EDITORIAL
Moffatt’s directions, by exposing and condemning (with the highest order of self-righteousness and a heavy dose of Western pride) their exploitation of child labor: “Little girls, poorly dressed and with pale faces are employed in these sweat shops. … This method of employing child labor at starvation wages … may be fashionable in Baxter Street, New York, but we desire to serve notice on these establishments that it will not go in the great West.”
On plenty of other occasions, high-mindedness fled the premises. During World War II, when the War Relocation Authority created an internment camp at Amache for persons of Japanese descent, The Post didn’t bother with virtuous posturing. As Mort Stern recounts in his dissertation on Hoyt and The Post, an unbroken stream of hostility against Japanese Americans seemed to grow “wilder and wilder each passing day.” Post articles repeated variations on a grim theme: “The Japs are a naturally treacherous race.” Recognizing the paper’s influence and reach, one concerned eyewitness “feared that some of the citizenry might be incited to attack the Nisei and blood might be shed,” as a direct response to such incendiary screeds.
On May 19, 1946, The Post began the regular publication of a separate editorial page, transforming its operating system for serving as “the voice of the people.” Hoyt launched the page with a grand vision that came near matching the self-confidence and bravado off his predecessors: “In this, the editorial column, The Post will speak for and to Denver, Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Empire. … The Rocky Mountain region is an economic empire of untold wealth and of vast importance to the United States and to the world. To help Denver and the Rocky Mountain Empire keep their appointment with destiny is the prime responsibility of The Post, a responsibility which it accepts.”
For the next several decades, writers would use the editorial page to make the case for the necessity of featuring the Rocky Mountain West in reckonings with issues of national and international importance. Geographically, The Post occupied a focal point in conversations about natural resource development, entrepreneurial innovation, immigration, growth and changing social values. Abandoning the gladiatorial spectacles that held the attention — and sometimes raised the alarm — of The Post’s readers in its first half-century, the post-1946 editorial page attempted with varying degrees of success to serve as then-editorial Page Editor Dan Haley re-affirmed on March 1, 2009, “a strong, centrist voice” of the region. An endless run of contentious issues — Mccarthyism, civil rights, Watergate, immigration, oil and gas development, war, and more recently, marijuana legalization and marriage equality — did not make the center a place of repose and tranquility. The Post regularly invited readers to respond to its positions, with results that rarely (but sometimes!) qualified for the adjectives of “tolerant” or “harmonic.”
In spite of the revolution in practice that Hoyt brought to the paper, defining the border between the domain of news and the domain of opinion is a matter of unending dispute.
As a habitat where the endangered practice of civil debate has found a rare refuge, the importance of The Post’s editorial page only expands, and never contracts. As its own measure of civic health, The Post has reconfigured its long-running mission to serve as “the voice of the people.” The editorial page now brings together the voices of the people — not as separate monologues, but as conversation.
Hoyt left quite a legacy.
The story goes that in the 1920s, The Denver Post ran a picture of this statue being removed from the courthouse during renovation, with the “O Justice” headline above. Justice found a new home, atop The Post building at 15th and Champa streets. Legend has it that that “Justice” sign outlived the building, which was torn down to make way for a parking lot in the late 1990s. (With parking at a premium in downtown Denver, Justice needs a place for that, too.)
Denver Post file