The Beast

15. The Beast, the Church and the Governorship

c 177 d T HE investigation of the franchise vote had had one hopeful issue: it proved that the corporation ballotbox stuffers were afraid of the teeth of our new registration law. Behind every vote that we counted there was a voter—although it was evident that at least a thousand of these had been “qualified” by fraud. The Supreme Court writ arrived in time to prevent us from investigating the fraud; and, by one of those suspicious strokes of luck that seem to happen only to the corporations, our very proof that the votes were not “phony” by wholesale, only redounded in the public mind to the greater profit of the Beast! The Denver Republican celebrated the fact that the election had been probably “the cleanest held in Denver since it became a city.” And it claimed the credit for itself and the Republican party. Said this official voice of the Beast, sweetly disguised: “It required an enormous amount of work to bring about this condition. It is a THE BEAST, the Church and the Governorship C H A P T E R X V T h e Be a s t c 178 d thing with which parties and courts grappled for years; it became necessary even to invoke the Legislature and the Supreme Court to wrest from corrupters of the ballot the fruits of illegal victory.” Do not let your smile be cynical. “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” There is still hope so long as the animal must wear its sheep’s skin—so long as it recognizes that if the people knew it in its true stripes they would promptly cut its throat. I have that hope yet; and I had it very strongly in the campaign of exposure in which we were engaged throughout these years. It seemed to me only necessary for the people to “see the cat” in order to set them on it; and I continued , with all the power of my lungs, to “bawl out” the corporations and recite the list of their crimes. The corporations replied through the Board of County Commis­ sioners by refusing to pay an outside judge for helping me in my court and by disallowing bills incurred in the work of the court by probation officers. During the five years that I had been in charge of the court, we had done more than twice as much work as any two courts in the history of the state, and we had done it for less than half the usual expense. In Indianapolis, there were three judges and three courts doing the work of our one court in Denver. The judge and the clerks in our court had more than returned their salaries to the county in fees paid by litigants. Although the four district judges together had less work to do than I had, they were continually calling in outside assistance and the County Board was paying for it. I appeared several times before the Board to ask for help, and I usually found in attendance, as the Board’s confidential adviser, Mr. “Jim” Williams, the right-hand man in politics of “Bill” Evans and the tramway company. I was even, on one occasion, referred to Mr. Williams, by the County Attorney, for the answer to my plea that I should have help with my court work. I did not get the help—avowedly because I refused to allow the Board to appoint extra officers, whom I did not need, at a cost of about six thousand dollars a year to the county. One of the officers of the Democratic party of the City Hall came to me and said: “You ought to go and see Mr. Field, president of the T H E BE A S T, t h e C h u rc h a n d t h e G ov e r nor s h i p c 179 d telephone company. He’s willing to help you out.” I did not go, but, subsequently I accepted an invitation from a friendly county official to meet Mr. Field at luncheon, and I found him very suave and conciliatory , despite the fact that I had been publicly naming him, with Evans and Cheesman, as one of the corporation rulers of Denver. Mr. Field is a desiccated, small man who came to Colorado as a “lunger” and here...