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Overview of the Area - Randy Roberts
Upon entering the Pittsburg State University archives, I was immediately impressed with the organization of all the materials. Randy Roberts, the lone curator, was the only person in Axe Library when I arrived. Everyone else had gone home because a heavy snowfall had started. I prepared for the interview in a well-lit display room in the basement. The room has artifacts that were salvaged from local historical sites. Mr. Roberts was working away on his computer while I got a table ready. One cannot help noticing he seems to thoroughly enjoy his work. The only help he gets in his job is through a part-time graduate student. You can tell Mr. Roberts is trying to make a difference. There is more work to be done than he can possibly do, and he is always fighting to preserve a history that few people are aware of. Mr. Roberts’ job covers so many areas that I’m surprised he had time to talk with me. Mr. Roberts showed me a room full of papers, letters, photographs, and a multitude of historical materials nicely stored for easy access. It’s hard to imagine one man in charge of so much information. If it weren’t for the work of Randy Roberts and his predecessor Gene DeGruson, many valuable aspects of southeast Kansas’ heritage would be lost. [Becoming the archivist at PSU] was kind of a long circular process. First, I was a student at Pittsburg State University working on a Bachelors Degree in English and history. I began to develop an interest in an academic library setting and being able to do some research and writing in history. [In the early 1980's I] did a masters degree in history. [While in school] I worked ten hours a week in special collections for Gene [DeGruson]. [Later], I was able to work at the State Historical Society, in the manuscript division at Topeka. I got my first full time position at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in what is known as the Western Manuscript Collection. I worked there for fourteen years, and I was thinking about taking another job. [At] about that same time I received a phone call from here at Pittsburg State. The first call was a sad call telling me that Gene DeGruson, the long time Curator here, had passed away very suddenly. The second call I got was to ask me if I had any interest in taking Gene's position. I was successful in getting the job as University archivist and as curator of Special Collections.
One of the things that all manuscript curators or archivists have to do, on a regular basis is get [materials] ready to use. If it's a print material, of course, it's catalogued in standard library methods. But [often] it's non-print material, [like] a collection of photographs or personal papers that would have diaries, letters, business records, or photographs within that collection of papers. All curators and archivists are constantly trying to organize the materials that come in so that people know what's in there. We go through a process that we typically call arrangement and description.
We organize every item that is in a collection. Sheet by sheet, or item
by item. [We] determine how they can be organized, and how it's going
to be usable by individuals that might be doing research. Then, after
the arrangement process is done, we will create a finding aid or a guide
to those materials. Then when someone comes in, we can present them a
copy of the guide; and they can identify which folders or which boxes,
or what part of the collection they're interested in seeing that is applicable
to their research. We'll do indexing and that kind of thing. One of the
other things that we do [here] is we put all those guides and finding
aids on web pages as well. I work with other staff here at the library
to create web pages all the time that will list the collection that we
have and the contents of those collections. A good example of that is
the Carson Robison collection. Robison was a musician, what we would call
a western or country western musician, who was raised in the Chetopa-Oswego
area in southeast Kansas. Robison wrote and recorded over three hundred
individual songs during his lifetime. He had radio programs; he had his
own country band. They did a lot of recording work, and he is fairly well
known in certain circles, of that genre of music. But I've discovered
that Robison is just as popular, or perhaps more so, today in Great Britain
and Australia than he is in the United States. I can't really explain
that; but a lot of my inquiries for copies of his music and songs have
come from Australia. He was also quite popular in the 1930’s and 1940’s,
and he wrote a number of songs that were well known during world War II.
I've had a number of people say, "We had one of Robison's songs as
our unit or our brigade song when we were in World War II. We are having
a reunion and would like to have the sheet music or a recording."
That's a lot of what I do here: acquiring materials, preparing materials
to be used, and then bringing the materials to a certain researcher's
attention. [In addition to my library work] writing articles in the newspaper has been fun to do. I don't claim to be a good writer, but one of the things I enjoy is doing the research and then trying to write about that myself. I had the good fortune about a year and a half ago to be invited by the local newspaper, The Morning Sun, to write an occasional historical article on things relating to Pittsburg or Crawford County history. [I’ve] done about twenty of those roughly, one a month in all. That is something else that takes time to do. But I really enjoy doing those little articles. I find southeast Kansas to be historically—maybe this shows my bias—the most interesting part of the state. But, while I say that, at the same time I think the heritage, the culture, the history of southeast Kansas is some of the least known history in the state. For example, there's another new history of the state of Kansas that was published just in the last few months, and the blurb on the dust jacket says, "the most comprehensive." I've only glanced at it so far, but I'm already disappointed in how little of the history of southeast Kansas [is] in that new history, which is supposed to be comprehensive. Historically, [southeast Kansas is] very interesting because it's very different from the rest of the state in a lot of ways. Just to give you some examples, there were a number of Indian reservations that were established here along the eastern border of the state of Kansas. But southeast Kansas, particularly Cherokee and Crawford counties and the southern part of Bourbon county, were some of the last areas in the state to undergo settlement because it was in the possession of Native Americans as reservation land, specifically the Cherokee Neutral lands until after the Civil War was over. It wasn't until 1866 that these counties, this land, was sold back to the federal government by the Cherokee Nation, and then shortly after that [the land] was opened up for settlement. [That’s when] you begin to have a number of people do homesteads in the traditional sort of agrarian settlement that took place in Kansas. Lo and behold, it's only a decade later when you begin to have the development of industry in southeast Kansas, primarily centering around coal. There are discoveries of bituminous coal in southeast Kansas. By the mid 1870’s you have a number of people, in a small way, begin coal mining here. The coal mining almost immediately attracts the railroads. You suddenly have all kinds of investors thinking about southeast Kansas as a new area for not only industrial development but capitalist investment. [As a result], you have a tremendous number of people from New York, from Philadelphia, from Chicago, from Kansas City, from all points, all major metropolitan areas, pouring money into southeast Kansas to develop the coal mining industry, the railroad industry, and very soon the lead and zinc smelting industries. Pittsburg itself, you may know, was established in 1876; so we're not the oldest city in the county. Pittsburg was established basically as a midpoint [between] coal fields, right on the railroad line that ran between Girard and Joplin. Basically, we started as a depot, as a convenient, central location for the coal. Then there is the discovery of lead and zinc resources in extreme southeast Kansas, southwest Missouri, a little in Oklahoma. [That brought about] the smelting operation [that] began in earnest in the 1880s here. [Meanwhile], you have tremendous amounts of coal being mined through the shaft methods of the early days. Tremendous amounts of lead and zinc ore from southwest Missouri are being shipped up here to Pittsburg, Weir, [and] Scammon, by railroad. The coal was used in the process of refining the lead and zinc. There is a point in time in the late 1880’s and early 1890’s when the state of Kansas, because of the zinc smelters here in southeast Kansas, had become the second largest producers of lead and zinc ores in the world. Only the entire nation of Belgium, as a whole, was producing more of these metal resources than Kansas. But all that is happening right here in Cherokee and Crawford county. Cherokee and Crawford counties and southeast Kansas put Kansas on the map between the 1880’s and the 1930’s as a significant industrial area. One of the things that happens very early is they realize that if you are going to develop the coal mining and the railroad and the smelting industries here in southeast Kansas you've got to have workers. The native population in southeast Kansas did not even begin to approach the number of persons you would need to develop that industry. That's why we very quickly began to get a lot of immigrants to southeast Kansas. Some of the original developers sent representatives to California to try and interest the Chinese to come to southeast Kansas to work in the mining. Apparently, they met with no success at all, and so they looked in separate directions. They went east to some of the coal mines that were already developed in Illinois and the smelter industries in Wisconsin. They would send agents back to the east coast, primarily New York. They would meet all the immigrants that were disembarking in New York, and try and interest them in coming to southeast Kansas to work in the coal mines. The wages that they were paying were high by European standards, but were not high at all by American standards. They put [the workers] on railroad cars and were shipping them out to southeast Kansas. It was not very long before steam ship companies, coal mining companies, and the railroad had agents sent directly to Europe itself. [Most workers came from] all the countries around the mediterranean and eastern Europe. They were distributing flyers and broadsides all over southeastern Europe saying, "Come to Kansas, and find work." They were very successful in recruiting tremendous numbers of individuals to come to southeast Kansas It’s been documented that there were over fifty different nationalities that came to southeast Kansas to work in the coal mines and the railroads. The fifty nationalities that came to southeast Kansas are hardly documented at all. [Most of them] are basically almost lost to history. All of this is going on with all the money coming from the outside to develop these industries. We have in our collections some of the original record books for some of the inter-urban lines that honeycombed all of southeast Kansas and southwest Missouri. When you look at the investors, [they are all] industrialists in the east. The Stilwell Hotel, here in Pittsburg, is a good example of that. Arthur Stilwell of Kansas City was connected with the railroads. [He] raised money to build that hotel, [and it] was named in his honor. But then, the history here gets even more interesting because the influx
of the southeastern Europeans and investment opportunities catch the eye
of a man who is operating a newspaper in the early 1890’s in Kansas City.
That happens to be J.A. Wayland, who was at that time a socialist newspaper
editor and publisher. He had a paper that he published for many years
called The Coming Nation. He had a Utopian colony set up in Tennessee,
but he basically lost control of [both the colony and] his newspaper.
He moved to Kansas City and started a new paper called the Appeal to Reason.
He wasn’t doing very well in Kansas City, but everything caught his attention
down here. The late 1890’s is when the populist movement in Kansas is
dying out. But there were a tremendous number of populist movement party
members in southeast Kansas, and some of them had leanings toward the
socialist party. Wayland moves his paper to Girard, Kansas, and in time
it has the largest circulation of a political newspaper in the United
States. It’s not that long before he suddenly has tens of thousands of
subscriptions nationwide, then he has hundreds of thousands. Then there
is a long period of time where the Appeal to Reason, it’s a weekly newspaper,
is publishing three hundred, four hundred thousand copies a week. Special
issues of the Appeal go over a million. In its heyday it was running six
hundred, seven hundred thousand copies a week, all being printed and distributed
out of Girard, Kansas. It [even] surpassed the New York Times, and any
other major paper of its time that you can think of. It was extremely,
extremely popular during that time. The Appeal to Reason suddenly attracted
people like Eugene Victor Debs, five-time presidential nominee for the
Socialist party. He served as an associate editor to the Appeal. He spends
time in Girard, Kansas. He campaigns here in Pittsburg, speaking off of
platforms at the Stilwell Hotel. After Wayland’s time has come to an end, around World War I, the Socialist Party had really fallen on hard times in the United States. You have the first Red Scare in the 1919, 1920 period: That really curtailed the activities of the Socialist Party. [Therefore], the Appeal to Reason subscriptions are very, very low. But the reputation of the Appeal continued to attract a number of people, and one of those people was a man named Haldeman-Julius. [He] had worked for socialist papers in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere. He comes to Girard, Kansas to take a job in 1915 as an associate editor to the Appeal to Reason. [Soon after] he married Marcet Haldeman, the daughter of the banker in Girard. [Her family was] not very socialist in their point of view. They were Episcopalian in religion, they were Republican in politics, they were conservative financially. [They were] just about everything that Haldeman-Julius was not. Her parents had passed away. She inherited the Haldeman estate, and she was vice-president of the State Bank of Girard. They’re able to, in a period of time, purchase the printing press and the Appeal to Reason from the descendents of the Wayland family and the others that were connected with it. So, it’s not very long after that they decide they’re going to start a new publishing venture, which turns into the Little Blue Books. I think [they] are some of the most outstanding stories in publishing history of the United States. It kind of puts southeast Kansas, between 1919 and 1950, on the publishing map. The Little Blue Books , if people aren’t familiar with them, are three
and a half by five inches in size. They’re very inexpensively created;
they’re just simple paper [back] books. Their binding is a staple or two
on the spine. But what [Haldeman-Julius] was publishing was the interesting
thing. He begins by publishing a number of standard socialist tracts and
materials, as well as some things from Oscar Wilde. Then he begins to
publish many other kinds of literary works. He [produces] some standard
and classic literature. He is also taking some works from foreign authors—Chekov,
Tolstoy, people like that—and translating them into English. The Little
Blue Books [had some] European titles [that were for] the first time published
anywhere in the English language. He’s doing a lot of self-help books.
He’s doing books on religion. He’s doing books on psychology. He’s doing
biography. He’s doing poetry. He’s doing all kinds of things. What he
comes to create is what he calls a “university” print. He sees it almost
as a social uplift movement. He starts out at twenty-five cents per book
eventually, through his techniques of mass publication, he is able to
gets costs down to ten cents or five cents a copy. What he wants to do
is to give the many hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and elsewhere
who do not have the opportunity to go to college--many of them don't even
have the option of finishing high school--the best literature, the best
self-help books, the best information he can. People will write in basically
a mail-order process. He is advertising in major metropolitan newspapers
and major magazines all across the United States. [He is] sending out
all kinds of flyers. And, of course, he is advertising in the Appeal to
Reason. Then, when the Appeal dies in 1922, he starts the Haldeman-Julius
weekly, which is another newspaper [he’s advertising in]. [First] people
would rip the order forms out and just put a checkmark by the titles they
want, and send it off. [Next] their little box would come to them in the
mail with five or ten of their Little Blue Books or one hundred--whatever
they ordered. Eventually his title list grows to about two thousand two
hundred different titles, and the best estimate is that between 1919 and
when he passed away in 1950 he sold over five hundred million Little Blue
Books. The farm kids would read them. Admiral Perry took a lot of them
with him on his expeditions to the South Pole. Margaret Mead took a suitcase
full of these things with her when she did some of her [anthropology]
studies in the South Seas. There are stories of people who bought three
sets of seven hundred of these titles to give to each of [their] grand
children. [They] wanted them to have the best access, in an inexpensive
format, to anything they would want to read. [Haldeman-Julius] is introducing,
not only a lot of literature and other kinds of materials to Americans
for the first time, but a lot of writers to common Americans for the first
time. For example, Margaret Sanger, some of her early sex education and
birth control things appeared in Blue Book format. Writers like Clarence
Darrow and Bertrand Russell, who most Americans didn’t know of, [were
introduced to people.] [In more recent history at PSU] we had two Pulitzer prize winners—James Tate is probably the better know of the two. He’s the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award. He published upwards of twenty volumes of poetry. A young woman who graduated in 1980 named Shirley Christian was the second Pulitzer Prize winner from PSU. She is a reporter working for papers in Miami, [like] the Miami Herald. She did a series of articles in the 1980s on the political aspects of central America. Her series of articles on that subject won her a Pulitzer Prize in foreign and national reporting. [Another famous person who went to PSU is] Vance Randolph. His parents lived in Girard, and then here in Pittsburg. His father was an attorney, and his mother was a librarian at the Pittsburg Public Library for a number of years. Vance Randolph attended school here in the nineteen teens. [He] became interested, a little bit later, in science and published a number of biological and other kinds of works. [Then, he] became interested in folklore and folk music, and is best known on his books over the Missouri Ozarks. That was an area that he studied a great deal. He was really known as one of the deans of American folklore. He produced very popular works in Missouri, and Ozark folklore. There are cartoonists from Pittsburg like Russell Meiers, who draws the “Broom Hilda” comic strip. Marlin Perkins was on the famous “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” years and years. He lived in Pittsburg for a time; [he] went to school here as a young man. Of course people know Don Gutteridge, the baseball player. He still lives here in Pittsburg, and [he] just came out with an autobiographical work. Gary Bussey comes to mind; [he is] kind of an interesting character, an actor. He went to school here at PSU for awhile. I guess it’s a real diverse group of people that come out of here. There are also a lot of other people who have made significant contributions that are not famous in that sense. [For] example, Mary Molek. Her parents were immigrants who came here to work in the coal mines. Mary lived basically in Chicopee and [the] West Mineral area and went to college here at PSU. [She] may be one of the earliest immigrant children of [the] first generation immigrants to go to school here. Mary entered college quite young. She was on a very different kind of fast track. She was on the fast track because it was so difficult for her family to raise the money for her to go to school in the first place. She probably entered school here when she was fifteen or sixteen years of age. She was completing her, what we would call high school, education as fast as she possibly could so she could start to earn some money. It was difficult times for the family. [Nevertheless], Mary graduated from here and [became] a school teacher. She eventually went to a graduate school at the University of Chicago, and it was there that she met Ivan Molek. He was also a fairly well-known immigrant, editor, publisher, and writer. They [got] married, and Mary worked with him in his writing over the years. Eventually, Mary [became] interested in library and archival work. She ended up at the University of Minnesota as the founding curator there. It became known as the Immigration History Research Center, which is known today as probably the premier center in the United States for immigration history. So [Mary], growing up in southeast Kansas and coming out of this mixture of people, [developed] this unending interest and familiarity with the immigrant experience. We here at Pittsburg State University, and Special Collections in particular, also benefit from Mary because, before she passed away, she was in contact with Gene DeGruson. [Mary] not only donated some letters and materials here, but she set up a small endowment that Special Collections is able to use for purchase of materials. She is one of the most significant benefactors that the Special Collections Department has had here, and so we appreciate that of course. [In addition to important people], there are a number of interesting historical buildings and places that I enjoy. Certainly, the Stilwell Hotel, with all the restoration work that was done there, [is one]. I really appreciate seeing the beautiful stained glass on the interior. [Plus], there is so much history connected with the Stilwell. I mentioned earlier [that] people like Eugene Victor Debs spoke there. Theodore Roosevelt spoke there; William Jennings Bryant spoke there. Jane Addams stayed there and spoke at the Stilwell Hotel. Jane was here because of the Haldeman-Julius family that I mentioned earlier. Jane Addams was Marcet Haldeman’s aunt. There is a direct connection there with the settlement house work in Chicago as well. If you’re down here on Locust Street look at the old Pittsburg Marble Works building. [It has] very interesting folk architecture, carvings of faces over the doors and windows. The Harold Bell Wright house on West Kansas is [also] interesting. I [likewise] enjoy going by and seeing the Pittsburg Public Library. The Prairie Style architecture there--the Frank Lloyd Wright influence--[plus the fact] of it being a Carnegie library [makes it unique]. It’s one hundred years old this year. When you go to Girard, the Haldeman-Julius house is right on highway 57 on the east side as you come in. On the north side of the road there is the Haldeman-Julius farm, [which is] in private hands now. The Haldeman family home, [where] Marcet’s parents [lived], is still there. The Wayland home is up on the north side of Girard. One of the sad things is almost every evidence of the Appeal to Reason and the Haldeman-Julius publishing plant is gone. Most of those buildings have been torn down, or they were burned down in 1978. So, there’s almost no evidence of these tremendous publishing ventures. Maybe it’s morbid, but it’s almost interesting to go out to the Girard Cemetery and see the Wayland tombstones and Wayland’s managing editor Fred Warren, and some of the Haldeman’s. Just all the names that are associated with Girard history are sort of interesting. When you go off down to the southwest here, [you can see] the site of Big Brutus. A lot of people do that, not only from this area, but [from] elsewhere. [It’s] always interesting to go down and see the museum. They have a lot more exhibits now than they did a few years ago. To climb up on Big Brutus is an impressive thing. If you know nothing about the coal mining industry or that kind of equipment, it’s still an impressive sight to go and see. [Finally], there are people who are interested in preserving the limited Civil War heritage in this area. Just north of us we have the Mine Creek monuments up around Mound City and Pleasanton. Some of that has been a lot better documented. Of course the fort at Fort Scott is an interesting site to go and tour. There’s not been much done yet with the Cow Creek massacre, but it’s [more like] the Cow Creek skirmish, [just] west of Pittsburg. People have been studying that, and trying to find out where the engagements actually took place. It’s not really a place to go because there’s not really a monument or mark there. But it’s kind of interesting to go out and visualize how Cow Creek has changed its course. Interview recorded December 20, 2002 by Erin De Lee [] Indicates words not said by Mr. Roberts |
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