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LINDSEY, BEN 1869-1943

JUDGE

Early Life

In 1901 Ben Lindsey became judge of the Juvenile and Family Court of Denver, which in the 1920s was the best-known court of its kind in the world. Lindsey grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, until he was eleven, when his family moved to Denver. He returned to Tennessee and went to high school at Southwestern Baptist University. In these years he became close to his aunt's husband, who had unorthodox views about politics and economics and who influenced Lindsey's thinking.

Lawyer and Judge

Lindsey returned to Denver at the age of sixteen, and his father, plagued by debt, committed suicide. Ben and his younger brother became family breadwinners. He was unable to finish high school but worked in a law office and began to read law. When he was nineteen, he attempted suicide out of fatigue and despair. After this crisis, as Lindsey later described it, he resolved to continue in the law and was admitted to the bar in 1894 at the age of twenty-four. Lindsey entered Democratic politics and in 1901 was appointed to an unexpired term in a county judgeship, an office he held through many heated elections for the next twenty-six years. During his term and through his efforts, the court evolved into the Juvenile and Family Court of Denver, an innovative center of the new juvenile-court movement.

Compassionate Justice

Lindsey led in the practice of compassionate juvenile justice and progressive thinking about family life. One of his most original legislative achievements was the Colorado Adult Delinquency Act of 1903, establishing the principle that adults contributing to the delinquency of a minor were legally responsible. By 1920 forty states adopted laws based on the Colorado statute. As juvenile-court judge Lindsey emphasized probation and rehabilitation rather than punishment. He often became involved with offending youth and their families: when he sentenced one youth to reform school for stealing coal and his mother became hysterical in court, Lindsey visited the boys home that night. The judge discovered that the boy stole the coal to heat his parents' shanty, where his father was dying of lead poisoning contracted as a miner. Lindsey placed the youth on informal probation and used the case to fight for social legislation.

Companionate Marriage

In the 1920s Lindsey became interested in the so-called sexual revolution then underway. He coined the term companionate marriage in his 1927 book by that title. In it he advocated compulsory education in sex, including contraception, and liberalization of divorce laws to allow childless couples whose marriages did not work to divorce without fees and law-suits. Though not especially radical, Lindsey's proposals won him the media title of spokesman for flaming youth.

Final Years

Lindsey's liberal views made him the target of the Ku Klux Klan, which was active in Colorado in the 1920s. His narrow electoral victory in 1924 was reversed when the state supreme court invalidated his votes in a predominantly Jewish district. He was disbarred in 1929 for receiving money for legal services while he was a judge, a decision widely called excessive and personally motivated since the services were rendered in New York, outside his jurisdiction. Although the Colorado bar readmitted him in 1935, he spent the rest of his life in California where he was overwhelmingly elected county judge of Los Angeles in 1934. He remained judge and continued to work on behalf of children until his death in 1943.