“Kansas Politics and Government” traces the evolution of our state’s government and its be-ginnings as an anti-slavery state. Anti-slavery sentiments led naturally to the domination of Abraham Lincoln’s philosophy and his Republican Party. The book then describes today’s strange mix of Democrat governors and Legislatures dominated by right-wing Republicans.
Written by Prof. H. Edward Flentje of Wichita State University and Prof. Joseph A. Aistrup of Kansas State University, it is a lively combination of history and psychoanalysis of the state’s political scene.
The authors are well equipped for the task they assigned themselves. Dr. Flentje is author of “Kansas Policy Choices” and was chosen to collect and publish the official papers of Govs. Robert Bennett and Mike Hayden. He teaches public administration in the Hugo Wall School of Ur-ban and Public Affairs at WSU.
Dr. Aistrup wrote “The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South.” He is interim associate dean of arts and sciences at K-State, where he teaches political science.
The authors believe that Kansas politics can best be understood as a clash of the political cultures of individualism, hierarchy and equalitarianism.
Don’t go away. This is no heavy-handed academic treatise.
Individualism equals the desire for freedom of action.
Freedom to accomplish, the authors say, drove young, ambitious men and women to the empty west to win their fortunes.
Hierarchy — government’s power structure — is necessary to achieve order or, in other words, to be civilized.
Equalitarianism sprang from the revolt of Kansas farmers and ranchers against the power that the “robber barons” who owned the railroads, the mills and the packing plants exerted over rural areas.
The principle that all men (and women) should be treated fairly and equally, that the little guy deserved fair play, grew out of the Populist movement and was strengthened by the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.
THE BOOK argues that the developments of Kansas politics from decade to decade is influenced by one of these cultural emphases and then another, with all three at work to some degree throughout.
After this brief scene-setting, the book leaps straight into modern times with an analysis of the decision by six members of the Kansas State Board of Education to attack Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and to eliminate references to “ma-croevolution” and the “big bang” theory from its science standards.
It was, indeed, a clash of cultures. The book relates how control of the board moved from moderate, to religious right, back to moderate and back again to anti-Darwinism, this time labeled “Intelligent Choice,” then returned to moderate again, where it remains today — however tenuously.
This saga of the 1990s, the authors believe, can be compared to the struggle between pro-slave, pro-freestate forces that gave Kansas its “Bloody Kansas” nickname and wound up cementing the state’s politics to Lincoln Republicanism.
It was then, they concluded, that “Kansas embraced individual liberty with a constitution that placed strict re-straints on state government and encouraged grassroots democracy and economic freedom to blossom outside the confines of state government.
“Kansans’ passion for liberty made Kansas the boom state of the post-Civil War period. Within the first 30 years of statehood nearly two million people immigrated into Kansas; entrepreneurial towns sprang up across the state; nine thousand miles of railroads were built; and 50 million acres of Kansas soil moved from public domain into private hands.”
Flentje and Aistrup then paused a bit to recognize that the love of liberty conflicted with an equal affection for order — as was demonstrated by the rise of the prohibition movement.
THE BOOK, which is published by the University of Nebraska Press, then takes a detailed look at the constitution, the Legislature, the governor’s office, the political parties and how lobbies and interest groups have affected policies and political outcomes. Fu-ture articles will review some of their observations.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
