1976, November, Pg. 1632. Judge Ben B. Lindsey and the Colorado Ku Klux Klan.

5 Colo.Law. 1632

Colorado Lawyer

1976.

1976, November, Pg. 1632.

Judge Ben B. Lindsey and the Colorado Ku Klux Klan

1632Vol. 5, No. 9, Pg. 1632Judge Ben B. Lindsey and the Colorado Ku Klux Klanby Frederic B. RodgersFrederic B. Rodgers, Denver, is Referee and Master of the Denver Juvenile Court.1633[Please see hardcopy for image]Judge Benjamin Barr LindseyNow that the national nominating conventions and the 1976 presidential election campaigns are behind us, it is interesting to consider the disparate routes traveled by the two major party candidates in achieving their nominations. In so doing, there may be a temptation on the part of political historians to look for ways in which the recent meeting of the Democratic National Convention in New York City may resemble the last previous Democratic Convention there---the June 1924 gathering at an earlier and less spacious Madison Square Garden. Almost certainly, there will never again be a national convention which will vote, as the Democrats did in 1924, not to condemn the Ku Klux Klan, the native American hate organization which rejected as un-American all Roman Catholics, Jews, and Blacks. And, most likely there will never again be an election in Colorado like that of November 1924 in which the Ku Klux Klan, having captured the Republican State Convention and nominated its choices for all statewide offices emerged in control of the House of Representatives, the Governor's mansion and every major statewide office it had sought.

The 1976 Democratic National Convention which saw Governor Jimmy Carter's first ballot nomination is in marked contrast to the 1924 nomination of John W. Davis who, despite his fame as a practitioner nonpareil before the United States Supreme Court, had to wait until the one hundred and third ballot for victory. The floor fight over the issue of Klan denunciation and the interminable nomination deadlock caused by the intransigence of supporters of candidates Governor Alfred E. Smith and former Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo created a circus spectacle from which the party could not recover by November, as former Vice-President Calvin Coolidge won a four-year term in his own right. Although the present spirit of Democratic accord and the technology of air-conditioning tamed the 1976 Convention hall atmosphere, the perhaps mischievous scheduling of events at the new Madison Square Garden produced a curious sequence of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus animals immediately preceding the Convention. These beasts, in turn, left behind them a circus ambience which modern disinfectants could not completely erase.

It was the malodorous stench of rotten politics which accompanied the Ku Klux Klan's emergence as a political force in Colorado's 1924 elections that moved one historian to characterize the ensuing1634 campaign as "the bitterest and dirtiest in the history of the Centennial State." When it was over in November, the Klan's statewide sweep was marred by only one important defeat: the race for the Denver Juvenile Court judgeship, an office which had been held since 1900, with slight variations in title, by Benjamin Barr Lindsey. Paradoxically, this defeat ultimately became the Klan's only long-range victory.

I

BEN LINDSEY IN POLITICS

Ben Lindsey was admitted to the Colorado bar in 1894 at the age of 24. His practice brought him cases which early awakened him to the nature of the prevailing injustice under law and the genial corruption of the gaslight era. Lindsey was often called upon to represent the interests of poor working persons aggrieved at the hands of the large corporations, and frequently the Denver City Tramway Company was his opponent. The frustrations he encountered with suspiciously hung juries, with a legal system innocent of employer's liability or industrial accident statutes, and with the prevailing common-law doctrines of contributory negligence, fellow servant and assumption of risk, all helped mold in Lindsey the social reformer's philosophy which became the heart of his public life.

A Social Reformer Deals with Juvenile CrimeBen Lindsey's diligent labors in the political vineyards of fin de siècle Denver Democratic politics led to his appointment in 1899 as Public Guardian and Administrator in the Arapahoe County Court, under Judge Robert W. Steele. The County Court was a bifurcated court of limited civil jurisdiction with a jurisdictional ceiling of $2,000 and a probate court, the latter providing orphans and dependents for Lindsey to represent. There was no juvenile court in Denver, or anywhere else for that matter until the City of Chicago formally organized one in 1899.

Troubled by the presence of children in adult courts and jails and the lack of any effort to reform delinquent children and save them from continuing a pattern of criminal behavior, Lindsey and Steele conferred together concerning a solution. Judge Steele proposed a weekend session of court, which he called "Juvenile Field Day," and commissioned Lindsey as referee and master to conduct the hearings. As his authority, he cited the so-called "School Law" which mandated school attendance and decried a child's "habitually wander[ing] about the streets during school hours."(fn1) Steele told Lindsey that such Saturday sessions would continue during his term "until all the children of the county should go to school regularly, and cease from offenses against the peace and dignity of the State of Colorado."(fn2) Lindsey's creative predilection as a social reformer first became apparent as he persuaded the Denver District Attorney to file his complaints against children on forms which he furnished and which alleged that the child was a "juvenile disorderly person."

Upon Judge Steele's election to the Colorado Supreme Court in 1900, Lindsey was named his successor. While he continued to exercise his court's jurisdiction over juveniles under this makeshift arrangement he had engineered, he began to tire of the traditional civil cases which were daily litigated in the County Court. However, Lindsey's genius as a reformer was not limited to his talent for legal improvisation. He proved to be a master of public relations with an accurate instinct for dramatizing his cause. Realizing that many of his "juvenile disorderly persons" got their starts in Denver's "wine rooms" and adjacent "cribs," as saloons and brothels were 1635 called, he exposed the corrupt alliance of the police and proprietors of these establishments in a special Saturday session of court to which the members of Denver's Police Commission, the press, and public were invited. Assembled in his courtroom were a large group of the Judge's "kids" all of whom told terrible tales of seduction and enticement by the saloonkeepers. The ensuing headlines proclaimed "The Wine Room Is the Gateway to Hades" among others, and a chagrined Police Commission soon made it impossible for the saloons to count adolescents among their general clientele.

In similar fashion, Lindsey "grandstanded with a megaphone" about conditions encountered by children in jail in Denver, eliciting from his child-witnesses, tales of sexual perversion, sadistic practices and education for a future life of crime. In the characteristic contemporary muckraker tone of moral outrage, Lindsey railed against "the abominable pollutions that had been committed on [their] little bodies."

The first of many so-called "Lindsey bills" reached the Colorado General Assembly in 1902 and by 1903, when the Judge addressed the annual conference of the Colorado Bar Association on the subject of revision of the probate code, he was, in reality, enlisting the support of that prestigious body for his proposed "Act Concerning Delinquent Children." The 1903 Juvenile Delinquent Law,(fn3) which was enacted by the legislature and became law, states in its preamble the philosophy of the then nascent juvenile court movement, in words bearing a marked similarity to the current Colorado Children's Code's legislative declaration.(fn4) It first favored custody of a child remaining with his natural parents and then encouraged that "any delinquent child shall be treated, not as a criminal, but as misdirected and misguided, and needing aid, encouragement, help and assistance." This law foretold the status offender, or child in need of supervision, then defining the CHINS of today's code(fn5) as an "incorrigible," the very same word used by the modern Model Juvenile Court Act, a law as yet enacted in only one state.

Lindsey's law put Colorado in the vanguard of the handfull of States which provided for jurisdictional separation of adults and children: the names of children and parents coming before the court could not be disclosed; a salaried probation1636 department was created to replace the Judge's hodge-podge of truant officers and friendly school teachers; jails were declared off-limits for children under sixteen, to eliminate their "consort[ing] with horse thieves and safe crackers"; and, in its most unusual provision, the "Adult Delinquency Law," the act proscribed as criminal any behavior on the part of an adult which caused or contributed to the delinquency of a minor. It was this latter provision which strengthened the national attention Lindsey and the Denver County Court had been attracting. Although the creation of a Colorado juvenile court independent from the probate and civil jurisdiction of the County Court was not to occur until...