Second of five articles on the history of trouble in the Kansas Republican party
Among the historic battles among Kansas Republicans, few match the decade-long skirmish between Gov. Robert Bennett and former state party chairman Don Concannon.
Both were successful lawyers and politicians. Bennett was from the plush suburbs of Johnson County, a party moderate and president of the Kansas Senate. Concannon, from Hugoton in the state’s rural southwest, had been Republican state chairman (1968-70) and was a popular and avid conservative.
The heat source for this feud developed in the early 1970s when arguments over legislative reapportionment were reignited. In a bald power grab, delegations from the metropolitan counties rekindled rural-urban conflict when State Sen. C.Y. “Kit” Thomas, a Mission Hills Republican, propelled legislation to shrink the party’s rural voice.
His bill removed county chairmen and vice-chairmen from the state party committees, abolishing the county memberships. Thomas, chairman of the sub-committee on elections, was successful. District committees, heavily urban, would elect the parties’ state boards.
This further angered rural Republicans, who believed that reapportionment in 1966 had already throttled their voice in the legislature. Urban legislators had now shut them out of their own party process.
Later in 1972, it was learned that state Republican platform hearings had been staged. Civic Services, a St. Louis public relations firm, actually had written the Kansas planks even before platform subcommittees had convened for hearings. The Republican candidate for governor, Morris Kay, had little to say about the position statements.
The dispute cost Republicans a fourth consecutive election for governor, a two-year term of office at the time. Incumbent Robert Docking was reelected.
In 1974, Concannon, Bennett and The Rev. Forrest Robinson, of Wichita, ran for governor in a fierce, neck-and-neck Republican primary. All were popular candidates, and Bennett defeated Concannon by only 299 votes, 67,284 to 66,985. Robinson finished third with 56,341. Bennett was elected governor in November.
Concannon claimed he wasn’t bitter.” But in 1976 he became Kansas chairman for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, infuriating party officials and Bennett, who were campaigning for incumbent President Gerald Ford.
When Concannon and the Reagan forces moved into Topeka for the state GOP convention in May 1976, they were only 29 votes short among 979 delegates registered. But ‒ in what seemed a flash ‒ Ford swept the convention. There were accusations of padded urban delegations, among them Johnson, Sedgwick and Shawnee Counties.
Frank Shelton, a Reagan chairman from Montgomery County, was so furious that he ran for governor in 1978 and got 17,000 votes, most of them from Republicans. Bennett lost to Democrat John Carlin by 15,000.
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By 1992, Kansas had elected only two Republican governors in 25 years ‒ Bennett (1974) and Mike Hayden (1986). State Treasurer Joan Finney, a popular Democrat, had been elected governor in 1990. Although Democrats seemed to run the executive branch, Republicans ‒ especially urban Republicans ‒ were building power in the legislature.
Bennett had retired from the scene, but fellow Republicans from Sedgwick and Johnson Counties were leveraging influence in Topeka. Eventually they would acquire strength enough to rule the state senate and chair its most powerful committees.
In early 1992, Concannon emerged from his quiet zone to denounce historic school finance reforms as a raid on the pocketbooks of southwest Kansas. As modified legislation headed toward approval, southwest citizens mobilized, voting in nine southwestern counties to start the process of seceding from Kansas.
Resentment in the mineral-rich and ag-abundant southwest had simmered for decades. Massive school consolidations in 1963, legislative reapportionment in 1966, court unification in 1974 ‒ all were seen as attacks on rural sovereignty. And a new (1983) severance tax on oil and gas had added to the region’s dismay.
The school finance formula, by which wealthier school districts help finance education in poor communities, pushed resentment to anger. The legislature, started hearings. More than 1,000 people traveled to Topeka from the southwest, many of them in busses. Meetings were moved to the Topeka Expo Center.
In the months following enactment of the new school law it became clear that much of the southwest wealth lay more with corporations that owned the land and the minerals and less with the people who lived there. The new formula found that in several “wealthy” school districts, at least half the students qualified, by poverty guidelines, for free and reduced-price meals.
Although seven of the nine southwest counties had voted to secede from Kansas, the movement would wane. In a region nearer the capitals of three other states, a sense of distance and isolation remained.
(Next: The religious left)
