A populism of decency

By Sherman Smith | editor-in-chief

By Max McCoy

At 7:30 on a September night in 1897, two trains collided on the Santa Fe railway about three miles northeast of Emporia.

An eastbound mail train smashed into the Mexico and California Express, a passenger train pulled by a pair of steam locomotives. The express, which had seven or eight full coaches, was on its way back from Burlingame, some 40 miles away, where evangelical populist William Jennings Bryan had delivered a speech to “nine thousand Kansas farmers,” according to a report in the Kansas City Times.

The impact of the trains was so fierce that boilers of all three locomotives exploded. The cars following behind the express plowed into the maelstrom of fire and steam and were flung about. One coach landed atop the twisted remains of the engines, teetering there upright before it burst into flames. Passengers jumped from windows, some to a horrific death.

In all, 13 died.

The accident was caused by a railway dispatcher who mistakenly put the opposing trains on the same track.

Emporia is still a train town, and I sometimes reflect on that long-ago tragedy when the Amtrak rumbles through on autumn nights. I’m thinking of it now because Bryan, who survived unscathed because he was in the last Pullman car and felt merely a jolt, was an evangelical Populist who might have understood what’s happening now in Kansas.

A Kansas Democrat now has a reasonable shot at being elected to the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1932. National news outlets increasingly report that Kansas is in play and that GOP nominee Roger “Doc” Marshall, infamous for suing hundreds of his own patients for payment and owning more stuff in Florida than in Kansas, is sweating bullets over the challenge from Democratic hopeful Adam Hamilton.

Hamilton has more in common with Bryan, the prairie populist who said God wants us to care for the poor, than with Democrat George McGill, a Wichita lawyer elected to his last U.S. Senate term in 1932.

For more than 35 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has surveyed American high school students every two years about their health and behavior.

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, established in 1991, draws a nationally representative sample of students in grades 9 through 12 at public and private schools. Over the years, it has tracked a broad range of issues affecting teenagers, from substance use and sexual behavior to violence, mental health and other health risks.

But the CDC’s latest national report, a full-color publication with photos, graphics and high school success stories, offers a markedly different portrait of adolescent health than the one it published two years ago.

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