Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

15. The 1920s

267 15 Gangsters, bootleg whiskey, jazz, Model T Fords, and silent movies provide the stock images of the supposedly exuberant United States during the “roaring” years from the end of World War I in 1918 to the start of the Great Depression in late 1929. In fact, for much of the nation that period was more a time of retreat than of roar, an era marked by fear, bigotry, and missed opportunity. Those years and the Depression decade of the 1930s constituted a great detour for Colorado, where normally growth, progress, and optimism had reigned. The economy slid downhill after World War I. Grain and livestock prices fell 60 percent within three years. Large wheat growers and cattle raisers on the high plains could survive by expanding their production, but smaller farmers were squeezed between declining revenues and fixed mortgages. In dry-land farming areas, low prices led to unpaid mortgages and foreclosures. Mining also suffered. Copper and zinc production dropped by 70 percent, and the Climax molybdenum mine north of Leadville shut down temporarily in the early 1920s. Cheap tungsten from China and vanadium from the Belgian Congo ruined Colorado producers. In western Colorado, speculators hoped to cash in on oil shale, but by 1925 refining problems and competition from cheap Texas oil dashed their dreams. Factories failed to fill the gap. Because much of the state’s manufacturing involved processing foodstuffs I will work with the Klan and for the Klan in the coming election, heart and soul. And if I am reelected, I will give the Klan the kind of administration it wants.1 —Denver mayor Benjamin F. Stapleton, auguSt 1924 the 1920s DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c15 chapter fifteen 268 and minerals, it suffered as agriculture and mining fell on hard times. The closing of smelters in Denver, Salida, and Pueblo, as well as the abandonment of the state’s pioneer sugar factory at Grand Junction, were symptomatic of the problem . By 1940 only 35,000 factory workers were bringing home paychecks, down 30 percent from a peak in the late 1910s. Manufacturing, mining, and farming, which together had provided over half of Colorado’s jobs in 1920, accounted for only one-third of the state’s employment by 1940.2 For the first time in the state’s history, its citizens’ per capita income dropped below the national average. Population growth slowed. Fewer people migrated to the state, and some Coloradans found opportunity elsewhere. From 1860 through 1910, recurring booms had attracted a higher proportion of European immigrants, men, and people in their twenties and thirties than was the case in the United States as a whole. Over the next thirty years Colorado lost these demographic patterns characteristic of a developing region. As early as 1920, the percentage of foreign-born Keota, a once-thriving Weld County farming town, fell on hard times during the 1920s and 1930s. By 1990 it had become one of 200 ghost towns that haunted Colorado’s eastern plains. (Photo by Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.) the 1920s 269 fell below the national average. At the same time, on average, Coloradans grew older. Once a young person’s state, by 1940 it had become considerably grayer. Life became quieter as the age of bonanzas passed. The state’s patricians, living at ease mainly in Denver and Colorado Springs, formed a “self-sufficient, isolated, self-contained, and complacent” business elite that usually preferred safe returns to promising risks.3 Politics offered little hope for social improvement. An alliance of liberals, farmers, and labor unionists elected longtime progressive William E. Sweet governor in 1922. His two years in office had little impact on the state. The largely Republican legislature in the 1920s represented industry, bankers, the Farm Bureau, cattlemen’s associations, and American Federation of Labor craft unions. Respectful of the status quo, the general assembly refused to modernize the outmoded state administration or to support the minimal public welfare programs found in many eastern states. Flu epidemic, red Scare, and tramway Strike For Colorado as for the rest of the United States, 1918 was a year of blessing and curse. Germany’s surrender on November 11, 1918, ended the carnage of World War I. Simultaneously, the nation faced the greatest plague in its history. Beginning in late summer, a virulent form of influenza spread rapidly from the East Coast, hitting Colorado in late September...