Benjamin Barr Lindsey

(b. Jackson, Tenn. 1869-d. Los Angeles 1943).

As the founding judge of Denver’s Juvenile Court from 1900 to 1927, Lindsey made his rehabilitation-centered, humane treatment of youth a widely copied national model. Imprisoning youngsters with adults, Lindsey claimed, was like sending them to a school for criminals. Although Lindsey stood barely five feet tall and weighed barely 100 pounds, he is the giant among Colorado reformers. Growing up in poverty in West Denver, he came close to suicide before deciding to devote his life to reform. Lindsey attacked political corruption in Colorado in his book, The Beast (with Harvey J. O’Higgins, 1910). Lindsey supported coal miners and their union after the 1914 labor strike in the Ludlow coal fields near Walsenburg, where the National Guard killed striking miners and their wives and children. He stirred even greater controversy with Companionate Marriage (with Wainright Evans, 1927), advocating cohabitation before marriage, birth control and no-fault divorce. Lindsey added the politically potent Ku Klux Klan to his enemy list, as well as conservative church groups.

Ousted from his judgeship and disbarred from practicing in Colorado, he moved to California where he was elected to the Los Angeles Superior Court. Lindsey championed more indulgent treatment of children and youth, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, birth control and trial marriage. A 1914 poll ranked Lindsey among the 10 greatest living Americans, but he is now mostly forgotten in Denver, where he criticized the power elite as greedy and corrupt.

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