Benjamin Barr Lindsey

• Benjamin B. Lindsey
• Born: November 25, 1869
• Died: March 26, 1943

Judge and architect of the juvenile court system, was the eldest of the four children of Landy Tunstall Lindsey and Letitia (Barr) Lindsey. Letitia’s father, Benjamin Barr, a southern plantation owner who managed to hold on to his property through the Civil War, provided a home for his extended family; Benjamin Barr Lindsey was born on his rambling old farm in Jackson, Tennessee. His father, who had been a captain in the Confederate army, became a telegraph operator after the war; an intellectual, he was drawn to the Oxford Movement and converted to Catholicism, driving a wedge between himself and his wife’s Southern Baptist family. When Ben was ten years old, Landy Lindsey moved his family to Denver, Colorado, where he became head of telegraph operations for the new Denver & South Park Railroad. As his father had a high regard for the importance of education, Ben Lindsey and his brother Chal were quickly sent East to attend the elementary department at Notre Dame University. Two years later Lindsey lost his job, and the boys returned to Jackson, Tennessee, where their grandfather enrolled them in Southwestern Baptist University, a prep school. Returning to Denver after three years in Jackson, Ben Lindsey found his father in poor health and realized that he would have to support the family. Just after Ben’s eighteenth birthday, his father committed suicide, leaving his son with both an overwhelming sense of responsibility and a morbidity that was expiated only with his own failed suicide attempt a year later.

Lindsey worked in a real estate office, sold newspapers, and did janitorial work at night before securing a post as an office boy and fledgling law clerk. He served an informal apprenticeship and was admitted to the Colorado bar in 1894. Assigned by a local judge to defend two young boys accused of robbery, he developed a passionate interest in juvenile justice. At the turn of the century Colorado statutes recognized ten as the “age of reason,” that is, the age at which a child could be held responsible for its own actions. Children were presumed not to understand the nature of crime—unless proven otherwise by the state—until the age of fourteen; adolescents were tried in adult courts and treated the same as adult criminals. Appointed public guardian and administrator in Denver in 1899, Lindsey heard a case in which a boy had been caught stealing coal. He remanded him to a reform school, but on discovering that the child’s father was dying and his family destitute, bent the prevailing judicial rules and put him on probation. Lindsey then drafted legislation creating a juvenile court and successfully lobbied for its passage through the state legislature. Becoming a justice of the juvenile court in December 1900, Lindsey was successively reelected to that post until July 1927.

He developed a unique style of juvenile justice that attracted widespread publicity. An environmentalist, Lindsey believed that most juvenile delinquents were decent people; many committed petty crimes because they were influenced by the actions of adults. Forming a rapport with his “boys,” the judge spoke to them in their own vernacular, giving informal talks at his Saturday meetings of probationers on such topics as “snitching” and “ditching” (throwing something away—in this case, one’s bad habits). After one particularly sensitive child wrote Lindsey a letter saying that little girls were too delicate to tell their misdeeds to a man, a female assistant judge heard their cases. Most controversial was Lindsey’s habit of releasing boys sentenced to the State Industrial School at Golden on their own recognizance to report there carrying their own commitment papers. In over twenty-five years he tried his honor system on hundreds of boys; he lost only five. Juveniles responded to Lindsey’s openness and trust. He became a secular father confessor.

The judge also bent his efforts to reforming the society that produced errant children. He fought Denver’s saloon-keepers when he discovered that they sold liquor to underage boys; he lobbied an Adult Delinquency Bill through the legislature, making it a criminal act to contribute to the delinquency of a minor. When he discovered petty graft in the county government, he forced indictments of members of his own party despite threats of personal and political ostracism. His knowledge of the informal arrangements between Colorado businessmen and public officials informed his opinion that American politics were corrupt and placed him squarely in the center of the developing progressive movement. By 1904 he had made so many enemies that the Democratic party tried to drop him, but it reversed itself after liberal elements of the Republican party secured his nomination on their ticket, and he won bipartisan endorsement. In 1906 he waged an unsuccessful independent campaign for the governorship; in 1908 neither party would touch him, but he easily retained his seat on the juvenile court by running as an independent.

As part of his 1908 campaign Lindsey had printed at his own expense a sixty-eight-page booklet called The Rule of the Plutocracy in Colorado: A Retrospect and a Warning. He gave a copy to Upton Sinclair, who referred it to Everybody’s Magazine. Its editor sent Harvey O’-Higgins, a young ghostwriter, to Colorado to work with the judge. They produced a series of articles published in 1909 as The Beast and the Jungle, and a year later in book form as The Beast. The beast was American capitalism as Lindsey had seen it functioning in Colorado; it was, he argued, the root cause of juvenile delinquency. It produced poverty and disabled workers who could not support their families, and it drove decent people to despair. His book made the judge a national figure. He joined the lecture circuit, and began to associate with prominent national progressives. He was an occasional guest at Theodore Roosevelt’s home—nicknamed Colorado’s “Bull Mouse” by his critics, he seconded Roosevelt’s nomination at the 1912 Progressive Convention, served for a brief period on the National Committee of the Progressive party, and became close friends with Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens.

Continuing his battle with the beast in Colorado, Lindsey sponsored and passed the Mothers’ Compensation Act of 1912, one of the earliest pieces of aid-to-dependent children legislation; he obtained a child labor act only to have it struck down by the courts; and he campaigned for a maternity law to provide prenatal and postnatal care that finally passed in 1923. Following the Ludlow Massacre of 1914, in which state militiamen killed several men, women, and children in a surprise attack against striking coal miners, the judge visited Washington in an appeal to President Wilson to take over the mines and settle the dispute; one Colorado plutocrat suggested that a committee be appointed to meet Lindsey at the station on his return to spit at him. The judge also supported national woman suffrage (women had been able to vote in Colorado since 1893); had good relations with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; and served on executive or advisory boards of the Boy Scouts, the American Anti-Cigarette League, and the Anti-Capital Punishment Society. In December 1915 he joined the Ford Peace Mission to Europe, but quickly reversed himself after United States entry into the war and toured Europe lecturing to soldiers and civilian audiences in the allied countries. The trip produced The Doughboys Religion and Other Aspects of Our Day (1919), again ghosted by O’Higgins.

What ensured Lindsey’s notoriety were two books published in the 1920s that bore his name but were actually written by Wainwright Evans in collaboration with the judge: The Revolt of Modern Youth (1925) and The Companionate Marriage (1927). The two volumes made him a leading spokesman for the sexual revolution. Using a framework of case histories that had come before the judge, The Revolt was a pragmatic attack on the reactions of parents and other authority figures to sexual activity among the young; it advocated sex education, including the free availability of birth control information, and instruction on venereal disease. Lindsey’s notions had been deeply influenced by Havelock Ellis and Walter Lippman, but the concept of “a companionate marriage” originated with a Barnard College social scientist, Melvin M. Knight, who had published an article on the subject in 1924. The ghostwriter Evans picked the term up from Knight as closely descriptive of Lindsey’s ideas. Companionate marriage was described as a legally binding union entered into for the purpose of companionship, with no intention of producing children. It would be more easily dissolved than a marriage which had produced a family, and except in unusual cases no alimony would be granted. It could be converted into a traditional union after a period of time. The judge tried to distinguish between companionate marriage and trial marriage—that is, living together out of wedlock—but few critics appreciated the distinction. The Companionate Marriage was made into a movie in 1928, and Lindsey further compromised his reputation by occasionally appearing at local openings. In December 1930 Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning preached a sermon condemning the judge and his ideas at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Lindsey interrupted the doxology that followed when he leaped on a table and demanded to be heard; dragged away by ushers and the police, he received only a reprimand from a city judge.

The publicity that attended the national success of his latest efforts left Lindsey vulnerable to the attacks of a new species of the beast. The xenophobia of the 1920s had brought the Ku Klux Klan to Denver. It had managed to capture control of the local Republican organization and in 1924 had targeted the judge, who had fought its hold on the national Democratic party, for defeat. More anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic than antiblack because of the availability of victims, the Klan challenged the ballot count in Lindsey’s home district—which was ninety percent Jewish. The case made its way slowly through the state court system until the supreme court finally invalidated the ballots from his home precinct and threw the judge off the bench in 1927, just when the ballyhoo about The Companionate Marriage was peaking. Not content with removing him from the juvenile court, the supreme court disbarred him in 1929, supposedly for accepting a legal fee for his services in contesting a will that disinherited two minor children, but actually for embarrassing the judicial system by encouraging his staff to walk out en masse with him, and for removing court records that he claimed to be personal documents to keep them out of the hands of the new probation officer, a Klansman. The Colorado supreme court offered to reinstate Lindsey in 1933 if he would apologize for criticisms he had made of the court in one of his books; he refused. In 1935 it voted to reinstate him unconditionally.

His career in Colorado at an end, Lindsey moved to Los Angeles, where he tried unsuccessfully to establish a law practice. He had already moved in the fringes of the movie industry (playing the bit part of a juvenile judge in one film and acting as a consultant on others). Neither this effort nor an attempt to obtain patronage from the Democratic party after Franklin Roosevelt’s election really worked, although he was finally appointed Labor Compliance Officer for the National Recovery Administration in Southern California, a post he held for less than four months. With the backing of influential friends he won election to the Superior Court System in 1934, but was deeply disappointed when his colleagues refused to assign him to the juvenile court. Resuming his aggressive reformism, the judge lobbied a bill through the Sacramento legislature creating a Children’s Court of Conciliation. Actually a divorce court that treated minor children as interested parties in the divorce of their parents, this “Court of Mended Hearts,” as the press christened it, attempted to save failed marriages and keep the family intact. Lindsey was appointed to its bench, and served there for the remainder of his life.

Lindsey married Henrietta Brevoort in Chicago on December 20, 1913. Their only child, a daughter, Benetta, was adopted. Lindsey died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1943. His body was cremated, and the ashes scattered by his friends over the family’s garden in Bel Air, California. Henrietta Lindsey took a small portion of the ashes to Denver and sprinkled them in a park on the site of the old courthouse where the judge had presided for twenty-five years.

Although Lindsey did not create the first juvenile court in the United States, he popularized the concept and pioneered in devising effective ways of dealing with children and their problems. His Saturday morning probationers’ meetings were actually group therapy sessions, with the judge reinforcing positive conduct and giving his boys a sense of pride in themselves. He contributed to the fight against archaic laws, particularly those relating to sexual conduct and in the fields of female and child welfare. Much of his contemporary fame rested on The Companionate Marriage, which in the late twentieth century seems an almost conservative proposition. To the extent that he urged Americans to be more pragmatic and less dogmatic in their attitudes toward human behavior, he helped to create that modern mindset that believes that the state should not interfere in the most private relations between persons.

Benjamin Lindsey’s papers are in the manuscript collection of the Library of Congress. Duplications of some can be found in the Department of Special Collections of the Library of the University of California at Los Angeles. Lindsey’s books The Beast (1910) and The Dangerous Life (1931) are semi-autobiographical. C. Larsen, The Good Fight (1972) is a thorough, well-written, modern biography. Other sources include: P. G. Slater, “Ben Lindsey and the Juvenile Court of Denver: A Progressive Looks at Human Nature,” American Quarterly, Summer 1968; M. Levine and A. Levine, A Social History of Helping Services (1970); L. Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939); and E. Goldman, Rendezvous With Destiny (1953). See also The National Cyclopeadia of American Biography (1945) and the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3 (1973). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, March 27, 1943.