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...

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...

In his second year as Denver’s juvenile court judge, Benjamin Barr Lindsey invited police commissioners to his courtroom. Judge Lindsey had just begun a series of innovative reforms to help delinquent children. However, urban temptations continually led his charges astray. Gambling halls, saloons, and brothels operating chiefly in downtown Denver mixed closely with working-class homes. Numerous boys and girls had come before the judge to relate stories of easy access to alcohol, drunken children as young as four, and friends lured into prostitution. After a series of fruitless appeals to the district attorney and police to uphold city ordinances regulating...

In July 1908, Denver hosted the Democratic National Convention. William Jennings Bryan received the presidential nomination on the first ballot with few dissenting votes. Colorado voters had overwhelmingly supported Bryan in his previous presidential bids, and 1908 would prove no exception. His pro-silver stance was only partly the reason. When he came to Denver, Bryan had developed a reputation as a leading Progressive Democrat. Behind his 1908 campaign slogan “Shall the People Rule?” Bryan decried corporate manipulations of politics. His party platform included a plank to limit the use of injunctions against organized labor and another in support of woman...

Just six years after the horrific violence of the Ten Days’ War after Ludlow, class warfare erupted in Denver. On August 5, 1920, an angry mob surrounded private guards employed by the Denver Tramway Company to break a five-day-old strike. Trapped inside the South Denver tramway facility on Broadway, more than one hundred strikebreakers feared the swelling crowd outside, which threw stones and lit a perimeter fence on fire. Guards then fired shots from inside the tramway facility, killing two nineteen-year-old men who were running away from the scene. Several others were wounded, but after midnight the police restored order...

In his 1906 Annual Message to Congress, President Roosevelt urged support for a bill to mandate the government investigation of labor disputes before allowing workers to strike.¹ In an “age of great corporate and labor combinations,” the president insisted that “the public has itself an interest which can not wisely be disregarded; an interest not merely of general convenience, for the question of a just and proper public policy must also be considered.”² Congress at the time was unmoved. Yet Roosevelt’s proposal signaled a growing Progressive movement to compel the investigation and arbitration of major labor conflicts. This movement peaked...

On his national lecture tours, Judge Ben Lindsey often celebrated the political work of Colorado clubwomen. His collaboration with activist women was more interesting to eastern audiences because of early twentieth-century debates about women’s suffrage.¹ Since 1893, Colorado women had voted on an equal footing with men. Women in Illinois and eastern states, by contrast, waited another twenty years for the vote in most elections. National women’s suffrage campaigners in these years reported regularly on the Colorado experiment. Progressives were keen to highlight the achievements Colorado women secured with the vote.

During the 1912 congressional debate over whether to extend...

The year 1924 proved pivotal for Colorado Progressives. While most women’s club leaders sought to mobilize members along feminine rather than party lines, Colorado labor leaders hoped to sustain a national movement devoted to the economic problems of farmers and workers. The promise of Robert M. La Follette’s Progressive presidential campaign captivated unionists across the state. It inspired hope for a revival of the Progressive Party coalition of 1912.

Yet the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado shifted the political campaign season decisively. Beginning with an election to recall Denver mayor Ben Stapleton in August 1924, the Klan...

Colorado Progressives left a complicated and unfinished legacy: demands that government officials curb prostitution, gambling, and alcohol use while easing burdens on taxpayers; a faith that class conflict could be resolved through scientific investigation despite repeated outbreaks of labor war; and a growing uncertainty about government interventions and concentrated authority in the hands of experts. Protestant reformers and those appealing to church-going voters reified a potent opposition between the vulnerable, respectable citizen and the threatening masculine world of the urban party machine. The link between Protestant morality and reform unexpectedly helped the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado achieve political successes...