A Home-Grown ‘Prairie Radical’ Dies Too Soon in Kansas

Mike Caddell RIP 1955-2024

Mike campaigning for Kansas state representative with his 2nd Amendment musket

Small-town journalism, a loving family, ThisCantBeHappening! and I personally, all suffered a terrible loss on the night of March 1, when Michael Caddell, a self-described ‘prairie radical socialist” who harked  back to that midwestern state’s Depression Era and its earlier ‘Free State”  abolitionist roots, suffered what turned out to be an aneurism of his abdominal aorta. The deadly incident happened when nobody was home to get him to a hospital quickly. 

Mike was was a dear and valued friend of mine for over a decade, though we never met in person, only a few times on Skype, and  mostly on the phone. Our long evening conversations when I would be taking a walk at the end of the day, especially during the past few years when I was working as co-producer of a Steve James-directed documentary on teen-age Manhattan Project physicist and Los Alamos atomic spy Ted Hall and researching and writing an investigative book about his courageous decision to give the Soviets the all the details needed for construction of their own atomic bomb, were always helpful. Mike would always let me know when my explanations  about what happened, and the significance of Ted Hall’s actions were too murky or complicated. 

“You can’t just tell this story for the coastal lib-tards,” he’d say. “You want the good ol’ boys here in Kansas to get it too.”

       Born on Jan. 2, 1955 in Iona, Kansas , not far from where his physician wife Kris Neuhaus notes that the great American socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason” was published half a century earlier,  Mike made that effort himself, producing several regular radio shows out of his farm house on Blog Talk Radio, where he gave the national and world news with commentary, interviewed interesting Kansas guests  and guests from other parts of the country, and even created a ThisCantBeHappening! Show, as well as giving ThisCantBeHappening’s John Grant a forum to host his own weekly take on major domestic and global events. Mike’s son Tristan was the engineer and director of those programs.

Mike and KRIS bought two small rural newspapers and made a go of being small town journalists for a time, helping to fund that difficult business by printing fliers for various progressive organizations. Eventually though, those ventures  failed. Mike hung onto the offset press though, often publishing from the family farm in North Jefferson City, KS,  carefully laid-out old-style folded and stapled pamphlets reminiscent of Tom Paine essays, highlighted print versions of selected  stories from ThisCantBeHappening.net and ran historical articles about Kansas and its tangled history of pro-slavery whites and abolitionists. His printing projects, which he always mailed off to a list of interested readers the old-fashioned way, using the US Postal Service service and actual first-class stamps, were supported, of all people, native Kansan and make-believe editor Ed Asner.  

Over the last few election cycles, Mike entered the electoral arena, running as the county’s Democratic candidate for the reactionary Republican-dominated state legislature.  

At a time when the US Supreme Court was being packed with hypocritical self-described “originalist” Justices who substitute biblical scripture and literal  meanings of the words used in the 18th Century Constitution to justify their often objectively un-christian rulings on complex modern-day moral issues like abortion, environmental destruction, government spying and gun ownership, Mike graphically showed Kansans how absurd such an approach is. 

Campaigning using his  ancient flatbed truck, he carried with him an old musket, and would loudly proclaim to anyone, listening,  “This is the kind of gun the country’s Founders had in mind when they wrote and approved the Second Amendment saying: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

“They didn’t know anything about repeater pistols, machine guns, large magazine rifles or semi-automatic assault rifles,” he told me, “All they knew about was muzzle-loaded guns that required packing powder and a metal ball into the barrel for each shot. Which of course would have made mass shootings really difficult or simply impossible.  The Signers of the Bill of Rights were talking about guns like this.”

He was right of course. All or certainly most of the Founders would have been appalled at the idea of strutting camp-clad crackpots going around town sporting large-magazine semi-automatic pistols or bump-stock altered AR-15  assault rifles capable of firing off 400-800 high-velocity projectiles per minute.

Mike himself got a gun permit and an investigator’s license to protect his wife Kris when fanatic antiabortionists in the state were threatening the abortion clinic run by Dr. George  Tiller, one of the few physicians in the country willing to perform late-term abortions on cases of young incest victims or women carrying damaged fetuses that had no chance of survival. Kris was a consulting physician for Tiller for a number of years, allowing Tiller to comply with state’s restrictive requirement that patient of doctors doing abortions had to first get a   separate independent physician’s recommendation endorsing it.  Tiller, whose clinic was fire-bombed by “pro-life“ fanatics at least twice,  was ultimately murdered  by one anti-abortion crackpot who shot him as he in the foyer of there church Tiller was a deacon in as he was handing out programs for a Sunday service. 

Mike would, I am sure,  have had no hesitation about using his licensed weapon to protect the “sweetie”  he so dearly loved. But he never had to, because, as he also told me, a number of his well armed neighbors in their rural community let him know, even though they didn’t share his radical political views, that they “had his family’s back” if they were ever threatened at home.

Mike didn’t win either of his campaigns for a seat in the Kansas Statehouse, though he racked up a respectable vote total both times in a country where most voters are Republicans. He may have been a radical lefty, but Mike was a part of his rural community. When Kansans were faced with a Republican-led campaign on a referendum that would have enshrined an absolute ban on abortion in the state’s constitution as year ago, Mike confidently assured me that it would be defeated. I expressed my skepticism.

“I hear from the Republican women when I go into the grocery store or the liquor store,” he told me, “Even the older women tell me, ‘Don’t let my husband know, but I’m voting against banning abortions,’” he said, “I’m telling you those Republican ladies are going to kill this effort.”

In the end, the “No votes” against a constitutional amendment banning abortion — even worded by Republican legislators in a confusing manner to make abortion rights supports vote ‘no’ to protect that right,  won by 59% to 50% in what was a surprising 50% turnout of registered voters. With Republicans in the deeply red stat vastly outnumbering Democrats, Republican women clearly turned out in large numbers to soundly defeat the ballot measure. 

“I told you didn’t I?” Mike boasted proudly in our next phone call after the voices had been tallied.

I’m going to miss those calls. 

Mike Caddeli presente!