Record high unemployment rates, government bailouts, politicians who don't seem to identify with the average citizen. Coloradans faced these hard facts every day during the Great Depression. Unemployment rates reached all-time highs during the 1930s, reaching over 24 percent nationwide in 1933 (today it's at nearly 10 percent). In Colorado, the unemployment rate jumped from 7.5 percent in 1930 to 13.63 percent in 1932.
Many people today are familiar with the terms "stimulus package" or "stimulus money." The 1930s equivalent was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The New Deal was set up as a way to pump money back into the economy and provide programs to help people find work and get back on their feet. The so-called "Alphabet Army" of New Deal Programs spent hundreds of millions of dollars and provided employment for tens of thousands of needy Coloradans.
But the New Deal was not universally loved, especially among Western governors who prided themselves on their stand against Big Government. Colorado's Democratic governors, William H. "Billy" Adams, elected in 1926, and Edwin C. Johnson, elected in 1933, fought hard against Roosevelt's federal works projects. Adams, an Alamosa businessman, was a self professed "do-nothing" governor who believed in balanced budgets and small government. Edwin Johnson's motto, too, was "we need less government, not more." The self-proclaimed simple farmer valued self-help, individualism and "horse sense," over big federal programs, thundering that, "The New Deal has been the worst fraud ever perpetrated on the American people."
Both weathered protests at the state capitol, but both also reflected the attitudes of many Coloradans – and Westerners in general. By the end of the decade, many Coloradans had turned their backs on the New Deal.
Sources:
From Soup Lines to the Front Lines: Denver during the Depression and World War II 1927-1947, Phil Goodstein
Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, Thomas J. Noel
