Background
Benjamin B. Lindsey was born in Jackson, Tennessee, United States on November 25, 1869; the son of a Confederate soldier.
Benjamin B. Lindsey was born in Jackson, Tennessee, United States on November 25, 1869; the son of a Confederate soldier.
He attended Southwest Baptist University.
At the age of 16, Lindsey began to work in Denver, Colorado, United States; he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1894.
Soon Lindsey began his long battle on the behalf of children, sponsoring laws that shielded them from criminal prosecution.
Lindsey engaged continually in propaganda and political action to advance his social causes. He traveled widely, urging the creation of humane laws and better family counseling services. In his work he was assisted by his wife, Henrietta.
He recognized that crime was a product not only of poverty and ignorance but of corporate determination to resist child-labor and child-care laws.
He also understood the need for measures to assist wayward children and to aid needy or deserted mothers.
Lindsey's increasing radicalism led him to denounce the negative influence of big business in The Beast and the Jungle (1910), written with a collaborator.
He was soon involved with cases for the poor and young.
His fame was spread by such articles as Lincoln Steffens's "Ben Lindsey, the Just Judge. "
Lindsey also contributed to Edwin Markham's Children in Bondage (1914).
Although Lindsey supported America's entry into World War I, he continued to seem radical to Denver conservatives.
His notoriety increased when he advocated "companionate marriage, " which was carelessly identified as "free love. "
In fact, Lindsey, in The Companionate Marriage (1927), written with Wainwright Evans, had urged legal marriage, birth control, counselling, and divorce if all else failed.
Nevertheless, his court was taken from him, and in 1929 he was debarred from practice in Colorado.
The next year, in New York, Lindsey was publicly denounced by a Catholic bishop and arrested for protesting the false statements that had been made respecting his beliefs.
Finally, Lindsey became a lawyer in Los Angeles, California, where he was elected judge of the supreme court.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(Book, Companionate Marriage, 1929)
