Shortfall

by Alice Echols

  25. It was Joshua B. Freeman who in a pioneering 1989 essay, “Putting Conservatism Back into the 1960s,” argued that it was time for historians of the sixties to address conservatism. Conservatism was not, he argued, simply a reaction to the rebellious decade, and seeing it as such “presents too great a discontinuity between the conservative triumph late in the decade and earlier conservative developments.” See “Teaching the Sixties: A Symposium,” in Radical History Review 44 (Spring 1989): 95. Freeman’s piece was followed by Alan Brinkley’s influential essay “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review 99 (April 1994).

  Historians’ interest in mapping modern American conservatism accelerated as the New Deal coalition began to further unravel. There are now many excellent books about American conservatism. David Kennedy argues that it was during the thirties, the years when New Deal liberalism was ascendant, that the hostility to federal power that we associate with much modern conservatism consolidated. See American People, 341. An important account that locates anti-statism firmly in the 1920s is Lyn Dumenil’s The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 26. Three essential books that focus on businessmen’s pushback against the New Deal are Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009); Kathryn S. Olmsted, Right out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: The New Press, 2015); and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Shandy, in particular, makes the point that the business conservatives she studied were not across the board anti-statist. They often turned to the federal government for “help constructing the infrastructure upon which commerce depended.” See Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism, 35–36.

  Other significant studies on the subject include Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, eds., The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Robert Kuttner, Revolt of the Haves: Tax Rebellions and Hard Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980); and David Bieto, Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

  26. Indispensable to understanding the region are two magisterial books—Elizabeth Jameson’s All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998) and Thomas A. Andrews’s Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

  27. The city’s streets-paved-with-gold scheme was hatched after gold mining was already in decline. The local taxpayers’ association, whose activities I chronicle later in this book, unsuccessfully challenged the bond issue. “‘Taxpayers’ Launch Campaign on Paving,” CSG, March 5, 1920. See also the oral history by J. Juan Reid, “Growing Up in the Twenties: One Man’s View of Colorado Springs,” 1980, in the holdings of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. “Springs Streets Really Paved with Gold,” CSG, May 23, 1965.

  28. Adam M. Sowards, United States West Coast: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 81; Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 100. Limerick observes that today in the American West what we have is not just a persistence of attitude but also the revival of mining activity. See Limerick, Something in the Soul: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: Norton, 2000), 225; William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American West (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

  29. Historian Catherine McNicol Stock has argued persuasively that in order to understand how America’s heartland, once the home of Populism, became more conservative, one needs to factor in changing attitudes toward the military: “The creation of a military economy in the heartland not only made obvious the association between local politicians and the military, but it took away their most potent anti-militarist view: that rich easterners and financiers on Wall Street were profiting from war while poor farm boys did the fighting and dying.” See Stock, “Making War Their Business: The Short History of Populist Anti-Militarism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13, no. 3 (July 2014): 396.

  30. In arguing for the prototypical quality of Colorado Springs I am aware that Mike Davis already made the case for California, which he says “acts as a kind of prefigurative microcosm of national politics; its intentional antinomies tend to anticipate the form and content of social conflict in the rest of the country.” See Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 158. Lisa McGirr has made the case that Orange County, California, was a prototype, arguing that it was “the first functional form of a new conservative milieu that appeared less distinctly elsewhere.” She likens several other cities, including Colorado Springs, to Orange County in the conservative cultures they have fostered. However, her focus is on a later period than mine—the 1960s. See her groundbreaking book, Suburban Warriors, 13. Focusing on the Republican establishment in 1940s California, Kristoffer Smemo argues that it pioneered a “new conservative statism” foreshadowing the moderate-liberal Republicanism of Dwight D. Eisenhower. See Smemo, “The Little People’s Century: Industrial Pluralism, Economic Development, and the Emergence of Liberal Republicanism in California, 1942–1946,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 2015): 1168.

  31. Robert O. Self, “California and the New Suburban History,” Reviews in American History 31, no. 1 (March 2003).

  32. Michael Kazin, “A Liberal Nation in Spite of Itself,” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (Fall 2008). Here Kazin is rephrasing the paradox noted by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, scholars of American public opinion. They maintained that most Americans are conservative ideologically but in practice liberal. Free and Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967).

  33. It was Robert G. Athearn who characterized Westerners’ response to the federal government as “politically schizophrenic.” He was referring specifically to the New Deal years, but he believed this attitude predated the Depression. See his book The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986), 103. DeVoto’s pithy assessment is quoted in Albert L. Hurtado’s “Whose Misfortune? Richard White’s Ambivalent Region,” in Reviews in American History 22, no. 2 (June 1994): 288.

  34. For more about Phoenix, see Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism. Later in the 1960s, after Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, Richard Nixon was able to successfully exploit the surge of suburban populist conservatism. Matthew Lassiter has demonstrated that “consumer status, taxpayer rights and meritocratic individualism” were the key building blocks in the mobilization of white suburban voters, Nixon’s “Silent Majority.” Taxpayer rights and a meritocratic individualism existed decades earlier in Colorado Springs but, as best as I can tell, largely disconnected in any overt way from race and suburbanization. See Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 198.

  35. “Palmer Removes Residence from El Paso County,” CSG, March 14, 1884, 4. His move was projected to reduce the county assessment by $60,000. It doesn’t appear that Pa
lmer actually did move out of the county. From the 1920s onward Colorado Springs prioritized low taxes. See “Springs’ Taxes Lower than Most Cities, Survey Shows,” CSG, February 26, 1950, B1. And “Springs One of Colorado Cities with Lowest Taxes,” CSG, September 19, 1949, B1.

  36. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

  37. See Richard Harris, “Working-Class Home Ownership in the American Metropolis,” Journal of Urban History 17 (November 1990): 63. One essential, in-depth study of a hardscrabble, white working-class suburb of south Los Angeles suggests that the antitax activism that erupted there during the Depression presaged the conservative tax revolts that would break out in California several decades later. See Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven. Many people of color yearned to own their homes as well, but racially discriminatory lending practices very often effectively put successful homeownership off-limits. See Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Margaret Garb, City of American Dream: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 188; Margaret Garb, “Drawing the Color Line: Race and Real Estate in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago,” Journal of Urban History 32, no. 5 (July 2006).

  38. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1906), 212.

  39. According to Margaret Garb, studies of neighborhood housing suggest that Sinclair’s rendering of the Rudkuses’ sad experience with homeownership was a fair depiction. See Garb, City of American Dream, 154–55. She argues that a neighborhood B&L was more apt to let a few missed payments be forgiven. However, that would not have been the case with a building and loan of the “nationals” variety.

  40. Lewinnek, The Working Man’s Reward, 100.

  41. Shortfall builds upon the work of left-leaning scholars who have explored a fuller range of working-class experiences and consciousness than the celebratory accounts of working-class resistance that has characterized much labor history. I have in mind three extraordinary books: Seth Koven’s The Match Girl and the Heiress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Alison Light’s Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Penguin, 2014); and Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). All three books focus on British class feelings.

  42. Both “working people” and “working class” are less than totally satisfactory terms. “Working people” is too baggy a term, and it reinforces the notion of the so-called classlessness of American society. Yet “working class” can obscure more than it clarifies, especially in a tourist town like the Springs with so few industrial workers. Certainly occupational categories tell us only so much. How do we categorize a barber or a contractor? Did the barber own his own shop or work in another man’s, and might that contractor have been better described as a carpenter? And what do we make of the Colorado City factory hand who reportedly attended college—usually a marker of middle-class status? Complicating matters further, the move from blue-collar to white-collar work did not always represent upward mobility. Then there is the question of self-identification. Many Americans prefer to see themselves as a “people not a class”—a preference not entirely reducible to disidentification with one’s class of origin. On the trickiness of “upward mobility,” see Chudacoff, “Success and Security,” 105. The succinct formulation about Americans and class is Michael Kazin’s in his essay “A People Not a Class: Rethinking the Political Language of the Modern US Labor Movement,” in Reshaping the U.S. Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s, ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1988), 257–86. This is also the view of David E. Kyvig in his book Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 165. It was British historian E.P. Thompson who defined a class as “a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions, and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways.” Quoted in Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 18.

  43. Light, Common People, xxviii.

  1: Advertisements for Himself

  1. This account of Palmer’s remaking of the Pikes Peak region is drawn from Andrews, Killing for Coal, 27–50.

  2. PikeView Coal Company operated north of town, but in the years ahead most industry would be located to the west in Colorado City.

  3. Marshall Sprague, Newport of the Rockies: The Life and Good Times of Colorado Springs (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1988), 18.

  4. Isabella Lucy Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1882), 177–78.

  5. Many who came were said to be the second sons of British aristocracy.

  6. See Christine Bold, The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880–1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 58–61.

  7. The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987), 56–57.

  8. Jameson, All That Glitters, 24.

  9. Melvyn Dubofsky, Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 43.

  10. One of the best sources about Colorado is The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado. See its section on Colorado Springs, 111–23.

  11. By 1917 when residents of Colorado City voted to be part of Colorado Springs, some of this would change. By that point the Golden Cycle Mill was still operating, but with a much diminished labor force. The far northern side of town also featured coal works. The city’s business leaders, eager to keep its tourist trade, aggressively attacked anything that might undermine its pristine reputation, such as the knock-on effects of Manitou’s lack of a sewer system. “Manitou and Fountain Creek,” CSG, December 10, 1904.

  12. See “City of Sunshine: Colorado Springs: Health, Education, Recreation, Residence, All Year Round,” 1917, Special Collections, Penrose Library, Pikes Peak Library District: “Into whatever part of the city he may go, his first impressions of beauty, taste and cleanliness deepen. . . . Many of the residences are mansions with spacious grounds. . . . Colorado Springs is cosmopolitan and metropolitan” (79).

  13. WPA Guide, 112.

  14. It was the view of Charles Mulford Robinson, “noted good roads expert,” who outlined a system of parking in his report to city officials, “Would Transform Streets into Lanes of Greensward,” CSG, August 2, 1905 (included in “Evolution of Historic Medians,” https://coloradosprings.gov/sites/default/files/planning/historicmedians.pdf).

  15. H.W. Brands, The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (New York: Anchor, 2003), 442. Recent work on the great California gold rush has complicated Brands’s view. It turns out that some of those who came looking for gold wanted to launch a successful small business or farm with their profits, not to become instantly rich. See, for example, Malcolm Rohrbough, Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848–1854 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). I would argue that for the men who became mine owners during the Cripple Creek gold rush, the dream of striking it rich (or richer in the case of those who arrived on the scene already moneyed) was often a powerful lure.

  16. J.R. Robinson, “The Ideal City,” in Colorado Springs City Council, Town Incorporation, City Organization and Reorganization (Colorado Springs: City Council, 1901–2). Robinson, the mayor, cited the state’s “unlimited mineral wealth.”

  17. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 100; Limerick, Something in the Soul, 225.

  18. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901).

  19. Sprague, Newport in the Rockies, 163.

  20. “To Establish Resort in Bear Creek Canyon,” CSG, Febr
uary 27, 1902. The plan was to build a summer resort for tourists in the area known as Jones Park.

  21. “‘Coney Island’ Resort in Ivywild to Cost $75,000,” CSG, January 5, 1906, 1; “New Bath House at Zoo, Open to Public, Finest in the State,” CSG, August 6, 1911; “Landell Bartlett Recalls Zoo and ‘Bathhouse John,’” CSGT, June 1, 1958, 2.

  22. Jameson, All That Glitters, 22–23.

  23. WPA Guide, 117.

  24. Jameson, All That Glitters, 48.

  25. Unfortunately, many of those in the region who were most in need of the Myron Stratton Home became ineligible when the community of miners in Cripple Creek broke away from Republican-dominated El Paso County to form Teller County in 1899. See Jameson, All That Glitters, 47.

  26. Also useful is “The Standard and Colorado-Philadelphia Mills,” adapted with minor revisions from Red Rock Rag 4, no. 7 (July 2003), Friends of Red Rock Canyon website, http://redrockcanyonopenspace.org/education/history/the-standard-and-colorado-philadelphia-mills.

  27. Jan MacKell, Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls: Prostitution in Colorado, 1860–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 131. The six-hundred-man figure is my best guess based upon the two hundred men who were employed at the Standard in 1905.

  28. WPA Guide, 116.

  29. The Golden Cycle adopted this new technology after a fire destroyed the mill. See Jameson, All That Glitters, 246. For the Haywood quote, see WPA Guide, 116.