Spoon River America here on the New Books Network.

Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network.

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