The Beast (Timberline) - Softcover

Lindsey, Benjain B.; O'higgins, Harvey Jerrold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870819534 ISBN 13: 9780870819537

Verlag: University Press of Colorado, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey’s exposé of big business’s influence on Colorado and Denver politics, a best seller when it was originally published in 1911, is now back in print. The Beast reveals the plight of working-class Denver citizens—in particular those Denver youths who ended up in Lindsey’s court day after day. These encounters led him to create the juvenile court, one of the first courts in the country set up to deal specifically with young delinquents. In addition, Lindsey exposes the darker side of many well-known figures in Colorado history, including Mayor Robert W. Speer, Governor Henry Augustus Buchtel, Will Evans, and many others. When first published, The Beast was considered every bit the equal Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and sold over 500,000 copies. More than just a fascinating slice of Denver history, this book—and Lindsey’s court— offered widespread social change in the United States.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The founding judge of Denver’s Juvenile Court from 1900 to 1927, Benjamin Barr Lindsey is credited as a pioneer of the U.S. juvenile court system. A 1914 poll ranked Lindsey among the ten greatest living Americans, along with by Thomas Edison and Theodore Roosevelt, but by 1929 he was ousted from his judgeship, was disbarred in the State of Colorado, and is now almost forgotten. He authored many other books during his lifetime, including The Revolt of Modern Youth (with Wainwright Evans, 1925), The Companionate Marriage (with Wainwright Evans, 1927), and his autobiography The Dangerous Life (with Rube Burrough,1931).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE BEAST

By BEN B. LINDSEY

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

Copyright © 1910 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87081-953-7

Contents

Introduction........................................................xiThe Beast...........................................................3I. Finding the Cat.................................................7II. The Cat Purrs..................................................26III. The Cat Keeps on Purring......................................44IV. The Beast in the Democracy.....................................55V. The Beast in the County Court...................................74VI. The Beast and the Children.....................................95VII. The Beast, Graft and Business.................................113VIII. At Work with the Children....................................133IX. The Beast and the Ballot.......................................153X. The Beast and the Ballot (Continued)............................170XI. The Beast at Bay...............................................185XII. The Beast and the Supreme Court...............................203XII. The Beast and Reform..........................................220XIV. A City Pillaged...............................................237XV. The Beast, the Church and the Governorship.....................257XVI. Hunting the Beast.............................................281XVII. A Victory at Last............................................299XVIII. Conclusion..................................................323

Chapter One

FINDING THE CAT

I CAME to Denver in the spring of 1 1880, at the age of eleven, as mildly inoffensive a small boy as ever left a farm - undersized and weakly, so that at the age of seventeen I commonly passed as twelve, and so unaccustomed to the sight of buildings that I thought the five-story Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and magnificence. I had been living with my maternal grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Tennessee, where I had been born; and I had come with my younger brother to join my parents, who had finally decided that Denver was to be their permanent home. The conductors on the trains had taken care of us, because my father was a railroad man, at the head of the telegraph system; and we had been entertained on the way by the stories of an old forty-niner, with a gray moustache, who told us how he had shot buffalo on those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I was not precocious; his stories interested me more than anything else on the journey; and I stared so hard at the old pioneer that I should recognize him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street.

My schooling was not peculiar; there was nothing "holier than thou" in my bringing up. My father, being a Roman Catholic convert from the Episcopalian Church, sent me to Notre Dame, Indiana, to be educated; and there, to be sure, I read the "Lives of the Saints," aspired to be a saint, and put pebbles in my small shoes to "mortify the flesh," because I was told that a good priest, Father Hudson - whom I all but worshipped - used to do so. But even at Notre Dame, and much more in Denver, I was homesick for the farm; and at last I was allowed to return to Jackson to be cared for by my Protestant relatives. They sent me to a Baptist school till

I was seventeen. And when I was recalled to Denver, because of the failure of my father's health, I went to work to help earn for the household, with no strong attachment for any church and with no recognized membership in any. I suppose there is no one who does not look back upon his past and wonder what he should have become in life if this or that crucial event had not occurred to set his destiny. It seems to me that if, it had not been for the sudden death of my father I, too, might have found our jungle beast a domestic tabby, and have fed it its prey without realizing what I was about. I should have been a lawyer, I know; for I had had that ambition from my earliest boyhood, and I had been confirmed in it by my success in debating at school. (Once, at Notre Dame, I spoke for a full hour in successful defence of the proposition that Colorado was the "greatest state in the Union," and proved at least that I had a lawyer's "wind.") But I should probably have been a lawyer who has learned his pleasant theories of life in the colleges. And on the night that my father died, the crushing realities of poverty put out an awful and compelling hand on me, and my struggle with them began.

I was eighteen years old, the eldest of four children. I had been "writing proofs" in the Denver land office, for claimants who had filed on Government land; and I had saved $150 of my salary before my work there ceased. I found, after my father's death, that this $150 was all we had in the world, and $130 of it went for funeral expenses. His life had been insured for $15,000, and we believed that the premiums had all been paid, but we could not find the last receipt; the agent denied having received the payment; the policy had lapsed on the day before my father's death; and we got nothing. Our furniture had been mortgaged; we were allowed only enough of it to furnish a little house on Santa F Avenue; and later we moved to a cottage on lower West Colfax Avenue, in which Negroes have since lived.

I went to work at a salary of $10 a month, in a real estate office - as office boy - and carried a "route" of newspapers in the morning before the office opened, and did janitor work at night when it closed. After a month of that, I got a better place, as office boy, with a mining company, at a salary of $25 a month. And finally, my younger brother found work in a law office and I "swapped jobs" with him - because I wished to study law!

It was the office of Mr. R. D. Thompson, who still practises in Denver; and his example as an incorruptibly honest lawyer has been one of the best and strongest influences of my life.

I had that one ambition - to be a lawyer. Associated with it I seem to have had an unusual curiosity about politics. And where I got either the ambition or the curiosity, I have no idea. My father's mother was a Greenleaf, and related to the author of "Greenleaf on Evidence," but my father himself had nothing of the legal mind. As a boy, living in Mississippi, he had joined the Confederate army when he was preparing for the University of Virginia, had attained the rank of captain, had become General Forrest's private secretary, and had written - or largely helped to write - General Forrest's autobiography. He was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive genius, with a really remarkable command of English, and an absorbing love of books. My mother's father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian; her mother was a Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a Methodist. The members of the family were practical, strong-willed, able men and women, but with no bent, that I know of, toward either law or politics.

And yet, one of the most vivid memories of my childhood in Jackson is of attending a political rally with my grandfather and hearing a Civil War veteran declaim against Republicans who "waved the bloody shirt" - a memory so strong that for years afterward I never saw a Republican without expecting to see the gory shirt on his back, and wondering vaguely why he was not in jail. When I came to Denver, where the Republicans were dominant, I felt myself in the land of the enemy. And when I "swapped" myself into Mr. Thompson's office, I was surprised to find that my employer, though a Republican from Pittsburg,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University Press of Colorado
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0870819534
• ISBN 13: 9780870819537
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 239
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland