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Kansas: A bland land that generates extremes and extremists
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Wintertime winds blow colder through northeastern Kansas than they do through most of New England. Most of summertime Kansas swelters under heat and humidity rivaling most of Florida.
Extreme climate is Kansas’ bellwether, with conditions often boiling down to being too hot (particularly July’s 100-degree-plus days), too humid, too windy, too wet (spring flooding is common around rivers and creeks), too cold, too lightning-stricken, too icy, or too tornadic.
In popular culture, Kansas’ best-known incidence of nasty weather is the fictional twister of the 1939 film classic “The Wizard of Oz.” In real life, Kansas’ best-known weather is probably the 2007 tornado that leveled the central Kansas town of Greensburg, which is now being completely rebuilt with green technology.
Even more destructive than tornadoes are Kansas’ hailstorms—somewhat euphemistically termed “severe weather” by heartland TV station weather forecasters—which wreak widespread damage to property and crops. Hailstones come in sizes ranging up from pea to dime to quarter to golf ball to baseball to softball to grapefruit.
Meanwhile, down in the southwestern corner of Kansas around Dodge City, where the tumbleweeds still tumble, lies another extreme: the windiest city in the nation. In short, Kansas' extreme weather shifts can produce flood, drought, dust bowl or tornadic destruction.
Although its weather conditions can be harsh in any season, Kansas’ climate is mostly pleasantly moderate—much like the people who inhabit the state. While the current economic climate might create more road rage in more crowded communities, most salt-of-the-earth Kansans would probably remain reasonable in any crisis. But beyond the dull care of everyday existence so often comes, out of the blue, a Kansan with powers and abilities to inspire, incite, or terrorize mortals. Might that explain why Superman grew up in the fictional town of Smallville, Kansas?
Kansas has suffered its fair share of political, cultural, and religious extremists. For instance, the "flat-earth" state's conservative Christian Board of Education banned the teaching of evolution in 1999. (The ban was lifted two years later.)
The danger of extreme beliefs clashing came to a head and into the national spotlight recently when Merriam’s hate-group terrorist Scott Roeder murdered Wichita’s late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller. This heinous act follows a long history of radicals whose extremist notions—running the full gamut from good to evil, from progressive to regressive, and from idiosyncratic to idiotic—have germinated in the Sunflower State.
Of course, Kansas City, Mo., larger than any two cities in Kansas combined, does its part to help Kansas raise radicals. KCMO is one of the cow towns from where the Wild West began and from where the causes of the Civil War were first ignited. KC remains the Midwest’s fun-to-funky city, where the jazz spirit lives on today.
Contrasting (or at least moderating) Kansas City’s “Paris of the Plains” bohemia, just across the state line, is the beige-and-taupe toned Johnson County, Kansas—one of the most conservative and conformist suburban counties in the country, with its sprawling manicured corporate lawns and enormous retail parking lots.
Following are profiles of some radicals who helped shape the weird, old America of Kansas.
Abolitionist John Brown, who incited the 1850s Missouri/Kansas “Bleeding Kansas” Border War (between the state of Missouri and Kansas Territory), which escalated tensions that led to the Civil War.
Civil War Confederate bushwacker William Clarke Quantrill whose Raiders roused Confederate rabble and rebels around Lawrence in the early 1860s.
John R. Brinkley, a controversial Milford, Kansas medical doctor who experimented with transplanting goat glands into humans to cure male impotence starting in 1918—killing and maiming many in the process before the American Medical Association finally took notice.
William Allen White, Emporia’s renowned American newspaper editor (Emporia Gazette), politician, and author. Between World War I and World War II, White became the iconic middle-American spokesman for thousands throughout the United States.
Fred Phelps, Topeka’s hateful minister, infamous for picketing military funerals of homosexual soldiers, who recently was banned from entering the United Kingdom.
Carrie Nation, member of the temperance movement—which opposed alcohol in pre-Prohibition America—particularly noted for promoting her viewpoint through vandalism. On many occasions, Nation would enter an alcohol-serving establishment and attack the bar with a hatchet. Upon beginning her campaign against liquor in the early 20th century, she adopted the name Carry A. Nation mainly for its value as a slogan, and had it registered as a trademark in the state of Kansas.
