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

By R. Todd Laugen

Chronicling the negotiations of Progressive groups and the obstacles that constrained them, The Gospel of Progressivism details the fight against corporate and political corruption in Colorado during the early twentieth century. While the various groups differed in their specific agendas, Protestant reformers, labor organizers, activist women, and mediation experts struggled to defend the public against special-interest groups and their stranglehold on Colorado politics.

Sharing enemies like the party boss and corporate lobbyist who undermined honest and responsive government, Progressive leaders were determined to root out selfish political action with public exposure. Labor unions defied bosses and rallied for government protection of workers. Women's clubs appealed to other women as mothers, calling for social welfare, economic justice, and government responsiveness. Protestant church congregations formed a core of support for moral reform. Labor relations experts struggled to prevent the outbreak of violence through mediation between corporate employers and organized labor. Persevering through World War I, Colorado reformers faced their greatest challenge in the 1920s, when leaders of the Ku Klux Klan drew upon the rhetoric of Protestant Progressives and manipulated reform tools to strengthen their own political machine. Once in power, Klan legislators turned on Progressive leaders in the state government.

A story of promising alliances never fully realized, zealous crusaders who resisted compromise, and reforms with unexpected consequences, The Gospel of Progressivism will appeal to those interested in Progressive Era reform, Colorado history, labor relations, and women's activism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Sep 24, 2010
• ISBN: 9781607320531

Book preview

THE GOSPEL OF PROGRESSIVISM

TIMBERLINE BOOKS

Thomas J. Noel and Stephen J. Leonard, editors

The Beast, Benjamin Barr Lindsey with Harvey J. O’Higgins

Colorado’s Japanese Americans, Bill Hosokawa

Denver: An Archaeological History, Sarah M. Nelson, K. Lynn Berry,

Richard F. Carrillo, Bonnie L. Clark, Lori E. Rhodes, and Dean Saitta

Dr. Charles David Spivak: A Jewish Immigrant and the

American Tuberculosis Movement, Jeanne E. Abrams

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

R. Todd Laugen

Ores to Metals: The Rocky Mountain Smelting Industry, James E. Fell, Jr.

A Tenderfoot in Colorado, R. B. Townshend

The Trail of Gold and Silver: Mining in Colorado, 1859–2009, Duane A. Smith

THE Gospel OF

PROGRESSIVISM

Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900–1930

R. TODD LAUGEN

Foreword by

STEPHEN J. LEONARD

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

© 2010 by the University Press of Colorado

Published by the University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laugen, R. Todd.

  The gospel of progressivism : moral reform and labor war in Colorado, 1900–1930 /

R. Todd Laugen.

    p. cm. — (Timberline books)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-60732-052-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60732-053-1 (e-book) 1.

Colorado—Politics and government—1876–1950. 2. Progressivism (United States politics)—History—20th century. 3. Labor—Colorado—History—20th century. 4. Labor laws and legislation—Colorado—History—20th century. 5. Women—Political activity—Colorado—History—20th century. 6. Political corruption—Colorado—History—20th century. I. Title.

  F781.L298 2010

  978.8’031—dc22

                                                       2010037930

Design by Daniel Pratt

1 9   1 8   1 7   1 6   1 5   1 4   1 3   1 2   1 1   1 0                  1 0   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

For Zoë

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Stephen J. Leonard

Introduction: The Varieties of Colorado Progressivism

1. Protestant Progressives and the Denver Party Machine

2. Public Enemy: Colorado Fuel and Iron or the Saloon?

3. The Denver Tramway Crisis and the Struggle for Masculine Citizenship

4. The Consuming Public and the Industrial Commission

5. Ben Lindsey and Women Progressives

6. The Colorado Klan and the Decline of Progressivism

Epilogue: The Progressive Legacy

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1.1. Denver Breaking His Chains

1.2. Ready to Grapple

1.3. Speer Driving Greater Denver

1.4. Speer Trampling Honest Elections

2.1. The Missing Big Stick Discovered

2.2. A Shatterer of Idols

2.3. Double, Double Toil and Trouble

3.1. Beggars Shouldn’t Be Choosers

3.2. The Thing for Labor to Fight

3.3. A Bad One to Arouse

6.1. The New Driver of the Colorado GOP

6.2. Waiting to See the Doctor

6.3. Ku Klux Klan—Ladies’ Auxiliary

6.4. Ku Klux Klan Montage

Acknowledgments

Writing and researching can be lonely endeavors. For this reason, I dearly appreciate the assistance of so many people and groups along the way.

Financial support from various institutions proved invaluable in sustaining an initial vision of this project while I labored frugally as a graduate student. The graduate Distinguished Research Fellowship and the Gloria and Jackson Main Fellowship at the University of Colorado were a lifeline. So too were the Thomas Edwin Devaney Dissertation Fellowship from the Center for Humanities and Arts and the Emerson Humanities Fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences. The Boulder Historical Society lent a valuable hand with its Thomas Meier Fellowship. The writing prize from the Center of the American West was deeply appreciated. After many years, I remain very grateful to these institutions.

While conducting research, I incurred debts to archivists, librarians, and activists who offered wonderful guidance and insight about sources. I benefited greatly from the help I received from David Hays in the archives at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The professional and patient staff at the Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy Department; the Colorado State Archives; the Colorado Historical Society; the Carnegie Library in Boulder; the Kansas Historical Society; and Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, offered tremendous assistance. A past president of the Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs, Helen Johnson, also opened her Denver office and its historical scrapbooks to me.

I deeply appreciate Darrin Pratt’s early and consistent encouragement for this project. As director of the University Press of Colorado, he facilitated key revisions that enhanced the big picture and the devilish details. Daniel Pratt, Beth Svinarich, and Caroline Denney have offered able assistance with the production and marketing processes. Laura Furney saved me from some embarrassing errors and enhanced the prose significantly with her careful editing. Maria Montoya, Tom Krainz, and an anonymous reviewer at the University Press of Colorado read the entire manuscript, urging me to refine and clarify my argument. Their careful suggestions and criticisms were of enormous help. Tom also provided steady encouragement throughout the process. As editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Alan Lessoff helped me develop an early version of Chapter 4. Elisabeth I. Perry, Karin Shapiro, and T. H. Baughman all read and improved conference papers that informed this manuscript. Robyn Muncy shared her expertise on the life of Josephine Roche. Reading two chapter drafts, Steve Leonard provided great insights into the quirks of Colorado history while sharpening my writing. Of course, I alone bear responsibility for any errors that remain.

Closer to home, other colleagues commented insightfully on portions of this manuscript or helped me confront the challenges of writing while teaching a heavy load. I extend my hearty thanks to a talented and dedicated cohort at Metropolitan State College of Denver: Jim Drake, John Monnett, Kim Klimek, Susan Lanman, Monys Hagen, Tom Altherr, Laura McCall, Tish Richard, Dolph Grundman, Vince C. de Baca, Ellen Slatkin, Tom McInerney, Matt Makley, Andy Muldoon, Paul Sidelko, Brian Weiser, and Justin Stephens. The MUPPETS reading group reviewed a ponderous draft chapter with remarkable forbearance. Members of the Boulder American Studies Reading Group—Mark Pittenger, Martha Gimenez, Erika Doss, and Brian DeLay—offered lively debate about how to write engaging history. At the University of Colorado, graduate colleagues Gerry Ronning, John Enyeart, Carol Byerly, Wendy Keefover-Ring, Nancy Vavra, Steve Dike, and Renee Johnson all enriched my early research on this project with wise advice and critiques. Neighborhood raconteurs Dan Baum and Margaret Knox pushed me to work harder at telling a good story. Finally, Julie Greene inspires me with her remarkable dedication as a scholar, teacher, activist, and parent. I have benefited over many years from her keen intelligence, patient counsel, and impressive example.

Family members have long kept the faith and offered their generous support as I completed this project. Robert and Marilyn Laugen, Annie and Michael Murray, Christian and Misrina Laugen, Heather Cochran and David Allen, Garrett and Janet Cochran, Deirdre Cochran, and Dan Couch all helped to keep me focused on the ultimate goal of publication. I know the process appeared confusing at times, but I dearly appreciate their abiding interest in my work. David Allen helped with an initial design of what became a fantastic cover. My grandmother, Audrey Myers Baker, offered encouragement at the start of this project, although she did not live to see it finished. Evan, Trevor, and Sasha deserve great thanks for their patience. Watching them grow wiser along with this book has been a tremendous joy. Last, Zoë has endured and still championed this project through great obstacles. Her generous spirit and deep loyalty made this book possible in so many ways. She has always served faithfully as critic and reviewer of the first and last resort. Her friendship has buoyed and sustained me throughout. To her, I dedicate this book, at last.

Foreword

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

Roscoe 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.

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 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 time.

John F. Shafroth, governor from 1909 to early 1913, did better. Buoyed by a coalition of laborers, moral uplifters, women’s and religious groups, as well as by citizens anxious to secure efficient, honest government, he got the stiff-necked General Assembly to pass numerous Progressive measures, including giving citizens the right to initiate laws. In Denver, peppery judge Benjamin B. Lindsey donned the armor of righteousness, in his case a Prince Albert coat, to fight against child labor and for clean government. Lindsey’s muckraking serialized exposé of rotten Denver politics, The Beast, brought the city’s sins to national attention and prompted increasing numbers of Denverites to wage holy war against Mayor Robert W. Speer’s corrupt machine.

Between its high-water mark in the 1912–1916 period and 1920, the reform tide ebbed so completely that those schooled in the doings of the dead could easily see the delighted bones of Roscoe Conkling dancing on his grave. Shafroth, elected to the US Senate in 1912, was ousted in 1918 by the multimillionaire Lawrence C. Phipps. Woodrow Wilson’s reform ship was torpedoed by World War I. He was succeeded in 1920 by Warren Harding, a man whose commitment to domestic reform was thinner than the thinnest playing card in his slim mental deck. Ben Lindsey survived until the mid-1920s, when a combination of Ku Klux Klan forces and other enemies scuttled his career as a Denver judge.

The ups and downs of reform movements have often attracted scholarly attention. Colorado has been blessed with studies of the Populists and Progressives, most of them focusing on movers and shakers such as Edward P. Costigan, Lindsey, Shafroth, and Waite or on watershed events such as the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Unfortunately, the habit of looking at the big animals has stolen attention from thousands of lesser creatures—prairie dogs, sparrows, noisy grasshoppers. Although lower on the food chain than mountain lions and bears, those little critters were vital to the Progressive movement.

In The Gospel of Progressivism: Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900–1930, R. Todd Laugen provides a fresh view. By digging at the roots of Progressivism, by examining its coalitions and crosscurrents and its thousands of unsung supporters, he demonstrates the movement’s complexity. He shows the importance of Protestant religious groups, women’s clubs, and labor unions in creating the voice of the people that sustained Costigan, Lindsey, Shafroth, and other leaders. Laugen proves Roscoe Conkling wrong. Parties can be partially made of gush, deportment, canting self-righteous people, and ladies’ magazines.

Tackling a thirty-year time span, Laugen sifts through layers of Progressivism, demonstrating that it did not abruptly end when Warren Harding walked into the White House. By encouraging Colorado historians to compare the reform impulse in their state with similar efforts in other states, he charts a course leading to an understanding of the complex local issues and political coalitions that undergird the national Progressive movement. In offering a well-researched and sophisticated analysis of Progressivism in one state, he provides a model valuable to scholars across the country.

R. Todd Laugen received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his M.A. from Stanford, and his Ph.D. in 2005 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Denver. Since 2005 he has been an assistant professor in the History Department at Metropolitan State College of Denver, where in addition to teaching large classes he labors to educate student teachers. His pains to encourage his colleagues to embrace new teaching methods, his bicycle riding, and his residence near Boulder suggest that he too is a reformer. He is quick to point out, however, that he is not of the self-righteous, sanctimonious tribe that so offended Conkling.

The Gospel of Progressivism, Laugen’s first book, provides a well-constructed template for those engaged in writing Colorado political history. His multilayered, grassroots approach gives scholars a nuanced and sophisticated view of the past. As such, it is a worthy addition to the University Press of Colorado’s Timberline series, which strives to publish significant and path-breaking works on Colorado.

STEPHEN J. LEONARD

COEDITOR OF THE TIMBERLINE SERIES

THE GOSPEL OF PROGRESSIVISM

Introduction

The Varieties of Colorado Progressivism

Soon after cofounding a new independent voters group in 1905, Denver attorney Edward Costigan appeared before the South Broadway Christian Church to appeal for support. Although the church was not yet fifteen years old, its Romanesque facade suggested centuries of tradition. Standing at the altar in front of vaulted organ pipes, the Republican attorney condemned the evil forces corrupting local politics. As a young Republican activist, Costigan bridled at the violations of law and decency he had witnessed in his brief political career. He lost election to the state Senate a few years earlier when Democrats padded the registration rolls with unqualified voters. Democratic ward heelers had even ejected Costigan from his post as a watcher of registration clerks while the police turned a blind eye.

In light of such brazen abuse by party operatives, the attorney insisted that the church needed to assert a positive, an affirmative, a practical and a vigilant resistance. He solicited the sanction and baptism of the church on his nonpartisan voters’ group. With city and state representatives little more than creatures of certain private and selfish interests answering ultimately to party bosses and corporate donors, the Voters’ League demanded honest men in public office and honest and untrammeled legislation in the interests of the public. The league would back candidates from either party who demonstrated independence and integrity. The audience at the South Broadway Christian Church likely shared Costigan’s faith in the power of moral zeal and public exposure of political corruption. Located roughly a mile south of the more affluent Capitol Hill neighborhood, the stone church hosted Protestant congregants who did not have the financial resources of the city’s elites. Yet Costigan optimistically concluded that with the help of zealous congregations, decent government would triumph.¹ His new voters’ group helped launch a movement of religiously inspired reformers. These churchgoers would back Costigan when he later campaigned as the Progressive Party candidate for governor.

Soon after Costigan’s speech, Denver labor leader H. B. Waters similarly demanded political change. Invoking the Populist tradition, Waters asked, [S]hall the people rule or be ruled? Shall they own the government or be owned by it? The labor leader insisted that the tools of direct democracy, the initiative and referendum, would at last enable working people to challenge corporate and party corruption of the political process. With these changes in government, the power of bribery will be infinitely diluted. . . . The lobby will die; rings and bosses will lose their power.² Waters appealed directly to the working class, sharing the urgency of Costigan.

Workers too felt outrage over recent political events. Union campaigns had persuaded state legislators to grant mine workers an eight-hour day in 1899. Yet before the new law could take effect, the Colorado Supreme Court overturned it as an unconstitutional intrusion of lawmaking power. A few years later, mine workers in Cripple Creek confronted private guards and state police in pitched battles over working conditions. The deaths of thirty workers in 1903 offered a painful reminder of the chaos and inequities of economic life in Colorado. Waters believed that the tools of Progressive reform were the remedy workers needed to achieve a measure of justice and influence in government.

A comparable faith in the power of direct legislation animated activist women in Colorado during these years. Advocating these reforms in Denver, women faced partisan treachery, insolent and tyrannous political bosses, and all the powers that plunder, in the words of a sympathetic observer. Women’s club leaders especially urged members to approve the initiative and referendum to counter political corruption. These tools would also enable reforming women to secure a city-owned water utility, ending the manipulations and inefficiency of a privately owned firm. Upon achieving these political changes, organized clubwomen leveled a disconcerting blow to the . . . bosses of both parties.³ By 1912 an influential cohort of women’s club leaders championed similar reforms at the statehouse.

These Colorado Progressives appeared to share common enemies. The party boss and the corporate lobbyist undermined honest and responsive government. As political outsiders, these reformers advanced similar solutions: direct primary elections, the initiative, and nonpartisan campaigns. All claimed to speak for the public in defense of the common good against the selfish interests of party and corporate leaders. Their political crusades, in fact, renegotiated what was public and private in social and economic realms.

A final group of Colorado Progressives invoked the public in similar terms, but with different implications. By 1915, self-proclaimed mediation experts emerged who sought to protect the consuming public from the self-interested negotiations of corporate employers and organized labor. Strikes and labor unrest interrupted economic activity in ways that state investigations could prevent, they claimed. Consumers were the real party in interest in all disputes between employer and employe[e], insisted one administrative Progressive in the state. They suffer all the hardships and pay all the bills.⁴ These mediation reformers, however, did not organize a movement, nor did they challenge party control over politics. Still, they proposed another Progressive opposition between the people and special interests.

These Progressive groups in Colorado relied on a common language to defend the public against special interests. Their memberships overlapped in many instances. Clubwomen and union workers attended Protestant churches. Some unionists served as mediation experts. But the leadership of each group tended to remain distinct, hoping to mobilize the public along lines of religion, class, sex, or faith in scientific investigation. They determined to root out selfish political action with public exposure.

These leaders differed in their relative influence on the political landscape of Colorado and interacted in uniquely revealing ways. Reformers and journalists relying on the language of Protestant morality successfully reshaped the framework for political debate and motivated a core of activists to advance their version of Progressivism in the state. Costigan was one of many leaders advocating Christian citizenship. This meant nonpartisan, morally informed voting that challenged party machines and corporate corruption of politics. Its advocates insisted that prohibition and an end to prostitution and public gambling were political goals that would eliminate the rule of the party boss. Nonpartisan office holders could then defy corporate lobbyists, curb patronage-ridden government, lower taxes, and advance efficiency and economy. As one leader of Denver’s Ministerial Alliance preached, We Christians must be interested, not only in so-called moral questions, but in the whole great problem of democratic government. Another insisted that corporations have no business in politics! They are always a corrupting element. In 1912 this minister urged his congregants to support a Progressive candidate for office and thus to vote as you pray. Progressivism assumed the urgency of the gospel for such civic leaders.⁵

Religiously motivated political reform, however, did little to temper the dramatic confrontations between workers and corporate leaders in this rapidly industrializing western state. In communities such as Cripple Creek and Huerfano County, as well as on the tramway lines of Denver, workers challenged their bosses for control over their economic and political lives. Workplace disputes easily became violent clashes. Local and state police often proved unable to protect life and preserve order. The class problem, which so engaged nationally recognized reformers such as Jane Addams, Paul Kellogg, and John Commons, proved particularly intense and intractable in this Rocky Mountain region.

Drawing on Colorado’s Populist tradition, labor reformers advocated a more class-conscious vision of Progressivism than the religious activists. Colorado Populism began in the 1890s as a movement of farmers and workers but became increasingly non-agrarian in its focus. The election of Populist governor Davis Waite in 1892 gave workers a brief glimpse of the promise of a sympathetic government. Waite unsuccessfully confronted the depression of 1893 and the plummeting price of silver. Yet his administration defended the right of industrial workers to organize and strike for improved working conditions. With Waite’s support, the demand for the eight-hour day for mine workers emerged as a key legacy of Colorado Populists.⁶ Industrial laborers backed the Populists in hopes of securing economic legislation to counter and curb the power of mine owners.

Party ties to corporate monopolies, especially within the state legislature, led unionists to champion reforms to restore lost economic and political independence. In 1896, Pueblo unionists called workers together to create the Colorado State Federation of Labor (CSFL) to focus their political activism. The platform demanded the liberation of the General Assembly from the grip of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and other companies who had a stranglehold on . . . the majority of legislators.⁷ Monopoly power remained the chief enemy of working-class citizenship. Court injunctions and limits on striking further weakened the economic power of workers. Labor progressives consistently struggled to define the public interest in terms that included a living wage for workers.

Unlike Protestant Progressives, labor activists only enjoyed a few key moments of political success. These moments particularly reveal the importance of coalitions and allies within state bureaucracy. Working with women activists around 1910, labor Progressives persuaded legislators to approve the initiative, referendum, and government protections for workers. In 1912 this coalition of labor and women activists used the initiative process to enact new protections for male and female workers as well as mothers and children. World War I provided a favorable context for the State Bureau of Labor Statistics to improve enforcement of labor law. Repeated waves of violent strikes in the state, however, undermined broad support for labor Progressivism. Even after the massacre at Ludlow in 1914, most Colorado voters demonstrated greater enthusiasm for prohibition than efforts to restrain the barony of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose officials dominated the hinterlands of the state.⁸ The labor-women’s coalition fractured over moral reform.

Clearly, male industrial workers were not the sole concern of Progressive reformers. They also focused their attention on the problems of children and working-class women. Between 1902 and 1914, a number of activist women mobilized the female public to protect wage-earning women and children. They, like Protestant ministers, wanted to rid cities of prostitution and gambling. Women’s club leaders joined labor activists in condemning the abusive power that business owners wielded over workers. Again, these problems were linked to party machines.

Women’s club leaders appealed to their members in different terms than did labor or Protestant Progressives. The state’s first female state senator, Denver clubwoman Helen Ring Robinson, insisted that women should be elected to office because they represented the maternal in politics.⁹ Motherhood suggested both a condition of vulnerability and the potential for improving a broad range of conditions outside the home. Like Chicago women in these years, Denver’s women’s club activists incorporated notions of maternalism, motherhood, and municipal housekeeping into a vision of a better society. This included social welfare, economic justice, and government responsiveness to citizens.¹⁰ Although some female activists called for political changes that were not strictly maternalist, most achieved their greatest successes and forged the broadest coalitions when appealing to women as mothers.

Because Colorado’s cities lacked the extensive settlement house network so important for women’s politics in cities like New York and Chicago, women’s clubs in Colorado offered the main sites for mobilizing a feminine public in support of Progressive reform. Enfranchised since 1893, Colorado women participated in politics more directly than their sisters in most other states. Women’s club leaders made consistent efforts to rally members along feminine rather than party lines. They made journalistic appeals to the organized women of the state and launched educational and civic campaigns to focus the political influence of both middle- and working-class women independent of party affiliation. Although parties did offer alternatives to clubs for some activist women, most celebrated nonpartisanship.¹¹ Women Progressives, both within and outside the parties, secured their major legislative victories in coalitions and with key institutional allies like Denver’s juvenile court, the state Board of Charities and Corrections, and the Child Welfare Bureau.

Ultimately women and labor Progressives had less impact on the class problem in Colorado than did administrative Progressives. This latter group insisted that industrial warfare could be scientifically investigated and impartially mediated. Labor peace could prevail, they insisted, without government reforms to alter the balance of power between worker and corporation. Organized labor, in the eyes of state industrial commissioners, appeared an equal competitor with capital, issuing demands based on its own selfish interests. In their view, the public interest meant an uninterrupted supply of consumer goods, even at the expense of a living wage for workers.

For all of these Progressive groups in Colorado the struggle between the people and corrupting special interests was consistently gendered. The contest to represent the public at the state and local levels often involved struggles over the political meaning of manhood and womanhood. Through political cartoons, newspaper photographs, and visual metaphors, Colorado reformers and their partisan opponents sought to represent the public as if it had inescapable implications for male and female citizenship. Protestant reformers insisted that their nonpartisan, Progressive public undergo a renegotiation of masculinity. Confronting the traditional links among party loyalty, civic activism, and male voting, religious reformers sought to replace the centrality of party organizations with nonpartisan associations of morally virtuous male citizenry.

In contrast, union visions of restrained manhood rested on Populist ideals of economic independence and alliances with sympathetic party