The Gospel of Progressivism: Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900-1930

Foreword

xv Who are these men who . . . are cracking their whips over Republicans and playing school-master to the Republican party and its conscience and convictions ? . . . Some of these worthies masquerade as reformers. Their vocation and ministry is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word “Reform.” —Roscoe Conkling, 1877 R oscoe Conkling, US senator from New York, knew how to oil a political machine with gobs of patronage. You grease my hand with a postmaster ’s job or a customhouse post and I’ll grease yours with fifty votes, a hundred, or a thousand. The senator knew what worked and what did not. “Parties,” he declared, “are not built up by deportment, or by ladies’ magazines , or gush.” Would-be do-gooders, who favored “snivel service” and other strange political experiments, were, in his opinion, “like grasshoppers in the corner of the fence [which] sometimes make more noise than the flocks that graze upon a thousand hills.” Foreword xvi Yet for all his realpolitik, Conkling was swimming against the tide of history. He lived until 1889, long enough to see the beginning of the end of the system that created and sustained him. In 1883, Congress initiated a civil service system that in time severely limited congressmen’s ability to name their supporters to federal jobs. In 1886 a young upstart, Theodore Roosevelt, gained the Republican nomination in the New York City mayoralty election. He lost, but he did not go away. In 1887 with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act the federal government took a feeble stab at controlling railroads . Still, when Conkling died, wide-scale reform was still only mist on the horizon. Conkling’s ghost gave thanks that Roscoe did not have to endure the years between 1890 and 1917, when the waters of reform, abetted by ladies’ magazines and gush, rose so high that even oligarchs such as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller had to take notice. In the 1890s, Populists insisted that the “voice of the people is the voice of God.” In 1896, voters elected Republican William McKinley to the presidency as men of Conkling’s stripe dodged the danger posed by William Jennings Bryan, a “vox populi” Democrat. McKinley won reelection in 1900. His moneyed backers rejoiced, for they assumed they could control a man belittled for having no more backbone than a chocolate éclair. To their dismay, however, Theodore Roosevelt, reputedly the author of the chocolate éclair crack, became vice president, a position that put him one shot from the presidency. That fateful shot felled McKinley on September 6, 1901, and nine days later Roosevelt was president. From their corner of the fence, ecstatic, change-sensing grasshoppers mounted a cacophonous din, hoping to sway the new man in the White House. They succeeded in part. TR shook his antitrust stick at a few corporations , vigorously protected the nation’s forests and scenic wonders, and pleased reformers in other ways. His successor, William Howard Taft, seen by historians as at least a moderate reformer, lacked Roosevelt’s charisma and angered the Roosevelt wing of the Republican Party. In 1912, Roosevelt ran as the Progressive Party candidate for president, Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic candidate, and Taft as a regular Republican. Together, Wilson and Roosevelt garnered more than 10 million votes. Taft, perceived as the least reform-minded, counted fewer than 4 million. Conkling’s ghost sobbed. From the 1890s into the early 1900s, reformers also flourished in Colorado. The Populists appealed to many voters because they wanted the federal government to purchase tons of silver. To Coloradans who mined silver by the ton, silver was gold and so, briefly, were the Populists. The Populist Davis H. Waite, elected governor in 1892, borrowed an image from Revelation 14:20 that terrified moderates and conservatives: “It is better, infinitely better, rather than our liberties be destroyed . . . that we should wade through a sea of blood: yes, blood to the horses’ bridles.” Many powerful mineowners despised Waite Foreword xvii because he refused to help them break labor unions. Ousted in 1894, he fluttered into the wastebasket of history, a reformer inept and before his...