Shortfall

by Alice Echols

  30. “High Winds Bring Clouds of Dust and Protests to City and County Officials,” CSG, March 25, 1914.

  31. WPA Guide, 116.

  32. Jameson, All That Glitters, 25.

  33. Andrews, Killing for Coal, 240.

  34. Jameson, All That Glitters, ch. 7; George G. Suggs Jr., Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 20; Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 374–75.

  35. Jameson, All That Glitters, 199–205.

  36. Dubofsky, Hard Work, 51.

  37. Jameson, All That Glitters, 199–202; Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 23; Suggs, Colorado’s War, 82–83.

  38. Suggs, Colorado’s War, 4, 111–12.

  39. Jameson, All That Glitters, 245–52.

  40. Ibid., 244.

  41. Reid, “Growing Up in the Twenties,” 55.

  42. The question of which side was most responsible for the violence is still debated. Certainly pro-union miners were no angels. Take the brutal murder of mine foreman Martin Gleason, which happened well before the strike, and was likely at their hands. Gleason’s body was completely mangled, with virtually every bone in it broken. After shooting him in the head, his murderers threw his body into an abandoned shaft that dropped some five hundred feet. Whoever killed him took neither his watch nor his money. “Mart Gleason Murdered and His Body Found in An Abandoned Shaft,” Cripple Creek Evening Star, December 27, 1901, 1. His murder occurred just two months after his employer, the Woods Investment Company, announced that those working at their Victor mine would have to live there rather than in Cripple Creek, a shift in policy that one of the local papers attacked. See “You Can Work for Stratton,” Cripple Creek Star, October 15, 1901, 5. A year and a half earlier Gleason had hired an African American miner to work in the Wild Horse Mine, whose workers Gleason supervised—a move that his crew successfully opposed. Still, a number of recent studies argue that some of the worst violence during the strike was the work of agents provocateurs, not WFM members. See Jameson, All That Glitters, 152.

  43. Bold, Frontier Club, 1.

  44. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 48. The chapter in which she discusses this is called “Empire of Innocence.” Christine Bold has dubbed this process the “perpetrator-victim reversal” in Frontier Club, 15. Historian Richard White wrote about this dynamic as well in It’s Your Misfortune, 603: “For people who were the beneficiaries of conquest, white westerners have had a persistent knack for portraying themselves as victims—of Indians, of the federal government, of eastern corporations.”

  45. Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Massacre and Class War in the American West (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 19–20.

  46. Quoted in James Green, “Re-interpreting Ludlow,” Dissent, Spring 2009, 135.

  47. The phrase “corporation-ridden” turns up in a number of places, including “Ex-Governor Adams Dies in Battle Creek After Long Illness,” DP, November 2, 1922, 1.

  48. “Simon, His Convention,” CSG, September 13, 1908, 10.

  49. Martelle, Blood Passion, 7.

  50. John Green, “A Colorado Miners’ Store,” Consumers’ Cooperation: Organ of the Consumers’ Cooperative Movement in the U.S.A. 3, no. 5 (May 1917).

  51. “Tutt Chosen Head of Open Shop Society,” CSG, December 22, 1922. For more on the politics of the NAM, see Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands. Elizabeth Shermer has argued that the post–World War II discourse of the right-to-work movement helped to unravel the New Deal’s support of labor unions and the idea that they were a “legitimate part of the tripartite body politic.” In the West, she says, leaders of the open shop exploited fears about unions’ coerciveness and racketeering. Again, there is evidence that these fears were mobilized earlier in Colorado. See Shermer, “Is Freedom of the Individual Un-American? Right-to-Work Campaigns and Anti-Union Conservatism, 1943–1958,” in The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 135–36.

  52. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 306–7.

  53. In an August 25, 2014, email, Jameson said she imagines that the defeat of the union was a devastating defeat for striking workers and their supporters in Colorado City.

  54. MacNeill quoted in Mining and Engineering World 23 (July–December 1905): 105; “Standard Mill to Close About Jan. 1,” CSG, December 2, 1911; “Mill Being Torn Down,” Colorado City Iris, January 19, 1917, 1.

  55. The Colorado Springs Independent, a westside paper with a more working-class readership, regularly referred to the Gazette and the Evening Telegraph as the “Daily Twins.” See, for example, a page-one article in the July 6, 1933 issue.

  56. Reid, “Growing Up.” I have reached this conclusion based upon the meeting places of the KKK, which were on the west side, the residence of KKK candidates for public office, and the precinct voting records from 1924 through 1930. The KKK was listed in the town’s city directory.

  57. See “Klan Puts Coolidge Ahead in Colorado,” NYT, October 2, 1924, 4. Both the Times and the local dailies were critical of the KKK. “Form Anti-Klan Body in Colorado,” NYT, May 13, 1925, 2; Robert Alan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) is the standard treatment. See also David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3rd ed. (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Ed Quillen, “Welcome to Kolorado, Klan Country,” Colorado Springs Independent, May 22, 2003 (the name is the same as that of the newspaper that promoted the KKK, but the Independent did not have an uninterrupted publishing history; this is a different paper).

  58. According to Goldberg, the local Masonic lodge was a KKK bastion. Goldberg, Hooded Empire, 53.

  59. The Independent published an article that put the number of Klansmen in the Springs at one thousand. See “K.K.K. Meeting Pulls Full House,” CSI, October 10, 1924, 1. Later the paper claimed that there were many more Klansmen in the larger Pikes Peak region, but I suspect that the paper’s number exaggerates the membership numbers. See “Say 6,000 Klansmen in This Region—Number Increasing,” CSI, November 14, 1925.

  60. “Strong Opposition to R.O.T.C. in High Schools of This City,” CSI, October 10, 1924, 1.

  61. One gets a good sense of the important role played by the figure of the “pioneer” in the newspaper obituaries.

  62. James J. Lorence, The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929–1941 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 126. Writing about the effects of the failed 1934 strike in the South, historian Jefferson Cowie notes, “Widespread industrial revolt would never again happen in the region.” See Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 107.

  63. What little we know of Walter Davis’s father indicates that he, too, was not a union man. When the barbers’ union in nearby Columbus announced that its members would be levying an additional charge for neck shaving, Allen Davis came out loudly against it in the pages of the Greensburg newspaper.

  64. Sheila Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 187.

  65. Bird, A Lady’s Life, 154.

  66. There are many articles about the TB industry in the Gazette, including the recent article by Scott Rappold, “America’s Greatest Sanitarium,” Gazette, June 17, 2007. For the connection between TB and street cleaning, see William French, “Drug Store Cowboy,” his recollections of downtown Colorado Springs circa 1936, Special Collections, Pioneers Museum, Colorado Springs. Contemporary articles include “Where
Colorado Springs Proves Its Brotherhood,” CSG, October 5, 1913. Also very helpful is Chris Nichol et al., eds., Doctors, Disease, and Dying in the Pikes Peak Region (Colorado Springs: PPLD, 2012).

  67. Henry Sewall quoted in Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1999), 422.

  68. Allen Davis Probate, File D113, box 43672, February 4, 1908, CSA.

  69. “Human Vultures Thrive in Colorado Springs,” CSW, May 27, 1932, 1.

  70. The Moffat Tunnel project, which proposed to unite the eastern and western slopes of the Rockies, was controversial in large part because the tunnel would eliminate Pueblo’s lock on westbound traffic. Legislation for it became bogged down in the general assembly more than once. It took a devastating flood in Pueblo, killing one hundred people, before the circumstances were such that Governor Oliver Shoup could see his way to pushing the legislation through. Linking the passage of the tunnel bill to one for emergency funds for the disaster and for flood relief in and around Pueblo proved crucial to getting it passed. The final roadblock was caused by Shoup’s insistence that the commission overseeing the tunnel’s construction be composed entirely of his own choices. Roy’s maneuverings got the legislation through the lower house, but with the proviso that the Moffat Tunnel commission be drawn from county commissioners of the four principal districts that were most affected. Roy’s compromise was bitterly opposed by the Denver delegation, and it made him enemies, including quite possibly Shoup himself. See “Davis Wins Victory,” CSG, April 27, 1922, 1; Kathleen Wallace, “Historical Perspectives: Who Was That Man Shoup?” New Falcon Herald 8, no. 6 (June 2011).

  71. See Lynn Dumenil, Modern Temper, 197.

  72. The Rotary Club magazine took note of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in Arthur E. Hobbs, “Is There Anything Wrong with Rotary?” The Rotarian, November 1925.

  73. Walter Davis, Bureau of Investigation File, Davis family archive.

  74. H. Dewey Anderson and Percy Erwin Davidson, Occupational Trends in the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1940), 599. Historian Sharon H. Strom argues that while jobs that were classified as “stenographer” and “typist” were becoming feminized as early as 1910, the absolute numbers of male stenographers and typists did not decline until 1930. She further argues that the impact of mechanization on the gendering of office work was somewhat more ambiguous than usually assumed. See Strom’s authoritative study, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 48.

  75. Arthur Brooks Baker, “The Velvet Hammer,” undated newspaper column, possibly written for the Denver Post. In this piece Baker touted Roy Davis’s skills as a state legislator, but he made mention of his office machines.

  76. Andrews, Killing for Coal, 59–61.

  77. “Economical Conditions in Europe Are Poor, Says Davis on Return from Rotary Trip,” CSG, July 19, 1927; John J. Lipsey, “Legionnaires to Paris,” letter to the editor, CSG, July 22, 1927.

  78. Devon E. Francis, “Statehouse Gossip,” CSG, April 14, 1929.

  79. See Susan Tucker, Katherine Ott, and Patricia Buckler, eds., The Scrapbook in American Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

  80. See Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  81. “Whitmore in Danger,” LAT, December 17, 1930; “Beesemyer in Deeper,” LAT, December 19, 1930.

  2: The Loan Man

  1. Peter R. Shergold, “The Loan Shark: The Small Loan Business in Early Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh,” Pennsylvania History 45, no. 3 (July 1978): 196.

  2. Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 52. The case of the eighteen-year installment plan is drawn from Elizabeth Ewen’s Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: New Feminist Library, 1985), 170.

  3. Calder, Financing, 50, 56.

  4. Ibid., 58–60.

  5. For a fascinating study of how personal debt moved from the shadows and into the mainstream of American capitalism, see Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  6. J.M. Oskison, “Exploiters of the Needy,” Collier’s, October 2, 1909, 17.

  7. “Everybody’s Business,” Jewish Social Service 5 (1914): 122.

  8. For example, what “lunchpail lending” giant Household Finance Corporation made in profits a hundred years ago would be dwarfed by what it would make in the 1990s and beyond. In 2001 HFC reported profits of $1.8 billion. Within a year the financial titan HSBC acquired HFC for $16.4 billion. Or take payday lending. In 2008, approximately 14 million households made use of a payday lender, and collectively they borrowed a staggering $40 billion in installments of $200 or $500 or $800. Respectable banks such as Wachovia, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo helped to finance the growth and expansion of the industry. Now the business of personal indebtedness is an engine of American capitalism. See Gary Rivlin, Broke USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Poor Became Big Business (New York: Harper, 2010), 18, 27.

  9. Calder, Financing, 26.

  10. Thanks to Anne Hyde for this observation.

  11. Shergold, “Loan Shark,” 198–99. Small loans for short periods and with little by way of security could sometimes be obtained at immigrant banks, but usually even this opportunity was extended only to bankers’ friends. See also Rivlin, Broke USA, 4.

  12. A 1911 New York Times article quoted a well-known advocate of anti-loan-shark legislation, who cited as typical the figure given him by a business insider—a $10,000 investment that had yielded $10,000 in profits in a little more than three months. See “Says Loan Sharks Bought Legislation,” NYT, June 27, 1911.

  13. Wells Fargo Messenger, “Borrowing Money: How Salaried Men Should NOT Do It,” B and O Magazine 2, no. 1 (October 14, 1914): 47. The article borrows liberally from an older article by Chas. F. Bigelow, “The Borrower and His Pitfalls,” which was published in the Proceedings of the National Federation of Remedial Loan Associations (Buffalo, NY: 1909).

  14. J.A. Reichart, “Loan Shark Still Flourishes,” Forbes, May 13, 1922, 31.

  15. One defender of payday lending argues in an op-ed piece that “hardworking Americans” of modest means use payday lenders and check-cashing businesses because they are often a better option than checking accounts at banks whose fees put them out of the range of these consumers. Lisa Servon, “Are Banks Too Expensive to Use?” NYT, October 30, 2014. Another journalist offers a more measured account, but argues that even some consumer advocates who favor stronger regulation of payday lending acknowledge that the very people whom tighter regulations are meant to protect will likely be the ones most hurt by it. See Stacy Cowley, “To Curb Abuse, Loan Rules May Cut a Lifeline,” NYT, July 23, 2016. And someone associated with EZ Pawn depicts the business as though it was a benevolent society: “We’re there to help the community and to help people who need short-term ‘bridge’ loans.” See Corey Kilgannon, “Chronicle of a Changing City,” NYT, January 16, 2011.

  16. Benjamin Blumberg, Industrial Lenders News 5, no. 12 (June 1921). Blumberg presented this paper in Indianapolis at the meeting of the Indiana Licensed Lenders Association in 1921. The article also claimed that the “borrower actually prefers to do business with money lenders so that he can preserve his pride, guard his dignity and avoid charity and alms.”

  17. Rivlin, Broke USA, 35.

  18. Shergold, “Loan Shark,” 210.

  19. Charles Rogers, “American Unthrift,�
�� Atlantic Monthly, May 1911.

  20. Some loan sharks would move their operations from “dank backrooms” into the personal loan businesses, now legal in states with the new small loan law. See Hyman, Debtor Nation, 12. Shergold argues that at first the result of the uniform small loan laws was to severely reduce the number of lenders, which caused a slight reduction in the capital available for loans. In the 1920s the number of authorized loan companies apparently declined. However, the continued inability of small loan companies to cope with the needs of low-income, high risk borrowers created an opening for the mob, which moved in and provided loans at much higher interest rates than were legally approved. See Shergold, “Loan Shark,” 222–3.

  21. Calder, Financing, 134. It is worth noting as regards today’s payday lending that a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study focusing on the profitability of payday lending found that the industry’s interest rates were necessary because of the overhead associated with operating a retail outlet and borrowers’ high rates of delinquency. See Cowley, “To Curb Abuse.”

  22. Some of today’s loan sharks have developed an endless appetite for poor people with bad credit or no credit, and for people who repeatedly default on their loans. In fact, as one local branch manager for Household Finance Corporation admitted, the company actually targets consumers with terrible credit, people with scads of maxed-out credit cards. These are precisely the people that HFC and other such companies cultivate for new loans—at higher rates, and with a whole new slew of up-front fees appended. Rivlin, Broke USA, 6.

  23. See Calder, Financing, 53–54.

  24. Herbert Corey, “Silence Is Trait of Money Kings,” 1927, newspaper clipping, Davis family archive.

  25. In his guide to moneylending, Denver’s leading loan shark, Charles E. Stratton, emphasized the necessity for secrecy in his line of work. See Oskison, “Exploiters of the Needy,” 18.

  26. Hugh Harper in June 24, 1932, letter to J. Edgar Hoover, director, Bureau of Investigation, from Walter Clyde Davis FBI file, 62-27247.