Shortfall

by Alice Echols

  The strike shaped Colorado City and neighboring Colorado Springs. By the end of 1905, moderate mine owners were completely outflanked by the anti-union Socialites and those who did their bidding. The millworkers union that had taken hold at two Colorado City mills was now dead. Going forward, this would be the new order. In 1922 local business leaders chose none other than Charles Tutt Jr. to head up a new group that was taking root across America. The Open Shop Society was committed to promoting the “American Plan,” which mandated that all workplaces be “open shops” in which union membership would be optional.51 The National Association of Manufactures, a conservative business group, was the first to push for the open shop, which was, effectively, a crucial first step in getting rid of labor unions. It was so popular among businessmen and Chambers of Commerce across America that Sinclair Lewis included it in his bestselling send-up of get-ahead 1920s business culture, Babbitt.52

  As for those striking workers, the union had meant considerably more to them than an annual Labor Day march. We know from Elizabeth Jameson’s study of Cripple Creek that the strike’s failure there had a devastating effect upon many of the district’s working people. It meant the death of an idea and an ideal—that workers might constitute an effective counterforce to the power of the mining and mill barons, both at the workplace and in the voting booth. More work needs to be done on working-class Colorado City, but there is no reason to think that defeated strikers and their supporters there experienced it as anything other than a crushing blow. After all, the strike originated in its mills.53

  With many of the region’s most militant unionists deported and new anti-union rules in place, most of the remaining radicals very likely left town. One exception was a Danish socialist who after being deported from Cripple Creek settled in Colorado City. He continued to agitate, but then, he was a writer, not a millworker. For those who had gone out on strike but then had signed the hated MOA cards in order to work, they surely struggled to absorb the defeat. “Fear and accommodation” is how historian Jameson characterizes labor’s relations with management, which held the upper hand, especially as gold mining and milling in the region began to wane. In 1905, with gold production slowing, the USR&R’s MacNeill, declaring the mill could not be run “on atmosphere,” announced the indefinite closure of the Standard, throwing two hundred men out of work. Soon the plant was sold to a competitor, who shut it down permanently in 1911 just three years after the opening of the Golden Cycle Mill, which introduced an improved and cheaper method of milling.54 Socialite Bert Carlton bought the Golden Cycle Mill in 1915, but as gold production continued to decline so did the need for smeltermen and millers. Once again the population in Colorado City fell off.

  Under this new regime in which unionism was banished, the white working class had limited ways to assert themselves. One way in which the residents of Colorado City continued to contest at least some aspects of the status quo was in the pages of their weekly paper. The Colorado City Independent (renamed the Colorado Springs Independent after the Springs annexed Colorado City in 1917) positioned itself in open opposition to the two Springs newspapers, which its editor derisively called “The Daily Twins.”55 It fought the city’s high taxes, which west side residents found especially galling when their neighbors to the east were the ones with the good parks and schools, and the dust-free air. During Prohibition the paper attacked the Colorado Springs police chief, calling him “General Harper,” and the man he was said to be protecting, the openly “wet” mining magnate and Broadmoor Hotel owner Spencer Penrose.

  By 1924 the Independent had become an organ of the Ku Klux Klan, and this was yet another way in which the westside weekly expressed its hostility to the “big men” of the Springs, who were resolutely anti-Klan. The frequency with which the mine and mill trust had used immigrants (and sometimes African Americans) as strikebreakers goes some way toward explaining why, even twenty years after the de-unionizing of the Pikes Peak region, so many white working-class residents flocked to the Klan, which in this iteration targeted immigrants, Catholics, Jews, bootleggers, and African Americans, among others.56 By 1926, Colorado had been so effectively “kluxed” that a New York Times journalist observed that the “invisible empire” wielded more power in Colorado than any other state, with the possible exceptions of Indiana and Kansas.57

  The KKK enjoyed considerable and enduring support in old mining towns and on the west side of Colorado Springs.58 At its peak, the El Paso County klavern attracted two thousand members and even boasted a Junior Klan and a women’s Klan that featured an all-female orchestra. It ran a slate of candidates—the so-called American Ticket—during the 1925 municipal elections, but the Springs political establishment went all out to ensure its defeat.59 The Klan was defeated, but Klan involvement was a way westsiders could provoke the Springs establishment.

  To be clear, the political shift of the white working classes of Colorado City took time. As late as the mid-twenties the Independent opposed the establishment of ROTC in area high schools on the grounds that it would encourage militarism, which it blamed on the “greed and ambition” of the wealthy and government officials. The paper’s stance may have reflected residents’ memories of how the militia had been used against union men two decades earlier.60 Class tensions persisted beyond the 1920s, but as later chapters demonstrate, by the 1930s politics in the Springs tended to be characterized by cross-class organizations. A widely shared “pioneer” identity, which included the prosperous and the working class, and the participation of so many men in lodges went some way toward mitigating the area’s class tensions.61

  Nearly twenty years separated the failed strike of 1903–4 and the rise of the KKK, and certainly other factors help explain the popularity of the Klan in those areas where unionism had been strong. That said, the trauma of the strike, coupled with the shriveling of Colorado City, likely reverberated across generations. There are parallels between what happened in Colorado City and what happened in many communities, particularly in the South in the wake of the failed Great Textile Strike of 1934. Workers there, unprepared for management’s hard-line response, which brought unemployment and eviction, turned their backs once and for all on unionism. The legacy of the failed strike lingered there, undermining any effort at unionization.62

  By the time the Davis family turned up in Colorado Springs in 1905, Colorado City still had its red-light district and many of its mill jobs. But by that point the anti-union regime was in place. The new order would not have transformed Walter Davis into a company man. After all, he arrived in town a stenographer located uncomfortably in the lower middle class but fully committed to joining the capitalist class.63 Nonetheless, the changes that followed from the crushing of unionism transformed the town where Walter Davis would make his name. In a town where the elite felt entitled to run the show, the realm of the permissible widened for all businessmen. This was perhaps especially true of my grandfather, many of whose earliest customers were working-class residents of Colorado City.

  Of course, there is no way that even as ambitious a newcomer as my grandfather could have immediately grasped the nature of power in Colorado Springs. During those first few weeks in town, at least when he was not trying to secure employment, he was probably taking it all in—particularly the comings and goings at the Mining Exchange. With a population of 21,000, Colorado Springs was more than three times the size of his hometown, and if not quite the jewel of Palmer’s original dream, it still made Greensburg, Indiana, seem poky. His new home must have felt like a place of plenitude, where talent, cleverness, and ambition might win out.

  Yet even as Colorado Springs offered opportunities to smart, go-ahead men, my grandfather would have soon discovered that its class boundaries at the upper end were rigidly drawn and meticulously maintained, much more so than in lethargic Greensburg. From its earliest days the Springs had cultivated a sense of its own preciousness, which was accentuated by the Cripple Creek mining boom. As a consequence, a kind of gold ceiling
settled over the town, determining which men belonged to the El Paso Club and which families were members of the exclusive Cheyenne Mountain Country Club (where Teddy Roosevelt played polo) and participated in the world of gala parties, debutante balls, and charity events—all lavishly chronicled in the local newspapers.

  Breaking into this world whose participants vacationed for “the season” in Europe, wore custom-made clothing, and hobnobbed with celebrities would have been daunting for a man of solid accomplishments. This was a world way beyond the ability and means of my twenty-four-year-old grandfather to crash. Nothing demonstrates just how far out of his league he was than those ludicrous marriage announcements in the Colorado papers. He also arrived with what felt to him like a liability. That would have been the rest of the Davis family—his father, fifty-one-year-old Allen; his mother, forty-five-year-old Lizzie; and his three siblings, twenty-one-year-old Ray, nearly eighteen-year-old Roy, and seven-year-old Willard. Family finances were sufficiently tight, even in Greensburg, that only Walter had finished high school. Younger brother Roy’s schooling ended at the eighth grade, and it’s a good bet that Ray’s did as well. On their first day in the Springs, Roy was sent out to search for work, which he did, finding a job as a package wrapper at Hibbard Department Store. Although Walter had helped his father set up a new barbershop, it was his brother Ray, who had also worked with his dad in the Greensburg tonsorial parlor, who joined him in this new venture.

  The swells of Colorado Springs, otherwise known as the members of the Cheyenne Mountain Country Club, in January 1913. Spencer Penrose is in the back row, fourth to the left; photographer Laura Gilpin’s father is in the middle row, to the left of the man holding the trophy. (Courtesy John Lipsey Photograph Collection, the Pikes Peak Library District, 304-4170)

  The sale of his home and business back in Indiana enabled Allen Davis to purchase a house and a small three-seat barbershop in downtown. Walter and his father had scouted out possibilities for another tonsorial parlor in the Springs, but the competition was fiercer than they had faced back home. By the time they arrived in Colorado Springs the town already had twenty-three barbershops, some of which were elaborate affairs offering all kinds of amenities, even baths. They did manage to rent space for the shop in the business district, but it seems unlikely that it enjoyed an A-list clientele. Still a barbershop today, with the old-style barber’s pole in front, the space is both cramped and gloomy. Given Allen Davis’s illness, he may also have had a difficult time keeping clients unless, of course, they were other consumptives.

  The people of Greensburg may have been unconcerned about a tubercular barber working in close proximity to his customers, but the same could not be said for some other parts of the nation. Once medical research revealed that tuberculosis was, in fact, communicable, attitudes toward the disease began to shift. By the turn of the century, TB, once deemed an almost fashionable illness, was increasingly understood to be a poor people’s disease, one that particularly afflicted immigrants crammed together in airless and germy tenements. Public health officials, alarmed at the disease’s spread, advocated the registration of people sick with tuberculosis. And by 1904 sixty cities, including New York, required physicians and other health providers to supply their health departments with the names and addresses of patients they were treating for TB. Officials even considered restricting the interstate travel of people with TB, although no action was taken. Even if people with TB did not entirely internalize the censorious judgments of health officials, they knew the sting of ostracism. “Your friends will treat you so low down,” sang blues musician Victoria Spivey in “TB Blues,” one of several such songs to carry this disheartening message.64

  Attitudes also began to shift somewhat in Colorado Springs, even though the town originally had been promoted as a resort for well-to-do consumptives. By 1900 over half of the town’s residents reported that either they or a family member had moved to the Springs in search of a TB cure. TB may have been the town’s first real economic engine, with its sanitariums, hospitals, and tent cottages, but not all of its residents were comfortable with such a large population of consumptives. After all, the town had a well-burnished reputation for cleanliness, too. Apparently one reason that the commercial hub of downtown—Tejon Street and Pikes Peak Avenue—was hosed down every day was to minimize the risk of tuberculosis spreading to healthy residents.

  By the time the Davises arrived in Colorado Springs the police were just as likely to give the boot or a train ticket to an indigent person suffering from tuberculosis as to let him camp out for free. Hotel clerks and landlords often denied lodging to those who were obviously sick because too many such people arriving in town were utterly without resources.65 There were local laws mandating the fumigation of houses where TB sufferers had lived, and, as in many other locales, laws banning promiscuous spitting. Still, Colorado Springs did establish the Sunnyrest Sanatorium in 1910, which offered free care to people with TB, despite the fears of some that the town would be flooded with indigent consumptives. It is perhaps not surprising that the town courted affluent sufferers, many of whom stayed at the Cragmor Sanitarium, described in one account as having the ambience of a cruise ship, with rollicking parties late into the night.66 As one Denver physician (and a person with tuberculosis himself) observed in 1904, “TB is a good respectable disease if you have money, but without it, it is a mean lowdown business.”67

  As a property-owning businessman, Allen Davis did not, one imagines, fall into the ranks of the shunned. But for my socially ambitious grandfather, having as his father a consumptive barber felt like a liability. Then, in January 1908, after two and a half years in Colorado, the mountain cure stopped working and Allen Davis ceased being a worry to him. Ray and Roy accompanied their father’s body back to Greensburg, where Allen wanted to be buried. Why wasn’t Walter, the eldest son, the one traveling back to his hometown and taking charge of his dad’s funeral? Initially I assumed he stayed behind because he was creating distance between himself and his family, but then I examined Allen Davis’s probate record. It turns out that Allen’s will stipulated that Roy, Ray, and nine-year-old Willard (through his guardian, Lizzie) each receive $1,060. The will made no provision for Walter. One possibility, I thought, was that Allen had already given Walter a substantial sum, effectively his inheritance, upon marrying Lula. But had that been the case Walter would not have challenged the will. In fact, he went so far as to question his father’s soundness of mind back in 1906, when he had made out his will. Walter’s legal challenge proved unsuccessful, but it may explain why, at age twenty-seven, he decided to go it alone. Or maybe Walter had already pulled away from his family, perhaps even in marrying Lula, and that accounted for his disinheritance. However events unfolded, it seems likely that Walter’s disinheritance, which was, after all, tantamount to being labeled a black sheep, hardened him.68

  Walter’s father was no longer around to be an embarrassment to him, but the rest of his family was. As long as they were all in the same town, there was no way my grandfather could shed his roots. In fact, twenty-five years later, shortly after Walter fled town in 1932, a newspaper serving the working-class west side (formerly Colorado City) called attention to his “humble background.”69 Allen’s death did not throw Lizzie into poverty, but she was a struggling widow who worked well into her sixties. At least a part of the sons’ inheritance was likely tapped five years after Allen’s death so that she could buy a big if undistinguished house on Nevada Avenue, on the northern edge of the business district. It was there that the Davis family—minus Walter and Lula—lived for some years. As her sons got married and moved out she turned her home into a boardinghouse. She also worked across the street at the high school as a matron, providing help and counsel, likely of a scriptural sort, to female pupils, who called her “Mother Davis.” Upon retirement, she had her house divided into a duplex so that her eldest son, Ray, and his wife could live next door to her and her youngest son, Willard. Meanwhile, Ray took over
ownership of Allen’s barbershop, which he ran for twenty years before becoming a traveling auditor for the Fraternal Order of Eagles. As for Willard, after serving seven months in the military during World War I, he held jobs as a gardener, embalmer, and ranch hand before settling into a job pumping gas at the local Conoco station.

  It could not have been easy for my grandfather to refashion himself as a middle-class professional man when most of his immediate relatives were common “working people.” It wasn’t just that they had fewer resources than he did, although surely that mattered. They didn’t drive the right cars, live in the right neighborhood, wear the right clothes, or work the right jobs.

  There was one exception, however—Walter’s enterprising younger brother Roy. Savvy, hardworking, and folksy, Roy was a gifted salesman. At age twenty-three, after only six years in the Springs, he opened up a typewriter shop. Perhaps the inheritance helped with that. One year later, in 1912, he was advertising aggressively in the city directory, with expensive bold-print ads featuring his stylized signature. Soon his eponymous shop dominated the local market in office machines. Selling typewriters paid the bills, but Roy harbored political ambitions. In 1919 he was elected to a seat in the lower house of the Colorado General Assembly. Two years later, in his second term, he was chosen Speaker of the House. At age thirty-three, Roy Davis was, the press boasted, the youngest person in the United States to have held such a position. In 1922 he scored an important legislative victory by helping to push through stalled legislation for the construction of the Moffat Tunnel.70 The controversial tunnel was meant to give Denver the improved rail access west that its business leaders were demanding, and which nearby Pueblo already enjoyed. Roy’s maneuvering earned him some enemies in his own Republican Party, but by 1928 he was back in politics after being elected to the Colorado Senate. He was subsequently elected to a second term, and was chosen president pro tem in 1931.