by Alice Echols
Roy Davis before the scandal. In the thirties, the combination of the scandal and the Depression nearly killed his typewriter business. He made ends meet by grading civil service exams for the state. (Author’s archive)
Roy owed much of his success to his feverish participation in the town’s many clubs and fraternal organizations. By 1914 he had already served as both the president and the vice president of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, and as the clerk of the Industrial Order of Odd Fellows. Soon that list would expand to include the all-important Scottish Rite Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Loyal Order of Moose, Modern Woodmen of America, the Rotary Club, the advisory board of the Salvation Army, and the Shrine Club. He later served as director and vice president of the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce. This is only a partial list. He made himself a ubiquitous presence in the town’s civic life, which served him well, especially come election time. He may have belonged to more clubs than most, but ambitious men of that era usually were clubmen. Membership in fraternal organizations was about to take off across America. Participating in these clubs brought real benefits. For example, Rotary Club membership ensured that other members would feel compelled to patronize your business rather than that of a non-Rotarian competitor. The growth in these organizations is inextricable from the get-ahead culture of those times and the expectation that influential contacts of all sorts would follow from membership in prestigious organizations such as the Masons.71 Sinclair Lewis was careful to give a different name to Babbitt’s club, but it was obviously modeled on the Rotary Club, whose members “never lost sight of doing a little more business.”72
You might think that Walter would have appreciated that one of his siblings was making something of himself and thereby raising the family’s profile, but this was not the case. After all, Roy was six years his junior. If Walter had met with more immediate success in Colorado Springs, he might not have felt so resentful of his younger brother, but nothing had worked out as he had hoped. He listed himself as a lawyer in the city directory, but he was never admitted to the bar, and I have found no evidence that he ever practiced law there. Instead, he worked as a stenographer for a real estate firm, then for the city, and finally on a freelance basis. I don’t want to overstate the modesty of my grandparents’ circumstances. Even if their house on East Willamette Street was in an unpretentious area, and even if Lula’s inheritance helped to finance it, they were not renters. Still, how was it that a man this obsessed with making it ended up playing second fiddle to his younger brother?
Davis listed himself as a lawyer in the city directory even though he appears to have never worked as an attorney. (Author’s archive)
After all, other men had used their position as secretary as a launching pad to wealth or at least influence. Take the example of the financier and energy magnate Samuel Insull, the son of a London dairyman who began his career as the private secretary to Thomas Edison. General Palmer worked with at least two private secretaries. After Palmer’s death, his longtime secretary on the East Coast, George A. Krause, became the president of the Colorado Springs Company and the Antlers Hotel. Palmer’s other secretary, William Postlethwaite, may have had only a high school education, but he worked for decades as the treasurer of Colorado College (and was known as an amateur anthropologist), which brought him respect if not wealth. The most famous of all these office men was Oliver Shoup, the private secretary to Verner Z. Reed, the thirty-seven-year-old real estate man who earned a $1 million commission when he sold Stratton’s mine, the Independence, to an English syndicate in 1901. Shoup began working with him before that sale, and eventually moved from managing Reed’s multiple business interests to partnering with him. When Shoup left Reed it was to establish an oil company, which was just the beginning of his far-flung business empire. He leveraged that success into two terms as the governor of Colorado, serving from 1919 until 1923. Finally, there was Edward Sharer, a graduate of the law school at Kent College in Chicago, who would later join the ranks of building and loan heads. Sharer worked for many years as a private secretary to J.R. McKinnie, a legendary pioneer of the mining business in Cripple Creek.
All of these local men were better educated than my grandfather, who when he was on the lam presented himself as a retired lawyer with a college degree.73 They also had been lucky enough to find employment with very wealthy men, and at a time when the gold supply from Cripple Creek still seemed inexhaustible. Moreover, they came to office work when it was accorded a higher status, before it became feminized. By the time Walter arrived in Colorado Springs in 1905 office work was undergoing a transition. Even though 1910 marked the year in which there was the greatest number of male stenographers in the United States, the job was becoming de-skilled through the mechanization and routinization of office work.74 With the introduction of office machines, men like my grandfather were finding themselves replaced by women, whose paychecks were considerably more slender. We can see the effects of these changes in Colorado Springs, where the 1906 city directory listed seven stenographers, only one of whom was male. Tellingly, Walter Davis never listed himself under the heading of stenographer, although he worked as one. By 1911 the total number of stenographers listing themselves in the city directory had dwindled to five—all of them female. To make matters worse, his brother Roy was selling the very machine that was helping to render obsolete the one real skill his eldest brother possessed. The Corona typewriter “shut up like a knife, a lesson to stenographers,” as one newspaper columnist noted.75
Walter’s stalled ambitions only made him more standoffish with his family. He looked down his nose at his brothers, even Roy, whose marriage to a waitress at the Acacia Hotel he criticized. And yet Roy’s wife left the paid labor force upon marrying him, whereas Walter’s wife, Lula, worked for a number of years by her husband’s side. Even after the birth in 1909 of Dorothy, their first and only child, Lula worked in his cramped office in a bank building. Her work there isn’t noted in the census or the city directory, but a century ago women who “helped” their husbands in the office or the store did not count as working people in their own right and were not part of the official record. My mother remembered spending long stretches of time in a dresser drawer in her father’s office, and a surviving photograph bears out her memory.
For my mother the fact that even as a baby she was not at home in a crib or a cradle, with her mother nearby, was the best evidence of how steep her family’s climb had been. Indeed, it says a lot about how Walter was faring financially that he needed Lula working with him at the office. The idea that the home was women’s and children’s sphere—inviolate, and separate from the ruthlessly competitive and morally compromising world of commerce in which men moved—still had traction, particularly in Colorado Springs, a place so alive to improprieties. So even if Lula and Walter were doing well enough, the very fact that the Davis’s worlds were not scrupulously demarcated meant that bourgeois respectability was beyond their reach. The ideology of separate spheres, with men notionally in the larger world and women in the home, never described the lives of most Americans—particularly those who were working class or, like my grandparents, not middle class. But even if it was a trope rather than an exact description of reality, those whose lives did not conform to prevailing notions of respectability were nonetheless affected by the condemnatory attitudes of those better positioned.
During the workweek, a bureau drawer in her father’s office served as my mother’s crib. For her, this stood as definitive proof of her parents’ very modest circumstances. (Author’s archive)
My grandfather had come up short, but he was determined to turn things around. He may have even considered moving to Pueblo to advance himself. The second-largest city in the state, Pueblo boasted the first and the only integrated steel mill west of the Missouri, which is how it came to call itself the “Pittsburgh of the West.”76 Walter and Lula hosted a dinner at one of the city’s better hotels, the Hotel Maine, for a group consisting mostly of Pueblo p
rofessionals and their wives. As an orchestra played, Walter, Lula, and their guests dined in an area discreetly screened by palms, at tables decorated with arrangements of cut flowers, ferns, and smilax. Eighteen people turned out for the event, including a department store owner, a prominent surgeon, a banker, a contractor, and an accountant. The surviving news clip is undated, so I don’t know if Walter was still trying to drum up business as a lawyer. Nonetheless, the event usefully illustrates the differences between the two brothers—Roy methodically earning a reputation for reliability, hard work, and charitable endeavors, and Walter blowing his wad on a splashy gambit. But my grandfather was not about to follow Roy’s path to power.
Lula Davis with baby Dorothy, on the steps of their East Willamette home. (Author’s archive)
Dorothy Davis as a child in her front yard in Colorado Springs. (Author’s archive)
Over time their starkly different styles and lifestyles likely hardened into positions, with Walter playing the cosmopolitan, self-consciously modern man and Roy the throwback—the Bible-quoting, civic-oriented, family man. Walter loved to travel to cities, while Roy preferred his cottage at nearby Carroll Lakes. Walter was a philanderer, while Roy was the most faithful of husbands. (His fellow legislators in the Twenty-Third General Assembly demonstrated just how well they understood Roy when they presented him with a gift: a fourteen-karat-gold watch with a picture of his wife and daughter on its dial.) Walter chose the most extravagant anything—car, restaurant, or hotel—whereas Roy always opted for the merely functional. It’s not surprising that the staple machine at Roy’s store was the Royal—the typewriter equivalent of Henry Ford’s Model T. And once he was successful Walter loved to throw money around, while Roy was notoriously tight-fisted. In one newspaper article, Roy warned American Legionnaires traveling to Paris about the aggressive “tip-seeking practices” of that city’s waiters, which led the paper’s regular columnist to observe that, “even in the United States here and there, tips are expected.”77
The more successful Roy became—and he was hailed in at least one newspaper as a “gifted genius” conversationally, especially when scriptures could be cited—the more of a know-it-all he was. The Gazette noted that he steered legislation through the state senate in nothing less than a “Napoleonic” fashion.78 Within the family Walter, who had been garrulous back in Greensburg, receded, preferring silence to competing for space with Roy, who increasingly behaved as though he was the eldest son. Well into the twentieth century people routinely kept scrapbooks, which in the articles cut and pasted can reveal a good deal about their assemblers.79 In the case of Walter and Roy, the two men disliked each other so much that each kept a scrapbook whose pages largely chronicled the other’s defeats.
Roy and Walter Davis each had an idea of what it was that he was pursuing. For both of them it involved pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and earning the respect of others. Yet theirs were fundamentally different versions of the American dream. Roy wanted to make his mark in politics, and while there was nothing modest about the man, he positioned himself as someone motivated by the “common good” even if that extended only to a portion of the population. As for the material world, his desires were, as he often said, simple. It was comfort and security he sought. For my grandfather the common good seems to have remained a distant concept meant for someone else, no matter what his building and loan advertisements claimed. He wanted nothing so much as the experience of being wealthy, and the respect that came along with it. He wanted what the wealthiest men of Colorado Springs enjoyed—the sense of rightness that comes with being able to navigate the cultural parameters of class. For sure, having money was essential, but it was about having the cultural wherewithal to pass as wealthy.
Walter and Lula shared the dream of making it . . . and the worry that their roots might stand in the way of those dreams. They passed their dreams and worries on to my mother, a woman who to me always seemed most at home at upscale restaurants and department stores. But one day as we were talking about her parents she interrupted me. “I don’t mean to upset you,” she said, “but we really were nobodies come from nowhere.” My mother did not explicitly reference The Great Gatsby, where a version of that phrase is used, but I knew she had read Fitzgerald’s novel. Any doubts I had about how fully she had internalized her parents’ shame were dispelled when she said, “You know, we weren’t from the best stock.” Several weeks later, just days before she died, she revealed that she was of Irish descent, a real drawback if you were socially ambitious.
America was meant to be a country unlike all others, where stock held no sway, where people were judged on the basis of their character, talents, and achievements, not where they came from. But even in America one’s character was never entirely separable from one’s roots, and at no time more so than in the early twentieth century, when pseudo-scientific hereditarianism was highly influential in public health, medicine, and beyond.80 The idea that criminality was hereditary, for example, was common. It surfaced in 1930 when depositors of the Hollywood Guaranty Building and Loan Association learned that its head was guilty of a shocking $8 million embezzlement. News of that Los Angeles scandal provoked bomb threats both against the embezzler’s family and against the state’s building and loan commissioner. One furious depositor, expressing what I suspect many depositors thought, wrote to the jailed B&L head, “You dirty rotten crook . . . your dirty blood runs through your son’s veins.” He vowed to make it his life’s work to rid the community of “this rotten strain.”81
My mother could never quite bring herself to blame her father. Perhaps she felt herself too compromised, too implicated. She remembered him as a tragic figure, victimized by his adopted town—the town of millionaires—and perhaps most of all by his desperate desire to vault over the distance between his roots and where he saw himself headed.
2
The Loan Man
Six years after moving to Colorado Springs, Walter Davis ditched stenography and embarked on a new career as a small moneylender. By 1912 he was using the moniker “The Loan Man” in the local city directory. He continued to advertise himself in the directory as an attorney, but it was as a moneylender that he first made his mark in the region.
The early twentieth century world of moneylending is often characterized as “fringe financing,” and in the larger scheme of things it was. Personal indebtedness was still at the fringes of the American economy. Nonetheless, to those millions of Americans whose survival depended upon them, moneylenders were essential. Nearly 25 percent of all families in New York City made use of small-loan facilities in 1907; for families with annual incomes of less than $700 that figure rose to almost 50 percent. Likewise, in early twentieth-century Pittsburgh between 20 and 25 percent of that city’s families borrowed from a loan business in any given year.1 And it wasn’t just poor people who resorted to small moneylenders. Many government employees—police, firemen, and white-collar workers—as well as skilled tradesmen and foremen sought their services.2
This undated photograph of Walter Davis was taken in his cramped walk-up office. (Author’s archive)
Small moneylenders were central to the twentieth-century revolution in consumption, too. Beginning in the 1880s, working-class immigrants began to buy “on time,” a practice that put the American dream within closer reach. Sometimes the terms of these on-time contracts were surprisingly lenient. Take the case of the installment-plan purchase of a sewing machine by one immigrant family living on New York’s Lower East Side. The husband purchased the machine from a neighborhood peddler, who agreed to let the couple pay it back at the rate of 25 cents a week over a prolonged period, which stretched into eighteen long years. The family sometimes failed to make its weekly payment, and yet the peddler became a trusted family friend. This sort of intimacy between neighborhood peddlers and “their” families was not uncommon. Indeed, buying on time made sense to those who spoke little or no English, found American culture perplexing, and had little money.3
Installment credit made its way into the middle class, too. Many such people bought on time in order to purchase the accoutrements of a middle-class lifestyle: a sewing machine, furniture, carpets, a piano, a stove, and an encyclopedia set. Installment contracts took the form of a lease or chattel mortgage that enabled retailers to repossess the goods in case of delinquency. Customers who fell behind on their payments and were anxious to avoid repossession often sought the services of small moneylenders, which is why their ranks grew in the late nineteenth century.4 Moneylending was not yet a critical component of American capitalism, but in terms of the numbers it served and the role it played in democratizing credit, there was nothing fringe about it.5
Small moneylenders were usually described as loan sharks, businessmen who charged extremely high rates of interest, with the aid of deceptive or coercive methods, and in ways that skirted established (if routinely ignored) law. Loan sharks were reviled. They operated under a “cloud of illegality,” but they varied in style and in business practices. One of these was Denverite Charles E. Stratton, whose loan shark operation stretched all the way from Helena, Montana, to Los Angeles, California. Even the Collier’s writer J.M. Oskison, a well-known muckraking journalist, admitted that Charles Stratton was a “man of wealth, some refinement, and culture.” If Stratton was, in his view, the best of the sharks, Harry Leven of Colorado Springs was the worst. The owner of Colorado Springs Weekly Loans, Leven was the kind of man “who keeps a revolver in a pigeonhole of his desk and has the crevices of his office walls stuffed with newspaper to prevent people in the adjoining offices from overhearing him.”6 He was an unabashed loan shark who listed his occupation in the city directory as “Money.” Leven, whom Oskison described as a “one-eyed Russian Jew,” confirmed the anti-Semitic stereotype of the moneylender, one that was sufficiently widespread that the editor of Jewish Social Service noted with considerable relief that when residents of Cleveland formed an anti-loan-shark movement they found not even one Jewish firm among those that had been prosecuted.7
