The governor was foul-mouthed, so profane he’d apologize later to his mother, who didn’t know he “used that kind of language.”
The expletives were recorded by bugs placed in his state Capitol office, placed by men looking to “detect any wrongdoing that might be planned by high state officials,” The Washington Post reported.
Two microphones hidden in ventilator shafts designed to capture every bit of political patronage during one of the nation’s most difficult economic times were analyzed by men whose actions had already quashed careers and engendered headlines with their pursuits.
But this is not modern-day Chicago and the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, D-Ill. The situation above describes 1937 and the infamous “microphone scandal” surrounding Colorado Gov. Teller Ammons.
Ammons, a Democrat, had been elected governor in 1936. A former state legislator and Denver city attorney, he had become a major power in the city’s Democratic Party.
With the blessing of Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton, he sought to govern as one who “would not be dominated by any man or any faction or any newspaper,” he told the city’s newspapers.
It was during the Great Depression. Instead of cutting government spending, Ammons tried to mimic the New Deal, creating 16 new state boards, bureaus and commissions without the benefit of new jobs. He raised taxes to pay their bills.
Longtime Republican attorney Erl Ellis believed chicanery must have been underway. He hired a private investigator, Jack Gilmore, who enlisted Denver Post reporter Walden E. Sweet in the plan. The latter two planted the crystal microphones, then hooked them up to a phone line that led to Gilmore’s apartment some five blocks away from the state Capitol.
Newspaper reports of the day said their vigilante efforts had already helped clean up Colorado’s slot-machine racket in 1934 and put a former secretary of state in jail for liquor grafting.
For weeks, Ammons couldn’t figure out which of his staff was the snitch. Political appointees, his good friends and patrons, were being unveiled on the front page of The Post before the individuals themselves had even been notified. Strategies were being vilified by the state’s leading newspaper before they had been shared publicly.
It wasn’t until an unnamed man entered Ammons’ office one morning and solved the mystery. The man motioned the governor to the window and whispered in his ear about the bugs before a loud cuss word came out of Ammons’ mouth.
It should be noted that Ammons was never charged with any criminal wrongdoing. He told reporters, according to Time magazine, “It was a cowardly trick and a plot designed to injure me.”
Gilmore, Sweet and Ellis were convicted of eavesdropping. They were sentenced to probation and Ellis was disbarred.
In an effort to regain public confidence, Ammons would trumpet his support for the University of Colorado football team that year. However, that too would lead to many other curse words, as he lost Pikes Peak in a bet to the Texas governor when Rice beat CU 28-14 in the January 1938 Cotton Bowl. It led to an embarrassing photo of the governors and the Texas flag on the summit later that year.
From the back-room deals of Teller Ammons came Ralph Carr, who won the governorship by promising a return of politics to the people. He would later sacrifice a chance to run for president to stand up for the constitutional rights of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.
If Ammons could be followed by a politician like Carr, who so clearly set aside his own interests for the public’s interests, maybe my home state of Illinois has a chance to recover from this latest scandal.
Adam Schrager is the political reporter for 9News in Denver and the author of “The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story” (Fulcrum, 2008).
