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As you've noticed by now, 1992 is The Denver Post's centennial year. This year is also the 100th anniversary of another singular event -- the only time a third party gained a significant election victory in Colorado.
The two centennials are related (the Post was founded by conservative gold Democrats who felt abandoned when the free-silver crowd captured the Democratic party and diverted party support to the radical Populists), but further details on that should be left a certified historian like Tom Noel.
Consider instead the political and economic climate of 1892. Millions of farmers faced foreclosure because crop prices had fallen -- Washington protected government bond-holders above all else. Miners worked dangerous 12-hour days and lived in shacks, while the silver barons luxuriated in their palaces on Capitol Hill.
The two established parties didn't care, so the farmers and miners organized the Populist Party, whose 1892 platform retains some interest today:
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge
of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption
dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress,
and touches even the ermine of the bench.
The people are demoralized . . . business prostrated,
homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the
land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. . .
.
The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen
to build up colossal fortunes for a few.
Colorado Populists nominated Davis H. Waite, an Aspen
newspaper editor, for governor. Waite didn't mince words.
The two old parties, he wrote, are kept alive only by
funds contributed by the money power.
Colorado's two
senators were corporation attorneys in the pay of Wall
Street.
Further, private ownership of land is
legalized robbery.
On a platform that would get him arrested today, Waite won with 44,292 votes to 8,944 for the Democrat and 38,806 for the Republican. His fellow Colorado Populists gained a majority in the state House of Representatives, and sent two Populist congressmen to Washington.
Once in office, Waite called out the militia to protect striking miners in Cripple Creek from the El Paso County sheriff's mercenary posse; always before and always since, the Colorado militia shot at strikers. Naturally, this threat to the establishment served only one two-year term.
Thwarted at the ballot box, Colorado workers fought a quarter-century of labor wars -- martial law in Cripple Creek, bombs at Independence and Telluride, the Ludlow Massacre.
So what does this mean a century later? Well, when our forebears got frustrated by the way America was run, they got serious about a third party that stood for something, and they risked their lives to fight for change.
Today, people appear frustrated by the rich white guys in suits who run things. But where do these would-be rebels turn? To H. Ross Perot, who's a richer white guy in a suit.
The Perot groundswell proves only one thing: TV can
cause terminal brain damage. Heaven knows we could use a
strong third-party movement in this country, just as in
1892, but Perot isn't a threat to the establishment -- he
is the establishment. If the Perot rebels
had been
around in 1776, we'd be singing God Save the Queen
at baseball games.
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