As a political movement, socialism was familiar to residents of Grand Junction before Socialist Thomas W. Todd was elected as mayor of the city in November, 1909.
In 1908, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party of America nominee for president, had stopped in Grand Junction.
According to The Daily Sentinel, more than 1,000 people gathered at the Park Opera House to hear Debs speak, “one of the greatest audiences that ever turned out to hear a political speaker in Grand Junction.”
Additionally, Debs was met at the railroad depot prior to his speech by “a large reception committee of local socialists,” the Sentinel said. Apparently, the movement had many followers here.
Even so, when Grand Junction elected Todd as mayor in 1909, it was big news, here and around the country.
In January of 1910, a national magazine called Human Life published a lengthy article about Todd. The Sentinel reprinted the article the same month.
The article called Todd “a mayor without a party,” because the city charter adopted by Grand Junction in September of 1909 didn’t allow party affiliation for municipal elections.
That article didn’t say Todd was a Socialist, only that he was known for “entertaining socialist views.”
Referring to the city’s preferential voting system, which allowed voters to mark their first, second and third choices for each municipal office, the Human Life article described Todd as “a third choice mayor elected to office not because he was the people’s choice, but because he was third choice.”
Although no party affiliation was allowed on the ballot or in campaign advertising, people clearly knew that Todd was affiliated with the Socialists.
But Todd was careful about that affiliation initially. A few weeks after the 1909 election, the Sentinel wrote, “There is sore disappointment among the socialists of this city,” because “Mayor Todd will not tolerate any capital being made for the socialist party out of his election.”
Although opposed to Socialism, the Sentinel didn’t object to Mayor Todd’s tenure at first. In fact, it supported some of his early actions.
By the end of Todd’s second year in office, however, Sentinel editor Walter Walker had a different view.
When Todd and the other city commissioners appointed Socialist Sheppard B. Hutchinson as police chief in late November, 1911, the Sentinel was not pleased.
“Police Chief is now a Socialist,” a headline proclaimed on Dec. 1, 1911. The accompanying news article said Grand Junction had “the first and only socialist chief of police in the United States.”
The newspaper objected strongly to a plan developed by Todd and Chief Hutchinson to create a municipal woodpile, where unemployed men could chop wood and earn food.
“Already the word has gone down the line that a man with a red card (a Socialist) can get a meal in the Junction for chopping a little wood,” the paper reported on Dec. 18, 1911. “The woodyard is also to be used for unemployed men who are not socialists or hoboes.”
When Todd and Hutchinson also sought to create a municipal icehouse that would offer free ice to anyone who needed it, the Sentinel opposed the plan.
When the city under Todd’s mayorship then tried to gain control of the local electric company to make it a municipal utility and establish a city-owned coal mine for the benefit of workers, the Sentinel’s opposition to Todd’s tenure only grew.
Thomas Matthew Todd was born in Illinois in 1858. He married Alice Selfridge in 1879 in Weld County, Colorado. By 1896, the Todds were living in Payson, Utah, south of Spanish Fork, and Thomas was secretary of the local Populist Party.
The couple and their two sons had moved to Grand Junction by the spring of 1898, when the Sentinel listed Thomas Todd’s occupation as beekeeper.
Sometime during the first years of the 20th century, Thomas Todd became owner or part owner of a lumber company that eventually became Mesa Lumber. He and his family were seen as well-to-do and lived in a large house on Main Street.
It’s not clear when he shifted his alliance to the Socialist Party of America. But after his 1909 election, he began to gain national recognition.
By 1912, he was even considered as a running mate for Eugene Debs.
As he prepared to leave for the Socialists’ national convention in Indianapolis in May of 1912, Todd told the Sentinel that he didn’t expect to be nominated. But if he were, he said he would accept the post “more as a move to get publicity for this city than from any honor I will personally receive.”
After the convention, the Sentinel reported that delegates from Colorado and Illinois had pushed Todd’s candidacy for vice president.
However, the former Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Emil Seidel, won the nomination instead.
The relationship between Todd and the Sentinel reached its low point in April of 1913. That month, 140 representatives of the International Workers of the World, the radical labor union known as the Wobblies, arrived in town.
At the suggestion of Police Chief Hutchinson, Mayor Todd and the other city commissioners approved city funds to feed the Wobblies.
Walker was outraged and the Sentinel demanded the recall of both Todd and Hutchinson. Todd refused to budge, but Hutchinson opted to resign, and the recall effort stalled.
Todd decided not to seek re-election in November of 1913. The Sentinel lamented Todd’s tenure as being detrimental to the city, but it refrained from attacking Todd personally.
“When we say this we are speaking of Thomas M. Todd as an official and as a Socialist, not as Thomas M. Todd personally,” Walker wrote, “for we have nothing whatever against him other than a dislike for his pronounced Socialist policies.”
By May of 1915, the feud had dissipated enough that the Sentinel cheered when Todd was elected president of the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce.
The Todds later moved back to Utah, and Alice Todd died in Salt Lake City in September, 1925.
Thomas eventually moved to California, where one of his two sons lived. He died in San Bernadino in 1946 at the age of 88.
Todd’s political career reached its zenith in 1912, which proved to be one of the best years the Socialist Party of America had in electoral success. Eugene Debs won 6% of the popular vote that year, double what he won in any of his other four campaigns for president.
After 1912, Socialism’s popularity in the United States began to decline. It made a brief comeback and peaked in 1924, with the presidential candidacy of Robert LaFollette. After that, Socialism was never the powerful political force that it had been at the beginning of the 20th century.
Still, for four years, it played a key role in Grand Junction’s politics, led by a wealthy businessman turned Socialist who had been the third choice of the city’s voters.
Sources: Historic copies of The Daily Sentinel at www.newspapers.com; “Walter Walker and His Fight Against Socialism,” by Jeannette Smith, Journal of the Western Slope, Fall, 1997; “When Grand Junction Had a Socialist Mayor,” by Noel Kalenian, www.mesacountylibraries.org; research conducted by the Museums of Western Colorado.
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Bob Silbernagel’s email is bobsilbernagel.com.
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