For many Americans, this lifelong Republican, who strayed only occasionally from his party, came to symbolize respectable, middle-class, reform-minded liberalism. white was by no means a deep or original thinker, nor did he run far in advance of the prevailing opinion of his time. Rather, he was one of what George Herbert Palmer once called those "sensitive, responsive souls, of less creative power," but on whom "current ideals record themselves with clearness."
White grew up in the frontier environment of late-nineteenth-century Kansas in the small town of El Dorado, some sixty miles southwest of Emporia. The rough-and-tumble Kansas of those years, with its shootings, lynchings, cowboys, and gambling saloons, was not for the weak or faint-hearted. At first glance the short, roly-poly Will White, with his chubby face as "pink and white, fat and sweet, as featureless and innocent as a baby's bottom," seemed out of place. You would see him "as he comes rolling down the street," one of his contemporary critics wrote, "and ... wonder that he ever did anything but sit in the shade of a tree, and drink lemonade." His clothes looked "as if they had been planned and cut out by the town tinner.
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