Fifty Years Ago This Week: At an informal talk in Denver, former U.S. District Attorney Charles Vigil, who served as Colorado’s U.S. attorney during the Truman administration (1949-1953), expatiated on the state of party politics in Colorado.

“You’d better not say ‘Democrat’ too loudly in Colorado,” Vigil said, “or ‘Republican’ either for all that.”

Vigil said that what had been a Republican state now appeared to be “touch-and-go” between the two major parties for control. Vigil, a lifelong Democrat who was Colorado’s first Hispanic U.S. attorney, said that there had been a time when his firmly Democratic home county of Las Animas had voted consistently Republican.

There was a time “when Colorado was essentially Republican,” Vigil said, arguing that the essential differences between the parties was a major factor in cementing Colorado’s status as a swing state.

“The Jeffersonian, or Democratic, viewpoint that all people should participate in decisions affecting their own welfare, and the Hamiltonian, Republican, view that the country could best be governed by a select few,” Vigil explained.

In a lighthearted moment, state Treasurer Tim Armstrong asked Vigil if he would submit to a draft as designee for state attorney general.

“Well, I couldn’t turn the Democratic Party down,” Vigil acquiesced.

In other news, the Colorado Republican Party had spent months making overtures to Labor groups, trying to convince the voting public that they were the party for laboring people. But at the Colorado Labor Council convention in Grand Junction hosted by the AFL-CIO, many delegates told repoters they were disappointed in what had resulted from that attempted courtship at their meeting.

Colorado Republican Party Chair Jean Tool had sent a two-page statement to be read to the AFL-CIO delegates. After hearing it, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Fred M. Betz, who was inattendqnce in person, responded in his address to the delegates that Tool’s statement contained mere generalities and only one specific piece of “labor-friendly” legislation: the 8-hour work day passed in 1866. Betz said that he, meanwhile, had prepared a comprehensive statement of “policies and past performances of interest to labor.”

“Despite individual differences of opinion here and there, it has been the Democratic Party,” Betz wrote in his statement, “in Colorado and in the nation, which has enacted the laws which labor believes in as beneficial to labor and to the nation as a whole.”

Betz also reminded the assembled labor delegates that in the previous legislative session, a measure to increase workmen’s compensation failed to pass because no Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for it — even those labor had endorsed.

Colorado AFL-CIO President Herrick Roth said that the delegates had expressed great appreciation for Betz’s statement.

“I don’t believe the Republicans are making any progress in their effort to woo labor votes,” Roth said, adding that labor members didn’t see any change of attitude or policy on the Republican Party’s part.

Fifteen Years Ago: In a column for The Colorado Statesman, former state legislator Jerry Kopel, D-Denver, outlined interesting historical trivia from Colorado’s statehood year.

Colorado was trilingual and its session laws had to be printed in English, Spanish and German for a number of years.

The legislature had the power to put a law on the ballot for women’s suffrage in 1876, but it did not pass until 1893. The legislation to accomplish the feat, House Bill 118, was sponsored by Rep. J.T. Heath who represented Montrose and Delta counties.

Legislators were paid $4 a day in a 40-day session.

And finally anyone participating in, or planning a duel – yes,  that kind of potentially mortal duel – would be barred from holding any elected office in the state.

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.