Book dossier

Life at Laurel Town in Anglo-Saxon Kansas

by Stephens, Kate

"Many readers will find her portrayal of blacks, Irish, Jews, and immigrants generally disturbing. It is important to realize that many Americans were themselves disturbed by the flood of immigrants from southern and eastern European countries that was altering the nature of traditional American society. At the same time, Stephens compiled this work in 1920, at a time when many Americans were experiencing a sense of betrayal from learning of the immense profits made by the 'Arms Merchants' from the First World War. Many Americans, Stephens included, were swelling a nativist and isolationist tide of sentiment. Kate Stephens was a disillusioned woman and wrote Life in Laurel Town in Anglo-Saxon Kansas to recall what her world had been like. She remembered a Lawrence still peopled by the men and women who had staked their lives in a bitter and bloody struggle against slavery, and a University whose function it was to call the young men and women of Kansas to higher ideals rather than to entertain them and prepare them for better-paying jobs. Beneath the rhetoric and racism, Stephens was attempting to explain problems that we are confronting once again: the decay of civic virtue, a growing tendency to deny individual responsibility, the decay of common ideals, and a loss of respect for a heritage for which our forbears fought and died."--Lynn H. Nelson, The Kansas Collection.