# Upbuilders/Chapter 3

​BEN LINDSEY, THE JUST JUDGE
i. “the kids’ court”
IN the County Court of Denver, one night, a boy was arraigned for larceny. The hour was late; the calendar was long, and the Judge was sitting overtime. Weary of the weary work, everybody was forcing the machinery of the law to grind through at top speed the dull routine of justice. All sorts of causes went to this court, grand and petty, civil and criminal, complicated and simple. The petty larceny case was plain; it could be disposed of in no time. A theft had been committed; no doubt of that. Had the prisoner at the bar done it ? The sleepy policeman had his witness on hand, and they swore out a case. There was no doubt about it; hardly any denial. The Law prescribed precisely what was to be done to such “cases,” and the bored Judge ordered that that thing be done. That was all. In the same breath with which he pronounced sentence, the Court called for the “next case” and the shift was under way, when something happened, something out of the ordinary.
​A cry, an old woman’s shriek, rang out from the rear of the room. There was nothing so very extraordinary about that. Our courts are held in public; and every now and then somebody makes a disturbance such as this old woman made when she rose now with that cry on her lips, and, tearing her hair and rending her garments, began to beat her head against the wall. It was the duty of the bailiff to put the person out, and that officer in this court moved to do his duty.
But the man on the bench was Ben B. Lindsey, the celebrated Judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver. He wasn’t celebrated then; he had no Juvenile Court. He was only a young lawyer and politician who, for political services (some aver, falsely, for delivering a vote for a United States Senatorship) had been appointed to fill out an unexpired term as County Judge. Lindsey didn’t want to be a judge; he had asked for the district-attorneyship. His experiences on the inside of politics had shown him that many things were wrong, and he had a private theory that the way to set the evils right was to enforce the law, as the law. But another man, Harry A. Lindsley, had a prior claim on the district-attorneyship, and Ben Lindsey had to take the judgeship or nothing. So he had taken it (January 8, 1901), and he had been administering justice—as ​
Justice—for several weeks when that woman cried out against his “Justice,” and his “bailee” moved to uphold the decorum of his court, the dignity of the Law. And—the Judge upheld the woman.
“I had noticed her before,” he says now. “As my eye wandered during the evening it had fallen several times on her, crouched there among the back benches, and I remember I thought how like a cave-dweller she looked. I didn’t connect her with the case, any case. I didn’t think of her in any human relationship whatsoever. For that matter, I hadn’t considered the larceny case in any human way. And there’s the point: I was a judge, judging ‘cases’ according to the ‘Law,’ till the cave-dweller’s mother-cry startled me into humanity. It was an awful cry, a terrible sight, and I was stunned. I looked at the prisoner again, but with new eyes now, and I saw the boy, an Italian boy. A thief ? No. A bad boy ? Perhaps, but not a lost criminal. I called him back, and I had the old woman brought before me. Comforting and quieting her, I talked with the two together, as mother and son this time, and I found that they had a home. It made me shudder. I had been about to send that boy to a prison among criminals when he had a home and a mother to go to. And that was the Law! ​
Copyright by Harris & Ewing ​ ​The fact that that boy had a good home; the circumstances which led him to—not steal, but ‘swipe’ something; the likelihood of his not doing it again—these were ‘evidence’ pertinent, nay vital, to his case. Yet the Law did not require the production of such evidence. The Law? Justice ? I stopped the machinery of justice to pull that boy out of its grinders. But he was guilty; what was to be done with him ? I didn’t know. I said I would take care of him myself, but I didn’t know what I meant to do — except to visit him and his mother at their home. And I did visit them, often, and—well, we—his mother and I, with the boy helping—we saved that boy, and to-day he is a fine young fellow, industrious, self-respecting, and a friend of the Court.”
This was the beginning, the Judge will tell you, of his practice of putting juvenile offenders, not in prison to be punished, but on probation to be saved. It wasn’t. The Judge is looking backward, and he sees things in retrospect as he has thought them out since, logically, with his mind. If you should take his word for it, you would get the impression that this first “probation case” was the beginning of his famous Juvenile Court, the most remarkable institution of the kind in all the world. And if you got that impression in just that way, you might do as the reformers of ​some twenty-five states and a few hundred cities have done—you might lose the significance of Judge Lindsey. You might learn his method s and miss the man. You might imitate his “kids’ court,” and make a mistake with both the “kids” and their “Jedge,” as they call him. And you certainly would do, as Denver desires to do, and Colorado—limit the meaning of Judge Lindsey’s life-work to the problem of the children.
Ben Lindsey’s “methods” are as applicable to grown-ups as to kids. Man has a way of inventing devices to help him to be a man; a spear, an army, the Church, political parties, business. By and by the aid to his weakness comes to be a fetish with him, a burden, an end in itself, an institution. He decorates his spear, keeping a commoner weapon to hunt with. His army returns from fighting his enemies to conquer him. Priests declare the Church holy and, instead of ministering to men, make men minister to the Church. Political parties, founded to establish principles for the strengthening of the State and its citizenship, betray principles and manhood and the State for the “good of the party.” Business, the mere machinery of living, has become in America the purpose of life, the end to which all other goods—honour, religion, politics, men, women and children, the very Nation itself— ​
are sacrificed. And so with the laws and the courts. Jurists and legislators note and deplore the passing of respect for the Law and of faith in the courts, and they wonder why. It is largely because we laymen think we observe that legislation purporting to be for the common good is bought for the special evils; that laws exacted to help us are manipulated to our hurt; and that our courts, set up to render justice, eit ler make a worship of the letter of the Law or v plate the spirit thereof to work deliberate injustice. As for the penal code, nourished by the centuries to prevent crime, it is operated as escapes for the strong criminal or as instruments of society’s revenge upon the weak.
Ben Lindsey’s great, new, ancient discovery is that men are what we are after, men and women; and that everything else, business and laws, politics, the Church, the schools — these are not institutions, but means to those higher ends, character and right living. He began with the laws; the Law he was prepared to revere. He saw that the Law was capable of stupid injustices and gross wrongs; and setting humanity up on the bench beside his authority, he has reduced the Law to its proper, humble function the service of men and of the State. He has drawn the sting of punishment out of the penal code, stamped ​
out the spirit of vengeance; he has tried to make his Court a place where the prisoners at the bar are helped to become good men and useful citizens. His greatest service has been to boys and girls, but that is only because he found in children the most, helpless victims of our machine system of “businesslike justice.” He has created in his Juvenile Court a new human institution, the beauty apd use of which is spreading imitative “movements” all over the land. But, wonderful as his creation is, this man should not be known as the founder of another institution. That might become, like certain societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals or to children, only another “end in itself.”
Judge Lindsey is a man, a brave, gentle man, who is r^-introducing into life, all life, and into all the institutions which he can influence, the spirit or humanity. As he puts it in his “ Problem of the Children,” “these great movements for the betterment of our children are simply typical of the noblest spirit of this age, the Christ-spirit of unselfish love, of hope and joy. It has reached its acme in what were formerly the criminal courts. The old process is changed. Instead of coming to destroy, we come to rescue. Instead of coming to punish, we come to uplift. Instead of coming to hate, we come to love.” ​
That the man has this more general 1 significance is shown by the gradual, apparently jLcqidental way in which he developed his “methods’'" imd his Court. He didn’t think them out with his mind, That isn’t the way big, human things are done in this big, human world of ours; they are felt out with the heart. The man Lindsey had heart, and the cave-dweller’s cry reached it, and when the Judge felt her agony, he found himself. That was all. His judgment in this case was but the beginning of Judge Lindsey’s practice of putting heart into his business. He didn’t know what probation was when he said he’d take care himself of the cave-dweller’s boy. We have seen that he hadn’t thought of being a judge, and the idea of a Juvenile Court hadn’t dawned upon him. It took other cases to “set him thinking.” The other cases came.
One day a “burglary” appeared on his calendar. The Judge says he looked around curiously for the burglars. He saw none till the case was called. Then three boys were haled whimpering before him, three ordinary, healthy American boys, from twelve to sixteen. What had they burglarized? A pigeon-loft. A pigeon-loft! Yes, your Honour, they broke into a pigeon-loft and were caught red-handed stealing pigeons. That was burglary; there was no doubt about the crime. ​
What was, to be done with the burglars? They were to be sent to the reformatory, of course; the Law prescribed the penalty. The Judge shook his head, “No.”
He didn’t say so in court then, but he tells now how he was recalling the time when he, as a boy, went robbing a pigeon-loft. He didn’t actually commit “burglary,” but he would have if he hadn’t lost his nerve. He was “scared”; the other kids had told him so, and it was true. And they left him, in contempt and ashamed, while they robbed the coop. So he wasn’t an ex-convict, not because he was a good boy, no; nor because he was “smaller than them,” though that was a plea set up in the gang in his behalf. He wasn’t a burglar, like these boys before him now, simply because he didn’t have as much “sand” as they had. Was he going to punish them as burglars, “send them up” for crime, to live among criminals ? No.
But the complainant had a view to present. A worried, old, persecuted man, he told how boys were forever stealing his pigeons; how he had “laid for them” again and again; how they generally escaped; and how, finally, after many failures, he had caught these three. He wanted them punished; he begged to have them “sent to jail.”
There was something familiar in the appearance ​of the poor old pigeon fancier, and the Judge questioned him: where he lived; where his barn was; just where the pigeon-loft was; what his name was; whether he had a nickname. The old man answered, peevishly, but fully enough for the Judge to learn what he wanted to know. This was the very man, his were the pigeons, his loft was the same old loft which he, the Judge, and his gang had burglarized years ago. And now the Law expected him, a Judge, to send to prison these boys who were no worse than he was; nay, who were better, for they had the “sand” he lacked! If he, the Judge, had been sent up for burglary he might not have become County Judge, and if he didn’t send up these boys as burglars, they might become county judges, or — since they had more “sand” — something better.
But there was the Law; what about that ? The boys had committed a crime; what was the Judge to do with them ? He didn’t know; he would have to “think it over.” And he thought it over. He went back to first principles. What did the complainant really want ? Only to have his property protected. And what was the law against burglary for? To protect property by preventing burglary. Wasn’t there any other way to achieve these common ends except by punishing these boys as burglars ? And if he put them ​
in prison might not other boys go on robbing the pigeon-loft? The Judge says it is “out of the mouths of babes” that he has learned wisdom. He took the prisoners into his chamber, and he talked with them.
Now, the Judge’s talks with boys and girls are regarded with superstition by some people; he gets such wonderful results — the truth, for example. Children who lie to their parents, their teachers, and the police, tell him everything. ‘The police started a story that Judge Lindsey is a “hypnotist,” and others speak wisely of his “method.” His “method” is very simple; he employed it, before he knew it was a “method,” with his Italian “thief” and his first trio of “burglars.” Friendship is the key. Judge Lindsey talks to boys as one boy talks to another.
His personal appearance helps him. The “Jedge” is a short, slight, boyish-looking young man, open-faced, direct, sincere, and he lays off the ermine, figuratively speaking, very readily; indeed, he hardly ever puts it on now, even on the bench. In chambers he comes right down to earth, using boy-talk, including slang. For this he has been criticized by good people who think of English as an institution, to be kept pure. The Judge answers that he has something else in mind than the purity of the language. He has ​
found “after four years’ experience that the judicious use of a few of these slang terms not only does not hurt the boy, but actually helps him, and wins his confidence,” and, since the boys are what he is after, he declares he will “continue to talk to the boys to a certain extent much the same as they talk with one another.”
As a matter of fact, it is an instinct with the Judge, a part of his simple naturalness and his native desire to understand others, which prompts him to say “ fellers”; “ ah, say, kids, let’s cut it out.” When he called in his burglars, it was no judge that asked them if they belonged to a gang. It was no fatherly elder, wisely pretending to a superior sort of interest in the habits and customs of their “crowd,” and the limits of their range or habitat. It was “one feller askin’ th’ other fellers, on the level now, all about swipin’ pigeons?”" The reason he, the Judge, and his gang robbed the coop was to get a certain variety of fan-tail pigeons which the old man wouldn’t sell, and he understood it when the boys explained that what they were after, really, was to get back some of their pigeons which had joined the old man’s bigger flock. Also, however, the boys understood the Judge when he reflected that it wasn’t right to go and “rob back” your pigeons; that it annoyed the old man, wronged him, and hurt the ​
boys. Maybe the old man was grouchy, but, gee, the coop was his, and “swiping” wasn’t “square.” It was sneaky, it was weak to steal. So he proposed to stop this “weakness” of this gang; not only of the three that had been caught, but of the whole gang.
Now, the Judge teaches respect for grown-up law by himself invariably showing great respect for “kid law.” It is against the law of Boyville to “snitch” (tattle). So he wouldn’t let them tell him who the other “burglars” were! ?r But, say, fellers,” he said, “you bring in the other kids, and we’ll talk it over, and we’ll see if we can’t agree to cut out stealing altogether, and especially td stop swipin’ pigeons off the old man.”
That was fair, and it was human. They went away, and they got the gang. And the gang entered into a deal with the “ Jedge”; “sure the did.” Who wouldn’t ? And do you think they would go back on a Judge like that? Sure they wouldn’t, and they wouldn’t let any other feller go back on him either; not much; not if they could prevent it; and they thought they could. And they did, as they reported from time to time.
It was this case, which, coming home so personally to him, set the Judge thinking. “It seemed to me,” he says, “that we were not proceeding just right in such cases. I didn’t know ​
anything about it, but it looked wrong to charge these boys with burglary. It was unnecessary under the Law, too; the school law of 1899 P er “ mitted children to be brought to the County Court as ‘juvenile disorderly persons.’ And here they were being arraigned as thieves and burglars. We were dealing with the thing the child did, not with the child; and the child was what should concern us. I don’t blame anybody in particular. I had been at fault myself. A good many children were brought into my Court, and I had been following the thoughtless routine. The fact is, I was pretty free in sending boys to the Industrial School at Golden till these special cases awoke my special interest. Then I began to consider the situation generally. I found that there was no system about juvenile cases. Some were sent to the District Court, others to the Justice Courts, others to mine. We all were ‘trying’ the boys for the ‘crimes’ they had committed, finding many of them guilty and sending them away. It was absurd; it was criminal, really. The thing a child had stolen was treated as of more importance than the child. This was carrying the idea of property to an extreme. It was time to get back to the idea of men and women, the men and women of to-morrow, and obviously some system of character-building was needed in ​
the Court. Fortunately, there were laws in existence under which juvenile offenders could be brought into court as ‘dependent,’ ‘neglected,’ or ‘delinquent’ children, and these laws were enough as they stood for the starting of a Juvenile Court. We hoped to get other laws later; but those that we had would enable us to treat the children, rather than the children’s crimes.”
Judge Lindsey went to District-attorney Lindsley with the request that all children’s cases be brought to his Court; and that they be accused there of delinquency instead of the particular crimes for which they were arrested. The District-attorney was willing. Lindsey’s request was regarded as “queer,” but nobody wanted the bother of these “kids’” cases, so the Judge was permitted to found his “kids’ court.” And he founded it, and it is the “kids’ court,” their very own. It is run in the interest of the “bad” boys and girls, and therefore of the state, and the children needed the Court, and so did the state.
While the Judge was “thinking,” the question arose in his mind: “What sort of a place is the Industrial School where I have been sending boys so freely?” He went to Golden to see. Nobody up there remembered ever having been visited before by a judge on the bench, and this Judge ​
saw boys with the ball and chain on them. He began a quiet reform of the reformatory. Then he asked himself what kind of places the jails were. One Sunday evening he visited the City Jail.
“It was a dirty, filthy place,” he says. “The plaster was off the walls, which were crawling with vermin.”
He went over to the County Jail. The conditions were much the same, but what stirred up the Judge’s “thoughts” to the bottom of his heart was the sight of boys in the same cells with men and women “of the vilest type.” A little further inquiry showed him that these children were allowed to associate freely with grown criminals. Locked up with them in the County Jail, they visited the men in the bull-pen down in the City Jail. The boys liked to listen to the “great criminals,” and the great criminals liked to brag to the boys. It was a school of crime. The men told the boys how they “beat the police and, filling them with criminal ideals, taught them how to commit “great” crimes.
“I found that in the five years before I went on the bench, 2,136 Denver boys had been in these jails for periods varying from a few hours to thirty days, and,” the Judge adds in his mild way, “I was satisfied the influence was not good. But that was typical. This was being done all over ​
the country, and it is now in many places. Every boy who makes a mistake or, if you will, every child that shows any tendency to crime is sent to a school where crime is taught. Is it any wonder that juvenile crime is on the increase ?”
And the Judge found that juvenile crime was on the increase generally in the United States. He engaged the services of a clipping bureau, and he quotes, in his “ Problem of the Children,” some of the results: “Five Thousand Boys Arrested Arrests Last Year Were Boys Under Twenty” (in a city of less than 150,000); “Bandits Caught Mere Boys” (a frequent head line); “Over Half the Murderers Last Year Were Boys”; “ Boy Burglars Getting Common”; “Thieving Increasing Among Children”; “Desperate Boy Bandits Captured” (aged twelve, thirteen, and fifteen). And he cites the Van Wormer boys of New York; the Biddles of Pennsylvania; the car-barn murderers of Illinois; the Collinses of Missouri; the boy murderers of Nebraska; the Youngblood murderers of Denver; the boy train-wreckers of the West, and the reform-school boy murderers of California. The phrase “mere boys” indicated that the news editors regarded juvenile crime as exceptional and remarkable; it isn’t. Three-quarters of the crimes committed in the United ​
States, the Judge says, are done by boys under twenty-three!
“And why not?” he asks. “The children of parents who die or fail in their duty are taken by the State and sent for their schooling into the streets or jails where they pick up false ideals and criminal arts. With few exceptions, all these boy criminals named above, whom society has sent to the slaughter-house to be killed, had been sent to jail in their teens by society for other crimes. And most of them were first imprisoned as little children.”
In other words, our criminal court system does not prevent, it fosters crime. Our “businesslike” procedure of heartless, thoughtless “justice” makes criminals. What should the State do ? The Judge says that when the State gets hold of a “bad” child, it takes the place of the parent, and like a good parent, it should try to mould that child into a good citizen. He gives an illustration in his “Problem of the Children.”
“We recall the case (and it is one of hundreds),” the Judge says there, “of a young man who had been in the criminal courts at the age of thirteen. At twenty he shot down a policeman who was heroically doing his duty. Suppose that at the age of thirteen that boy had been studied, helped, looked after, and carefully handled; would that ​
policeman be maimed for life, or dead, a young wife and child a charge on the community, and a strong, robust young man a charge on the State for life? Perhaps not, and even so we could have felt better about it, and in the sight of God less accountable. Was the State responsible ? Yes, even more than the boy, for he was in jail in the plastic stage. The State had him in time, and it did nothing — not even try. The State treated him as a man, this boy. . . Strange that if his money or property were involved he could control none of it; he would need a guardian in that case. A boy’s property is important. But his morals — the boy, the man in embryo, the citizen to be — needed no guardian. This boy needed no help. He needed punishment. He needed retribution, and so as a boy he got what men got, that which is often barbarous even for men. I have seen them, eleven to fifteen years of age, in the same bullpen with men and women, with chains about their waists and limbs. And I have seen them crowded together in idleness, in filthy rooms where suggestiveness fills the mind with all things vile and lewd. Such has been too often the first step taken by the great State in the correction of the child.”
Judge Lindsey founded his Juvenile Court to correct and save to the State the children ​who were
caught up in the meshes of the criminal law, and his first step was the correction of himself and of the Court. Having to start with only the idea, which was really little more than a sentiment, that the welfare of the child prisoner was the chief consideration, he had to institute proceedings to meet the needs of the child. What were those needs ? The Judge didn’t know, and he had no theory; he had to find out for himself. How did he go about finding out? Very simply, very naturally. He asked the child, one of the first, most obvious observations he made was that children came into Court with either tears or defiance in their eyes. They hated the policeman, and they feared the Judge, and since the “cop” and the Court were the personification of justice and the State, these young citizens were being reared in the spirit of dread and hatred of law and authority. This was all wrong, and yet it was perfectly natural.
“The criminal court for child-offenders,” writes the Judge, “is based on the doctrine of fear, degradation, and punishment. It was, and is, absurd. The Juvenile Court was founded on the principle of love. We assumed that the child had committed, not a crime, but a mistake, and that he deserved correction, not punishment. Of course, there is firmness and justice, for ​
without these there would be danger in leniency. But there is no justice without love.”
The Judge drove out fear from his Court, and hate and brutality; for awe, he substituted confidence and affection. How did he do this ? By coming down off the bench to the boy. Since the boy was the centre of interest, the Judge subordinated his own “dignity” and the whole machinery of the Court and even the “stolen property,” to win back the prisoner at the bar. The good of the boy, obviously paramount in the mind of the Court, was made paramount in the mind of the boy, who was led to feel that every- body cared about him, that everything done was done for him in his interest. “Of course,” he ' says, “the Law is important, but the vital thing is the relationship established with the child. The case from the boy’s standpoint must be under- stood.” Each case, the Judge means. He seeks to get for himself a personal, sympathetic under- standing of each separate case. There are no hard and fast rules. No fixed routine will do the work. The Judge didn’t turn away hate, quiet fear, and dry tears by any “methods.” When a child is brought weeping or scowling before him, Ben Lindsey is dragged off that bench by his heartstrings, and when he sits on a stool beside the boy in trouble, or goes for a walk with him. ​
or takes him home to dinner or “out to the show,” this is no art thought out by a wise man. This is nothing but a good man putting into his work what he wants to get out of it — “faith, hope, and love.”
To understand the case of Ben Lindsey, it is necessary to study it as he advises us to study the cases of boys — from the boys’ standpoint. He tells in one of his articles how a young fellow of twenty, who was under sentence for murder, regarded the old criminal court. This boy had been arrested at the age of twelve for stealing a razor to whittle a stick. “It was this way,” he explained to Lindsey. “The guy on the high bench, with the whiskers, says, ‘What’s the boy done, officer ? ’ And the cop says, says he, ‘He’s a bad kid, your Honour, and broke into a store and stole a razor.’ And the guy on the high bench says, ‘Ten dollars or ten days.’ Time, three minutes; one round of a prize-fight.”
In Judge Lindsey’s court, in the beginning, when boys still came there with sorrow and gnashing of teeth, they saw no “guy with whis- kers, on a high bench ” asking the “ cop ’ questions. They saw a clean-cut young man come into court, go up to the first boy to be ‘ tried and ask: “What’s the matter, my boy? You been mak- ing a mistake ? Well, lots of fellers make ​
mistakes. That’s nothing. I’ve made mistakes myself, worse’n yours, I guess.” Then turning to the policeman, he asks: “What is it, officer?” The policeman tells about the crime, say theft. “Stealing isn’t right,” says the Judge, and he appeals to the boys in the court room, “Is it, fellers ?” Putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he gives him a shove back and a pull forward. “It’s weak to swipe things.” That hurts. Boys learn in the street that it’s smart and brave to steal, and the only evil thing about it is getting caught. Lots of men take this view, too, but Judge Lindsey sets up another standard. “I know how it is,” he says. “It’s a temptation. It’s a chance to get something easy, something you want; or something you can sell to get something you want. Wanted to go to the show, maybe. Well, it takes a pretty strong feller to down the desire to take the chance and see the show. But it’s wrong to swipe things. ’Tain’t fair; ’tain’t brave; it’s just mean,.and it hurts the feller that steals. Makes him steal again, and by and by he is caught and sent up — a thief. Now you ain’t a thief, and you don’t want to be. Do you ? But you were too weak to resist the temptation, so you were caught. Ought to cut it out. Not because you were caught. That isn’t the reason a feller oughtn’t to steal. It’s ​
because it’s mean and sneaky, and no feller wants to be mean and sneaky. He wants to be on the square.
“But what are you crying for? You’ve been crying ever since I began to talk to you. Afraid of being punished ? Pshaw, a feller ought to stand up and take his medicine; but we don’t punish boys. We just try to help ’em get strong and be square. Even when we send fellers to Golden, it isn’t for punishment; it’s only to help a kid that’s weak to get strong enough to control himself. So we aren’t going to punish you. I believe you can control yourself without going to Golden. We’ll see. But first off, a kid ought to be strong enough and sufficiently on the square to tell the truth about himself. Ought to tell not only about this time, when you’re caught, but all the other times, too. You wait, and after court we’ll go back in chambers and we’ll have it all out, just us two.
This is rather reassuring, isn’t it? It proved so to the children who sat waiting their turn at the first sessions of the Juvenile Court. There was no terrorism in it, no trace of hardness, there were no awful forms. The children felt the dif- ference. “The Judge, he gives a feller a show,” said one boy to me. And as they saw the pro- ceedings in court, so the children heard ​about the
scenes in chambers. These were the best of all, best for the kids and best for the Judge. There is where Lindsey saw into the hearts of children, and where they saw into his.
“Never let a child get away with a lie on his soul,” the Judge says. “A clean breast is half the battle.” Children are wonderful liars, but the Judge thinks he can tell when they are lying and they admit that he has an instinct for the truth. One foundation for their respect for him is that with all his kindness he isn’t sentimental; and he isn’t.“easy.” “You can’t fool the Jedge,” the boys say, and the police tell, as an illustra- tion, the story of a “tough kid” on whom all the Judge’s appeals seemed to fail. He “lied straight,” and since the Judge will not help (try) a boy who will not tell the truth, he told the offi- cer to take the boy away. On the way back to jail, the boy changed his mind. He asked to be taken again before the Judge. “You’re right, Judge,” he said, “and you’re game, too. I lied to you; I lied like a horse thief; and I couldn’t fool you a little bit. You’ve beat me, Judge, and I’ll tell you th’ truth.” And he did.
1 he Judge in chambers reasons with the boy that while it is wrong to “snitch” on other fel- lows, it is all right to “snitch” on yourself. The boys understand this. It is made clear to them ​
that there is no punishment, only “help for a feller if he needs it,” and among the most inter- esting experiences that the Judge has to tell, are the discussions he has with boys as to whether they “need to go to Golden.”
There’s a little, old, young, big man, called “ Major,” whom I saw in command of the battalion at Golden. He is somewhere between twelve and sixteen, but with an old, old face; very tiny of stature, but very tall in dignity. He never smiles, so sober and sensible is he. But he had what the kids and their Judge know as the “movin’-about fever.” The Major had come honestly by it. He had no home, and he wanted none, for he could range all over the West, from Chicago up into Idaho and down into New Mexico, and always, everywhere, he was known, for his pom- pous dignity, to hoboes, cow-boys, miners — to all men as “the Major.” The Judge gave him trial after trial, and it was no use; the time always came when the Major had to “move on.” If they must move, the Judge lets boys go, but he expects them to call on him to say good-bye and be pledged to write to him regularly and not to steal. Well, once when the fever was coming upon the Major, he called on the Judge. The Judge urged the Major to down the temptation. The Major tried, but he couldn’t; he confessed that ​he was too “weak” to resist. Then the Judge suggested Golden; they would help him there, all right, to stay. The Major received the suggestion thoughtfully. He raised objections which the Judge answered, but they separated with- out a decision, and the Judge says that for a week or two he and the Major weighed ponderously the mighty question, till in the end the Major agreed that perhaps he’d better go up to Golden and be helped to cure that moving-about attack and thus learn to “stay put.” That’s how the Major came to go to Golden, and that’s how he won the rank and title which the “movin’-about” world had given him as a “little shaver.”
And that’s the spirit in which the Judge in chambers persuades boys to “ snitch up ” on themselves and look upon the reformatory as a help. As they begin to tell him things bit by bit, he expresses no horror, only understanding; he sympathizes with a feller. If a kid describes how he saw an easy chance to steal and not get caught, the Judge exclaims: “Gee, that was a chance. That’s certain. But ’tain’t square, Hank.” “Mistake” after “mistake” is confessed, “weakness” after “weakness”; no crimes, you understand, for the kid and the Judge, they see things through the kid’s eyes, with all the mitigating circumstances. And so they come to discuss the question whether ​
the kid can “cut it out.” The Judge is sure the boy can, surer than the boy, but then, it’s up to the boy, because the boy has to do the hard work of resisting. The Judge can “only help; th’ feller has to do the business himself.” “Inter- est is everything in a boy’s life,” the Judge says sagely. “If you want his loyalty, excite his interest.” Well, the game of correction is inter- esting, especially when you are the centre of the game. It’s one of the most interesting games “a feller” ever played, and the Judge has a fas- cinating way of playing it. Having done some- thing wrong, you try to do something that’s right, positively right. This is the Judge’s great doc- trine. He calls it “overcoming evil with good.” There’s nothing “sissy-boy” about it. You have done an evil thing; you are not, therefore, bad, only so much weakened. So you go and do a good thing. This not only balances the evil; it “strengthens a feller.”
Now then, a good thing a feller can usually do right away is to go out and bring in some other kids that are “swipin’ things.” You mustn’t tell the Judge who the other fellers are. That would be snitching. But it’s all right to get the other fellers to come in and “snitch up” on themselves just as you have “snitched up” on yourself. That §cts them ​
into the game; helps them and, since the more fellers there are in on it, the easier it is for you — it helps you.
One of the early cases in the Juvenile Court was that of seven boys brought before him by a policeman who had caught them wiring tip signal- boxes, hopping cars, stoning motormen and con- ductors, and otherwise interfering with the traf- fic of the street railway. The boys were either tearful or sullen, and they denied the testimony of the officer and his witnesses. The Judge took them into his chambers. There he cleared away all ideas of punishment, and got down to the truth. The Judge could see that it was fun, but also he could see that what was fun for the boys was trouble for the conductors and motor- men; it made life hard for them, delayed them, and got them home late. The boys hadn’t thought before of these railroad men as human beings, only as fair game, as fellers what’d give you a chase if you held ’em up.” So the Judge gave the boys a good view of the men’s side of the fun, then he said:
“ Tain’t fair, is it, fellers ?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, what do you say to cuttin’ it out?”
They agreed. But there was more for these boys to do than simply to quit themseK es. There ​
was an evil deed done to be overcome with good. There was the gang.
“Will you fellers bring in the rest of the gang to-morrow ? ”
“Sure they would.” But they didn’t. The seven turned up the next day without their “crowd.”
“The other fellers was askeared to come,” they reported.
“Well, what are you going to do?” the Judge asked the seven.
They believed that if the Judge would write a letter to the gang, they would come.
“A warrant,” said the Judge, seizing the chance to take the terror out of another instrument of the Law. “I’ll write you out a warrant, and you shall serve it on the gang. But what’ll I write ? ”
One little fellow spoke up. “You begin it,” he said; “begin by saying, ‘No kid has snitched, but if you’ll come, the Judge’ll give you a square deal.’”
This showed what the matter was, and it brought home to the Judge the force of his own feeling against snitching.
The Judge began the “warrant” as the little fellow suggested, and thus he ended it, too. The boys took it, and evidently they served it, for the next day the gang came pouring into t ​he court,
fifty-two kids. There was a talk, straight talk, like that which he gave the seven. Only the Judge put more faith into it. He was going to see if they couldn’t get along out where that gang lived without any policemen. The peace of the neighbourhood was to be left to the gang, but the gang had to play fair, and give him a square deal.
“For,” said the Judge, making a personal appeal to their honour, “I have told the com- pany that I would be responsible for their having no more trouble. The company don’t trust you kids; and they say I’ll be fooled. They said you’d go back on me. But I said you wouldn’t, and I say now that you won’t. So I’m depending on you fellers; and I don’t believe you’ll throw me down. What do you say ? ”
“We’ll stay wit’ you, Jedge,”’ they shouted. And they didn’t throw the Judge down. They organized, then and there, a Kid Citizens’ League, and the League played square with the Judge.
It will be noticed that Lindsey made effective use in this case of the “gang” which the police and all prematurely old reformers seek only to “break up.” The “kids’ Jedge” never thought of breaking up such organizations. His sense is for essentials, instinctively, and there’s nothing wrong about gangs as such. They are as natural ​
as organizations of men. The only trouble with gangs is that they absorb all the loyalty of the members, turning them from and often against the home, the Law, and the State. But that happens in grown-ups’ gangs, too. Railroad and other corporations are gangs which, in the interest of their “business,” corrupt the State. Churches are “gangs” whose members submit to evils because, if they fought them, the church might be hurt. So with universities, and newspapers, and all kinds of business organizations. Tammany Hall is only a gang which, absorbing the loyalty of its members, turns it, for the good of the gang, against the welfare of the city. Judge Lindsey simply taught the members of his kid gang what many gangs of grown-ups have to learn, that they are citizens also, and he turned the loyalty of the Kid Citizens’ League back to the city, using the honour of the gang as his lever.
Another similar case came up when two boys were brought in by a policeman from the Union Station. The policeman said they belonged to a gang the members of which stoned him wherever they saw him. Why? Well, he was trying to keep them out of the station and off the grass around the station. What were the boys doing at the station and on the station lawn ? They ​
explained, and they explained with many mani- festations of hate for the cop. They were there to sell papers. It was their place of business, and everybody had acknowledged it — not only all the other newsboys, but everybody else—till, one day, some other bigger boys wdth red caps appeared there selling papers and things. Then “this cop chased us off.” Why? Why had the cop suddenly interfered with their business ? It was his turn to explain, and he explained that the railroad company, having come to realize that the trade in newspapers at the station was profitable, had decided to take a share in it. The con- cession was let to a man who employed the boys with red caps. The man wanted a monopoly. So the policeman had received orders to drive off the other boys. He had obeyed. No explana- tion was given to the boys; no notice. They sud- denly found themselves deprived of their means of livelihood, and resenting it, blamed the cop and — stoned him.
Thus it was all a misunderstanding, not a crime” at all, and the Judge undertook to clear it up to the satisfaction of all concerned. Hav- ing explained it to the two boys under arrest, he enlisted their services in behalf of the Court to bring in the others who were “in it” but had not been caught. The policeman, knowing how hard ​
it had been to catch two, was scornful of the Judge’s confidence of getting the rest, but he was invited to be present at the hour appointed for the “round up,” and he was not a little chagrined when his two prisoners returned with twenty- four other kids. The Judge lined up the gang on one side of the room, the policeman and his friends on the other. This was the Juvenile Court in session; let the Judge describe what happened:
“I proceeded to explain why it was that the owners of the station had a right to grant ‘concessions’ to the man who employed the boys with the red caps to sell papers and carry baggage to the exclusion of all others; why, if the company demanded it, they had a right to protection for their lawn; how all of this was justified by the Law, which secured the right of every man in the enjoyment of his property; how it was not the officer’s doings, but the Law that required him to perform his duty; how, therefore, they had no real grievance against the police- man — rather their sympathies should be with him. After the sympathetic admission by both the officer and the Court that if it were our station and grounds all boys could play on the grass and sell papers there, there was gained for the police- man sympathy and loyalty. As littl ​e citizens,
interested in a ‘decent town of decent kids,’ they agreed not only to ‘keep off’ and ‘keep out’ them- selves, but to keep other boys out; and everyone agreed ‘on the square’ that he would give any kid there leave to ‘snitch’ to me, if any boy broke his word and was not square. Thus harmony was established between their world and ours, and we all pulled together one way.”
As the Judge remarked to me, those boys did what few men would do; they gave up their business “just because it was right.” All that was necessary was to make them understand the right and their duties, and then to interest them in the “game of correction.”
The arena for the great game of correction is the Court of Probation. Held every other Saturday forenoon, it is a picturesque and a very pleasant spectacle. All the “bad” boys in town who have been caught committing mistakes or who have “snitched up” on themselves, assemble there to report. It isn’t new. Like the Juvenile Court itself, the “method” of putting children on probation did not originate with Judge Lindsey. Yet he discovered it himself. As I quote him as saying above, he didn’t know about such things. When he went first to the home of the “cave-dweller” to investigate, he was performing one function of a probation officer; and when he ​
went there again and again, he was holding a court of probation. So with the three pigeon burglars and their gang; he went to see them, but there was no method as yet. It was only as the cases grew that the Judge had to ask the boys to come to see him, and then, finally, to appoint a time and place where most of the boys could meet all together with him; and that was the origin of Judge Lindsey’s Court of Probation, the institution.
But there is more than that to the story of it. The Judge feels that he suffered as “ a little shaver” from lack of approbation. He was born in Ten- nessee and his family, well-to-do Southern people, were brought to trouble and to Denver by the War. His father died, and Ben had to work hard as a boy. For a long time he had three jobs: he carried newspapers in the early morn- ing; worked all day in a lawyer’s office; and, after hours, served as janitor. Always slight of build, he was often worn out; and nobody appre- ciated it. He was only doing his duty, and it nearly killed him — literally. He sank under his load to the very verge of despair; and he learned the value of a kind word of sympathy and good cheer.
Many of the bad boys who came to his court were lonely little fellows. They had no ​home and
no friends, and he found in their hearts a long- ing which he knew all about. He gave them the sympathetic hearing and the kind word he had wanted, and “they drank,” he says, “they drank in my friendship as if they were famished.” Right there we have one secret of his “hypnotic” influence over children. The Judge is proud now of the fact that he has made himself a friend of every boy in town, or, at least, of every “feller that needs a friend,” and he will tell you the philosophy and the use of his method if you care to listen. He will tell you how he learned from the gangs that the members thereof did bad things largely because some big fellow, who was bad, or some leader of their own, suggested to them evil and praised them for its accomplishment. He will reason it all out for you, now, if you wish, showing how by his method he has put himself in the place of the big fellow; made himself the fountain of praise, the source of approbation, “the feller” for whose good words kids do good things now. In short, Ben Lindsey is the actual leader of most of the gangs of Denver. And the loyalty which the boys give to him, he is giving back to the State.
All this, however, is but the unforeseen result of this kind man’s native sweetness and strength. The only definitely thought-out method is that ​
of having the boys bring reports from the schools. “If you want a boy’s loyalty, excite his interest.” It was easy enough for the Judge to excite the boy’s interest; the problem was to keep it. In the early history of the court, before the new laws, he had no probation officers to follow up his cases, and since there was too much for him to do, he bethought him of the school teachers. The Judge has always been clear on the point that his Juvenile Court is merely supplementary, that the home and the school are the places where juvenile character should be moulded, and that he had to do only with those children who, for some reason, were not successfully treated in the regular way. Thus he was helping the teachers, and since he needed help, he went to the teachers for it, and he got it. The school teachers of Denver have been his mainstay. All that the Judge required of the teachers was a report as to how the boys in his Court of Probation were doing in deportment and studies.
“What I was after,” the Judge explained, “was something for which I could praise the boy in open court. Believing in approbation as an incentive, I had to have their reports for the boy to show me, in order that I might have a basis for encouraging comment, or, if the reports were not up to the mark, for sympathy. It didn’t ​
matter to me very much what the reports were about. Some of the teachers couldn’t see at first why they should report on the scholarship of a boy who was good at school and bad — a thief, perhaps — out of school. But you can see that these fortnightly reports were an excuse for keeping up my friendly relationship with the boy, holding his loyalty, and maintaining our common interest in the game of correction he and I were playing together. Since we had a truancy law, the teachers were in touch and thus could keep me in touch with every boy under school age in the city, and their reports were my excuse for praise or appeal.”
Judge Lindsey’s Court of Probation is thus a Court of Approbation. It serves other purposes; indeed, it is everything to the boys of Denver. It is the State, the Law, and Justice; it is Home, School, Club, and Society; it is Friendship, Success, and the scene of Triumphs; it is the place also where Failure goes for Help and for Hope renewed. It is all that Judge Lindsey is; all that he means to the minds of the boys. For the Judge’s personality makes it, his and the boys’, and they made it up out of their own needs.
The boys assemble early, two or three hun- dred of them, of all ages and all sorts, “small ​
kids” and “big fellers”; well-dressed “lads” and ragged “little shavers”; burglars who have entered a store, and burglars who have “robbed back” pigeons; thieves who have stolen bicycles, and thieves who have “ swiped” papers; “toughs” who have “sassed” a cop or stoned a conductor, and boys who have talked bad language to little girls, or who “hate their father,” or who have been backward at school and played hookey because the teacher doesn’t like them. It isn’t generally known, and the Judge rarely tells just what a boy has done; the deed doesn’t matter, you know, only the boy, and all boys look pretty much alike to the Judge and to the boys. So they all come together there, except that boys who work, and newsboys, when there s an extra out, are excused to come at another time. But nine o’clock Saturday morning finds most of the “fellers” in their seats, looking as clean as pos- sible, and happy.
The Judge comes in and, passing the bench, which looms up empty and useless behind him, he takes his place, leaning against the clerk s
table or sitting on a camp-chair.
“Boys,” he begins, “last time I told you about
Kid Dawson and some other boys who used to be with us here and who ‘made good.’ To-day I’ve got a letter from the Kid. He’s in Oregon, ​
and he’s doing well. I’ll read you what he says about himself and his new job.”
And he reads the letter, which is full of details roughly set in a general feeling of encouragement and self-confidence.
“Fine, isn’t it!” the Judge says. “Kid Dawson had a mighty hard time with himself for , awhile, but you can see he’s got his hand on his throttle now. Well, let’s see. The last time, I talked about snitching, didn’t I ? To-day I’m going to talk about * ditching. ’ ” And he is off on the address, with which he opens court. His topics are always interesting to boys, for he handles his subjects boy-fashion. “Snitchinm” the favourite theme, deals with the difference between “snitching,” which is telling orTanother boy to hurt him; and “snitching on the square,” which is intended to help the other fellow. “ Ditch- ing” is another popular subject. “To ditch” a thing is to throw it away; and the Judge, starting oft with stories of boys who have ditched their commitment papers, proceeds to tell about others who, “like Kid Dawson out there in Oregon,” have “ditched” their bad habits and “got strong.”
I heard him on Arbor Day speak on trees; how they grew, some straight, some crooked. There’s always a moral in these talks, but the Judge makes it plain and blunt; he doesn’t “rub it in.” ​
After the address, which is never long, the boys are called up by schools. Each boy is greeted by himself, but the Judge uses only his given or nickname. “'The boys from the Arapahoe Street School,” he calls, and, as the group comes forward, the Judge reaches out and seizing one by the shoulder, pulls him up to him, saying:
“Skinny, you’ve been doing fine lately; had a cracker jack report every time. I just want to see if you have kept it up. Bet you have. Let’s see.” He opens the report. “And you have. That’s great. Shake, Skin. You’re all right, you are.” Skinny shines.
Pointing at another, he says: “ And you, Mumps, you got only ‘fair’ last time. What you got this time ? You promised me ‘excellent,’ and I know you’ve made good.” He tears open the envelope. “Sure,” he says. “You’ve done it. Bully for you.” Turning to the room, he tells the fellers how Mumps began playing hookey, and was so weak he simply thought he couldn t stay in school. “He blamed the teacher; said she was down on him. She wasn’t at all. He was just weak, Mumps was; had no backbone at all. But look at him now. He’s bracing right up. You watch Mumps. He’s the ‘stuff,’ Mumps is. Aren’t you, Mumps ? Teacher likes you now all right, doesn’t she? Yes. And she tells me she does. ​
Go on now and keep it up, Mumps. I believe in you.”
“Why, Eddie,” the Judge says, as another boy comes up crying. “What are you crying for? Haven’t you made good ? ”
“No, sir,” Eddie says, weeping the harder.
“Well, I told you I thought you’d better go to Golden. You don’t want to go, eh ? Get an- other job, you say ? But you can’t keep it, Eddie. You know you can’t. Give you another chance ? What’s the use, Eddie? You’ll lose it. The best thing for you, Eddie, is Golden. They’ll help you up there, make you stick to things, just make you; and so you’ll get strong.”
Eddie swims in tears, and it seemed to me I’d have to give that boy “another chance,” but the Judge, who is called “easy,” was not moved at all. His mind was on the good of that boy; not on his own feelings, nor yet on the boy’s. “You see,” said he to me, “he is hysterical, abnormal. The discipline of Golden is just what he needs.” And he turned to the room full of boys.
“Boys,” he said, “Em going to send Eddie up to Golden. He hasn’t done wrong; not a thing. But he’s weak. He and I have tried again and again to win out down here in the city, and he wants another trial. But I think a year or so at Golden will brace Eddie right up, and make him ​
a strong, manly fellow. He’s not going up there to be punished. That isn’t what Eddie needs, and that isn’t what Golden is for. Is it, fellers ?”
“No, sir,” the room shouted.
“It would be unjust to punish Eddie, but Eddie understands that. Don’t you, Eddie ?”
“Yes, sir, but” (blubbering), “Judge, I think if I only had one more show I could do all right.”
“Eddie, you’re wrong about that. I’m sure I’m right. I’m sure that after a year or two you’ll be glad I sent you to the school. And I’ll be up there in a few days to see you, Eddie, myself. What’s more, I know some boys up there — friends of mine, that’ll help you, Eddie; be friends to you. They won’t want to like a kid that cries, but I’ll tell ’em you need friends to strengthen you, and they’ll stay with you.”
All forenoon this goes on, the boys coming up in groups to be treated each one by himself. He is known to the Court, well known, and the Judge, his personal friend, and the officers of the Court and the spectators, his fellow-clubmen, all rejoice with him, if he is “making good,” and if he is doing badly, they are sorry. And in that case, he may be invited to a private talk with the Judge, a talk, mind you, which has no terrors for the boy, only comfort. They often seek such inter- views voluntarily. They sneak into the Judge s ​
chambers or call at his house to “snitch up” that they are not doing well. And the boys who sit there and see this every two weeks, or hear all about it, they not only have forgotten all their old fear of the Law; they go to the Court now as to a friend, they and their friends. For Judge Lindsey had not been doing “kid justice to kids” very long before all Boyville knew it. The rumour spread like wildfire. The boys “snitched” on the Judge, “snitched on the square”; they told one another that the County Judge was all right.
The Judge tells many stories to illustrate the change that followed. Once as he approached a group of boys, one of them said: “There’s th’ Jedge, fellers, and two kids dived down an alley. The others gathered around the Judge.
“Who were those boys that ran away?” he asked.
Who ? Them ? Oh,” came the answer, “they’re kids from K. C.” (Kansas City); “they ain’t on to the game here.”
Another time the Judge was walking along the street arguing with me that stealing isn’t a heinous crime in a boy, and that it shouldn’t be treated with holy horror. Most boys swipe something at one time or another; and to prove his point, he halted before a “gang.” ​
“Say, kids,” he said, and, as they looked up, he asked: “how many of you fellers have swiped things ? ”
Every boy’s hand shot up in the air. The Judge had proved his point, but he had proved also another thing. Those boys knew he was the Judge, yet they were not afraid to tell the truth. Or, to state the situation more completely: those boys knew he was the Judge and therefore they were not afraid to tell him the truth. Not all these boys had been in his Court; in fact, only one or two had; but that didn’t matter. All the boys of Denver know of the Judge, and what they know of him is that though he represents the Law and the State, he is “all right.”
One afternoon, a boy of about ten years stuck his head into the door of the Judge’s private room.
“Is the Judge in?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the Judge.
“Is this him?” the boy asked.
“Yes, my boy. I’m the Judge.”
“Well, I’m Johnny Rosenbaum, and I came down here to see you.”
“Yes ? I’m glad you’ve come, John, but what did you come for ? ”
“Well,” he said, “Joe Rosenthal, he used to come down here, and he ‘swiped’ thing ​s once.
And I ‘swiped’ something, and he said I better come down here and see you about it.”
“All right, but what have you come to me about it for?”
The tears started. “Well,” he said, “I came down here to tell you I’d cut it out and never do it again. And I thought I better get here before the cop did. Joe said the cop ’ud ditch a kid that swiped things, but that you’d help a feller to ditch the swipin’.”
“Yes, I’ll help you ditch swipin’, but you’re a mighty little boy; how did you find the way down here alone ? ”
“Oh,” he said, “ ‘’most every kid I seed knew about it, and they passed me down th’ line to here.”
Johnny Rosenbaum was put on probation, and he began overcoming evil with good, as he proved one day in court. Sometimes the Judge will turn to the boys and ask whether any feller has done that week a thing good enough to make up for an evil thing done before. Once, when he asked this question, Johnny rose and said:
“Judge, some of the kids I run with was diggin’ a cave, and we wanted a shovel, and they said: Let’s go and swipe one.’ So they wanted to put me into Mr. Putnam’s barn where the shovel was, through a little hole that nobody but ​a little
kid could crawl through. And I says, ‘No, I gotter report down to th’ Judge, and I told him that I’d cut out swipin’ and when I got a chanct I’d do a good thing. Now is my chanct,’ I says. ‘ I won’t swipe th’ shovel,’ I says, ‘ and you mustn’t,’ I says to them. Now I ain’t goin’ to snitch on who the fellers was because they says ‘All right, we won’t swipe the shovel.’ And I went ’round and I ast Mr. Putnam to borrow us the shovel, and he said he would. So we got the shovel on th’ square. But, Judge, if I hadn’t done that they would have swiped the shovel, wouldn’t they ? ”
“Yes, John,” said the Judge. “They would have swiped the shovel, and if you ever swiped anything in your life, you have more than made up for it by doing the right thing this time.”
Another case of “making good” was that of Eli Carson. Eli told at a meeting how his news gang down in the Post alley were going to swipe a box of cherries off’n Wolf Londoner’s grocery store.” “I says it wasn’t square,” said Eli, “and the other kids, they all allowed it wasn’t either. Texas was th’ kid that said first to swipe th’ cherries; and he thought afterwards it was best not to do it. And I wanted to tell you, Judge, that I had done a good thing, but Texas he didn t want me to. But by and by Texas c ​hanged his
mind, and says I could tell you. So I’m not snitchin’, am I ? ”
“An experience like that,” the Judge said by way of comment, “goes to show that my theory is correct, that all we need is an influence for good to counteract the influence for bad of the gang. For Texas is a well-known newsboy, and had Eli not been a member of our gang, coming to Court where he could tell his experiences in the presence of one hundred and fifty other boys, and be praised, why, then, Eli would have wanted to please Texas. As it is, he wants to please me and the Court gang; and Texas does, too.”
Another instance of faith in the Court: The Judge had been trying a case all day. It was a grown-up case, difficult and slow, and when the adjournment came late, at six o’clock, the Judge was tired. As the court room cleared, however, he saw a child in a back seat. “ He was so small,” the Judge says, “that I thought someone must have gone off and forgotten him, and I told ‘Uncle John’ Murrey (the bailiff) to find out whose child it was. But when Uncle John spoke to him, the little fellow got up, and I saw he was almost ten years old. I called him up to the bench, and he came, and when he reached me he dropped his head on my shoulder and began to sob.
Judge, he said, I’m Clifford, and my ​
mamma don’t live here, and I stay with my aunt down on - Street, so I been swipin’ things, I have, and I come here to ‘cut it out.’” As the tears flowed more abundantly, he said he was sorry and would never do it again if the Judge would “give him a show,” as he had another boy he named. The Judge took the little fellow back in his chambers; they had a long talk, and the boy, put on probation, reported regularly and well. “He turned out to be a splendid boy,” the Judge says.
But the best example the Judge gives of the difference in results between the old criminal court system of vengeance and fear and the new method of friendship and service, is a story he tells of two brothers. “ Both were wayward,” he says. “The older was brought to the criminal court for some boyish offence in the days before the establishment of the Juvenile Court. He was flung into a filthy jail and herded with men and women, where he heard and saw vile and obscene things. He was dragged into court by an officer and put through the police court mill. He was only a little boy. He had been sinned against long before his birth. Both by heredity and environment he had been driven to lawless- ness. But the State took no account of this. It had its chance to make a good man of him. He ​
wanted bread; the State gave him a stone. It branded him a criminal, made him a criminal. It made the pressure of evil upon him inexorable. To-day he is a man and in the penitentiary.
“The younger brother was as wayward as the elder. Four years ago he was brought to the Juvenile Court, defiant and frightened, just as his brother had been taken to another tribunal. The policeman told me the boy was a very Ananias, and I replied that, given the same conditions, he (the cop) would probably have been the same, and the officer went away convinced that there was no use bringing the boys to the Juvenile Court, where the Judge ‘did nothing to them.’ The policeman would count as nothing the many hours during many weeks that I laboured for that boy. He told me the truth; he convicted himself, but no stigma of conviction was put upon him, and he was not punished. He was put on probation, and encouraged to do his best. He was made to feel that the State was on his side; that the forces of the Law were working for him rather than against him; that the Court was his friend, his appeal when he was in trouble. And that Morris, as I will call him, did feel perfect faith in the Court the Law, and the State, he proved once in an amusing way.
“One day I was trying an important will case. ​
Millions of dollars were involved. The door opened cautiously, and Morris poked his freckled face in, piping up that he wanted to see the Judge. The bailiff started to shoo him away, but I called in the boy. I ordered a recess. No doubt the distinguished counsel were shocked; certainly they looked shocked. But a live boy looms larger than a dead man’s millions to me, and when this boy came into my Court, unafraid, smiling, and sure of justice, I remembered the flash of fear and hatred that I once had seen on this same freckled face. So I beckoned Morris up to me, and I heard his case then and there. He was in busi- ness. He sold newspapers, and his place of busi- ness was a certain busy corner where he dealt not only with pedestrians, but with passengers on passing cars. The ‘old cop, it seemed, had let him ‘hop the cars,’ and all had gone well till a new cop had come there. The ‘new guy,’ as Morris called him, had ordered the boy off the corner. ‘Thinks ’cause he’s a cop he owns the whole town,’ said Morris, who was losing about fifty cents a day. The case stated, I asked Mor- ris what he would have me do.
“Evidently Morris had been reading, as well as selling, his newspapers, for he was ready with
his answer.
“‘Judge,’ he said, ‘can’t you gimme one o ​
them there things they call ’junctions against de fly cop ?’
“I gave him one. Why not? I called for an injunction blank, and on it I wrote a note to the policeman. I told him about Morris; not much, but enough to make him understand that the boy was one of my probationers who was try- ing to ‘make good’; that he was bringing me good reports from his teachers; and that I hoped the officer would give the boy all the leeway possible. To the boy I explained that the officer repre- sented the Law, as I did, and must be respected accordingly. Morris went away gleefully with his writ.”
And the writ “worked.” The Judge says that the next time he saw Morris, he asked the boy about it. Morris said he had “served it all right.”
“An’ say, Judge,” he said, “ it worked fine. De cop liked to ’a’ dropped dead when he read it. He tinks I got a pull wit’ de Court, so he wants to be my friend. And I don’t know but I’ll let him in.” The Judge spoke for the cop. He told Morris he must be a friend of the policeman, and the boy reported later that he had “let the cop in. And he had. The Judge learned that they became good friends.
In his comment on this incident, ​the Judge attributes the difference between Morris and his brother to one thing: “opportunity.” “The State,” he says, “surroun'ded the boy who is in the penitentiary with everything to make him do evil; hence the State must support him now in the penitentiary. The State surrounded Morris with every influence to make him do right; hence he is growing up a good citizen who will support the State.” There is a great difference there. But I want to point out another “difference,” a “method” of the Judge to which he does not refer in anything he ever says about the celebrated injunction case of Morris, the “bad” boy, vs. the new cop on his corner. Recall what the Judge wrote into that injunction. How did he make the policeman obey the writ which the boy served on him ? The Judge simply told the policeman about the boy. Having told the boy about the cop, he related enough of the history of the newsboy to get the cop interested in the boy and in the game of correction which he and the boy were playing together. In other words, Ben Lindsey, the man of heart, reached for the heart of the policeman, and since the heart is a vital spot, it is no wonder “ de cop liked to a dropped dead.”
This, then, is Judge Lindsey’s method.
It is an old method. He didn’t discover it. A ​
great religion was founded on “faith, hope, and love” once. That was long ago. The only new and interesting thing about Lindsey’s experi- ment is that he finds that this ancient, neglected method “works”—works, too, as I said at the outset, with grown-ups as well as with children, with cops as well as with kids. It has won his fight for him. Yes, he fights. The kids’ Judge has had to fight, and, as we shall see, he has fought. The fight isn’t finished yet. The “bad” men of Colorado haven’t been taught by their State and their courts to see things as the bad boys of Colorado are learning to see them. They also go to the courts for injunctions, and some of them get their writs. Ben B. Lindsey is a man with a man’s fight for men on his hands, and he is the kind of man that finishes his fights. He will win with good men or — he’ll wait and win it with bad boys. For his bad boys will grow up some day, and they know what the State can be to a feller and that “there can be no justice with- out the love of man for man.”
II. WHAT MAKES “ BAD ” CHILDREN BAD
If you care to take the measure of Chris- tian civilization in the United States to-day, ​
reflect for a moment frankly upon the meaning of this fact: There is opposition to Judge Lindsey. That men like Heney and La Follette, Everett Colby, and (even) Mark Fagan, should have to fight for the right to do right, is significant enough of the power of evil among us; but Ben Lindsey! This man is so just and so gentle; his purposes are so pure, his work is so beautiful, so successful, and—you would think — so harmless, that no one would expect to see any man’s hand raised against the Judge of the Juvenile Court of Den- ver. Callous souls might show indifference, but why opposition ? And such opposition ?
The two bosses of the two political parties con- spired together once to keep Judge Lindsey off the bench. At another time, some men tempted him to disgrace with a woman! Legislation is pro- posed (and has been passed) to divide his Court and thus limit his power as a judge to serve the children of his county. Physically delicate, the only rest this overworked man takes is when he travels, as he does, thousands of miles to tell people what wonders “justice with love” has done for the “bad kids” of Denver. This time- off he justifies on the ground that his lectures further the cause of the children elsewhere, and bring in money to carry on his plans for his own “Court gang” at home; and he spends thus all ​
he makes from these lectures, and out of the $4,600 which the county pays him, he retains some other judge to fill his place while he is away. I ask the thousands of men and women who have heard Judge Lindsey tell his stories of boys and girls, to consider what it means, that powerful men in Colorado have drawn a bill that shall “put a stop to this little whipper-snapper’s run- ning around all over the country lecturing.” This is hate. And the other attacks upon him and his work show a deeper-seated opposition. Why ?
There’s a reason. There are two reasons. One is that Judge Lindsey does not confine him- self to saving the children that are “ lost in crime”; he began early to inquire into the causes of juve- nile crime. He asked what made bad children bad. That led him to a study of the conditions of child-life; that led him to the conclusion that the typical environment of an average Christian community was such that even little children could not be good; and that led this man to attack those conditions. In other words, Judge Lindsey has sought not merely to cure but to prevent the evils of child-life.
“Don’t tear down all the time,” men shout at reformers. “What we want is reconstructive work.” It was Lindsey’s “reconstructive work” that threatened to “hurt business.” ​
There we have one all-sufficient reason why he has to fight; but there’s a second: Ben Lindsey does not limit his labours to the cause of the children. He is celebrated for his juvenile sys- tem, and in Denver you hear that he is “a philan- thropist, and if he would stick to his philanthropic work, he might go on forever.” That’s a lie. But, as I said, this man should not be known only as the founder of the Juvenile Court; he is doing a man’s work for men. The “kids’ Judge” of Denver was elected as the County Judge of Den- ver, and as such he dealt out justice to bad men as well as to bad boys, and when by accident one day he discovered evidence of graft in his Court, Judge Lindsey forced the grafters to trial and to conviction.
Ben Lindsey does his duty, his whole duty as a man, as a citizen, and as a public official, and that’s what makes him a menace to Things As They Are in Colorado and in the United States. Like Heney, and La Follette, and Colby, and (even) Mark Fagan, Ben Lindsey is up against the Sys- tem, and, therefore, like them and like every hon- est man you hear of in this land, the just Judge has to fight.
A large part of the opposition to Judge Lindsej, especially at first, was honest. It was ignorant, but sincere and natural. For, yo ​u understand,
Lindsey’s methods are applied Christianity. With- out thinking much about it he was putting into practice in actual life, and, of all places, in the criminal courts, the doctrine of faith, hope, and charity. In a Christian community this was revolutionary and, “as it was in the beginning,” caused a great rumpus. The Bar was shocked. When the Judge, searching the juvenile mind for causes of juvenile crime, saw fear of the Law and hate of the Court in the eyes of the little pris- oners and, looking about him, realized that there was reason for this dread, we have seen how he threw off authority, came down off the bench, subordinated the machinery of justice to the good of the boy, and for routine and vengeance substi- tuted sympathy and help. He took the boys’ view of boys’ “mistakes,” and when he sent a “feller” to the reform school at Golden, it was only upon his own confession and for his own good. The boys understood, but the lawyers wagged their heads: the lawyers, I mean, who regard the Law as a sacred Institution. When they saw a judge who was “a lawyer, and a good lawyer,” sweeping aside technicalities and ignoring “good prac- tice” to get at the real, human interest of the prisoner at the bar, they were deeply pained. But the Judge, who understands men as well as he does boys, understood this feeling, and ​
he was patient to explain, and, since this was an honest opposition, he overcame it. He tells the story:
“I sent a boy to the Industrial School on the charge of ‘needing correction for his own good.’ The boy had made a clean breast of it to me, and we had such a perfect understanding, that boy and I, that he had taken his commitment papers and gone off by himself to Golden. Then appeared Counsel employed by his parents, de- claring that he had been dealt with without due process of law, no jury trial, etc., etc. He (the lawyer) said he would apply for a writ of habeas corpus. I assured him I could make no objection, but that the boy had been guilty of two or three offences constituting technical burglary, so that while he might be released for the pur- pose of obtaining due process of law, this pro- cess would not only make the boy a burglar and a thief, but would return him, so branded by the records, to the place whence he might be brought upon the habeas corpus writ.
“ The case,” says the Judge, “ was never brought.” Lawyers still lift their brows at Judge Lindsey’s “loose practice,” but though he has dealt with more than five thousand children’s cases, the ques- tion of due process has been raised but once since — at home. A Boston judge demurred not long ​
ago. Lindsey lectured there, teaching his doc- trine that the boy is more important than the Law, and that where justice, blindfolded, made criminals of “bad” boys, justice with love saved them to the State. God forgive the people who brought that man here!” exclaimed the Boston judge. And the next time a young criminal was brought before him he “showed how to deal with such cases. The boy had thrown a snowball at a man, and the Boston judge sent the prisoner to jail for thirty days “on the evidence.” But Lindsey’s doctrine had taken hold of the public mind; the newspapers investigated the case very
much as Lindsey would have done, and_
on the facts Boston public opinion reversed the Boston judge. He had made a mistake. He was right, in a way, this law-worshipping judge; it wouldn’t do to let men like him exercise their human feelings. But Boston was right, too; such men shouldn’t be allowed to deal with the. children of men. Even blind justice isn’t revenge.
The penal instinct is strong in man, and Den- ver felt, for a long while, as this pagan judge felt. Grave fears were expressed everywhere of Lind- sey’s “leniency,” as men called his Christianity, for, of course, no one recognized it for what it was.
What the little devils want is a good licking,” said the grown-ups, “or the jail.” ​
No,” the Judge replied, “all they lack is a fair show and — understanding.” And he gave the boys and girls a “show and understanding,” and they showed that they understood. He had to fight the doubts of their elders, but he believes in fighting. “The world needs fighting men,” he teaches. “Every good, great man was a fighter.” So he enlisted the children in his fight for a “decent town of decent kids,” by telling them how he was called foolish for putting faith in “bad kids.” But also he teaches that “a good example and loving service — these are the weapons of peace.” And this, likewise, the kids understood. The difficulty was to make their elders understand, but he was patient, and the children helped him.
A city official of high degree, exasperated by the outrageous depredations of a “gang up his way,” called on the Judge once to send to prison three of the boys that were under arrest.
“ Born criminals, that’s what they are,” said the official, and some of their acts were “burglaries.”
The Judge talked with the boys. He got them to bring in the others, and among them was the son of the official of high degree!
“Your son isn’t a born criminal,” said the Judge, “and neither are the others.”
He sent none of the boys to prison. The Judge ​
taught them some elementary lessons about crime and, putting them on their honour, let them go “on probation.” Their “crimes” ceased.
The Judge says his service in the Juvenile Court has taught him many things about chil- dren, but the information he has gained there about parents he characterizes as “amazing.” He ranks fool fathers and incompetent mothers among the first causes of the troubles of children, and if you add vicious and negligent parents you have nine-tenths of all his children’s “cases” accounted for.
“ Children don’t rebel at authority,” he says, “only at ignorant authority,” and there is where many parents fail. “Every father and mother ought to know more about their own children than anyone else. Perhaps, in most cases, they do, but it is amazing how often they don’t. And the reason they don’t is that they haven’t enough love for children to understand them, and not enough character to hold their respect. Their children lie to them, and it is the parents’ fault. I recall hardly a single case in the thousands I have dealt with when we did not get the truth from the child; yet in hundreds of these cases the children had lied to the parents. Why ? They were afraid of their parents; they were not under- stood at home.” ​
The reference here is not to the parents of the poor “bad kids”; they also have their faults, and the Judge has had his troubles with them. But the poor have in poverty an excuse for neglect, and where one parent is vicious, the other is pathetically glad, usually, of help such as Judge Lindsey gave. The poor are “down on” the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Chil- dren, of New York; but for Judge Lindsey, of Denver, they will fight — even at the polls. He won over the poor easily enough.
His hardest honest battles were with the well-to- do father who “had no time to fuss with his boy,” except now and then to “lick him,’’and the vain and frivolous mother who “just knew that her nice little boy” or her “nicer” little girl “wouldn’t do such things.” Now, the Judge finds that all children are pretty much alike at bottom; they all are “nice,” but the Old Harry who is in their parents is in the kids, too; and the Judge doesn’t mind. The Judge has a sneaking, human preju- dice against “little prigs”; he rather favours husky lads and mischievous little girls who, if they can do wrong, can do right with equal energy. But the “nice” parents are forever making prigs and snobs of their children or proving to them their elderly assininity.
“I remember a gentleman,” the Judge relates. ​
“who was most violent in his complaints to me about boys in a certain (fashionable) district who swiped ice-cream and other good things to eat from back porches, and he declared he had for- bidden his boy to go with the suspects. He was the surprised dad of one, the worst of the gang. I had to find it out for him. He should have known it himself. He was too busy downtown all day, and at night too busy denouncing his neigh- bours’ children. He is busier now studying his own son.
“The mother of a very well-to-do family once swept into my chambers, highly indignant that I had sent to the school for her boy who had been, with others, complained against for a serious offence. I had preferred not to send an officer to arrest him. ‘I would have you to understand,’ she excitedly declared, ‘that my boy is no thief; he never did anything wrong in his life.’ She knew it because she heard her boy say his prayers every night at her knee. And she knew how he came to be so falsely accused. For she said: ‘I know Mrs. A. across the street has been lying about Frank. She is a mean, contemptible old thing. She told Mrs. B. that he did so and so, and I know it is a lie, because Frankie told me so.’ I had never heard of Mrs. A. before,” the Judge says; I had got at the truth from the boys them​
selves, and Frank had told me all about his part in it. Indeed, we had just finished our talk, and Frank was in the next room waiting for the type- writer to copy a note I had dictated to ask his father not to lick the boy. Frank feared his father, and I knew that the licking would be, not to correct the boy, but to sate the anger of the parent and salve his wounded pride. Children know, and I know, and you know how many a licking is as selfish as that. Well, as the mother ended her tirade, the boy came back with the letter to be signed. His face fell when he saw his mother. ‘Now, Frank,’ I said, ‘tell your mother what you have told me.’ He did. She sank into a chair with a frightened little sigh: ‘ Well who would have believed it?’ Another mother, in an exactly similar situation, after nearly faint- ing away, suddenly arose and, with the image of Mrs. A. plainly in her mind, persuaded her little Frankie to repudiate his confession and stick to the lie. Her little Frankie didn’t turn out as well, but the one I saved from a ‘lickin’’ has been a princely little fellow ever since this, his first real lesson.”
Experiences like these would make an ordinary man feel like “licking” Frankie’s busy father and humiliating his silly mother, and Judge Lindsey has some very healthy, human feel ​ings about
such things, as he shows by the way he writes of them. The man has humour and heat, but also he has charity and infinite patience. He was as gentle with those parents as he was with their children. Having discovered early that many parents thought less of their children than of what their neighbours might say, the Judge provided privacy. We have seen him calling up boys in his Probation Court by schools, and addressing them by their first or “nick” names. This he does to spare not only the pride of the boy, but the vanity of his father and mother. And so he abolished criminal records in the Juvenile Court, not only to save a boy from growing up with a rogue’s name to burden him, but to shield his family from “disgrace.”
But the best example of his practice of privacy and consideration for both parents and children is his method of dealing with girls. He himself seldom speaks of this part of his work, and the reason is that he finds it is a sex-problem. Some women, who themselves are students of delinquent children and who admire Lindsey’s service with boys, say that he errs with girls.
“Little girls steal, lie, and do all the other things that boys do,” they say. “The police don’t arrest them as often, but the problem of the girls is as various and as complex as that of the boys.” ​
However that may be, Lindsey finds the sex-problem big enough to alarm him; and he says his observations are borne out by men who know in other cities.
In brief, it is another case of parental ignorance and Anglo-Saxon prudery. Parents do not like to tell their children the essential, natural facts of sex; they think their children too inno- cent. The result is that their children learn them at school or at play from other people’s children, “bad” boys and “forward” girls, who impart all this knowledge in the very vilest form. And the Judge, probing into the doings of boys and girls brought before him for other things, dis- covered that these lessons had taken a practical turn; that in certain schools, where the thing got started, it had spread to include, in one case fif- teen, in another nearly all the little girls in the school. What did he do about it ?
First, he got the truth. Girls lie more readily and more obstinately than boys, but he per- suaded them to tell all about it. And this he accomplished by affecting no horror of the sub- ject. He treated it naturally. He didn t take the course the world would have taken, and especially the women’s world — he didn t make the poor little girl feel that she was lost forever and ever. As with boys, he called it all a mistake, and a ​
mistake that could be ret rieved. Having the truth, he called in the mother. It is a fact for mothers to ponder that no children wanted mamma and papa to know; they would get no such can- dour and no such sympathetic understanding at home as they got from their Judge. But the Judge insisted, and after an hour with the child, he often had to spend hours with the mother to prepare her to be motherly. She was horror- stricken; she thought of the disgrace; of what Mrs. A. would say. But the Judge had foreseen all that. He had other women calling on him the same day, other mothers and unmarried women. The shocked mother’s good name was shielded, and she and her daughter were brought together. For once, no lies, no vanities, no hypocrisies, and no false modesty stood between them, and there- fore there was no lack of a perfect understanding. In one case the Judge was so stirred by the extent to which the schools had been cursed by this evil that he called a “meeting of mothers.” No one knew what it was for; mothers not involved were invited with those that were in trouble; school teachers and other women; some of the “best” women in town. There, all together, the women of Denver were informed, warned, and instructed in private. It was beautifully done. NA names were mentioned, of course, not even the name of ​
the school, and no breath of the purpose of that meeting ever leaked out.
The head of one of the public utility companies once marked Lindsey for defeat, and one of his executive staff remonstrated.
“Oh, no,” he said, “not Lindsey.”
“What!” exclaimed the magnate. “You, too ? Everywhere I turn it is, ‘ Oh, no, not Lindsey.’ My wife is for Lindsey, my mother is for Lindsey, my sisters are for Lindsey. And now you are for Lindsey. What is it that makes everybody and everything fight for this judge?”
Everybody doesn’t fight for Judge Lindsey; only those are for him who know how he has conspired with them in secret to help their little boy or their little girl. But these are legion. Poor and rich, “everybody” has knowledge of private calls made by this man; of hours, days, weeks spent on the case of somebody’s bad little boy whom they have seen afterward being “good” to “show ’em that th’ Jedge is dead right in bankin’ on th’ honour of a kid.” Opposition? That of the parents of Denver melted like one of Den- ver’s summer snows.
All the opposition to faith in mischievous boys soon disappeared, but there remained the fear of this treatment for “really ​bad boys.
The police represented the old policy of ven- geance and prison. When the Judge received official permission to deal with all juvenile cases, and they saw what his treatment was — faith and hope and love — they snorted. The town snorted with them, and when the police held back its “criminals born,” public opinion backed the police. But the Judge is a politi- cian, too; he knows the game, and he went after the police. How ? He might have exercised his authority, and he has done that since, in his fights with the dishonest opposition of the police. But this was honest opposition, this that came first. It was nothing but the natural conservatism of human nature, and he was patient with it. He reasoned with the police. He “showed them.” He got the bad boys to help him “show ’em,” just as the “nice” boys had helped him show the “good” people up on the hill. Judge Lindsey came down off the bench to go into the jails and bring into his Court the “criminals born”; and he brought them there, and there he ga\ e to them also trust, encouragement, and service, and, like the good boys, the bad ones gave him back faith for faith, hope for hope, and for his love, their loyalty, and — his greatest triumph.
That is what
most of the admirer ​s of Judge
Lindsey call his practice of trusting young “ criminals” to go alone to Golden. Other triumphs of his seem to me to be greater, but certainly the sight of “a convict,” and a boy convict at that, receiving his commitment papers from the Judge and passing through the streets, taking train and changing cars to get to Golden, and there delivering himself up — this is indeed a spectacle to see. And it is a common spec- tacle in Denver. Judge Lindsey hardly ever sends an officer with a boy now, and out of the hundreds he has trusted, only three have failed him. One of these I saw. He was “Eddie,” the boy I told about in the first part of this story, who was hysterical, and the Judge had doubts about him; indeed, he put him privately in charge of a “tough kid” who was going also to the school, and it was the tough kid who reported by tele- phone from the station where they changed cars, that “Eddie can’t seem to make it, Judge. He don’t say he won’t, but he cries, and I guess he ain’t strong enough.”
Another of the three failures was a boy who was started twice, and when the Judge reproached him for his weakness, suggested a way to beat himself. “Try me by another road, Judge,” he said. “This road goes right by my old stamping ground, and when I see th’ gang playin’ ​
’round, I can’t help it. I just have to drop off th’ car.” The Judge gave him tickets over another route, and that night received word that the boy had “made it.”
Well, this practice of the Judge was begun on an impulse in this first, honest conflict with the police. They had caught two “dangerous young criminals,” boys with records for serious crimes and jail breaking, and the Judge, having found them in the cells, talked with them. One night the Judge telephoned to the warden to send over two of the boys. An officer brought one. “ I think,” the Judge says, “that the warden’s idea was that it was dangerous to send two at one time without handcuffs on them, and the police knew it offended me to have them come into my Court or my chambers with young fellows handcuffed.”
When the officer came in with the boy, he spoke in an undertone to the Judge, warning him that the prisoner was the “worst in the bunch,” and that every time he had brought him to that room, the boy had eyed the window with the fire-escape.
“ Better let me stay here,” said the officer. The Judge said he would take his chances. “All right,” said the officer, and he smiled, “but we shall have to hold you responsible. You know ​
what it has cost the county to catch this prisoner.” The Judge knew, and he promised to give a written order of court, if necessary, and the officer left.
It was ten o’clock at night, dark and cold. The boy, sixteen years old, was strong, and his face was not very prepossessing. The Judge is built like a flower, but he had worked hard on this boy, and he believed in his method. So when the door closed behind the officer, he went straight up to the boy.
“Henry,” he said, “the officer who brought you here says you had your eye on the fire-escape, and that you are looking for a chance to skip. He said he wouldn’t be responsible for your return to jail if I made him leave you alone in this room with me. He said that you d be down that fire-escape quicker’n a wink. Now, I don't believe it. I believe in you, Henry, and I hope you believe in me.”
With that, the Judge went to the window and, throwing it up as high as it would go, he said:
“There, Henry, there’s the fire-escape and the night and two hours the best of it, for I’ll promise, if you decide to ‘duck,’ not to report to the Warden till twelve o’clock. Now, then, if you think you are not worth saving, not worth helping ​
all the hours I have spent with you in jail are to go for nothing, you ‘scoot.’ I’ll not interfere. I leave it to you. I can’t save a fellow, you know, not by myself; I can only help a fellow to save himself, if he wants to. If he doesn’t want to, and I can’t convince him that he ought to want to, then I do not see much hope. So, go or stay, as you wish, Henry.”
“Do you mean that, Judge?” the boy asked, and the Judge thinks his impulse was to go.
“You know what I mean,” he answered, and for a moment the two looked at each other.
“Then,” says the Judge, “I thought I saw a peculiar shadow cross his face, and I believed he understood. I went back to my table and sat down. I must confess it was an anxious moment for me. I wasn’t sure that I had made on that boy the impression I hoped to make. He looked so hard. And he wavered there. I hardly dared to look at him. I thought of the ridicule of the police, of the failure and what it would mean: the defeat of the policy I was coming to believe in. And there that boy hung, swinging, actually swinging. Well, he had a certain peculiar swinging gait, and when he made a lurch for that window, my heart rose in my throat. His hand went up in the air, and I thought he was gone. But no — the hand that went up ​
seized the window and brought it down with a slam and a bang. Then the boy came and sat down at my table.
“‘Judge,’ he said in a very simple, almost boyish way, ‘I’ll stay with you. I never had nobody talk to me like you. I’ll do anything you say for me to do.’ ”
So they talked. The Judge told the boy he might have to go to Buena Vista (the peniten- tiary), and they discussed that. And they discussed crime and the police, till it was time for Henry to go back to the jail. And then — the Judge sent him back alone, and he went back alone, and he took voluntarily his place behind the bars!
It “worked,” this “method” did, so the Judge adopted it as a method. It would strengthen the boys. He told the police that he proposed thereafter to trust all prisoners to go alone to Golden. The police laughed. It is said that they passed the word to put up a job on the Judge. At any rate, the next boy for Golden was Billy B., a chronic little runaway, and with the two policemen who brought him in came two reporters. The officers excused their double patrol by pointing to a brand-new shine-box which Billy carried as evidence that he meant to “skip.” That kid had given them a two ​
weeks’ chase, they said, and they weren’t taking any chances on him. The Judge might, they implied, but there were the two reporters to bear witness that, if Billy skipped, it was no fault of the police. As a matter of fact, one of the re- porters told the Judge that the papers had been “tipped off to send them out and get a good story on the Judge.”
When the case was called, everybody was laughing in his sleeve, everybody but the Judge and Billy B. The Judge was anxious, and the boy was sobbing in a corner with his shine-box hugged to his breast. Billy was only twelve years old. He had no father, and his mother was a washerwoman. He had learned early to tramp. The Judge had worked with him, but when the “movin’-about fever” got hold of Billy, Billy had to move. And he had the fever now. He admitted it to the Judge, and when the Judge said he must go to Golden, the little fellow burst into tears. He had visions of stone walls and iron bars, with a policeman standing over him with a club all the rest of his days. That is what prison means to boys, and Golden was prison to Billy. So he dropped on his knees and begged the Judge not to send him away, promising piti- fully never to do it again.” Billy was simply afraid. ​
“Billy,” said the Judge, “you are crying be- cause you are scared. What are you scared of? Me ? Why should you be afraid of me ? Haven’t I given you a square deal ? Haven’t I given you every chance I could, helped you every way to be a good boy at home ?”
“Yes,” Billy sobbed, “but-”
“You can’t be a good boy at home. You don’t get a fair chance at home. You want to move on all the time, and by and by you’ll just be a ‘vag.’ Now, you don’t want to grow up to be a bum; do you ? No, you want a chance to learn a trade and be a man.”
The Judge explained at length that Golden wasn’t a reformatory or a prison. It was only a school, a good industrial school, where a poor kid that hadn’t a chance at home could learn a trade. “Why,” said the Judge, “I’ve been there. I like to go there. And I tell you everybody up there just loves a kid that tries to do his best, and they help him. Nobody hates a kid at Golden. No, siree.”
By and by, the tears ceased to flow. The Judge described the school, its shops, its military organization, its baseball nines, and then, as the Judge relates, “when fear vanished, and interest began, I appealed to the boy’s nobility, to his honour, pride, his loyalty to me. ​
Judge Lindsey seized for this purpose the very preparations the police had made for their
“joke on the Judge.” He introduced Billy to the reporters.
“What do you think the cops have told these reporters, Billy?” he said. “They have told them that that fool Judge was going to trust little Billy B. to go to the industrial school all by himself, and that they were going to have the laugh on the Judge because they knew Billy better than the Judge did. They say they
know you’ll never go, and they are saying what a fine joke it will be to have the reporters write a story to-morrow telling how the Judge trusted Billy, and Billy threw the Judge down, ditched his papers, and ran away. And, gee whiz, it would be tough if I did get thrown down. But I’m not scared. I believe in you, and I’m going to trust you. I am going to give you these, your commitment papers, and your railroad ticket, and we’ll see whether you stay with me or stay with the police. I want these reporters to tell just what happens, so it’ll be up to you, Billy, to go to Golden or skip.”
As the Judge proceeded, Billy’s head began to go up in the air. By and by he pushed the cold tears out of his eyes, and when the Judge ceased to speak, those eyes were blazing. ​
“Judge,” he said, “you know John Handing, don’t you?”
The Judge hesitated.
“You know, Judge; the kid th’ fellers call Fatty Felix.”
“Yes, yes,” said the Judge.
“Well,” said Billy, “he’s my chum. Fatty is. Now, here’s my shine-box. You give that to Fatty, and you gimme them papers. I’ll show ’em. You trust me, and I’ll stay wit’ ye, Judge, and we’ll fool ’em, all right.”
And off went Billy B., twelve years old, out of the court-room, down through the streets — the streets he loved —to the car; then over three railroads to the little town of Golden where, asking his way, he climbed the long, lonely hill road to the industrial school — just to show a doubting world that “it” works.
Was the world convinced ? No. The grown- ups marvelled, and even the boys sneered. The Judge “fixed” the boys. He heard that they called Billy B. a “chump” up at Golden, so he went up there, and he told the story in a speech which made Billy B.’s face shine like his old shine-box. That speech, repeated again and again, at Golden and in Denver and all over the State, has made it an honour to go alone to Golden: a test of pluck, loyalty, and self-control. And, ​
on the other hand, to “ditch your papers and run,” is a disgrace in Boyville now. A boy called on the Judge one day with an offer from the gang to “ lick” any kid that ditched his papers or in any other way went back on the Judge, and the Judge had some difficulty in explaining why that wasn’t “square.”
Wonderful ? Yes, it’s wonderful, if you don’t see what “it” is, and Denver didn’t — at least, official Denver didn’t. The Judge saw that he had to “win out” with what the world calls “young criminals born,” so he watched for a chance; and the chance came.
“One morning,” he says, “the newspapers reported the capture of Lee Martin and Jack Heimel, two notorious boy burglars known as ‘The Eel,’ and ‘Tatters.’ They were the lead- ers of the River-Front gang of sneak thieves, pickpockets, burglars, etc., and they had done time in the reform school and jails in Colorado and elsewhere. The newspapers, having told all about them and their crimes, went on to say that these criminals had amply qualified for a long term, and they should therefore be tried in the criminal court, not before the new-fangled, grand- motherly juvenile department. Here was my chance and a challenge.
“I visited the jail. The boys were in separate ​
cells, handcuffed to their benches. They had just come out of the sweat-box where the police had been bullying and threatening them for hours in an effort to make them tell on the other members of the gang, and they were bruised and battered. Tatters looked more like a pirate than the fifteen-year-old grammar school boy he was. A picture of uncleanliness, he scowled at me out of sullen black eyes, and the sinister effect was increased by the livid bruises on his swarthy face. I talked with him, but could get nothing out of him. His lips were padlocked, for he was plainly suspicious of me.
“Lee Martin presented a very different appearance. He was slight, fair, and scrupulously neat, despite the unutterable prison filth. About him was an air of childish innocence hard to reconcile with his established reputation as the most expert and reckless boy criminal within a thousand miles. There was something peculiarly winning about him. I have never met so interesting a boy, or one so full of vital, human experiences learned in the hard school of life. He had gentle, blue eyes, just now glaring with hate. It was an expression I was to see in them often during the next few months, for hatred and revenge were then the dominant emotions of his life. ​
“As I stepped across the cell, he drew himself up with an odd touch of dignified pride peculiar to him. He was only a little boy, hunted and run to earth like a wolf, cuffed and kicked and flung into a dark cell prior to being railroaded through the court to the reformatory, but he was staunch and ‘game’ still to his comrades.
“‘I ain’t no snitch,’ he flung out before I had said a dozen words.
“‘Good for you,’ I told him. ‘There’s always good in a fellow that won’t snitch on his chums.’
“He looked at me, greatly surprised but still suspicious. He asked me who I was. I told him. ‘Are they going to try me in your Court?’ he asked. I answered that he would probably be tried in the criminal court. ‘They’ll send me up, all right,’ he said with conviction. ‘Would you?’ he demanded. ‘I’d give you a square deal,’ I told him. He sneered in my face.”
Not a very promising beginning, was it? The Judge did not give up. He called again on the boys, and again and again. He told them the truth. He told them he was labouring to have them tried in his Court, and why. He talked about his Court, and what it meant; how it was opposed, and why. He had no secrets; he kept nothing back. He discussed crime, his view of it, the police view of it, the world’s. He didn’t ​
know who was right. “ Gradually their suspicion of me disappeared,” the Judge says. “They came to regard me and my Court as engaged in a fight for them against the hated police.” The Judge let them think that. It was true. He explained how it was true, how “the police were not to blame,” not the policemen. They were reared in a school that taught them that it was their duty to fight crime with crime, craft with craft, violence with force, and maybe that was the only way. Certainly, “fellers like Tatters and the Eel made it hard for the police. Hadn’t the boys added to the work of the “cops,” and to their worries ?
They had indeed. The Judge laid down the kid law, which was the criminal law, about “snitching”; how snitching on the other fellow was wrong, but snitching on yourself was all right, if you believed what you told was to be used to help you. This they understood, and as their confidence grew, they began to snitch on themselves.
They told the Judge their stories, and they were amazing stories of crime and of hate. The Eel especially hated anything in the nature of legal machinery with a bitterness that amazed me,” the Judge says, “till I had heard his story.” And then the Judge tells the Eel’s story. His ​
father was foreman in a machine-shop, honest enough, but brutal to the boy, who loved his mother, who loved, but was too weak to help, her son. He “bummed” the streets day and night, dodging his father, who cuffed and cursed him whenever their paths crossed. Lee ran away, and to keep himself became a sneak thief. Before he was ten, he had “bummed” his way from Chicago to Denver and become a “pretty slick thief.” Arrested now and then, and railroaded by the law, he was patted on the back in the jails by hardened criminals who taught him to pick pockets. Caught at this, he learned burglary from burglars in the jail and, at the age of twelve, nearly killed himself trying to blow a safe. The “Bull-pen” had shown him how, but he put the powder in the wrong place. He was full of courage. An experienced “hobo,” he travelled twenty-five thousand miles in one year on brake- beams till, tiring of that, he learned to sneak into Pullmans and hide and sleep in a vacant upper berth. Once he was awakened by an excla- mation from the porter: “Good Lawd, they’s a kid in heah!” The Eel tells the rest: “I flew th’ coop when the coon guy went to tell th’ conductor. That ditched me in a town they call Reno, Nevada. ’Course, I was broke. I touched a guy for a half and bought me a cane and some ​
chewing-gum. I walked into a bank and up to th’ guy in th’ monkey cage. I says I wanted work, and when he went to see de head guy, I rammed th’ gum in de end of my cane, shoved it through the cage, and swiped a twenty that stuck to th’ gum. Then I hiked out on th’ express that night.”
Where did the boy learn that trick ? In jail. That’s where the State taught him his trade, and, when he had learned a new crime, he could break out and try it. Twice he had broken jail, cleverly, boldly. Once when an officer, Roberts, tried to recapture him, Lee smashed a lantern in the man’s face and then led him a chase through a back yard where clothes-lines hung in the dark. Caught under the chin by a line, the officer turned a “flip-flop,” and the boy got away; not unscathed, however; the officer fired several shots at him, and one hit the boy in the hand.
To kill that policeman was one of the vows the boy had made to himself. “ He tried to kill me. I was only a kid, and he tried to kill me. I’m going to kill him one of these nights.
The Judge listened to these stories, noted what they meant, and he sympathized with the boys. But that isn’t all he did. He sympathized with the Law and with the policeman, too. He showed the boys just where he thought things ​
were wrong in the Law and in the courts, and the boys came to understand. It wasn’t easy to correct the teachings of the jails and the police and the home and the streets, but this man did it with those boys. He showed them, for example, how the officer, Roberts, was acting in good faith, doing his duty, and how he must have been exasperated with the Eel. And the Eel saw it. And when the Judge saw that he saw it, he brought the boy and the officer together, and — they are good friends now.
So with the Law; the Judge explained what the machinery of justice was for. It had been perverted from its true function, justice, to ven- geance, but it could help a fellow, and he proved it, the Judge did. He got the cases. And he got them with the consent of the police. One captain who was loudest in his protestations, said:
“You can’t baby Lee Martin, Judge. He’s been in jail thirteen times, and it hasn’t done him any good.”
“No,” said the Judge, “and if I fail, I’ll still have twelve times the best of you., You’ve failed with him your way. It’s my turn now. It has cost the city in officers’ fees alone, $1,036 to make a criminal of him. Let’s see what it’ll cost to turn him into an honest boy.”
The captain ran over a list of his crimes. The ​
Judge brought out a longer, more correct, type- written list.
“How in the world did you get that?” the officer asked, astonished.
“They’ve confessed to me everything.”
“ How did you do it ? We couldn’t sweat it out of them.”
“I made them see that I was their friend,” the Judge said, “and that I wanted to use the information for and not against them.”
It was a strange, new point of view to the police, but they saw that there was something in it, so they tried the boys before the kids’ Judge. , The evidence was plain. Burglary was the specific charge, and the police proved it; the Judge was convinced formally of what he knew (for the boys had told him all about it). What did the Judge do to the boys ?
He put them on probation. Yes, to the horror of the police and the town, he did by these bad boys just as he did by good boys; he gave them a “show.” What was the result?
A day or two later the boys called on the Judge. With them were two others, “Red” Mike and Tommy Green. The Judge understood; these were members of the River-Front gang, for whom the police were on the lookout. But nothing was said about that. “We had a general talk ​
about crime,” the Judge says, “and the principles of the Juvenile Court.” The Judge was expect- ant, so were Lee and Tatters, but it was left to the newcomers to do their own snitching, and they did it. After a while, “Red” turned to Tommy. “Don’t you think it’s about time we were snitchin’ up ?” he asked. Tommy allowed that it was, and then followed wfhat the Judge calls “a snitching bee.” “And,” the Judge adds, “I had two new probationers for my Court.” A week or so more, and these four called with a fifth “kid,” and he, a “soft, mushy one,” as the Judge describes him, he also “snitched up.” Another period, and the five brought in two more. That finished the “crim- inal” list of the River-Front gang. “Not one of these boys had snitched on another,” the Judge says. “Each one had told only on himself.”
All those “young criminals” were put on probation, “and,” says the Judge, “six out of the seven have stuck. The seventh made the pluckiest fight I ever saw before he slipped back, and I still have hopes of his ultimate success.”
What does the Judge mean by a plucky fight? “A plucky fight” means what the Judge means by probation - the game of correction, the game of overcoming evil with good. These young criminals had not only to be good; they couldn’t ​
be good. That’s too negative for husky kids, and the River-Front gang were a husky lot. The Judge says boys are bad because, while they have lots of opportunity to do wrong, they have none to do good. So, as in the case of mis- chievous boys, he gave these criminals opportu- nities to do good. There were other “fellers” starting on careers of crime. If they were allowed to go on, they would be caught, jailed, and made criminals by the police, who, though they didn’t mean to be, were really criminal- manufacturers. The game was to beat the police and beat public opinion by showing the opposition that the Judge was right about kids, that “there ain’t no bad kids.” So the game was for the River-Front gang to bring in kids that were going wrong, get them into the Court gang, and thus prove by the good they all could do together that “it” worked. And “it” did work.
5 The loyalty of the River-Front gang to the Judge as leader of their new gang was superb. It was mistaken sometimes. Once when Jack Heimel’s mother was away, he slept in a cheap boarding-house. A drunken man cried out that he had been robbed, and he accused Jack and a friend of Jack’s. The lodging-house keeper knew Jack and, of course, believed the charge, so, sending for the police, he placed himself in ​
the door to bar the way out. Jack made a dash, hit the man behind the ear and, dropping him, leaped out and away with his chum. The police searched for them all night, but couldn’t find them. The Judge found them. When he went down to Court the next morning the boys were “layin’ for him.” Jack explained:
“We didn’t take th’ money, Judge, but I had to hit de guy, because, you see, if de cops had ’a’ jugged me, me name would 'a’ been in the papers, and then, wouldn’t they say that this was de feller what de Judge ought to ’a’ sent up and didn’t ? And, say, wouldn’t dat ’a’ got you into trouble, and maybe lost you yer job r”
It developed afterward that the drunken man hadn’t lost the money at all, so Jack Heimel was cleared, and that was his last “scrape.” He got a job as a mechanic in the railroad shops and, loyal always, his last report to the Judge was that he had sent East for a book on mechanical engineering. He was rising, and he feels to this day that his success means much, not only to him, but to the Judge and the Court gang, and the methods thereof.
The Eel had a hard time. “This boy, whom the police called a depraved criminal, has done more to discourage crime,” the Judge says, ​
“than any ten policemen in the city.” He brought in boy after boy to “snitch up,” and he helped keep his own gang straight. “Red” Mike slipped back once. Arrested for robbery, he escaped, and the police were after him. The Eel was troubled. He called on the Judge. He knew where “Red” was hiding, and he knew the Judge knew he knew, but the Judge asked no questions. He and Lee simply talked the matter over till they agreed that it would be better for “Red” to come in and surrender than to be driven deeper into crime. And a day or two later “Red” appeared at the Judge’s house, “ready,” as he said, “to take his papers and go to the reformatory.”
Lee became an unofficial officer of the Court, and the Judge used him freely. Once a boy stole a pocketbook from a woman in the store where he worked. The Judge sent for Lee. “Something ought to be done,” the Judge said, “to get that boy back in the right path.” Lee went after him. He found him in a cheap theatre, “treating a gang,” brought him volun- tarily in, and— to-day the boy is a trusted employee in that same store.
Another time, Teddy Mack, a fourteen-year- old “criminal,” who was arrested for stealing a watch, sawed his way out of jail and got out of ​
Denver. All summer the police searched, and the Judge and Lee Martin often talked over the case. One day Lee said:
“I’d like to get that kid for you, Judge. I’ll bet he’s down to the fair at El Paso. You send me down there, and — I won’t be a ‘ snitch cop,’ but I believe I kin get him to come in.”
The Judge gave Lee five dollars, and the boy went across the line to the bull-fight. There was Teddy. The two boys took in the fair together, but Lee talked “crime, and the prin- ciples of the Juvenile Court” to Teddy, and back these two came together to the “Jedge.” Teddy “snitched up.” The Judge gave him twenty dollars to redeem the watch he had pawned for three dollars, and when Teddy returned with the watch and the exact change, he was sent to deliver the watch to the owner and to admit that he was the thief. That settled the case, and that settled Teddy. “We had no more trouble with Teddy Mack,” the Judge says, “though he had been one of the worst boy thieves in the city.”
The boy with whom Lee Martin had the most trouble was Lee Martin. He could not settle down. The habit of “bumming,” developed in him from early childhood, was too strong, and every once in a while that “movin’-about fever” ​
would get him. “It was like a thirst for drink,” the Judge says, “and I told him that when he felt it he must come to me. Once or twice when I saw that the call of the road was too strong to be resisted, I let him take a ride as far as Colo- rado Springs and back.” But that didn’t always satisfy him, and he would throw up his job and “skip.” It hurt him to do this; it was regarded as disloyalty to the Judge, and that was awful.
“One Sunday evening,” the Judge relates, “word reached me that Lee was going to ‘fly out.’ This worried me so much that I started for his home. I found his mother in tears. The Eel was gone.
“‘He just couldn’t stand it any longer, Jedge,’ she apologized. ‘He lay on the floor there and sobbed just like he was in a high fever. “What’ll the Judge think ? What’ll the Judge think ?” he kept saying, an’,’ the woman added, ‘he told me to tell you he’d write.’
“I went home much troubled, but the promised letters reached me, one from Albuquerque, then another from El Paso, a rapid succession of them. They were like wails from a lost soul. He im- plored me not to think he had ‘thrown me down.’ That was the burden of them all. He was coming back, he said; he just had to get on the move for a while, but he hadn’t thrown me down. I ​
wrote him not to steal, and he didn’t. When he came back a month later, he showed me a letter from a man he had worked for to prove it.”
There is more of the story, more triumphs, and more disappointments, and there are more stories just like it, of other gangs. For all the time the Judge was devoting himself to the “River-Fronts,” he was giving himself with the same devotion to his other “cases.” And there were failures as well as successes, and the police and the cynics clung to the failures. As the Judge says, however, the failures were really weak boys. “The husky kids, the kind the cops call ‘dangerous,’ they stuck with me; they showed the police that there ‘ain’t no really bad kids.’ Bad ? I believe,” the Judge said, smiling, and he quoted Riley:
“‘I believe all childern’s good Ef they’re only understood —
Even bad ones, ’pears to me,
’S jes as good as they kin be!’”
He smiles as he quotes, then the smile disap- pears, and he adds, “And that’s so of men, too.”
“Yes, but,’’you say,“ there are criminals born ?”
“Yes,” he replies, “there are criminals born, and there are criminals bred, minors and majors, too. But who bears them, and — what breeds them ? What makes bad boys bad ​j 1 What
makes bad girls bad ? And what makes men and women bad?”
That’s his answer, another question: one question; the fortunate, fatal question which got Ben Lindsey into his fights with the dishonest opposition of Denver, the fights which — because he won them, he and the children, and because they led him straight to the cause of crime, juvenile, and grown-up, too—have made the “kids’ Jedge” of Denver one of the leaders of the great war that is going on in Colorado. The outside world couldn’t understand why the people of his state wanted the Judge of the Juvenile Court to run for Governor; nor why he was willing to take the nomination. The reason, as we shall see, was that Ben Lindsey is no mere philanthropist, but (in the true sense of the word) a politician; no mere saver of little victims of wrong, but a man leading men to destroy the opportunities for evil-doing, and to give all the children of men a “show” to “do good.”
III. BATTLES WITH “bad” MEN
Early in the history of Denver’s Juvenile Court, a boy was arraigned for stealing lumber and sand from a contractor. The contractor ​
was indignant; he “wanted to know whether Judge Lindsey was going to coddle that kid or protect the property of the citizens of Denver from thieves.” The Judge said he would take the case under advisement. He did. He took the case “for a walk and a talk.”
Once out of that stiff old, stuffy old court room, the tears dried up, and the two got acquainted.
“What did you want the lumber for, kid?” the Judge asked.
“We were building a shack in my back yard, and we needed more boards than we had.”
The Judge used to build shacks, and he and the kid discussed the different kinds you could build. The Judge bragged about some he’d put up. But he never used sand in a shack.
“What did you swipe the sand for ?” he asked.
“Well,” said the kid, “girls can’t build shacks. They can keep house in ’em after they’re built, but my sister and the other fellers’ sisters, they wanted something to do till the shack was done. So while we was gettin’ the boards, we seen the sand, and we swiped a little pile for the girls to play in.”
And coming into the back yard, the kid showed the Judge the shack and the sand-pile — aban- doned now. All work was suspended, pending a decision in their case. The kid wanted to ​
know what the Court was going to do to him. The Judge said he’d take the case under advise- ment, and he did. He took a walk down to the contractor, and he told said complainant all about the shack and the sand, and the contractor furnished all the lumber and sand necessary to finish the job in that back yard. As for the children, they “cut out” all “swipin’.”
The Judge kept the case under advisement, however. He kept on walking around in back yards, and talking with young “thieves” and “builders.” He saw many signs of energy and enterprise, and nothing to do; nothing good. Everywhere was private; nowhere to play. Every- thing was property to steal. The grown-ups had “hogged” everything, and children had nowhere to play and nothing to play with.
The Judge set about organizing a juvenile association of grown-ups to furnish materials for young builders to build with; playgrounds to build on; water to swim in; jobs in the beet fields for vacation kids that had to work, and mountain trips for the rest. In brief, the Judge’s Juvenile Association for the Protection and Betterment of Children, which he is trying to make a national organization, originated out of his discovery that society had forgotten to provide children with opportunities for good. ​
But society provided opportunities for evil. Denver offered plenty of these, and the children knew them all. “I was amazed to hear what children knew,” the Judge says. “I talked to them, and I walked with and among them; I visited back alleys at night, hung around cheap theatres, visited the tenderloin and the slums. Standing in the shadow just outside of saloons, I saw children come with pitchers in their hands, sent there for beer by their parents, and while they waited, I heard men tell obscene stories. The children listened, boys and little girls. I talked with the boys, and I found that they under- stood everything that was vile. You see, I was trying to get at the causes of criminality in chil- dren, in children whom I found responsive to the noblest sentiments of honour and fair dealing. Well, I thought I saw what the causes were: the problem is one of environment; manifold oppor- tunity for evil and none for good; and then, back of this, certain social and economic conditions. What could I do to relieve these conditions ? I asked myself that again and again. My Court could correct the evil done, some of it, but how could I prevent the evil from being done?”
Perfectly simple and logical, all this. The Judge had no answer ready, but he attacked the worst condition, one that stirred him to his depths. ​
He found that the Denver saloons had wine- rooms, and that not only boys, but girls, were allowed in them and ruined. The law forbade these places to women, but the law wasn’t en- forced. Why ? Everybody knows, in a general way, why. Denver is a typical American city government, and Lindsey, a former member of the Democratic State Executive Committee, knew, in a general way, the reason for a “liberal” excise policy. It helped business. When cow- boys and miners and other visitors came to town, they wanted to have a good time, and it was good for all business to help them spend their money. But the Judge saw that however good for business it might be to neglect to enforce the wine-room law, it was bad for the children; and he put that view of it before the Police Board. He knew well the president, Frank Adams, and the members of the Board. Frank is a Democrat, like Ben, so Ben urged Frank to enforce the law in the interest of the children. The Judge also addressed the Chief of Police. The Chief couldn’t do anything but refer the letters to the Board, which wouldn’t or, at any rate, didn’t, do anything. The Judge then proceeded in his own way to compel the Board to enforce this law.
Colorado is a great place for injunctions. The “interests” there use the courts very much as ​
in other states they use legislatures and governors. The brewers own the saloons, and brewing is an interest. It “contributes” to both parties. The brewers and the dive interests got out a writ en- joining the Police Board from enforcing the law.
Judge Lindsey says the Police Board got out the writ against itself, and there was some ground for this suspicion. In the first place, the attorney for the brew T ers was the Democratic State Chair- man. In the second place, Frank Adams, who is a member of the Adams family, famous in Colorado politics, was the “iceman” in Denver. There were other icemen, but the saloons generally bought of him. So he may have been doing his customers a favour, on the side. But certainly the brewers were interested, for they warned Lindsey that if he went on making trouble for them, they would defeat him for reelection. No matter about that, however. Judge Peter L. Palmer — of whom it has been said that he would “enjoin the birds of the air from flying and the fishes of the sea from swimming” —- Peter L. Palmer held that since, under the con- stitution of Colorado, women had the same rights as men, the law forbidding them the wine-rooms was unconstitutional. Wherefore he enjoined the Folice Board, and the Police Board obeyed his order. Judge Lindsey didn t. He fined a dive​
keeper in the face of it, and the Supreme Court of the United States upheld his ruling.
It takes time to go through the courts, however, and while the case was pending on appeal, girls were being haled into the Juvenile Court as “incorrigible”; and they did look “bad.” But the evidence showed that they had been made bad in wine-rooms.
“And I found that these wine-rooms were ‘protected’ by the police,” the Judge says. I tried time and again, with Frank Adams and with the other commissioners and with the Chief of Police to get the wine-room keepers arrested, and in vain. Children they would bring in, the boys and girls, but no adults. I investigated further. I called on the Humane Society, and the Secre- tary, Mr. E. K. Whitehead, told me of the most horrible details. He also had complained in vain to the police. Then I went out and I saw some of these things. I saw sixteen boys gambling in one place, and when I reported it to the policeman on the corner, he insulted me. I wrote about this and about the wine-room to the Chief and to the Commissioner. No answer.
“One Sunday I went to visit one of my probationers, and I found him cursing his mother vilely, with an amazing command of oaths. Looking about, I saw that it was partly a house ​
of assignation, partly a home for the very poor, and all the children were masters of men’s language. Looking further, I saw, ten feet from the door of this house, the rear entrance to a wine-room—wide open, though it was a Sunday morning. I went to the mistress of the house of assignation, and she, hardened though she was, told me that this wine-room had supplied more than one bad place with inmates. Only a week before, she said, she saw two girls halt at that wine-room door. One was afraid to go in. The other was urging her, and while they were talking three men came out, seized the reluctant girl, and dragged her in. The next day the woman heard groans and sobs across the way, and she went to see what was the matter. She found the girls in the cellar, naked and drunk!
“My God!” the Judge exclaimed, “where was the policeman all this time?”
“Oh!” she said, “he knew all about it. He was in there, too, drinking with them!”
“It would be hard for me to repeat,” the Judge says, “all the things I saw and heard that har- rowed my very soul. But they were the causes, this crime and vice and this police partnership, of many of the woes and troubles that come into my Court.”
What could he do ? The Judge knew that ​
besides the “ice” and the brewers’ contributions, there were other powers back of all these conditions. The railroads ruled the state, the railroads and the mine-owners and the American Smelting Company. Under them, in Denver, and for them, were all the public utility companies which, having grants of privileges, rewarded the people of the city and state by corrupting their government. “It’s necessary, they say. Now the corrupt business interests that ruled Denver and Colorado ruled partly by ballot-box stuffing, and it was the dive-keepers, thieves, loafers all the hangers-on of vice and crime — who did the stuffing. Lindsey, who long had known this, realized now that he had nowhere to turn to appeal for some little consideration of^ the children of his town, except to the people of his town.
He invited the Police Board to visit the Chil- dren’s Court on Saturday morning, May 24, 1902. He also invited reporters. Frank Adams didn’t come, but the other commissioners did, and the bailiff gave them seats in the jury-box. There the children could see them, and they could see the children, and there were some two hundred children on hand that morning: two hundred “bad” boys who knew all about everything, including that Police Board. When they were all ready, Judge Lindsey entered and took his ​
place on the bench. He looked over his gang of kids, and then he spoke to those officials, typical American officials.
“I have asked you gentlemen to come here and look at these boys,” he said. “There are also girls in this city who report on Fridays,” he added. The commissioners looked at the boys, and the Judge went on to say that while these children were brought there as delinquents, it was not alone the children who were delin- quent. “Parents, in many cases, and adults who violate the law, and particularly police officials who refuse to enforce the law, they are more re- sponsible than the children,” he said.
He illustrated: “It became the duty of this Court recently to send a young girl to the In- dustrial School. She was not depraved or vicious; she was capable of being a good, pure woman with any kind of favourable environment. But she was subject to temptations. What were these temptations? The wine-rooms; not one, but many. She was induced to enter such places. You knowingly permitted them to run in viola- tion of the law. Yet the child is punished and disgraced. \ou and the dive-keeper, the real culprits, you go scot-free.”
The Judge—from the bench, mind you — said this to those commissioners. Then he ​
spoke of a young man who had lost his life in the same place where this girl was ruined. He told the rooming-house woman’s story, and he described also her terror lest the police should learn that she had informed on the dive-keepers! Then he described what he knew of gambling by boys.
“I have seen a pitiful, gray-haired old lady, bent with years, her face dimmed with tears, pleading in this Court to recover the all she had on earth, lost by a son in a gambling hell tolerated by you. And here in broad daylight those who conduct the place come, and they tell of the open game of this young man and the loss of that money, and this they do with the prosecuting officer passing in and out. . . • It is nonsense
to talk about these things not being known to your Board. It only subjects you to contempt and ridicule.”
Frank Adams had been appealing to the Judge in the name of “business” and “the party,’ not to “rip up” the liquor question. The Judge answered that appeal now with another:
“Flesh and blood, body and soul, the future of little children is so sacred,” he said, that it is a monstrous sacrilege to permit any other consideration to interfere. ... I know it is unusual to speak thus publicly, but all ​things
usual have been done, and something unusual is justifiable. I therefore beg of you in this public manner, in the presence of these children, for their benefit, that you earnestly and diligently war upon these places. ... I assure you that you will have then the good will and respect which are denied you now. That is worth more than all the vaunted boastings of all the devil’s agents in this town. It is to these that you are catering now, and until you break the spell they have over you, you will be storing up misery, hell, and damnation for the present and future genera- tions.”
It was a terrible arraignment, there before those children, whose eyes bored into those officials. There was silence for a moment; then one commissioner, Charles F. Wilson, rose to answer. He said the Board had closed the place where the Judge had seen the boys gambling. The two hundred boys looked at the Judge; he hesitated. Didn’t he know about that ? Some of the boys did, and one of them sprang to his rescue. Leo Batson, twelve years old, rose, and pointing his finger at Commissioner Wilson, he said:
Yes, you closed it up, but you opened it up again, like you generally do. It was open inside of a week. And it’s open now, ’cause I seen boys in there ​myself.”
There was silence when Leo sat down. The boys looked at the commissioner. He was still a moment, then he went on without answering the boy. He referred to Peter L. Palmer’s injunction. It was the Judge’s turn.
“The issuance of that injunction was without sense or precedent,” said Judge Lindsey. “And it didn’t tie your hands. You could have brought your cases to my Court. In this tribunal you will find the whole power of the Court on the side of the law.”
The newspapers all turned “yellow” with this story, and that settled the matter for the time being. The tip was passed that the police couldn’t “stand for wine-rooms where young girls went for a while.”
The Judge went on walking and talking with the children, and he listened, too, and the things they suffered kept his feelings aroused, while their wisdom “put him wise.” It was appalling, what these children knew.
“Huh, business men! They steal, too!” said a cynical little thief one day when the Judge held out to him the prospect of growing up to be a “respected business man,” if only he would stop stealing. “Don’t the street railway swipe fran- chises ? And the gas company and them, don’t they steal ’em ? Guess I can read. And ​my boss,
that’s kicking to have me sent to jail, don’t he sell cheap jewelry for eighteen carat fine ?”
In this and similar cases the Judge had to reach down below the teachings of the world of business to the nobility born in the “born thief,” to save him. “It’s mean to cheat and steal,” he said, and it was the success of this appeal that con- vinced Ben Lindsey that human nature was good enough to go to war for.
Of course, he didn’t realize at first what he was warring against. Brought up in a perfectly conventional way, his notions of life and economics were perfectly commonplace; but when men came to him and in the name of “Tnisiness,” the party, and property” besought him not to fight so hard for the children, he began to see that the enemy of men, as of children, was not men, but things. Once he and a police captain had a dispute in chambers over the custody of some boys arrested for stealing bicycles. The police wanted to hold the boys. Why? The Judge couldn’t make out till the officers said something about the owners of the wheels wanting to “get back their property.”
Oh, said the Judge, “I see the difference between you and me: you want to recover the property, while I want to recover the boys.”
The Judge recovered both, ​
A cotton mill was set up in Colorado. That was a new industry, and the men who established it were applauded for their “enterprise, which could not but benefit the whole State.” To compete with the South, however, this mill had to employ child labour. The kids’ Judge heard that they were importing large families and setting the little children to work. Colorado had a child-labour law, and the Judge went to the mill to see if the law was being violated. It was, and the conditions were pitiful.
“These imported people were practically slaves,” he says. “They had come out under contracts, and the children, unschooled, toiled at the machines first to liberate their parents, then to support them.”
The Judge warned the milling company, but that did no good, so he had criminal proceedings in- stituted, and not only against the superintendent, but against the higher officers also.
This is not the custom in the United States, and the president of the mill, who was also one of the big men in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, called on the Judge to explain that he was a respectable citizen. The Judge suggested that it wasn’t proper to try to influence a judge in a pending case, but the president “didn’t want to do anything improper”; all he wanted ​
was to remind the Judge that a conviction in the case would make him (the president) a criminal. “And I am no criminal,” he said. The Judge replied that he was if he broke the law. But the president didn t break the law. If the law was broken, it was by his superintendent, and it was all right to fine his superintendent. But the president was a gentleman and a “big man.”
‘I’d rather fine you than your superintendent,” said the Judge. “He is only your agent, and, as you intimate, you wouldn’t mind if he were punished. So I’ll punish you as I warned you; I told you that if he persisted in violating the law for you, I’d hold you responsible.”
But, Judge, he said, “if you are going to keep up this fight, we will close the mill! ” And he proceeded to tell what a great industry it was; how many people it gave employment; how much good it was doing to the city (he meant the business) of Denver; and how much money had been invested in it by himself and other capitalists.
His point of view,” the Judge says, “was perfectly plain. Money was sacred, men were of no account. If business went well, children could go to — well, let us say, to work. And he blamed me, not the Law, not the State; he had no fear of these. I, personally, with my queer ​
regard for men and women and children — I was a menace to business.”
“I warn you right now,” he said to the Judge, “that if this thing keeps up, we will shut down the mill, and you will have to share the consequences.”
And Judge Lindsey replied: “We are here to protect the children and to enforce the Law, and all I regret is that the penalty isn’t imprison- ment instead of a fine, so that I could be sure of preventing you from employing young chil- dren.”
And the Judge persisted, and the mill was closed down. Other causes contributed, but Lindsey never shirked his share of the respon- sibility.”
What is more, Judge Lindsey had the child- labour law made stricter. He can put “money” in prison now if it hurts children. He had to fight business and politics and the police to do it, but he did it; he and the kids and the men and women of Denver.
We have seen that the Judge set out to correct the evils of child life under the laws as they stood. He had been making notes, however, of legislation he wanted, all the while he was walking and talking and trying cases. For example, the Juvenile Court ex ​isted by the
courtesy of the District-attorney, who was a machine man; Lindsev gave himself the legal right to demand all children’s cases. He had exercised discretion; he gave himself explicit authority to exercise discretion. He had found adults at fault for the criminality of children; he drew a paragraph making parents, employers, business men, and all other grown-ups amenable to the criminal law for neglect, abuse, or temptation of children. This is his now famous “con- tributory delinquency law against adults.” Need- ing probation officers, he authorized the appointment of them, and since the police and the Sheriff and the District-attorney were all tied up with the liquor and other business interests, he gave his probation officers certain police powers. The child-labour law was only one item in the legislation Judge Lindsey went after.
The Judge’s bills were most important legis- lation, and to put them through he had to proceed most carefully. He began in the convention, by taking a hand in the nomination of legislators. His enemies fought him there, and they beat his man, but he came up on good terms with the others. They introduced his bills and started them through the mill, very quietly. Hardly any notice was taken of them. Apparently the lobbyists didn t do their work well, for the interests ​
were amazed after it was all over to see in the new laws “what Lindsey had been up to.” An officer in one of the telegraph companies said the “interests” would never have let either the child labour or the adult delinquency bill pass if they had known of them. The Judge had learned that the messenger service was a degrading influence for boys; they were sent to all sorts of vile places, saw all sorts of vile things, and caught respectable citizens in predicaments the knowl- edge of which made the boys cynical and vicious. So he advised, and he still advises, both boys and parents against the messenger service. But he wished also to have a club to hold over the companies; wherefore he had drawn into one of his bills a clause including officers of telegraph companies under the “adult delinquency law.” The companies, suspecting the Judge, twice sent a lawyer to the capital to see “Lindsey’s bill,” and he saw one bill, an inoffensive one, never the other. He didn’t know there was another. It was the other that “hurt our busi- ness,” he said. Thus beaten, the companies never dared to move for a repeal; they surrendered, and, calling on the Judge, came to an understand- ing with him about what they might and might not do with boys.
There was a fight on these bills, however. ​
It is known among the good citizens and bad kids of Denver as “the fight against the jail.” After moving along regularly through the Senate, the Judge noticed that his bills suddenly stuck in the House. “What was the matter?” the Judge inquired. The clerk couldn’t explain. One eve- ning a reporter called at the Judge’s house.
“Judge,” he said, “Frank Adams is fighting your bills. His brother Billy, you know, is a power in the Legislature. They don’t dare come out in the open and fight you, but they are telling it around that you are crazy on the children subject, and that the boys fill you up with lies!”
“What had I better do?” the Judge asked.
“Stir ’em up,” said the reporter. “Give me an interview and tell all about the jail.”
“That’s grand-stand playing,” the Judge said, smiling.
“ It’s appealing to public opinion,” said the reporter, “and that’s against the rule of graft, but what do you care ? You aren’t a grafter.”
The Judge made out a statement, but it was too mild. The reporter rejected it, and with the facts the Judge told him and what he and all police reporters knew, Harry Wilber (for that was the reporter’s name) did what newspaper men love to do when they get the chance — he wrote the truth, and he wrote it to ki ​ll. United
States Senator Patterson’s paper, the Rocky Moun- tain News , printed the interview in red, and it was sensational. The Judge says it gave him a sensation himself. But it was true, so he “stood for it.” Frank Adams answered it with a denial. The boys were liars, he said, and as for Judge Lindsey, he was crazy.
“I knew then,” says the Judge, “that I was up against it. I must make good. So I wrote to the Police Board offering to hold an inquiry. They were willing, they answered, but not then. I wanted it then, and I ordered it for two o’clock the next day in my court room. And lest the Board, recalling the last time they met the boys, might not come, I invited also the Governor, the Mayor, the District-attorney, other officials, fifteen ministers and rabbis, and others. I didn’t expect many to come, but they all accepted, even Governor Peabody — all but Frank Adams and the police commissioners. The Board sent a dummy to represent it.”
It was Saturday morning when the Judge got his acceptances, and he had to hurry. Calling in a friendly deputy sheriff, he asked him to get ten witnesses named on a list he had made of boys who had been in the jails. I must have them by two o’clock,” the Judge said. The officer declared it impossible. He should have ​
had two days’ notice. The Judge was in despair, but he ran over his list till he came to the name “Mickey.”
Mickey was a street boy. He had been in jail often, and the last time was only a month or so before. After he got out, he and the boys in with him had called on the Judge to com- plain. They stated their case. They were run- ning through the street when one of them knocked over a sign to which some shoes were attached. The man in the store rushed out and sent the policeman after the boys. They had stolen his shoes, he said, and the policeman arrested them. The boys hadn’t taken a shoe, and absolutely the only evidence against them was the fact that one of the boys needed shoes! His feet had come through his old ones. They were thrown into cells among criminals, bums, and drunks, then put all together in one cell next to drunken women of the street. During the evening one of them broke a window, and when the jailer came and cursed and kicked them about, they wouldn’t tell who had done it. In a rage, the man knocked down one of them and, when the rest scattered and ran, pursued, and bowled them over with his great keys. They were de- tained a week and then released without a hearing.
The Judge had the boys examined by a physi​
cian, who found evidences enough that they had been beaten. But the Judge went down to the jail, and he learned the truth there from his regular sources of information. Satisfied of the justice of their complaint, the Judge went with the boys to lodge a protest with the Police Board. The commissioner refused to believe the boys’ stories. It was this case, and many, many cases like it that had convinced Judge Lindsey that the jails were not only schools where older crim- inals, male and female, taught boys crime and vice, but places where the police practised brutal injustices which made the boys hate the police, dread the law, and despise everything that we mean by “civilized society.” It was the experi- ences of boys like Mickey and his gang which had prompted the Judge to write the bill which had been held up, the bill providing a detention school and forbidding juvenile offenders to be held in jail at all.
“This was Mickey’s fight that I was making,” the Judge says, as he tells the story, and I knew I could count on the little chap. I asked the officer if he could get me Mickey. He said he could, and I begged him to go and tell the boy I needed help.”
In a few moments Mickey burst breathlessly into the Judge’s chamber. ​
“What’s the matter, Judge?” he asked.
“Mickey,” the Judge said, “I’m in trouble, and you’ve got to help me. I helped you. I went down and I made a fight for you fellows. Didn’t I?”
“That’s what you did,” said Mickey. “Betcher life you did.”
“Well, now you’ve got to stay with me.” And he told Mickey what he wanted — all the kids he could find that had been in jail. “The offi- cer can’t get them; says there isn’t time enough. Can you ?”
Can I? Well, you watch me! Don’t you worry about the kids, Judge! Gimme a wheel, and I’ll get kids, kids to burn!”
The Judge went out, and he and Mickey borrowed a wheel. It didn’t fit, but Mickey hopped on and went spinning down the street.
It was a relief to me to see him go,” the Judge says, “but my worry wasn’t over. The invited officials began to arrive before Mickey returned. At ten minutes before two, when the Governor appeared, there was not a kid in sight. The entire company had assembled in my chambers before I saw sign of any witnesses, and I was troubled. It was painful. I knew I could count on Mickey, and the kids generally, but suppose he couldn’t find them!” ​
But Mickey found them. Just at two there was a murmur outside. It grew into a hubbub which, as it came down the hall, developed into an alarm. The Judge’s guests were startled, and even the Judge wasn’t sure. It sounded like a mob, and up the stairs it rattled, then down the upper hall toward his chamber. As it approached, the Judge knew. He flung open the doors, and there were thirty or forty boys, with Mickey radiant at their head.
“Here’s the kids, Judge. Got more’n I thought I would.”
“Bully for you, Mickey!” said the Judge. “You’ve saved the day.”
“I told ye I’d stay wit’ ye, Judge.”
The Judge took the “mob” into a side room. There he told them what was up. They were to tell the truth about the jails. “The police say you have lied to me,” he said. £ If you have, I ask you now to tell the truth. But tell it. Tell it as you tell one another. Tell it in your own words. They may be bad words, but these gentlemen want to know the truth. So tell them all. Tell them what you see — the dirty things; tell them what the older prisoners say, and what they do to you.”
He put Mickey in charge. “Pick out your best witnesses, Mickey,” he instructed him. ​
“and send them in one by one.” And Mickey began to sort his witnesses. As the Judge left the room, he heard Mickey say, with a shove, “You get back there, Skinny, you’ve only been in five or six times. Fatty Felix has been in twenty-three times and ——”
Mickey led in his witnesses, one by one, Fatty Felix, Teddy Healy, Teddy Mack, and the rest, till the Governor and the ministers cried “enough!”
Those boys told what was what. They told of lessons in crime by older criminals; stories they had heard there of injustices by judges and of cruelties by the police. They showed up the world as the criminals see it and as those criminals showed it to the boys. And they also related scenes of vice and foulness too revolting to repeat. And those boys made that company of grown-ups believe them, too. Once or twice the police representative interrupted, but, as the Judge says, “Teddy Healy’s answer, direct, awful, and yet innocently delivered, made the matter ten times worse.” The officials dropped all thought of cross-examination. Once a minis- ter asked Mickey about the visits of the clergy to the jail.
“Never saw one,” said Mickey. Then he remembered. Oh, yes, seen the Salvation Army ​
there onct, but they sang ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,’ and we’d heard that before, and besides, there didn’t seem to be no blessings flowing our way.”
It was the officials’ turn to smile, and the ministers, they also ceased to cross-examine. The boys were left to talk, watched by Mickey and frankly guided by the Judge. It went on for an hour or two, then a preacher rose.
“My God,” he said, “this has gone far enough! It is too, too horrible!” And, as he left, Governor Peabody got up.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I never in my life heard or knew of so much rot, corruption, and vileness as I have learned this day from these babes — almost — and I want to say that nothing in my administration will be so important to me as signing Judge Lindsey s bills. I don t care to read those bills. If he says they are designed to correct these conditions, I am satisfied. And, turning to the representative of Frank Adams, he added, “if Judge Lindsey is crazy, I want my name written right under his as one of the crazy people. And as to those boys lying, anyone who says they have been lying to-day must be himself a liar.”
With that the meeting broke up. The Judge went back to the boys, and he thanked them ​
and Mickey. He was careful to explain again what it was all about. “‘Skill in handling marble is as nothing to skill in handling men,”’ he quotes, and he wished to be sure that no false impressions were left in these boys’ minds. “I am fighting for a decent place to keep kids that are too weak to be on the level,” he said. “The jails are not decent; and Mickey, you boys have beaten the jail to-day, you and all the good kids in Denver. Go out and tell them so, for it is their victory.”
That was true. It was a victory. The pulpits rang with the story the next day. The men and women of Denver heard, and so did the grafters, . and the grafters felt the effect in public opinion. Lindsey’s bills came up from the bottom and were passed and signed and made part of the laws of Colorado within a week. And now other states are copying them.
Reformers, whose notion of reform consists in “getting a law passed,” are often amazed to find that their good law does no good. The reason is that neither public opinion nor public officials enforce the new laws. Lindsey had waited for his legislation till he had the support of public opinion, and then he enforced his new laws; he, and the boys and girls, and public opinion.
They were effective laws. They gave the ​
Judge control of the whole children’s case. He proceeded gently to the enforcement of his power. He had written into the laws full authority to exercise his discretion, with adults as with children, and he did this because he meant to be human and charitable to men as he had been to children. It had worked with the children; he would try it on their elders. So he was firm but not unkind.
When the police brought in a boy for getting drunk, the Judge asked for the man who sold the boy the liquor, and the police had to fetch the man. Sometimes the Judge fined him; sometimes he imprisoned him; sometimes he suspended sentence. For he talked to the men as he did to the boys, and if he found that they hadn’t thought of the evil they did by carelessly serving boys and girls with tobacco and liquor, the Judge explained it to these saloon-keepers. And if he thought they were impressed, he put them also “on probation.” That gave him a hold on them, which prevented crime and vice. For the Judge knew what was going on. He had thousands of eyes. The boys and girls watched for him. When the Judge had got his legislation, he told the children that the new laws were their laws — enacted for them and by them; for Mickey and his “gang of jailbirds, who carried the day, represented the children of ​
Denver. The children, therefore, must obey these laws and help enforce them. He broadened the doctrine of “snitching on the square.” It was mean to spy; it was wrong under the law to “get a man to break the law and then peach on him.” No child was to be “smart” and hunt for evil. But when a man sold cigarettes and liquor to children, that man was “making kids bad,” and for a pitifully small profit, too. Where- fore, the thing for a kid to do was, first, to warn the man, then, if he didn’t “cut it out,” to tell the Judge.
This was a very delicate part of the Judge’s policy, and many a man will shake his head over it. We all despise spying. But boys despise it more than men, and I know no better way to prove that the Judge made it clear and right than by stating that the boys of Denver, the big fellers, approved the doctrine and practised it. Take the “Battle-Axe gang” of Globeville, for example. Globeville is a suburb of Denver, and the Battle-Axes were the toughest fellers over there. Their leaders were three brothers, known as the Cahoots — “ Big Cahoot,” “Middle Cahoot,” and “Little Cahoot.” The whole gang frequented dives, drank, smoked, chewed (they were named after their favourite brand of plug tobacco); they did everything that ​
men did, and other things besides. The Judge got hold of this gang, in the usual way; one or two were arrested, won over, and persuaded to bring in the rest. They all came, and were interested in the game of correction. The good they could do, the Judge told them, was to help enforce the laws of the kids’ Court. They did it, too. They had trouble at first. One day Big Cahoot went to a saloon where some of the little fellers in his gang had bought tobacco. He told the man about the law and asked him not to sell to any Battle-Axes. The saloon-keeper, taken aback, became angry, and started for the boy. Big Cahoot wasn’t afraid. He stood his ground; there was a fight, and the young tough was kicked out into the street. But he told the Judge, and the Judge sent the man to jail for fifteen days. After that it was easier for the boys, who are still reporting to the Judge that the law is respected **over in Globeville and that the Battle-Axes are doin’ all right.”
One curious development of this policy was that many of the liquor dealers, having been made to understand what all this meant to the children, came to like the Judge and to help him to carry out his policy. The Baker case will illustrate.
One day a girl was brought in. She told her story; it was a wine-room story, and the Judge ​
had the wine-room keeper, Baker, arrested. He tried him in the Juvenile Court, and sent him up for sixty days.
“The girl I kept on probation,” he says, “and I was talking to her one day — the day before Christmas—when I was told that a boy, Paul Baker, wanted to see me. Putting the girl in a side room, I had the boy in. He was a handsome, wholesome little fellow, and he came up to my table, halting, but with a frank look on his face.
“‘Judge,’ he said, ‘you put my papa in jail, but everybody says that you like boys and do all you can to help a boy. So I came to ask you to let my father come home for Christmas.’”
He began to cry, and the Judge spoke.
“Yes, I like boys,” he said, “and I like men, too. Do you think I dislike your father ? Not a bit! I was sorry to put him in jail. And did it never occur to you that it wasn’t I that put him in jail ? It was the Law. And the Law is right. Do you know what your father did?”
The boy knew. “Well, I like little girls as well as I like boys, and you know that wine- rooms are bad places for little girls. This little girl and her mother, they are suffering just as you and your father are suffering; all because he broke the law.”
The Judge sent for the girl, and he introduced ​
the two children. He drew the girl on to tell what “trouble” the violation of the law had caused her and her mother. The Judge explained why she should not hate, but be sorry for the man, since he was only thoughtless, as she was, and was in trouble, too.
“Here is his son, Paul, who has come to ask that his father may be allowed to come home for Christmas to see his family. His mother suffers as yours does; his sister has wept as you have wept. It is all, all trouble, and no one is worse than another. Now, what shall I do about letting Mr. Baker go home for Christmas?”
“Let him go,” the girl said, and she and the boy joined in the plea. The Judge consented.
When Paul brought in his father to see the Judge, on the day after Christmas, the Judge sent the boy out of the room, then he praised the son to the father. It was a pity, he said, to bring up that boy in such a business.
“Judge,” the man said, “you are right. I’ve been thinking it all over in jail, and I’ve made up my mind to get rid of this business and go back to the mountains where I came from.
The Judge did not send Baker back to jail; he suspended sentence, as his law authorized him to do, and the man did sell out and go back to the mountains. Now, when they come to town. ​
he and his boy always call on the Judge, their “best friend.”
“You see,” the Judge says, “Baker wasn’t a bad man. He did a bad thing, and that bad thing made a little girl bad. But what made him do the bad thing ? To make his business good; to increase his profits. But there was the Law and the power of the State to compel him to restrict his enterprise within limits where it wouldn’t hurt anybody else. That’s where the System broke down; that’s where it breaks down all the time. Why ?”
Baker told him why. He said that he broke the law because the bosses told him he might. He contributed to their campaign funds, paid blackmail, and furnished “stuffers” to vote, so they told him he was “protected.” “Then you came along, Judge, and you sent me up. I don’t blame you. I blamed them, and I went to them for their protection. They said they couldn’t handle you. They said they didn’t mean I could break juvenile* laws, but they didn’t tell me that. I paid them, and they couldn’t deliver the goods. That’s why I blame them.”
Baker blamed the bosses, and so did the other saloon-keepers. So did the people of Denver; most of us blame the political bos ​ses. The
Judge himself blamed them for a long while, and he ought to have known better. One of his first political services was to help Governor Thomas destroy the power of Boss Thomas J. Mahoney, famous in Denver politics. And they did destroy Mahoney’s power. But that made no difference. Only the man was down and out; the boss lived. Who was the boss of the political boss ? For whom was blackmail collected from the saloon-keepers in return for which they were permitted to break the law, sell liquor to boys, and keep wine-rooms where girls might be ruined ? The parties ? For whom did the parties work ? The parties worked for the big business interests of Denver and Colorado, as the Judge found out.
You hear in Denver that “the trouble with Ben Lindsey is that he ‘butts into’ everything.” He does and he must. His critics mean that Judge Lindsey might solve the problem of the children, if, for their sake, he would not inter- fere with other evils. Many good men and women adopt that policy. Temperance reformers, to get their prohibition laws through, trade vptes with the railroads; and charities and churches, colleges and all sorts of benevolent and reform groups, to say nothing of businesses, professions, and interests generally — we, all of us, are ​
standing in with Evil, in the hope of destroying the particular little evils against which we are fighting. Lindsey won’t. This is the institutional idea; this is the fallacy which makes men sacrifice civilization — for no less is at stake—for their church, their party, or their grocery store. If Lindsey should make this common, almost universal, mistake he might build up his Juvenile Court, they tell him, into a national, yes, an international institution, and send his name reverberating down through the ages. But Ben Lindsey won’t do it; and he won’t because he sees that he can’t.
He can’t for two reasons. One, as he soon learned, is that the problem of the children isn’t a separate problem. Ben Lindsey discovered that bad children are made bad by the conditions which men create. And he went after some of those conditions, and when it was found that his legislation gave him power over adults that hurt children, as well as over the children, the leading citizens of Denver were incensed. Why? His authority over saloon and other vice interests loosened the hold the machines had over the vicious elements of society, and menaced the election frauds on which the business and political system of the state was built. And Lindsey saw, and he was told (though not in these words) that the ​
big men of his state would prefer to see children hurt than business. So they fought him, and when he beat them, as we have seen, with the help of the men, women, and children of the city, they declared that he “had too much work to do,” and that therefore they would take away from his Court jurisdiction over adults who contributed to the delinquency of children. In other words, they are indeed willing to let him do what he can for the kids after the harm is done, but he must not undermine the vice of the city, however much it may injure youth, the foundation of “prosperity.”
Thus the first reason why he can’t let all the other evils go to correct the one he is after, was his discovery that our apparently separate evils are all tied up together; they are all one evil; they are a System, as he calls it, of Evil.
The second reason is that Lindsey is so constituted that he must attack any wrong with which he comes in personal contact. We have seen how, accidentally, the County Judge drifted into the case of the children. That was characteristic. When he was a young lawyer he was beaten in a damage suit against the street railway by a “fixed” jury. Inquiring into the matter, he learned that jury-fixing was a common practice, and he attacked that practice. He drew a ​
bill to enable a majority of jurors to render a verdict. The company offered his firm an annual retainer, but Lindsey declared that it was a bribe and refused it. “This was my first sight of the grand System,” he says, “but I didn’t recognize it as such. I’ve learned since that this is the way the interests get their first hold on promising or troublesome young lawyers.” Lindsey put his bill through. Challenged as unconstitutional, it was first upheld, then thrown out by the Supreme Court of Colorado; “which gave me my first sight of the Supreme Court as a part of the System,” he says.
His practice developed along probate lines, and he found the laws obscure and unfair. He revised them, and his revision, enacted, has been highly praised by the law journals. Indeed, his knowledge of probate law was one of the justifi- cations for putting so young a man on the county bench. Lindsey is the author of the present election laws of his state. Everybody was com- plaining of the old laws, but nothing was done about them till Lindsey went to work and got them changed. I could go on for a page with practical reforms taken up by this man, all of them suggested by his accidental, personal contact with evils, and all having nothing to do with children. If Judge Lindsey had never heard of ​
the problem of the children he would have been known as a man doing a man’s work for men.
But the incident in his career which will show this best is his exposure of the County Commissioners. That also was begun by accident.
At the close of the Juvenile Court one Saturday afternoon, the Judge picked up idly from the clerk’s desk a paper, which, as he talked, he glanced at. “To 1,000 sheets paper, $280.” It was a bill, and the price interested the Judge. He asked the clerk about it. The clerk hadn’t seen the bill. He “guessed” it was there by mis- take; bills didn’t come to him; “must have been meant for the clerk of the County Board.” Lindsey sent the clerk to “see Mr. Smith, of the Smith-Brooks Publishing Company (which furnished the paper), and ask if the bill was correct.” The clerk brought the answer that his (Smith’s) “damned boy had taken the bill to the wrong place, and the price was none of our business.” The Judge sent to the County Clerk for other bills charged to the County Court.
“I was amazed at the charges,” he says. Six letter files at $6 apiece; these cost me personally twenty-eight and thirty cents apiece. Paper which was charged for at the rate of $48 a thousand I could get for $6. I spent the night on those bills, and the next (Sunday) morning I took expert ​
advice. I found that the County was paying several hundred per cent, too much for all supplies to my Court.”
As with the children and as wit the Police Board, the Judge wished to give the County Commissioners a hearing, so he wrote them a letter containing the facts. “I thought prob- ably they didn’t know about these overcharges. I didn’t want to misjudge them, and I wanted to examine into the situation with them privately and personally. I believe if they had come up with the truth, I’d have been satisfied if they had promised to cut it out.”
The Judge received no reply to his letter. He sent another, and still no response; that is to say, none that was direct. There was an in- direct response, however, which interested the Judge profoundly. Both the Police and the County Boards of Denver were bi-partisan, but the fighting line in the politics of the city was a machine, not a party line, and the Police and the County Boards were at odds. The County Board had appointed Lindsey a judge. When he went after the Police Board, Frank Adams, the president, unable to believe in honesty and sincerity, had looked around for an explanation of “Lindsey’s enmity” to him; and the theory he fixed upon was that Lindsey, out of gratitude ​
to the County Board for his job, was “hurting the party” to help Frank Bishop, the president of the County Board, who was a candidate for the nomination for Governor of Colorado. So now, when Ben “got after Frank Bishop’s Board,” he puzzled Frank Adams and all the other men in Denver who, to account for the conduct of others, read their own souls.
“What does Ben mean? Is he an ingrate? You go ask him what the hell he means.” This was said by Commissioner Watts to the Judge’s clerk, whom the Board had also “given his job.” Cass Harrington called; the attorney to the County Board, this man had resigned to be “of counsel” to the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company. Others called, many prominent men. “This stealing,” the Judge says, “had friends, political and business friends, and they were powerful men, all of them.” He saw that he would also need friends, so the Judge paid some visits. He called on some other judges; he told them the facts, and he asked them to move with him for an investigation. They wouldn t.
“Why, Judge,” said one of them, “you have your hands full now. You are doing more than two or three men can do. You oughtn t to want to know about this. I don t. That would make me responsible, and I don t want to have anything ​
to do with it. Go to the District-attorney.
Well, then, that means that you know what politics is in this town. My advice to you is, let the whole thing alone.”
This from a judge! And other officials took the same view or a similar view: “You can’t do anything”; or “The County Board appointed you; I believe in sticking by your friends”; or “It will ruin you, Judge”; or “It will spoil your work for the children.”
The Judge went on investigating, and the evidence he discovered and the things his “friends” told him to stop him, showed him that this County graft was well known, and that it was but a small part of a system of graft. For example, business men were in on the deals; each commissioner had merchants for graft- partners. And besides, the County Board was a board of tax revision; it had remitted the taxes of public service corporations, and it could “hurt” or “help” property-holders generally. But the Judge got help. Some of the early commissioners “snitched” to the Judge; they didn’t snitch like the boys, “on the square”-—they “squealed” to save themselves, and the others squealed on the squealers to get even. Oh, he got the facts! He appointed a committee to investigate, and the committee reported the facts — to the Judge. ​
A concerted effort was made to have the Judge suppress his report. Many respectable friends of the grafters went to the front for graft. They pretended to represent “business,” the “party,” “the fair fame of Denver,” etc. They used the names of United States Senators Patterson and Teller. They were panic-stricken. As for the Judge, he was awed at the show of influence. “And,” he says, “I was really in doubt lest I might be doing a great harm to accomplish a little good.” But he was reassured. He sounded the United States Senators, and both Mr. Patter- son and Mr. Teller sent back word to “go ahead and show up the grafters regardless of party.” That was the first encouragement the Judge got. Finally, three of the County Commissioners called, and their pleadings decided him. They also prayed in the name of “the party, the “credit of business,” Denver, gratitude, their families; but — there was no word about stopping the stealing! The Judge published the report in the Democratic newspaper, the News.
The County Board had to act; and it began with an investigation of its own a farce, of course. “One thing I learned from it, however,” the Judge says, “and that was that many men of business are cowards. The same experts who had told me that the commissioners were thieves, went ​
on the stand and perjured themselves.” And their perjury was all in vain. District-attorney Lindsley had to act. Lindsley is the man who got his office when Lindsey wanted it, and the Judge urged him now to do what he, himself, had thought of doing: use the power of the public prosecutor to prosecute public criminals and clean up the city. Lindsley wouldn’t; he was in the gang, and other gangsters said he didn’t dare. He proposed that the Judge meet with a committee of the party leaders and discuss what should be done. The Judge refused. And the newspapers made demands. So Lindsley had to make a show of action. He called on the Judge and talked about doing his duty. He has a peculiar whine, Lindsley has, and in that whining way he protested to the Judge that while he didn’t believe the commissioners could be convicted, he would do his duty. Judge Lindsey happened to go down to the Democratic Club right after this talk, and he found Lindsley there drinking with one of the accused commissioners. And the information that this District-attorney drew was under a statute which limited the penalty to $300 fine and removal from office.
The newspapers, principally Senator Patter- son s, forced this case to trial. District-attorney Lindsley refused to appear in it himself; he ​
appointed a deputy, George Allan Smith, who, the Judge says, was faithful. (And evidently he was, for he was forced to resign after the trial.) No local judge cared to sit on the case, so a judge of the Pueblo district (controlled by the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company) was called in. For the grafters appeared Charles J. Hughes, a leading attorney for the corrupt corporations of Colorado (since elected a United States Senator). The story of the trial is a story of “jury work,” stolen papers, conspiracies and plots, and an attempt to brand Judge Lindsey as “an ingrate” (to the System), a “reformer,” and a “grand-stand player.” (How they do hate to have a man serve and appeal to the people!) Nobody ex- pected anything but a verdict of acquittal, and then Judge Lindsey was to have been put on trial.
But the jury convicted those grafters. How it happened I couldn’t learn. Somebody blun- dered, I heard. The jurors apologized; the District-attorney apologized; the very judge apologized. Judge Voorheis delivered from the bench to those prisoners at the bar a speech which was eulogistic of them. He spoke of their stand- ing and usefulness as Christian gentlemen and good citizens. He said they were victims of an evil System. He regretted that he had to impose any punishment, but he must; so he gave the ​
smallest penalty provided by the law: “Ten dollars and costs! ”
The learned judge was right: there is a System, and the penalties that System imposed upon Judge Lindsey were not light. His sentence was destruction. Knowing that money couldn’t prostitute him, women were tried. The janitor of the County Court House wouldn’t clean Lind- sey’s court-room and so neglected his closet that the Board of Health had to interfere. He was cut on the street by other officials and, to avoid hearing himself called insulting names, had to stay away from his club. His party council allowed the convicted County Commissioners to name their successors and to reject from the platform a plank declaring for honesty in office.
This persecution continued for a year or two and, it must be confessed, the Judge was aggra- vating. He not only refused to surrender; he went right on fearlessly supporting in public every good reform measure and movement that anybody proposed. For example, a convention, called for by the so-called Rush Amendment to the State Constitution, drew for Denver a good, new, home-rule charter. The big business in- terests had to beat it, however, because it gave the people a vote on all franchise grants and permitted municipal ownership. The only ​
way to beat it was to have the ballot-boxes stuffed. Yet, when some inexperienced young men organized a League for Honest Elections, this County Judge came down off the bench to help the league. And, as usual, his speech was no mere perfunctory address on the sacred- ness of the ballot-box; he named names, and he named not merely the despised agents who did the dirty work; Judge Lindsey called the roll of the officials who employed and protected the ballot-box stuffers! The people, already aroused, became so inflamed that finally their rulers had to elect a pretty good charter themselves.
Do you see the situation ? Do you see Ben Lindsey doing his duty, all of it, not only as a judge of children, but as County Judge, and not only as a judge on the bench, but as a man on the bench and off it ? and fighting all the while for his life; cheerfully, without malice, but without fear ? Paul Thieman in the Denver Post once called Ben Lindsey “the first citizen of Colorado,” and declared that, not the mines and the mills, not the railroads, the farms, and the banks, but Ben Lindsey’s work was “the greatest thing the state has produced.” And from the point of view of the history of man, this is true. It looks absurd from a shop window, but Paul Thieman was seeing things through ​
the eyes of a little boy he mentions, who, sitting silent one day watching the Judge deal out justice, suddenly rushed up and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you!” the child said.
The test came at the elections of 1904. The Judge had to run then, and he sought the office. “I had to,” he says apologetically; “my work was only just begun.” His enemies meant to defeat him. Who were his enemies ? There was Frank Adams and his Police Board, whose co-partnership with vice and crime he had exposed and disturbed; they were still in office and powerful in his party. Then there were the County Commissioners whom he had driven to trial for grafting; they controlled the County Board, and the party machinery. These two groups with all their followers hated the just Judge, of course, and they proposed to beat him openly for the nomination. But wiser counsels prevailed. Other, cooler enemies, passed the word to beat him quietly. Lindsey was “popu- lar” with the women and children, the leaders said, and — women vote in Colorado. The bio- leaders advised caution, and the scheme was to make him decline the nomination himself. They proposed to nominate as his associate on the County Bench a man who was “going to knock out all this kid business.” They expected the ​
Judge to revolt, and he did; he said he would “ denounce his fellow-candidate from the stump.” This was the excuse the Democrats wanted, and they decided to drop the Judge.
But a hitch occurred. There was a row in the Republican party, and the dominant state leader, to affront the Denver boss, William G. Evans, nominated Judge Lindsey on the Repub- lican ticket. This put the Democrats in an awkward attitude. They demanded that Lindsey be loyal to his own party and decline the Republican nomination. He refused. They offered him a better associate judge, if he would run only on the Democratic ticket. But the Judge knew that they meant to knife him, so he accepted their associate, but declared he would accept any and all nominations from all parties. And he did. And his party decided again not to nominate him. This was three days before the convention, but that was time enough for the Judge.
He went to the people. He published an open letter in the Denver Post. The newsboys, all friends of the Judge, cried it as news, and not only that, they sent kids as couriers to raise the gangs. Men took the letter home, and mothers turned out. But the children were before them. They poured out into the streets and, c ​ollected
and organized by the newsboys, marched up and down the main streets, yelling for Lindsey. By the time the procession had reached the Demo- cratic Club, the cries of the children had developed into a song which they sang as they marched and countermarched and halted before the club:
“Who, which, when ?
Wish we was men,
So we could vote for our little Ben.”
And they kept it up all that night and all the next day. It was most embarrassing to the
politicians. “Little sons of -!” exclaimed
a leader in the club, “they are doing more than anybody else to beat us.” But the answer was that cry from the street, “Who, which, when?” All day long, everywhere, the boys kept at it. And then the mothers of the city held a mass- meeting at the Women’s Club. And then there was a mass-meeting of men, women, and children in the Opera House.
Ben Lindsey was nominated, “ amid howls and curses” — and on his own terms, on his own party ticket, and all other tickets, excepting only that of the Socialists. Nominated by the people, he was elected by their unanimous vote; but that didn’t settle it.
The Judge believed that the election of two County Judges was unconstitutional; if it was, ​
the Mayor of the city would have to choose between him and his colleague. The Mayor, Robert Speer, was a Democrat and the leader of Lindsey’s party. The Judge asked him whom he would choose. This Democratic Mayor said he would have to consult with William G. Evans, the Republican boss, before he could answer, and he did see Mr. Evans and the answer was that there would be no choice; the spring election was legal and would stand. But if it should not be held legal, then, the Mayor made plain, Judge Lindsey would not be the Judge.
“That’s enough for me,” said Lindsey. “I fight.” And he went forth to fight. He went to the editors of Senator Patterson’s two papers, the News and the Times, and to the Denver Post. They sounded the alarm, and they kept it up, too. Paul Thieman rehearsed the whole story of the kid’s Judge as a serial. The people began to be interested, but they were too late; the conventions of both parties met and ad- journed without nominating the Judge, and “Bill” Evans left for New York.
Mayor Speer, the Democrat, was in charge of this business for both parties, but he could not control the younger Republicans. They made such a fuss that the older leaders consented ​
to recall the convention. It was to nominate Lindsey, of course, but this matter of course was so insisted upon by the System s organ, the Republican, that Lindsey became suspicious. He inquired, and he heard the night before the convention that all this talk was part of the game to keep the young Republicans away from the convention; another man was to be nominated in the Judge’s place.
Lindsey called up his friends among the dele- gates, and the young men wanted to give up. The caucus had been held; the slate was fixed; it was too late to make a fight. The Judge wouldn’t hear of quitting, however, so, in their desperation, one of them suggested seeing David H. Moffatt. Mr. Moffatt is the leading banker and financier of Colorado, and to go to him was to appeal over the heads of all the political bosses and the apparent business bosses to the very head of the System. Moffatt was the man to go to, but Lindsey didn’t know Moffatt.
“Well, you know Walter Cheesman; go to him.”
Walter Cheesman was a religious man, very rich and benevolent and an active supporter of the Humane Society and of Lindsey’s Juvenile Improvement Society. So the Judge knew Mr. Cheesman, but it was not because of his ​benevo-
Ience that those young men suggested seeing him. Walter Cheesman was president of the Denver Water Company, and therefore “had to” be part of the System which causes the corruption and the evils that, as a philanthropist, he “had to” contribute money to ameliorate.
The Judge went to see the philanthropist. Fie told Mr. Cheesman about the plot and the caucus.
“You, Mr. Cheesman, you know,” he said, “what I have done in that office. You know I have slaved and worked and fought; that it has been often a hell on earth. You know, too, that I have saved the county very much money, in many ways; that I have tried to walk straight and do right; and that I have begun for the children a work that must not stop now.”
“Judge,” said Mr. Cheesman, “I am sorry, and I have just been talking to Mr. Field about your case.”
Mr. Field ? Mr. Field was the president of the Telephone Company, another privileged business. _ The Judge was seeing the System plainly.
“Mr. Field and I discussed the case, Judge,” said Mr. Cheesman, “and we are very sorry, but we can do nothing. With us, politics is business and — business comes first. You might as well understand it. My advice to ​you is to
let go the judgeship, and the Children s Court. Mr. Shattock will be nominated by the Repub- lican convention; Mr. Johnson will be nominated by the Democratic convention. That s certain. And I want to give you one bit of advice. Don’t you run independent. I know what I m talking about. You can’t be elected.”
So that was the situation; that was the System. The Judge rose:
“I’m going to fight,” he said, “and I’m going to fight till I’m licked good and hard.”
He went back and he told his young men. There was no time to appeal to the voters, but it wasn’t necessary. Those young men scoured the town; they filled the streets and the conven- tion hall. The excitement was intense. Speer, the Democrat, wired to Evans, the Republican, that the Republicans were pulling away, and that if they did, the Democrats would have to quit, too. Evans wired his orders back, but Lindsey was nominated by the Republicans, and the Democrats had to nominate him. They had to nominate and run their whole County ticket over again, and (this is the funniest thing that I know in politics) the Democratic gang that had hatched this scheme to “lose Lindsey somehow in the mix-up” —these grafters, elected in the spring and settled at their graft, were ​
defeated in the fall! Lindsey alone was reelected. And the Supreme Court did declare the spring election void. The gang had beaten themselves. And the people — the women, the children, the honest men of Denver — they had saved Ben Lindsey.