Biography of Alva Adams

By Jason Brockman

Alva Adams, three time democratic Governor of Colorado, was born in Dane County, Wisconsin on May 14, 1850. While Adams had little in the way of a formal education while he was growing up, he had a voracious appetite for literature which made up for his lack of schooling. By the time Adams died, he had acquired a collection of over six thousand books, which was one of the largest private libraries in the region.

Like many people who settled in Colorado, the Adams' moved west when a member of the family contracted tuberculosis. The arid climate was reputedly beneficial for sufferers of this debilitating disease. At twenty-one years of age, Alva Adams began his rags to riches story by hauling ties for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Like the railroads, themselves, Adams cleared his own path toward entrepreneurial fame. He first became part owner of a hardware and lumber firm in Colorado Springs which did business with the booming railroads. He soon sold this company in order to open another one in Pueblo. Adams opened a franchise to parallel almost every extension of the growing Denver & Rio Grande, and in a period of five years became independently wealthy due to his business acumen.

After living in Colorado for a mere five years, the wealthy Adams successfully entered the world of politics as a Representative in the Colorado General Assembly in 1876. After one term in office Adams made an unsuccessful gubernatorial bid. Two years later, however, he became the state's youngest governor in 1887. His first term was moderately uneventful except for the Ute Uprising in 1887. This revolt began with a small skirmish between a Ute hunting party and a band of settlers on the Western Slope. Due to a sensationalistic press and the building tension between the Utes and the settlers, this relatively isolated incident flared into an all out war. Under public pressure Adams sent in the Colorado National Guard to deal with the situation. Once he was able to accurately assess the reality of this relatively minor conflict, Adams pulled out the troops in order to avoid needless bloodshed, and eventually returned captured property to the Utes.

During his first administration Adams also took a controversial pro-labor stand. He was influential in passing bills establishing the Bureau of Labor Statistics and making it illegal to use children under the age of fourteen for labor. Another volatile subject was capitol punishment which Adams was opposed to, preferring reform to what he saw as revenge. Adams personally sponsored a bill ending public executions, and played an integral part in ending corporal punishment practices at State institutions.

After a ten-year hiatus from politics Adams ran for the governorship again in 1897, and won. Unlike his first term, Adams' second term was very contentious. The first problem that the Adams administration inherited was the Leadville strike of 1896. As a result of the 1893 depression and the abandonment of the silver standard, there was an agreement between the Western Federation of Miners and the mine managers that wages would be reduced in order to keep the mines open. This delicate labor pact began t o disintegrate in 1896 when a few mine owners began to raise wages while others continued to rely on the 1893 pact to increase their profit margin. The miners' union, fresh from a victory against Cripple Creek mine owners in Teller County, demanded that they be offered a uniform wage of three dollars. The owners chose not to honor this request which resulted in the workers going on strike, the mines closing, and a total of 2,300 men put out of work. The out-going Governor McIntire sent in the National Guard to stop the violence that had erupted and to set up non-union miners to open up the mines again. As soon as Adams took over his new gubernatorial post he met immediately with the union leaders, local residents, miners, and mine owners in an attempt to hammer out some type of compromise. While discussions, special commissions, investigations, and conferences were utilized, nobody seemed to be able to find anything the two sides wouldn't reject. Although Adams ordered the withdrawal of the troops, the miners lost their battle for increased wages. Adams continued to support the idea of arbitration which was, in his view, more effective than military intervention. He sponsored the creation of the State Board of Arbitration in 1897 which successfully ended numerous labor conflicts.

Adams' challenges did not end with the withdrawal of National Guard troops from Leadville. When President McKinley announced that America was at war with Spain on April 28, 1998, Governor Adams became the first Colorado Governor called upon to mobilize a nd lead the state during a national war. The President requested that Adams provide one regiment of infantry and two troops of cavalry. Housing for the troops became a problem, however, since the federal army would not provide barracks. As a result, the troops were stationed at Camp Adams in City Park; a site that worked well despite incredibly poor weather conditions and tensions created by the choosing of officers. Three weeks after the declaration of war, the mobilized, equipped, and trained Colorado troops went to the Philippines to defend the honor of the country. Since the federal government did not finance the troops, and the legislature was out of session, Adams raised $26,000 in private money to finance "the splendid little war." Governor Adams went so far as to personally purchase each soldier's identification tags.

After another hiatus from politics, Adams ran in what would become the most corrupt election to ever haunt the Colorado ballot box. During the election of 1904 the Democratic Party allegedly committed voting fraud in Denver and the surrounding urban areas . The Republican Party was said to have committed voting fraud in the populous mining and corporately dominated towns. In one Denver precinct 717 Democratic ballots were cast, while the district only had 100 legal voters. Likewise, many mine owners forced thousands of immigrant workers to vote for Governor James H. Peabody or lose their jobs. One Republican officer of the Denver Union Water Company publicly boasted, "We rule...the people have nothing to do with nominations and elections. We rule and we're going to continue to rule." Despite these presumptions, Democrat Adams was elected governor, while Republican Jesse McDonald became Lieutenant Governor. Once the Legislature came into session in 1905, however, party fighting became so blatant that it risked making the Colorado General Assembly a laughing stock. After much argument and accusations of election fraud, the predominately Republican legislature agreed that neither Adams or Peabody should be governor. Instead, Jesse McDonald took the oath, stepping up from his position as Lieutenant Governor. While Alva Adams ran again in 1906, he lost. After this fall from grace in 1904, Adams pursued his banking, mercantile, and Masonic interests. He died of diabetes on November 1, 1922 in Battle Cr eek, Michigan, and is buried at Roselawn Cemetery in Pueblo.

Source: http://www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/govs/adams.html