Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/13

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
viii
UPBUILDERS

as he is in my book—Mark is an Irish Catholic Republican undertaker, but he carried Democratic Jersey City three times running. Everett Colby who turned upside down Essex, the county next to Mayor Fagan's—Senator Colby was a Wall Street broker; the heir of a rich railroad builder; a college graduate; and he looks his part. But to the voters of Essex the boy looked sincere, and they helped him to beat his boss, and theirs. Ben Lindsey was a Democratic politician and a County Judge, when he began to do justice to children, and when, at the last Denver election (1908), both the old parties and the "best" people, both men and women (who vote in Colorado), and some of the largest churches, all “went back" on the "kids' judge." —

"I went to the people," he wrote me. “I went into the shops and the workers received me with open arms . . . a glorious victory! . . . The Mary Murphys in the mills, the men there, and the kids in the street— the people won it."

W. S. U'Ren was a blacksmith in Colorado, before he became, while a visitor in Oregon, a lobbyist there, the people's lobbyist; and, as such, began to hammer out legislative tools for the use of democracy everywhere. This strange, It was