Dr. Craft and Justice Kingman: Defining the Right to Challenge Government in Gilded Age Kansas

In "Dr. Craft and Justice Kingman," David Ress, a journalist and historian, argues that at issue in Rufus S. Craft's 1860s legal skirmish with the Jackson County commission were two different views about the relationship of individuals and government. The one, Dr. Craft's, rooted in a traditional republican vision of civic duties and civic virtue; the other, Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Samuel A. Kingman's, distrusted claims of an individual's special right to speak for a community in a representative democracy. Dr. Craft, in a sense, exemplified the Mugwump and Muckraker sensibility; Justice Kingman was a stand in for the reformers of the much later "short ballot" and city manager movements. Dr. Craft claimed the right to sue on behalf of everyone in the county; Justice Kingman disagreed, ruling that good public order meant it was up to voters on Election Day and, in the event of criminal misuse of public monies, officers of the state to deal with abuse of public trust. At the time Justice Kingman ruled, the standing of an individual to sue on behalf of a community was not settled law; in the decades that followed most states would say that individuals did have the right to do so.