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chapter 1 Growing Up Concerned Childhood, Family, and the Formation of a Value System, 1918–1939 Origins of Commitment: Plotting a Life Course Watching over the bustling resort community and mining town of Colorado Springs, the front range of the majestic Rocky Mountains provided the backdrop to where Clinton E. Jencks grew to maturity during the dark days of the Great Depression. The natural beauty of this environment, together with the dramatic story of its exploitation by first prospectors and then the mining industry, fired the imagination of a young man who as a child often explored the remnants of the mining boom and dreamed of the class struggle that could be dimly perceived in the history of the area. What Jencks learned as a result of study and exploration was the hard lesson that his region had been the site of sharp labor-management confrontation in the rugged mining districts of frontier Colorado. As his awareness of historical inequities sharpened, the trajectory of what was to be an eventful life as an advocate of social justice was set in motion; in short, Clint Jencks’s long life in the human rights movement reflected these early perceptions of the world in which he lived and the culture of which he was a product. It was also this regional growth that in the late nineteenth century had once attracted his forebears to a developing mining community, service center, health resort, and railroad junction. By the late 1890s Colorado Springs was well on the way to the transition from frontier boom town to trading community , industrial supplier, and transportation hub, emerging as a service center where, increasingly, permanent settlers like the Jencks clan established residence. Here in Colorado Springs, transplanted Yankees DeWitt Clinton Jencks and his wife, Sarah, found a home in 1888 when they resettled a growing family after spending their early years in the more staid environment of Lorence_Palomino.indd 3 2/19/13 12:12 PM Wyndham County, Connecticut. Prior to their permanent removal to Colorado , the stability of comfortable New England childhoods and their strong religious upbringing had first led the pious young couple to spend ten eventful years of their marriage as missionaries in Japan. In 1866 family patriarch Leavens Jencks, a successful carpenter, had gone to his final rest, leaving his widow, Esther, alone to raise a family of six children with assistance from two children employed as teachers and her oldest son, DeWitt Clinton Jencks, a bookkeeper by trade. In his youth DeWitt followed a religious vocation during the late Civil War years, working as a teacher in the South for the Freedman’s Bureau. As Clinton E. Jencks’s later journey into the Southwest demonstrates, DeWitt was the first but not the last Jencks to tread the path of moral responsibility in pursuit of social justice. After his father’s death, DeWitt returned to Connecticut to assist his widowed mother, but the restless young man remained conscious of something missing in his life after his separation from the Freedman’s Bureau. By 1873 he was again contemplating some expression of the religious life, driven by an impulse that brought him to Chicago for a meeting of the Home Board for Congregationalist Foreign Missions. It was here that he met Reverend Henry Bagg Smith, another native of Wyndham, Connecticut, and a man dedicated to spreading the word of God overseas. A proud parent, Smith introduced DeWitt to his daughter, Sarah Maria Smith, and in October 1876, shortly after his mother’s death, DeWitt married Sarah in Greenfield Hills, Connecticut, thus cementing a union that drew him more closely into the religious community presided over by his father-in-law and liberally populated by the militant Congregationalists of his spouse’s family.1 Genealogical, census, and family records make it absolutely clear, then, that Clinton E. Jencks’s extended family history, which included a long line of morally driven New Englanders, was peppered with Congregationalist clergy, teachers, and religiously devoted laypersons. This background indicates that a tendency toward piety and personal moral imperative was a key element in the cultural baggage carried to Colorado by Clinton Jencks’s Yankee forebears; it also foreshadows the deep religious commitment that would be displayed by young Clint in the 1920s and 1930s. It is evident that a sense of Christian duty and moral responsibility was his birthright. Given the Jencks family’s religious history, it was no surprise that in 1877 the adventurous DeWitt Clinton Jencks embarked upon a...

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