Lost Books: “The Beast” by Ben B. Lindsey
Portion of the cover for Ben B. Lindsey’s “The Beast” (1909).
This column is dedicated to the books in Swarthmore’s libraries that haven’t been checked out in at least 30 years. Every three weeks, I’ll read and review one, try to understand why it hasn’t been read, and then explain why I think it’s still important.
The Beast is a 1909 memoir by Coloradan judge and moral reformer Ben B. Lindsey. It covers roughly the first half of his career, when he opened a law practice, went into politics, and became an activist. He founded the first juvenile court in the country, organized a massive grassroots Progressive movement, and won re-election to the bench in 1908.
When The Beast came out, Lindsey was the most prominent Progressive in Colorado, but the movement was still small. The middle class, in Colorado and the rest of the country, was complacent– they didn’t understand the scale of the problem, and they thought Lindsey was too extreme. He wrote The Beast to change their minds.
Lindsey’s “Beast” comes from a children’s book illustration that he and his readers grew up with. A drawing of a jungle was captioned “Find the Cat.” They’d hunted through the picture for a house cat hiding behind a bush or perched in a tree, but all they found was fragments of a cat’s body– one ear, one paw—until it snapped into focus and they almost dropped the book. The “cat” was a tiger ready to pounce.
Lindsey started his career as naive as his readers. He became a Democratic party organizer because he’d heard the Republicans were corrupt, and he thought that if the Democrats could beat them, they’d clean up the state government. He turned down bribes, judged his cases to the letter of the law, and wrote common sense bills for the state legislature. Colorado required a unanimous jury to win a lawsuit, so when someone sued a corporation, the corporation paid one member of the jury to dissent. Lindsey wrote a jury law that would have changed the requirement for a verdict to a three-quarters majority.
The same people who paid the jurors paid the state legislators. Every one of Lindsey’s bills died, the Democrats turned out to be just as corrupt as the Republicans, and the law required him to send children to prison for playing pranks. Lindsey found the Beast. It was controlled by the most powerful corporations in the state, it protected petty criminals, and it owned Colorado’s party machines, legislature, courts, bureaucrats, lawyers, and churches. It was the reason all of the state’s worst problems flourished.
The Beast hasn’t been checked out since 1973. 1909 was already far in the past then, and it’s slid farther away in the years since. Lindsey’s hyperspecifics are less and less relevant, and the effort of parsing his style– uneven, repetitive, confusingly organized– is harder to justify. The Beast is a string of anecdotes about Denver politics surrounded by comprehensive histories of the national Progressive movement and carefully researched sociology studies. It fell out of circulation, and it took its ideas with it.
It’s worth rediscovering. The Beast was written before the Progressive movement was history. None of its characters are legends yet. In 1964, Lindsey starred in an episode of Profiles in Courage, but in The Beast, he rants for more than a page about a youth group’s doomed crusade to hang a photo of him in the Denver YMCA. He gives middle schoolers more focus than Teddy Roosevelt, who appears, makes a stump speech, and is never mentioned again. Lindsey wrote about him because he wanted to make a point about politicians. He dedicated the book “to those who have helped: the hundreds whose names I have not had room to mention; the thousands whose names I do not even know.” The Beast has as many players, with as many different stories, as the news does now.
I learned that systemic economic issues weakened the rule of law during the Gilded Age from an APUSH textbook. I didn’t understand what that meant until I read The Beast. When Lindsey writes about Denver, he’s describing his hometown, not summarizing historical context, and his stories make it feel real. The realities of Gilded Age life could be hilarious. Denver had a superintendent of Presbyterian Sunday schools who was also a lynchpin of governmental corruption. Lindsey once sentenced a tycoon to county jail, but he was freed by a member of the Supreme Court on grounds that the Court was on vacation. For most people, though, life was terrifying. One of Lindsey’s first-ever clients as a lawyer was a mother of a child who was killed in a preventable train accident. He lost the case. Because the child didn’t earn money, his mother wasn’t eligible for damages.
This week, a former Philadelphia labor leader and lobbyist is selling $25,000 tickets to his retirement party while he awaits two federal trials and a sentence for a bribery conviction. The Denver of 1909 is distant, but its problems aren’t. The same cycle of poverty and crime still pins down poor families, forces workers into dangerous, underpaid jobs, and locks children out of education. Interests buy out activists. Moderates stay home. It’s hard to imagine dealing with the Beast before workman’s comp or a minimum wage, but it’s harder to imagine life without it.
Lindsey exposed the links between the government, corporations, and crime, attacked the causes of crime instead of criminals, and designed his court to rehabilitate defendants. His reforms sound progressive. Lindsey himself doesn’t fit anywhere in the modern political spectrum. Modern progressives usually believe that people make good and bad choices, but they’re basically good or neutral. Modern conservatives tend to see people as basically bad, or some as good and others as bad. Lindsey believed that children had no morality at all – he calls them “savages” – and they became inherently, permanently good or bad depending on their environments. He was one of the first politicians to combine scientific sociology with traditional American Christianity. His goal was to “civilize” children before they could become criminals.
Lindsey’s ideas can be disturbing. He was a moral reformer: the movement’s enemies were vice and spiritual corruption, not material exploitation. When people campaign against sex work now, they claim that it leads to sex trafficking. Lindsey justifies a crackdown on sex trafficking because it could lead victims to sex work. Progressivism has evolved since then, but it’s impossible to understand how without understanding where it started, and The Beast is more than a list of the earliest Progressives’ accomplishments– it preserves the way they thought. Regardless of who’s reading it, it’s interesting. For progressives, it’s vital. Their ideas are directly descended from activists like Lindsey. To continue their work without their bigotry, they need to understand how the two were connected.
The Beast still went 49 years without being read. It’s deeply flawed, and the audience it was written for doesn’t exist anymore. It still matters because its flaws make it possible to reconstruct that audience. Lindsey skates over vital context because they already understood it, he states the obvious because it was new to them, and he makes every argument he thought could persuade them. The Beast is a painstaking record of how the Gilded Age battered Denver for the people who lived through it. It makes history sound like the present.