Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey’s exposé of big business’s influence on Colorado and Denver politics, a best seller when it was originally published in 1911, is now back in print. The Beas t reveals the plight of working-class Denver citizens—in particular those Denver youths who ended up in Lindsey’s court day after day. These encounters led him to create the juvenile court, one of the first courts in the country set up to deal specifically with young delinquents. In addition, Lindsey exposes the darker side of many well-known figures in Colorado history, including Mayor Robert W. Speer, Governor Henry Augustus Buchtel, Will Evans, and many others. When first published, The Beast was considered every bit the equal Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and sold over 500,000 copies. More than just a fascinating slice of Denver history, this book—and Lindsey’s court— offered widespread social change in the United States. The founding judge of Denver’s Juvenile Court from 1900 to 1927, Benjamin Barr Lindsey is credited as a pioneer of the U.S. juvenile court system. A 1914 poll ranked Lindsey among the ten greatest living Americans, along with by Thomas Edison and Theodore Roosevelt, but by 1929 he was ousted from his judgeship, was disbarred in the State of Colorado, and is now almost forgotten. He authored many other books during his lifetime, including The Revolt of Modern Youth (with Wainwright Evans, 1925), The Companionate Marriage (with Wainwright Evans, 1927), and his autobiography The Dangerous Life (with Rube Burrough,1931). THE BEAST By BEN B. LINDSEY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY Copyright © 1910 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87081-953-7 Contents Introduction........................................................xiThe Beast...........................................................3I. Finding the Cat.................................................7II. The Cat Purrs..................................................26III. The Cat Keeps on Purring......................................44IV. The Beast in the Democracy.....................................55V. The Beast in the County Court...................................74VI. The Beast and the Children.....................................95VII. The Beast, Graft and Business.................................113VIII. At Work with the Children....................................133IX. The Beast and the Ballot.......................................153X. The Beast and the Ballot (Continued)............................170XI. The Beast at Bay...............................................185XII. The Beast and the Supreme Court...............................203XII. The Beast and Reform..........................................220XIV. A City Pillaged...............................................237XV. The Beast, the Church and the Governorship.....................257XVI. Hunting the Beast.............................................281XVII. A Victory at Last............................................299XVIII. Conclusion..................................................323 Chapter One FINDING THE CAT I CAME to Denver in the spring of 1 1880, at the age of eleven, as mildly inoffensive a small boy as ever left a farm - undersized and weakly, so that at the age of seventeen I commonly passed as twelve, and so unaccustomed to the sight of buildings that I thought the five-story Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and magnificence. I had been living with my maternal grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Tennessee, where I had been born; and I had come with my younger brother to join my parents, who had finally decided that Denver was to be their permanent home. The conductors on the trains had taken care of us, because my father was a railroad man, at the head of the telegraph system; and we had been entertained on the way by the stories of an old forty-niner, with a gray moustache, who told us how he had shot buffalo on those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I was not precocious; his stories interested me more than anything else on the journey; and I stared so hard at the old pioneer that I should recognize him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street. My schooling was not peculiar; there was nothing "holier than thou" in my bringing up. My father, being a Roman Catholic convert from the Episcopalian Church, sent me to Notre Dame, Indiana, to be educated; and there, to be sure, I read the "Lives of the Saints," aspired to be a saint, and put pebbles in my small shoes to "mortify the flesh," because I was told that a good priest, Father Hudson - whom I all but worshipped - used to do so. But even at Notre Dame, and much more in Denver, I was homesick for the farm; and at last I was allowed to return to Jackson to be cared for by my Protestant relatives. They sent me to a Baptist school till I was seventeen. And when I was recalled to Denver, because of the failure of my father's health, I