Last month, police in Marion, Kan., (population 1,902), raided the community’s 154-year-old weekly newspaper, seizing computers, cell phones, and other material in what many deemed a violation of federal law protecting journalists.
The uniformed intrusion was part of an unsettling coincidence.
A century before and fewer than 50 miles away, an icon of American newspapering earned the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after he, himself, got arrested over a free speech issue.
The good news is that in both cases, when cooler heads prevailed the outcome was, “Never mind.”
Still, the recent invasion of the Marion County Record, over how it obtained information it never published, is disturbing in an age when rapacious corporate ownership and the internet’s suspect Babel are robbing many communities of their informational village squares – their newspapers.
The problem is sadly with us here in Rhode Island: Just recently, two local weeklies, the Chariho Times and the Coventry Courier, shut down.
As for Kansas, the long-ago Pulitzer Prize recipient was William Allen White. In 1895 he bought the small-town Emporia Gazette, a bully pulpit for his strong support of racial tolerance, equality, and the importance of free speech.
His own brush with the law, which later won him the Pulitzer, came when he defied a governor’s promise to arrest anyone who supported an ongoing strike by railroad workers.
As with the recent case in Marion, his “crime” wasn’t a published article. Instead, in an act of defiance, he put a poster supporting the strike in the Gazette’s window.
The charges were subsequently dropped, but White, who became known as the “Sage of Emporia,” offered his thoughts in the prize-winning editorial that’s still viable a century later:
“…You can have no free thought unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people…This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold…”
That was the rhetorical White, but in other writings he could be plain-spoken:
“We say that money talks, but it speaks a broken, poverty-stricken language. Hearts talk better, clearer, and with wider intelligence.”
And White could be prescient – many in our own era have followed this counsel of his: “My advice to the women of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.”
White, a progressive Republican, dispensed wisdom that’s still valid for GOP operatives who abide the disgraces of their party’s current leadership: “Any appeasement of tyranny is treason.”
The observation I like best, though, transcends the politics, acrimony, and intemperance that divide us:
“If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own … how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.”
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
