The Beast

9. The Beast and the Ballot

c 105 d T HESE days of 1902, 1903 and 1904 were the heydays of our Juvenile Court, and I should like to dwell upon them fondly— as the song says—because of what ensued. Our campaigns against the wine rooms, the jails, and the grafting Commissioners had made the court as popular as a prizefighter, and the newspapers kept it constantly in the public eye. The Denver Chamber of Commerce—(let me boast of it!)—invited me to luncheon, gave a reception in my honour , and praised me to the last blush. (This is the same Chamber that has since branded me an enemy of the state.) Philanthropic men and women assisted our Juvenile Improvement Association, helped with our charity benefits, and contributed to the Fresh Air Fund, the summer camp, the day nursery, and other branches of our work, with all the delighted eagerness of Lady Bountiful herself. (At a recent “benefit ” given in the aid of the Juvenile Court by Miss Olga Nethersole there were not two hundred persons in the whole house; and “Society” THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT C H A P T E R I X T h e Be a s t c 106 d was conspicuously elsewhere.) Mr. Walter S. Cheesman, president of the water company, was at the head of our Association, and if we needed money we had only to ask for it. (This is the same Walter S. Cheesman who afterward lent a vacant lot to a charity bazaar on condition that not a penny of the proceeds should go to the Juvenile Court work.) I was elected chairman of a building committee of the Y.M.C.A. (from which I afterward resigned when I found that my chairmanship hindered the work of raising money for the Association). I was made a member of the Board of Trustees of the Denver University. (And Miss Ida Tarbell could not have been removed from the Board of Rockefeller’s Chicago college more shrewdly and softly than I was “transferred” from the Denver University Board when the days of my offence against the “interests” developed.) In short, I was receiving the same applause in Denver that Heney received in San Francisco before he turned from prosecuting grafters to prosecuting the big business men and “leading citizens” who made the grafters. I had as yet done only one thing to offend business: that was the enforcement of the child-labour laws in 1902. Cotton mills had been established just outside of Denver, and poor families had been imported from Alabama and the Carolinas to work as operatives. I went through the factories, visited the homes and talked with the children; and I found that the awful labour conditions of the Southern cotton mills had been transplanted to Colorado. The workers were practically slaves, for they had been imported under contract and had assigned part of their wages, in advance, to pay for transportation; and boys and girls from ten to twelve years of age were at work in the mills, without education and subject to the temptations of bad moral conditions, trying to help free their parents from the bondage of debt. We took proceedings against the company—in spite of an outcry that we were interfering with a prosperous industry that added to the wealth of the state—and we fined the owners and the superintendent the limit allowed by the law. One of the men of wealth interested in the mills came to my chambers and protested. He had lived T H E BE A S T A N D T H E BA L L OT c 107 d in the community a good many years, he said, and he was no criminal . It was all right to fine the superintendent; the superintendent was responsible for the conditions at the mills. But it was all wrong to fine him, the owner; for he had a reputation and a good name and he did not propose to be branded a criminal. “We have never had any trouble ,” he said, “until this fight started. We’re helping Denver, and we ought to be encouraged instead of being persecuted. I warn you, right now, that if this thing is kept up, we’ll shut down the mills and you’ll have to take the consequences.” The thing was kept up. The children were forced to go to school. The mill...