Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fifth Edition

19. Postwar Politics and Other Diversions

329 19 At the end of World War II, much of the power in Colorado still rested with its interlocked family dynasties . In his mid-nineties, Charles Boettcher no longer tended to the day-to-day doings of his sugar, cement, banking, and brokerage domain, but his son Claude was in firm command.2 In Pueblo, Mahlon D. Thatcher Jr. ruled his family’s fiefdom as he had for three decades. UnderthewatchfuleyesoftheBoettchers,theThatchers, and other like-minded patriarchs, the state generally stagnated. John Vivian—governor from 1943 to 1947—never drove an automobile, wrote poetry, wore a fireman’s helmet while gardening, and amassed a $13 million state surplus. “His tenure,” said the Rocky Mountain News, “was marked by no spectacular achievements. It was wartime and there were a lot of things he couldn’t have done if he had wanted to.” His detractors charged that he “wouldn’t have done anything even if he could.”3 Yet almost accidentally, Vivian promoted a significant reform. In late 1944, sensing that the state should plan for the postwar period, he appointed a raft of committees to plan for the future. As an afterthought, he belatedly added a committee on health and named Dr. Florence Rena Sabin to head it. Sabin, a renowned scientist , had recently retired from New York’s Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and returned to her native Colorado. [Colorado] is conservative politically, economically, financially. I do not mean reactionary. Just conservative— with the kind of conservatism that does not budge an inch for anybody or anything unless pinched and pushed.1 —John Gunther, 1947 Postwar Politics and other Diversions DOI: 10.5876/9781607322276:c19 chapter nineteen 330 By publicizing grim statistics, Sabin demonstrated that improving public health was literally a matter of life or death. Poliomyelitis, a crippler that sometimes killed, felled a few people every year and occasionally flared into an epidemic , as in 1943 when 292 cases were reported. From 1940 to 1944, more than 100 people in the state died from measles and a similar number from diphtheria. Syphilis killed nearly 500, tuberculosis (TB) more than 2,000. In 1943 Colorado Florence Rena Sabin, a native of Central City, became a nationally prominent physician, medical school professor, scientist, and champion of better public health. (Denver Public Library, Western History Collection.) postwar politics and other diversions 331 had the sixth-highest death rate in the nation for scarlet fever, the ninth-highest for whooping cough, and the fourth-highest infant mortality rate. Sabin concluded that more than 8,000 deaths over a five-year period could be avoided if the state cleaned up its milk and water, eliminated bubbler drinking fountains that re-circulated the previous drinker’s bacteria to the next sipper, and built hospitals. In 1947 eight measures known as the Sabin bills were introduced in the general assembly. They provided for a new state Department of Public Health, money for the University of Colorado’s medical school, a new wing for Colorado General Hospital, and improved milk safety. Tirelessly stumping for public health, Sabin spoke throughout the state. In one town Sabin asked her hostess to show her the sewage disposal plant: “The woman went home and asked her husband where the sewage-disposal plant was, and he replied, ‘Take her down to the river.’”4 By alerting Coloradans to the evils of dumping raw sewage in rivers, of leaving water untreated and milk unpasteurized, Sabin saved countless lives. Between 1940 and 1964, better sanitation, medical advances, and improved hospitals helped cut the state’s maternal death rate by more than 90 percent and the infant death rate by more than 50 percent. By initiating mass vaccination programs against polio in the mid-1950s, the state ensured that it would never again experience years such as 1951, when it suffered more than a thousand cases. From 1960 to 1964, only forty cases were reported, and no one died from the disease.5 In 1947 Mayor Quigg Newton appointed the seventy-six-year-old Sabin Denver’s manager of health and charities. She declared war on the rats infesting the city’s alleys and initiated mass X-ray screening for detection of TB. She insistedthatrestaurantsbesanitaryandthatmilkbeclean.TheTBratefellbyhalf, the syphilis rate by 90 percent. As Elinor Bluemel reported, “More was accomplished for Denver in terms of health in four months than had been achieved in all the city’s history.”6 Nearing eighty in...