The Beast

17. A Victory at Last

c 205 d I COME, now, to the last chapter of this story of the Beast; but I come to it, in the reminiscence—thank heaven!—with a lighter heart than any of us had when we faced it in the fact. As the result of seven years of almost frantic agitation for legislative reform, we had gained—an effective registration law! Nothing more! In all our fights to obtain an honest charter for Denver, to prevent dishonest elections, to protect the city from the theft of its franchises, to defend the poor from exploitation and to check the corporations in their abuse of the courts, we had failed. We had founded, it is true, a Juvenile Court with laws that protected the children from the agents of the System; but we had gained no election law that would protect the court itself; and we were continually assured by the agents of the Beast that they would “get” that court yet. Governor Buchtel had gone about the country, in the summer of 1907, on a Chautauqua lecture tour, heralding himself as the man who had been called upon to A VICTORY AT LAST C H A P T E R X V I I T h e Be a s t c 206 d “guide Colorado from the verge of political anarchy,” and incidentally defending Guggenheim and the corporations that had elected him. The Denver Chamber of Commerce had passed a resolution declaring me an enemy of the state, because a false news despatch reported me as saying, in a public lecture in the East, that Guggenheim ought to be hanged if we hanged Orchard; and the members of the Chamber passed their resolution, although many of them afterward admitted to me that they thought I was “right” in my attacks on the corporations and their Senator. (“You told the truth,” they would assure me, privately, “but, you know, it hurts business to tell it—it hurts the prosperity of the state.”) The Denver Post followed the resolution with a demand that I be driven from town, and stirred up all possible enmity against me as a “defamer” of my state. In the city elections of the spring of 1908, the Anti-saloon League and the “church element” tried to elect a mayoralty candidate in opposition to Mayor Speer and the “dive element”; but the corporations, represented by Boss Evans, betrayed the League while pretending to support it, and Speer was triumphantly reelected by the Beast. We were all discouraged. I knew that I was regarded as hopelessly “discredited.” I knew that the men whom I had fought believed that the public was tired of our crusading —for there is nothing more wearisome to a Western community than a “professional kicker.” Men would come to my chambers and say: “Ben, what’s the use? You’re only butting your head into a stone wall. Why don’t you settle down to some sort of peace and comfort? If the people want their state run this way, let them have it.” The trouble was that I did not believe the people knew how their state was run. I was determined that they should know, if I could tell them. And I went into the campaign for the judgeship, in the autumn of 1908—as I had gone into that for the governorship in 1906—with the single and forlorn purpose of making it a “campaign of education.” It was probable that I should be unable to get a nomination from either party, and we had first to consider the possibility of making an independent campaign; and we came to the immediate conclusion that there was no possibility of me succeeding as an independent. A V IC TORY AT L A S T c 207 d During the county elections of 1906, a strong organization of prominent citizens had nominated a number of independent candidates for the judiciary, in an attempt to free the courts from the influence of the corporation machine; the independent ticket had been supported by a large campaign fund and an efficient organization; the candidates were men well known to the community for their honesty and public spirit; yet those candidates who did not also get a nomination on a party ticket received less than 3,000 votes out of about 60,000 cast. This result was pointed out to me, by the men who had...