The KOHP 2024 Annual Meeting included the highlight of the day, Michael Smith and Ed Flentje’s discussion of their recently released book, Reform and Reaction: The Arc of Kansas Politics. In addition, Sue Peterson, who was elected KOHP Vice-President at the meeting, reflected on her service as staff for House Leadership, including former Speaker of the House Mike Hayden. Dave Heinemann, a member of the KOHP Board of Directors and Executive Committee, and the volunteer responsible for most of the oral history recordings archived at KsOralHistory.org presented a compilation of segments of interviews that focused on the usefulness of taking a bipartisan approach to policy making.
The keynote presentation was an interview by KOHP board member Jim McLean of Flentje and Smith focused on the events described in their book. The interview began with Flentje and Smith crediting the late Dr. Burdett Loomis, a distinguished and well-known member of the Political Science Department at the University of Kansas from 1979 through 2021. His leadership started the ball rolling on the book. Loomis also was instrumental in the creation of the Kansas Oral History Project.
In their presentation, as in the book, Flentje and Smith focused on structural and political changes in state government in Kansas from the 1960s through the first two decades of the 21st Century. The discussion explored themes highlighted in the day’s other two presentations — moderation, bipartisanship, and modernization –and how state leaders moved away from those approaches in the latter portion of the years that were examined. Click on the book cover image above to view the recording of the presentations.