The Beast

12. The Beast and the Supreme Court

c 139 d I N a republic, such as ours, where the law is the only king, “there is a divinity doth hedge” the courts; and it is right that it should be so. If our democracy is to endure, we must obey the law and respect its agents. The man who wilfully tries to impair the public credit of our courts, when those courts are just, is the greatest traitor that our country has. But what if a court is not just? What if it does not impartially administer the law, but does the bidding of a ruling faction of the community, and oppresses the helpless many in the interests of the powerful few? Must we respect the corrupt priest and minister of justice who degrades his almost holy office and defiles the very temple of justice with his iniquities? Must we obey the court that crushes us? Or is it true with courts as it is with monarchs that “resistance to tyrants is obedience to God”? Throughout this story I have been careful to accuse no judge of corruption , by inference—to relate nothing of him but what I personally THE BEAST AND THE SUPREME COURT C H A P T E R X I I T h e Be a s t c 140 d knew to be true. I have refrained from arguing any conclusions; I have left the facts to plead for themselves. I have particularly respected the Supreme Court of Colorado, the high altar of justice in our state; and even when the evidences of corruption there were more than arguable , I have drawn no inferences of guilt. I have waited until I had followed the trail of the Beast, step by step, from the dives to the Police Board, from the Police Board to the lower courts, from the courts to the political leaders who nominated the judges of the courts, and from the political leaders to the corporation magnates who ruled all. But now the trail goes one step farther. It leads from the offices of the corporations to the doors of the Capitol; it ascends the steps of the State House; it enters the sacred precincts of the Supreme Court itself. And I propose to follow it. I thought I had seen the footprint of the Beast in the Supreme Court’s decisions on our three-fourths-jury law. I thought I had seen it in the decision that protected the ballot-box stuffer who was prosecuted by the Honest Election League. I thought I had seen it in the injunction that prevented me from opening the ballot boxes in the spring of 1904. I thought I had seen it in 1893 when the tramway company claimed a perpetual franchise in Denver, contrary to the provision of the constitution that declared: “No law making an irrevocable grant of privileges, franchises or immunities, shall be passed by the General Assembly”—and Justice Luther M. Goddard first held that the franchise was void, and then, allowed a rehearing and reversed himself! (So that the tramway company was able to sell its stocks and bonds in Wall Street on the representation that it had “a franchise without limit as to time, and therefore, perpetual,” in spite of the constitution , the law and the courts.) But these were merely strongly suspicious circumstances; I needed proofs that were above suspicion. I got them in the memorable elections of the fall of 1904. Six months before, in the spring, the corporations had elected Mayor Speer and his Democratic machine men by ballot-box frauds that were open and admitted. But the state was normally Republican; and the corporations now turned Republican in order to elect their T H E BE A S T A N D T H E S U PR E M E C OU RT c 141 d candidates to the Legislature and the governorship. The Democrats were warned that they must not “stuff” the ballot boxes; and Speer in person carried the warning to the Democratic “Savages,” ward heelers and election crooks—as they themselves afterward confessed to me. The Savages, having candidates on the Democratic ticket, from their own ranks, took the warning with a countenance that did not promise well; and before the balloting began—on the application of a corporation attorney acting ostensibly for the Republican party—the Supreme Court issued a blanket injunction enjoining the election officials...