Chapter 14

—But Scenery Is Not Enough

To fling Ossa upon Olympus, and to pile Pelion with all its growth of leafy woods on Ossa.

—Odyssey, XI, 315

They came to the Delectable Mountains.

—Pilgrim’s Progress

COLORADO, the most spectacular of the mountain states, lives on many things—scenery, beet sugar, gold, molybdenum, livestock, tourists, and tuberculosis. As to this last I heard an ungentle and tasteless Coloradan complain, “Some fiend in human form discovered that rest, not altitude, was the best cure for t.b., and so the tuberculosis cases don’t come to Colorado so much any more, and the economy of the state suffered terribly as a result, so I suppose you could say that t.b. is killing us, not the patients.”

Very little in the world can compare to the scenery of Colorado. The vistas here stretch the eyes, enlighten the heart, and make the spirit humble. Colorado has more than 1,500 peaks—literally—more than 10,000 feet high, and of the sixty-five in the United States higher than 14,000 feet, it has not less than fifty-one. This is indeed the top of the nation. Colorado has the highest automobile road in the country, the highest automobile races, the highest ski courses, the highest astronomical laboratory and the highest railway tunnel and the highest lake and the highest yacht anchorage and the highest suspension bridge. It has two national parks and six national monuments, fourteen million acres of national forest and more than seven thousand miles of fishing streams. And no matter where you turn, up and down or left and right, the overwhelming variety and magnitude of the view makes you blink. But—the state has had to learn these past years that scenery alone, no matter how stupefyingly dramatic, does not pay the bills. Scenery alone is not enough.

Colorado, like Oregon among the western states, is distinctly on the conservative side. It is conservative politically, economically, financially. I do not mean reactionary. Just conservative—with the kind of conservativeness that does not budge an inch for anybody or anything unless pinched and pushed. For instance, one point among several, Colorado is the thirty-ninth state in amount of state aid to education. Or consider reconversion. Washington and California, as we know, worked hard and concretely on postwar planning, to ease the gap toward peace. Colorado did almost nothing—and was proud of it. It has ridden for year after year on its prestige, its reputation. Nothing better illustrates this than affairs in Denver, as we shall soon see.

But to return to scenery and tourist traffic for a moment. In a normal year tourists bring into the state something like sixty-five million dollars. This sum is not to be sneezed at, but it could be greater. I heard complaints generally that “Colorado has missed the boat on tourism.” Scenery is to Colorado what sunshine is to California, but it makes nothing like California’s effort to capitalize on this asset, dramatize and buttress it. There will be many, I grant, who will congratulate Colorado for its lack of organized booster spirit. But progressive Coloradans themselves worry about how the state is becoming a backwater. Until quite recently, for instance, it employed no director of public relations and the governor had no press advisor. This was mostly the result of negative influence by the Denver Post, which held that it, exclusively, provided enough publicity for Colorado; it vehemently opposed creation of any other agency. As a consequence the state paid comparatively small attention to roads, country hotels, and the like; it built no enterprises like Sun Valley, and the general mood was to give the visitor a quick glimpse of Pike’s Peak, and then let him get out.

Colorado is divided down the middle by the sharp and impenetrable spine of the continental divide; its western and eastern sections differ considerably, though the cleavage is not so sharp as in Washington. The western slope faces Salt Lake City, the eastern Denver. The west, behind the divide, is mostly mining and livestock country; the east is irrigated and merges into the Great Plains. The western slope is dominated by two or three land-owning families; the eastern—including Denver—has one overriding magnate, Claude K. Boettcher. I use this somewhat old-fashioned word, “magnate,” because Mr. Boettcher so precisely evokes its spirit. The word “tycoon” connotes a touch of the parvenu, the adventurous. Boettcher is no parvenu. He is solid like a plinth, adhesive, and pachydermous. If I were a casting director in Hollywood and wanted a type to play one of the railroad barons of the last century, I would hire Mr. Boettcher at once. This margrave of the sugar beets, this padishah of cement, potash, mining, what not, one of the richest men in America and one of the least known, is a magnate like the antique Astors and Vanderbilts.

But the chief element of difference between eastern and western Colorado is water. Touch water, and you touch everything; about water the state is as sensitive as a carbuncle. Water—as is true all over the West—is everybody’s chief preoccupation. In the briefest kind of summary, the situation is that western Colorado has more water than it can use, eastern less than it needs. Hence the east must have irrigation and the problem—this is reminiscent of California—is to get the water over. This the west resents. It thinks it is being milked of water for the benefit of capitalists in Denver which, in many respects, is almost as “foreign” a city as Wilmington, Delaware or Brookline, Massachusetts. The east replies that the water is “spare” water and that the west wastes it anyway.

Water is blood in Colorado; only California among American states has a greater irrigated area. And I know no state with quite so many water issues:

(1) The Big Thompson Diversion project. This is a thirteen-mile tunnel through the divide, built by the Bureau of Reclamation to tap the Colorado River headwaters. It will, in effect, make the river pump itself backward through the mountains, to provide three hundred thousand acre-feet per year for irrigation on the eastern slopes. The project is built, but the war delayed the finishing touches, and as of the moment it is not yet in operation.

(2) A still larger diversion scheme is planned for the Blue River, a northern tributary of the Colorado, with a twenty-mile tunnel that will produce 500,000 acre-feet per year. This is a joint project of the Bureau of Reclamation, the state of Colorado, and Denver; it will irrigate 320,000 acres now insufficiently supplied with water.

(3) The Gunnison River project. This, according to plans, will do for the Arkansas River valley (in southern Colorado) what Big Thompson and Blue River will do for the north.

(4) MVA. The conservative interests of course oppose MVA, and Denver has been the focus of more propaganda against it than any other city. MVA, it is claimed, would upset Colorado’s own irrigation schemes; the issue is not only fear of government authority, but loss of water. That MVA would interfere with Colorado irrigation has, however, by no means been proved. Governor John C. Vivian, whom I would rank as one of the dullest American governors I met, told me, “The courts have held for fifty years that the man who makes beneficial use of water owns not the water itself but the use of it. Now this MVA thing comes along and three men in Washington could take our water away. What do we care about navigation up around Fargo? We want our own water here!” The governor, incidentally, once publicly said that, to beat MVA, he would spend the whole state surplus of nine million dollars if necessary.

(5) Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska have been at each other’s throats for a quarter of a century, arguing in the courts about disposition of water from the North Platte; each of the three states, by long-established “filings,” gets its “take” of North Platte water. Colorado says (in the person of Magnate Boettcher who put it this way to me): “We’ve been here for seventy years. We made the prairie bloom. We turned sagebrush into sugar beets. We did all this when Nebraska and Kansas were nothing but territory fit for jack rabbits.” Wyoming, too, bitterly resents what it calls Nebraska’s “grab.” But by a recent Supreme Court judgment Nebraska is to get 75 per cent of North Platte water, with Colorado and Wyoming dividing the remainder.

(6) The Colorado River Compact and the Mexican Water Treaty. This we shall mention later where it more properly belongs, in connection with Arizona.

Historically Colorado is of mixed origin; in whole or in part it has variously belonged to Spain, France, Mexico, and Texas. There is still a strong Spanish underlay in the southern tier of counties; all these bear Spanish names.¹ Its modern annals begin with the discovery of gold in 1858, nine years after the California Gold Rush, and the mines at Leadville and Cripple Creek became a mud-and-canvas Mecca. It is an interesting revelation of the national character—James Truslow Adams makes a point of this—that California and the far West, though farther away, should have been settled before the states of the Rockies and Great Plains. It is as if a crazy impetuosity carried the first frontiersmen as far as they could possibly go geographically; they swooped straight across the continent without pause (of course this generalization is too broad); then later a second wave, less volatile, descended on the states between.

Coloradans are proud of being Coloradans, and the state has a large proportion of citizens born within its borders. This is in acute contrast to Oklahoma and Arizona, say. A very real cleavage, especially in Denver, is that between old-timers born locally and those who moved in from outside; I felt this more strongly in Colorado than anywhere else in the country, except possibly New England. This prompts one to a word about the Indians who, after all, were in Colorado even before the first families of Denver got there. Colorado is the only western state where I never once heard the word “Indian” spoken, which is the more interesting in that the Utes were the only Indian tribe in the United States—like the Araucanians in Chile—never conquered. Today they play no role in state life at all.

The total wealth of Colorado was estimated in 1937 at $3,434,000,000 and the foundation of the state’s economy is not, as one would be apt to think, mining, but agriculture. Mining began to decline thirty years ago. The easy gold got scooped out; the easy money ended when it became necessary to use complex and expensive metallurgical processes to refine ore.² People turned instead to sugar beets and livestock. Today, it is not gold or even comparatively rare metals like uranium and vanadium that are the heart of the mining industry that remains, but prosaic coal. Colorado is the first state in the union in coal reserves, with—in theory—enough deposits to last forever.

Colorado has more big game than any other American state, and Denver is the biggest manufactory of fishhooks in the world; Colorado Springs is the glisteningly suave “Newport of the West,” and the greatest man the state ever produced was Judge Ben Lindsey, who was of course reviled by the city he worked so hard to improve. Once, when he sentenced a utilities executive to jail, the executive shouted in the courtroom, “This state has more sunshine and more bastards than any place on earth!”

“Top of the Nation”

I drove into Denver along the sharp steel-blue curtain of the divide. We saw antelope; we saw the B-29’s drilling invisible holes overhead; we saw the turkeys. These are herded just like sheep, thousands to the herd, and they have commendable utility; they eat grasshoppers out of the wheat, and then are duly eaten themselves. We saw something that I would not have believed could exist-—a coal mine protruding through a wheat field; we saw the untidy beet dumps in clusters around the small, ugly, chugging sugar factories. We passed fields of crest grass, for which the government furnishes seed as part of the soil conservation program; we passed haystackers at work and ghost villages that the automobile assassinated. In the horse-and-buggy days a village with a post office and general store could support itself, but not now, inasmuch as people with a car can drive greater distances to a bigger or more advantageous market. We looked at a hamlet called Nunn, with a bold sign WATCH NUNN GROW on the water tower. The population of Nunn is exactly 196.

The wheat looked different from that in Washington or Montana. Here it is harvested by a binder, which leaves the shocks in the field to be threshed later. Colorado does not go in for combines much. First, a combine leaves no straw, and there is a big demand for straw in Denver; second, a binder can cut wheat while still moist, whereas it has to be bone dry before a combine can handle it; the binder thus makes harvesting possible a few days earlier, and lessens the risk of damage by bad weather. Hail can kill a county full of wheat in half an hour. If hail could be abolished, there would be no beets or corn in Colorado. People who bought wheat farms at twenty dollars an acre last year have paid for their land already, with one tremendous crop.

Later I drove from Denver out to Boulder and Central City to see the forests. Colorado has hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin timber—much of it in carefully protected national parks—and scarcely a single mill. From the point of view of conservation this is admirable. Consider the depraved looting of Oregon by contrast. But it isn’t just conservation that keeps processing mills out of Colorado; freight rates are the major reason. Ship unprocessed timber to the East, and the rate is favorable. Make a plank out of a log, let alone pulp or paper, and it jumps prohibitively.

We watched the cattle in the high pastures. They are born and raised here, fattened in the local feed lots, slaughtered in the Colorado yards, and sold all over the country, including Denver—as Kansas City beef! We watched the sheep. The herders bring them up to government-owned land, near the snow, every winter, where grazing is free except for a nominal charge. Here too, freight rates become a problem. To ship raw or unprocessed wool east is comparatively cheap, but to clean wool takes three-quarters of the weight away, and on this “scoured” wool, the rate goes up. The railways prefer to ship the heavier wool anyway, since it makes a bigger freight load. So Colorado has no wool scouring plants.

At Boulder, one of the most briskly lovely towns I have ever seen, we visited the university, which is the seat and fountainhead of much of what liberalism obtains in the state, and which has become a kind of intellectual capital (like Chapel Hill in the South) for the whole mountain region. There has been a lively issue lately over academic freedom; the episode resembles to an extent the famous brawl at the University of Texas, which we will deal with in due course—but it has a different ending. Regents at the University of Colorado are chosen by what is known as the “Michigan system,” i.e. they are elected by vote of the people on a party basis. Nominations were, however, usually reserved for deserving party hacks; to get on the board of regents was something like being promoted to the House of Lords. But in 1944 the character of the board changed. President Robert L. Stearns was on leave of absence with the armed forces—where he made a brilliant record—and the president in his absence was R. G. Gustavson, professor of chemistry and a vivid and hard-hitting progressive. Gustavson later became dean of the faculties at the University of Chicago, and then (September, 1946) chancellor of the University of Nebraska. The regents, with two new reactionary members, began to stir up trouble, and it became known that four professors had been passed over for routine promotion and salary increases. That this was pure discrimination and that the four were being disciplined for “liberalism” could not be doubted. Of the four one was a Jew, Joseph Cohen, professor of philosophy; one, Clay Malick, was called a “radical” because he once told a political science class that the British cabinet system was as good as ours; one, Professor Edwin Walker of the department of religion, had been instrumental in inviting Harry Bridges to address a student assembly; one, Professor Morris E. Garnsey, chairman of the department of economics, was an adherent of MVA. Indeed partisanship over MVA had a good deal to do with the whole issue. In the end—from the point of view of academic freedom—all turned out happily. President Stearns came back and took a strong line in favor of the “radical” professors, public opinion became aroused, the board of regents backed down, and the four duly received their promotions.³

Central City is totally something else again. This is a shadow town like Virginia City in Nevada. Sagging boardwalks and yellowish torn curtains over cracked windows; stairways frayed and broken; dogeared timbers holding back yellow mud in what was once one of the great mines of the world. Central City had been dying for a long time; the War Production Board ban on gold and silver mining killed it. But Central City is celebrated for two reasons other than the mines. The Teller House, an ancient and proud hotel, contains the original Face on the Barroom Floor; it’s still there to see. Everybody knows the old ballad this evoked:

’Twas a balmy summer evening, and a goodly crowd was there

Which well-nigh filled Joe’s barroom on the corner of the square,

And as songs and witty stories came through the open door,

A vagabond crept slowly in and posed upon the floor.

And at the end—

Another drink and with chalk in hand, the vagabond began

To sketch a face that well might buy the soul of any man,

Then as he placed another lock upon the shapely head

With a fearful shriek he leaped and fell across the picture dead.

Also, until the war, Central City had a theater festival that brought summer visitors from everywhere. The opera house—how revealing it is that these old mining towns should all have had their formidably ornate operas!—was refurbished for the occasion, and performances were put on like Othello with Walter Huston, The Merry Widow with Gladys Swarthout, and A Doll’s House with Ruth Gordon. All this in a deserted mining village tucked high and almost invisible in the Rocky Mountains !

Colorado is, as a matter of fact, a state famous for theatrical talent. The Elitch open air theater in Denver has a sumptuous history, and Douglas Fairbanks, Ernest Truex, Fredric March, Harold Lloyd, Fred Stone, Edward G. Robinson, are among figures of stage and screen who are, or were, Colorado born.

Some Factors in Colorado Politics

(1) Seventeenth Street. This is the Denver financial and banking center, the equivalent of Wall Street; for years it pretty well dominated the state. But nowadays, though still powerful, it doesn’t always have its own way. And although it absolutely controls the state legislature, it doesn’t carry so much weight in the city; for instance FDR carried Denver every time he ran. I asked one eminent Seventeenth Street tycoon whether it was really true that his brethren ran Colorado, and he sighed in reply, “Ah, if it were only true!”

(2) The Denver Post, which for years occupied itself largely by grinding out hate.

(3) Industry, which is of course tied up with Seventeenth Street. For decades the most important single enterprise was the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Pueblo, owned by the Rockefellers. The Rockefeller people sold it in 1945, however, to other eastern interests. Colorado Fuel and Iron made two things indispensable to the growing West—barbed wire and rails—and hence prospered. One should also mention the cement companies in which Boettcher is the main figure, and the utilities. The chief power companies are the Southern Colorado Power Company and the Public Service Company of Colorado, which was recently separated by the SEC from the Cities Service Company (Doherty interests) and is now autonomous.

Colorado has some superb railways, and nothing is more brilliant than the record of the lustrous streamliners which bore their way to Chicago, 1,052 miles away, every day in fifteen hours—the Burlington Zephyrs, the Union Pacific streamliners, and the Rock Island Rockets. But the railways have, in a way, less influence in Colorado than elsewhere in the West, if only because the first transcontinental lines did not cross it. The Union Pacific by-passed Denver for Cheyenne, and the Santa Fe went through New Mexico. Naughty politics played no role in this; the obstacle was simply the barrier of the mountains.

(4) Sugar. By far the biggest Colorado company is the Great Western Sugar Company, a Boettcher concern. In fact it was the Boettcher family and other German settlers at the turn of the century who first brought sugar beets to the state. The industry grew prodigiously during and after the shortages of World War I, and since that time, as everybody knows, sugar has been a headache—nationally and internationally—of migraine size. To tell the story in any detail would take a book, and I must beg indulgence for attempting to foreshorten into a paragraph a subject of the most dense and abstruse difficulty. The long and short of it is that sugar, more than any other product used in America, is supported by a fantastically artificial price. The story has ramifications all over the place. For instance it was the large domestic sugar producers who assisted greatly in the movement for Filipino independence; the first idea—though it hasn’t quite worked out that way—was that commonwealth status would push Filipino sugar outside the American free-trade area, so that it would be able to compete with domestic sugar only after climbing a tariff barrier. At the moment, however, Filipino sugar comes in duty free; a preferential tariff will begin to operate in 1954. Meantime the American consumer—and taxpayer—is helping to pay for sugar subsidies to Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and for a price arrangement with Cuba, to keep Cuba from exploding, which it always does if it cannot sell enough sugar to the United States. Without these arrangements, beet sugar, a highly synthetic industry to say the least, could hardly survive. Finally, there is the domestic subsidy to the American cane and beet producers. This was set at $4.00 per ton for beet sugar in 1945, though the sugar growers wanted it higher. The farmer at present receives $13.50 per ton of sugar beets. Of this roughly $6.90 comes from the processor, $2.60 from the federal government under the Sugar Act, and $4.00 as a subsidy payment (also federal) by the Commodity Corporation. But both growers and processors want further help. Late in 1946 sugar was the only commodity in the United States still on the ration list. Despite every stimulus to the domestic industry, there isn’t enough to go around, though plenty of cheap sugar is grown in the world.

The sugar bloc in Congress, comprising western and southern senators both, has a legislative power—and veto power—like none other in the country except possibly the silver bloc. And, even more than the silver bloc, it represents an extreme minority of interest. Only 3 per cent of American farmers grow sugar beet and cane; the entire processing industry employs no more than twenty-five thousand people. But sugar is spread through many states—beets grow in seventeen, cane in two—which gives it thirty-eight senators out of ninety-six,⁴ and they can certainly make a noise.

(5) The Colorado Education Association (an organization of schoolteachers founded in 1875), the American Legion, and groups similarly familiar in many states. We might also mention hangovers from the Ku Klux Klan; for Colorado more than any northern state except Oregon and Indiana, had a strong Klan movement after World War I. One former governor, an overt Klansman, was arrested on a stock fraud not long ago and sentenced to jail. Also one might include old age pensionnaires—who are protected by quite generous legislation—and the liquor interests. Finally, the wool and cattlemen’s associations.

(6) A sizable Spanish-American vote, and a considerable Catholic influence. There are at least twenty-five thousand “Mexicans” in Denver alone.

(7) Labor. The CIO membership in the state is only about eight thousand, that of the AF of L more and of the Railway Brotherhoods somewhat less. But labor is an active and growing force, and the CIO takes credit for cutting some Republican majorities in half in the last election. The legislature passed in 1943 the Colorado Labor Peace Act—so-called although there had not been a single wartime strike—that wiped out every labor gain since the Ludlow Massacre in 1914; it set a record in the nation for antilabor legislation, and was even denounced by Westbrook Pegler. The courts nullified some sections of it after a time, and no substitute bill has ever been passed—which Colorado labor counts as a considerable victory, if negative. The CIO itself is badly split. One wing lines up with the United Steel Workers, another with the International Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, a union which is itself divided. The wage scale for miners is the lowest in the nation. A man at Anaconda gets only $7.75 per day; but at Pueblo or at the molybdenum works at Climax (which produces 85 per cent of the world’s molybdenum), the rate may be as low as $5.00.

(8) The legislature. This is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican. Several members are wealthy lawyers with corporation practices, like Robert G. Bosworth and Arthur H. Laws who helped write the labor bill; others are the state’s biggest dry farmers and cattlemen. It is comparatively rare in the United States for men of such beam and caliber to bother with active participation in a legislature. But Seventeenth Street watches its interests hard.

(9) The parties and personalities. In sixteen national elections up to 1944, Colorado went Democratic eight times, Republican eight times, so it is touch-and-go on the presidential level. Roosevelt carried it, as we know, in 1932 and 1936, but Willkie won by about fifteen thousand votes in 1940, and Dewey in 1944 by about thirty thousand. One interesting politician is a Republican liberal, former governor Ralph L. Carr who was beaten for the senate recently, in part because he took a strong pro-Nisei stand when Japanese exclusion was a burning issue. Once, when a flash strike seemed to be getting out of hand, Carr sent state troops to protect labor, instead of intimidating it, something almost unheard of in Colorado.

About Colorado’s senators little need be said, except that Edwin C. Johnson (Dem.) is one of the most extroverted men in Washington. He has never been beaten in an election; nobody in Colorado could possibly beat him, if only because he gets the upper echelon of Republican as well as Democratic votes. At the moment Johnson is fighting a clamorous civil war with Eugene Cervi, the liberal state chairman. The Republican senator is Eugene D. Millikin, an extreme conservative. His wife, whose name was Delia Schuyler, must be one of the very few American women ever to have married two senators; her first husband was also a Colorado Senator, who died. Millikin was his law partner.⁵

Denver: Notes for a Portrait

I don’t know any other American city quite so fascinatingly strange. Not merely because yellow cabs are painted green or because the fourteenth step on the state capitol bears the proud plaque, ONE MILE ABOVE SEA LEVEL. Or even because it has luxuriant shade trees (every single one of which had to be imported), or because it is full of people who think that Ray Clapper and Ernie Pyle were Communists (and that Eric Johnston and Henry Kaiser are), or because the Rocky Mountain News prints the most original Advice to the Lovelorn column in the United States, or even because of Zeitz’s Buckhorn Cafe. This estimable establishment is run by the last living survivor among Buffalo Bill’s scouts; looking at you as you dine, and dine well, are stuffed animals which are the rustic equivalent of Antoine’s medals in New Orleans, and which include some splendid snakes and a fine two-headed calf.

The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver is quite possibly the best hotel in the United States. It was run for years by a legendary character named Moxcy Tabor; this was the son of H.A.W. (“Haw”) Tabor, one of the creators of Colorado, a man who had never heard of Shakespeare and who named his daughter Silver Dollar.⁶ A carpenter in Colorado Springs took a vacation prospecting, and discovered the first vein in Cripple Creek; his name was Stratton, and he made about five million dollars, very quick. In the Brown Palace one day Mr. Stratton kicked up even more of a rumpus than was usual, and Tabor told him he would have to get out. Insulted, he walked across the street, went to the bank, and bought the hotel from under Tabor’s head. This was a good many years ago. The Boettcher interests bought the Brown Palace in 1922, and have been running it ever since.

The remarkable thing about Denver is its ineffable closedness; when it moves, or opens up, it is like a Chippendale molting its veneer. This is not to say that Denver is reactionary. No—because reaction suggests motion, whereas Denver is immobile. We will in the course of this book come on other cities, like Tulsa, that really are reactionary; but Denver is Olympian, impassive, and inert. It is probably the most self-sufficient, isolated, self-contained and complacent city in the world.

It was named for General James W. Denver, an old-time governor of Kansas, whom scarcely anybody has ever heard of. (Similarly Dallas, Texas, takes its name from a politician almost unknown in life, but immortalized by a city.) It has a very peculiar unity, being both a city and a county, both a congressional and a judicial district. The story is that Byers made Denver a camp, Tabor made it a town, and Speer a city. W. N. Byers was the founder of the Rocky Mountain News, and he persuaded visitors—in those hoary and dynamic days—to stay. Tabor incidentally died broke; he was the city’s postmaster and still illiterate. Robert W. Speer was its greatest mayor.

The mayor today is a man who gave me the impression of gliding on his oars, Benjamin Franklin Stapleton; he has been mayor for almost a quarter of a century—since 1923 in fact, except for one four-year interval. Stapleton runs the most unusual municipal machine in America, in that it is both completely impregnable politically and just as completely nonpartisan. Laborites know that Stapleton won’t send the police after them, and Seventeenth Street knows that he will do what he can on taxes. Only one city post in Denver is elective; Stapleton appoints everybody else; this helps to give him his considerable power.

But the greater power in Denver lies in the tightly knit, family-interlocked financial structure. The city is one of the half-dozen richest in the nation; most of its money—as in Boston—is tied up in trust funds, and a great deal is held by women, daughters and granddaughters of the gold and silver kings. Denver has the largest number of bond houses per capita of any American city; its major banks put most of their money into bonds and are extremely chary of loans—which is one reason the city doesn’t grow; the attitude is to hold tight, stand pat, discourage new industry (that might compete), and keep expensive labor out. The ruling class in Denver has, it should also be noted, a distinct sense of noblesse oblige, that is to say it spends a considerable amount of conscience money; hence the parks, Civic Center, and well-kept hospitals.

In Denver, almost for the first time since California, we may detect signs of religious crackpotism on a lively scale. One church has a “Department of Psychoanalysis,” and I saw advertisements for Back to the Bible broadcasts, tent meetings by wandering evangelists, Rosicrucian and Holiness Camp lectures, and—something that even Los Angeles hasn’t got—a church with drive-in services. We may find political crackpotism too, associated with “religion” exactly as in California. One preacher, a henchman of Gerald L. K. Smith, runs both a large church and a newspaper, the Western Voice, which is a typical anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-United Nations, and antilabor smear sheet of the reactionary fringe.

The Denver Post is difficult to write about just now, because it is in process of rebirth. This was for many years the most lunatic paper in the United States, as well as one of the most conservative. Its front page looked like a confused and bloody railway accident; it had no editorial page at all; its slogan was Denver Post—First in Everything. I was particularly entranced, while in Denver, at its chauvinism about the weather. It printed a box every day with the rubric ’Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado, and then the words “There are exactly 14 hours and 12 minutes of sunlight in Denver on Monday.” [Italics mine.] This would appear on Monday afternoon! The Post cared not a whit if God should not oblige. In fact, the announcement of the amount of sunlight due was often followed in the next line by an actual forecast predicting rain.

The Post was founded by two raucous and pyrotechnic adventurers, a rapscallion bartender named Harry Tammen and the celebrated F. G. Bonfils, a lottery promoter. For a generation, howling and screaming, they splattered Denver with red ink, and made a vast fortune by so doing. The paper, as lascivious politically as any in the nation, maintained most of its idiosyncrasies even after they died. Though it printed every lucrative comic (= continuity) strip it could find, it would (like the Chicago Tribune) buy no columns, and its readers lived in an intellectual vacuum of a kind comparatively rare in the United States. Of course the Denver Post could not have been expected to print anybody like Lippmann, Mark Sullivan, Edgar A. Mowrer, the Alsops, Tom Stokes, Pearson, Ernest Lindley, Lowell Mellett, Winchell, Grafton, or Eleanor Roosevelt; but it didn’t print Pegler or Sokolsky either. Its presentation of news was often murderously vindictive. Its favorite weapon was to ignore. For instance in a hot and news-worthy campaign in 1944, the Post never once mentioned Charles A. Graham by name, though he was the perfectly respectable Democratic candidate; it considered him a “radical.” Once, during a bizarre circulation war, the Rocky Mountain News called Bonfils a rattlesnake and Bonfils sued for libel. A distinguished attorney named Philip Van Cise represented the News, and from that day on, the Post never printed Van Cise’s name. Bonfils died in 1933. The Saturday Evening Post wrote that a lot of people came to the funeral to see for themselves if he were really dead—and hoping he was buried deep.⁷

E. Palmer Hoyt, formerly of the Portland Oregonian, became publisher of the Denver Post in 1946. Already he has changed the paper beyond description. The first thing he did, Roscoe Fleming reports, was to put doors back on the toilets. Bonfils had taken them off to keep his beloved employees from sneaking any time off.

Perhaps we should end this section on a different note. Two other things make Denver distinguished. The National Opinion Research Center, the third of the great American poll-taking organizations like Gallup and Roper, has its headquarters at the University of Denver and the city is the home of the National Farmers Union, the most progressive of American farm groups, and of its remarkable leader, James

G. Patton.

Playground of the Republic

I have not mentioned in this book so far that all American states, house proud and retentive of tradition, have their own flags, flowers, slogans, and the like. For the record and as an example—all are similar in kind—we might list those of Colorado. Flag, stripes of blue and white with a red C and a golden circle; nickname, Centennial State; great seal, a shield with mountains and miner’s tools; flower, the Rocky Mountain columbine; motto, Nil Sine Numine (Nothing without God); bird, the lark bunting; song, “Where the Columbines Grow”; and tree, blue spruce.

¹ Spanish (or Mexican) influence versus British is another Colorado cleavage. British influence has always been strong in the north and east: for instance the streetcars in Denver are called tramways. An odd point is that the Catholic Mexicans in the south were permitted, by special dispensation, to eat meat on Fridays, since the area was too dry for fish. For this note, as well as for much else in this chapter, I am indebted to my friend Roscoe Fleming.

² A striking illustration of this is the way the names of mines changed. At first they had such names as Ace of Diamonds, Invincible, Golconda. Then they became Last Chance, Grubstake, Hard Times. These United States, II, p. 374.

³ The University of Colorado at Boulder is not to be confused with the University of Denver, which is an altogether different institution. It too has an able president, Dr. Ben M. Cherrington.

⁴ See “The Sugar Shortage and Politics,” by Hubert A. Kenny, American Mercury, May, 1946.

⁵ Perhaps strangely Colorado was one of the few states with Democratic victories in 1946. John A. Carroll, a former Denver district attorney and a pronounced liberal who ran with Cervi’s support, even displaced a Republican congressman.

⁶ She was almost as renowned a creature as her father. She died a violent death in a Chicago brothel. Cf. Silver Dollar, by David Karsner.

⁷ “Papa’s Girl,” by Mary Ellen and Mark Murphy, December 23, 1944.