Another Kansas summer is nearly spent. The season has been perfect for the ‘rascals’ of democracy.

The railing of the author's home, ready for paint, with a flag bracket that's been on the porch for decades. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)

As the end of summer approaches the grass in the front yard has gone to seed. The flowery heads sag with the promise of new life and sway like a murmur in the evening breeze. It won’t be long before some city fire department employee comes along in a little white pickup, hops out, and measures the grass with a ruler to find that some patches are above the 8-inch legal maximum.

Then a wooden stake will be pounded into the yard with a cardstock notice written in Sharpie giving me a few days in which to cut the grass or face fines and the threat that the city will cut it for me and bill me for the bother.

But the grass is hardly a nuisance, not yet, so it remains uncut, at least for today. Lawns are also environmental disasters. They limit biodiversity, take too much watering, and are generally made of nonnative grass. They’re also an indicator of class status, a signal that you have the leisure time to care for a lawn or the means to have somebody do it for you. And yes, the grass can be a fire hazard if it’s too tall and close to a building. That’s why the fire department measures it with rulers.

I’m tempted to replace the lawn with native plants.

But there’s been too much activity on Constitution Street in the past month with little time for lawn care or native landscaping. Empty paint cans are piled like empty beer cans on the porch and the tracks from a bucket truck are still visible in the damp yard. My guy doing the painting used the bucket to reach some of the highest peaks of the many gabled roof, part of the design of a house that was built before the phrase “world war” was in our vocabulary. It is an elaborate roof for such a small home, with some of the extant gingerbread between the gables reminding me more of a steamboat than a house. The water has been deep enough in the front yard during the rains of the past month that the old house has seemed like a ship laid up in strange waters. This port of call has been the summer of 2025.

The end of summer always finds me in a reflective mood. There’s just over two weeks left before autumn arrives — it officially begins at 1:19 p.m. Sept. 22 — so I have an urge to get things done. The painting will be finished in a week, if it doesn’t rain too much, but there’s still some carpentry work to do. I’ll tackle that myself, and will be glad to use some of the skills passed down by my father. I’ll leave the plumbing repairs to a professional, although I’ll hear my amateur handyman father whispering behind me that I should be doing it myself. He’s been dead 27 years, but he comes to me in my dreams, never speaking but always with a red metal toolbox and the need to repair something — a car, a door, a water heater.

I know that repairs aren’t really about fixing objects. What my subconscious is manifesting, other than a longing for a dead parent, is a desire to confront challenges, to bring order to chaos, to heal the tribulation of the summer nearly past and the years immediately preceding it.

Sometimes I’ll wake with a start before dawn, my T-shirt soaked with sweat, staring into the darkness and pondering the latest home repair dream. When I can’t get back to sleep, I’ll come downstairs in the quiet house and turn on the lamp behind my writing desk and pull down a volume from the bookshelf. This last episode of unscheduled nocturnal reading happened a couple of nights ago, and the book I reached for was published in 1940. “Rascals in Democracy” was written by W.G. Clugston, a newspaper reporter whose beat was the Kansas Statehouse. While it is ostensibly about politics in the Sunflower State, it’s really about politics everywhere.

Clugston was 50 years old when the book was published and was the kind of reporter Hecht and MacArthur wrote plays about. He was cynical, somebody who saw how the sausage was made, and didn’t shy from telling others the stomach-turning details. He didn’t have much regard for William Allen White, the legendary newspaper editor from Emporia, saying that White could have become a great literary figure if he had not soiled his talents in the “dirty sewer lines of politics.”

Other figures, from Gov. Harry H. Woodring to 1936 presidential hopeful Alf Landon, were similarly dismissed as opportunists. About the only Kansas politician Clugston seemed to like was Arthur Capper, and even then the approval was qualified. Capper, he says, built his publishing empire through classified advertisements in his magazines hawking hoax remedies for impotence to his predominately rural readership.

Clugston was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and graduated with a law degree from the university there. But instead of practicing law he pursued journalism, working for United Press International and the Democratic-leaning Kansas City Post. Once, while covering the Kansas Statehouse for the Post, he was locked in a room and held incommunicado.

At 3:30 a.m. March 17, 1921, officials discovered him hiding in the secretary of state’s office, adjacent to the Senate, while lawmakers met in closed session to debate appointments to a variety of state offices, including bank examiner.

“He was asked (after being hauled before the Senate) to give his promise to refrain from disclosing anything he had heard of the debate on the appointments,” the Wichita Beacon reported. “He refused. As a result he was ordered imprisoned in one of the adjacent committee rooms, where he will remain under the eye of a sergeant-at-arms until the session ends.”

Clugston’s detention lasted until sine die adjournment, 11 hours later.

His first-hand observation of Statehouse politics persuaded him that most politicians were “rascals.” He may have settled on the word because it was a colorful and relatively safe description that did not make an accusation he would have to defend in court.

But Clugston knew how to make a point with humor.

“Scientists have never established, with any degree of accuracy, just how long it takes to produce an outstanding rascal under any form of government,” he wrote. “Nor does history provide much basis for computing the length of time it takes for an individual, or a succession of individuals, to corrupt a state. But Kansas has produced some factual material which might prove useful to statisticians interested in trying to calculate the time elements likely to be involved in such undertakings.”

The ingredients included social snobbery, rampant ambition, the shameless exploitation of family connections, and wrapping oneself in a hypocritical cloak of patriotism and purity. Clugston seems to have envisioned the era of Trump even before our current rascal-in-chief was born.

Clugston believed the long-term fix for the dismal state of politics was education, and for education to be effective teachers had to be liberated from political dogma and be adequately paid. Teachers, he said, were “terrorized” into teaching what benefited the ruling elite instead of spreading enlightenment. Trump? Check.

“The teachers are not to blame for anything except their very human yielding to the urge to keep body and soul together by earning their daily bread through their chosen profession,” Clugston wrote. “But until we really have an educational system that educates, and until the teachers are emancipated and freed from the economic straight-jackets which they are now required to wear, democracy will always be weak in one of its most important understructures.”

Clugston had an unshakeable belief that the people were, if not smarter than their politicians, at least motivated by a desire to express their collective will for good. This seems old-fashioned now, but when “Rascals in Democracy” was released, Britain was already at war with Nazi Germany over the invasion of Poland. The storm clouds were hard to miss, even from across the Atlantic.

This belief in the essential good of the populace was as American as Norman Rockwell, and perhaps as naïve. But Clugston believed in it earnestly, just as he did in a particular form of Christianity, one rooted in civic service. Clugston was also a joiner of things, including a Topeka club founded by Karl Menninger called “The Naked and Unashamed Club.” No, it wasn’t that kind of group. Dedicated to philosophical discussion, the members put their inhibitions aside for open and freewheeling debate.

The book I now hold in my hand is personally signed by Clugston, in the flowing script of a fountain pen. “To my good Irish friend Ed Rooney, whom I love but with whom I can’t agree about anything.” It’s dated June 5, 1940, at Topeka.

Rooney was a Topeka lawyer, a professor at the Washburn University School of Law, and a fellow member of the Naked and Unashamed. In 1942, he and Clugston debated “campaign issues” at Kansas State University at Manhattan, at the invitation of the college’s department of journalism. If there remains a transcript of that debate I would pay cash money for it.

Clugston died in 1963. He was 78. The Associated Press attributed his death to cancer. His literary death, precipitated by a decline in his influence after World War II, was due to neglect. The kind of radicals that flourished in Kansas during the 1920s, including the entire “Appeal to Reason” socialist contingent out of Girard, were crushed by the post-war Red Scare.

If Clugston is remembered at all now, it is as a footnote in a dissertation.

I first came across Clugston years ago while examining some “Little Blue Books” published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius at the Appeal offices in Girard. Clugston’s “Facts You Should Know About Kansas” came out in 1946.

While I don’t agree with Clugston on everything — his assessment of White was wrong, if only because he was Mary White’s father — I am richer for having read his contrarian view of Kansas politics. There are more things in heaven and Topeka than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

As we near the end of summer, things become clearer on reflection. Our political summer has lasted for some eight decades, a period when those Americans who had fought the rise of fascism endeavored to make a better world using the tools they had. The result wasn’t perfect, especially in an age when a phrase like “world war” was needed, but it was progress.

Now we face a domestic threat to democracy.

One of the tools missing from our citizen toolbox is the ability to have rational and deep debates on the challenges inherent in democracy. Can we recover from a misstep when nobody has yet emerged to galvanize the resistance? How do we engage with our countrymen who reject constitutional democracy in favor of theocracy, oligarchy, or outright dictatorship?

Protest is important. Many thousands have taken to the streets in Topeka and across the county to decry the growing police state and other presidential abuses of power. Their signs and voices express the desire for change. We need protest, but we also need reasoned dissent.

Instead of engaging in informed conversations we hide behind memes, buzzwords, and taunts. So do our politicians. We reject the principled argument in favor of the endorphin rush of manufactured outrage. So do our politicians. This is not righteous outrage, not the kind of outrage over real events that drives movements, but the gossamer constructs of online manipulation.

If there is one lesson I’ve taken from Clugston the forgotten, it’s this:

Thank God for dissent. It is the seed from which democracy grows.

He didn’t say that, but he lived it. And his dissent was informed, insightful, and hurled like a spitball at his targets. He wrote books and signed them to friends who disagreed. He was cranky and colorful and even a bit reckless — can you imagine what the current Kansas Senate would do to a reporter who hid himself to hear a closed-door discussion? — but Clug, as his friends called him, was the genuine article.

This is the kind of thing I ponder when I wake before dawn, with just a couple of weeks of summer left, and reach for an old book on the shelf. In the dreams with my father we never really finish our repairs. The tasks change, but we’re always in the midst of it, using the tools we have. It is the nature of maintenance, whether for a car or a hot water heater or the house of democracy.