Walking “through” Kansas City was actually quite nice! Again, I’m not actually anywhere near the center, instead skirting the southern edge between Raytown and Olathe, but I see why the ADT designers took this approach. There’s shade-a-plenty through here, starting first with the Blue River Road past Swope Park and the zoo; as an added bonus, Blue River Road was closed to traffic for a chunk, but still easily walked on. From there, the route follows the Indian Creek Trail, a paved track holding closely to the creekside. A short break for a drink brought me off-route at “State Line Road,” where I got to stand with a foot in Kansas and another in Missouri. State number six!
Kansas City brings me back in range of the Missouri River. A sign near the end of today’s walk noted that I was in historic Westport, a former settlement situated here that was crossed by the Santa Fe, California, and Oregon Trails, not to mention Lewis & Clark. The Missouri has a significant bend at Kansas City, so many long-distance travelers followed the river here and then shifted to an overland approach. Westport Historical Society notes that the western border of Missouri, now the aforementioned State Line Road, was the “limits of civilization” for decades, as a consequence of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which declared all lands to the west as Indian land (oops… about that…). The wealth Westport generated through all of these wagon trains ultimately brought about its demise, as the neighboring town of Kansas also thrived; in time, they grew into each other and merged into Kansas City.
In preparation for my arrival in Kansas, I’ve been revisiting Thomas Frank’s 2004 work, What’s the Matter with Kansas. While it certainly generated a lot of headlines at the time, it deserves greater recognition for its early anticipation of Trump’s America, as he identified many of the forces at work in Kansas in the early 2000s that would continue to spread over the next decade. (I’ll note here, as an aside, that Frank’s Listen, Liberal is even more of a must-read, especially for liberals who want to understand the significant role that Democrats played in Trump’s emergence. There are a dozen different books you could read for the conservative perspective and get equal effect; this is the most perceptive and fairly critical diagnosis of the left’s failings that I’ve seen, and it’s not even close.)
Frank’s titular question was sparked in the 2000 presidential election, when the poorest county in America–located in Kansas–went 80% in favor of Bush. Frank writes that people “getting their interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” and goes on to try to make sense of what he perceives as working and middle class Kansans doing just that by voting Republican. And not just Republican, but a newly emerging strain of Republican that in the years ahead would fall under the Tea Party banner. There are plenty who would challenge Frank’s premise, and even if you do, I still think it’s possible to find parts of his discussion valid and insightful.
Frank’s focus is twofold. First, it’s on a historic trend that he calls the “Great Backlash,” a “style of conservatism” that emerged in response to the countercultural movement of the 1960s. The backlash helps to explain the voting choices of poor Kansans, according to Frank, because it seized onto controversial cultural issues and then leveraged those to push through pro-business economic initiatives. Make a social issue contentious and divisive enough and people can be persuaded to overlook or rationalize away a host of other policy priorities. This tactic has facilitated the rise of deregulation, the fall of unions, and the surge towards privatization over the last four decades, and Frank asserts that all of those have been harmful to rank-and-file Kansans.
Second, Frank’s focus is (of course) on Kansas, his home state. Frank characterizes Kansas as the most stereotypically “American” of American states; he quotes John Gunther, who wrote in 1947 that “the Kansan is the most average of all Americans.” Among other things, Frank highlights the following Kansas facts: Superman was born there, Dorothy wanted to get back there, it ranks last in the US in tourism, it’s the home of Hallmark, Pizza Hut and Applebee’s were born here, as well as the country’s first suburban mall. That said, it’s important to Frank to highlight that Kansas’s widely-assumed statically-conservative identity is actually a relatively recent phenomenon (and heck, a Democrat won the gubernatorial election in 2018, while another won a seat in the House). Indeed, Kansas was once a hotbed of leftist radicalism and a reliable state for Democrats. It’s the state of abolitionist John Brown and prohibitionist Carry A. Nation. It is also the center of the first major wave of populism.
Kansas features prominently in the reflections of many ADT walkers, as they consistently note the kindness and friendliness of the people here. I’ll spend more time here than in any other state on this walk–it’s really big!–so I look forward to that a great deal. And I’m very curious to see if Kansas is going to be at the forefront of another political shift.
