address debs' continuing legacy of peace, equality, and social juice advertise and let people know how they might pursue their interest in debs if they want to know something more about him. >> certainly. well, you know, in this age of technology there's a website devoted to the debs foundation. so that's certainly an easy way to access more information about the debs foundation and what's here in the debs house and about debs' legacy. and you know, the social justice piece is what we call it today. but he -- as i said earlier, he certainly continues to provide inspiration to working people. here in terra haute and throughout the u.s. as they struggle against lowering wages, unemployment, all the things that are plaguing us today. >> this house is open for visitors. how many do you get every year and how do people visit? >> i don't know the numbers and how many people we have every year, but the museum is open

every afternoon of the week. and on saturdays. and you can go to the website and contact karen brown, who runs tours of the museum throughout the week. >> we have one minute left. i'm going to turn the floor over to you. >> another great resource of the indiana state university special collections has online, an amazing collection of images of debs, but also pamphlets and access to his letters and so forth. that's another great place to find more. >> your book here, earnest free berg's book, "democracy's prisoner," his final years. i want to say thanks to both of you as we close out here for being with us in terra haute, indiana, telling us more about this third party five-time purchase surf the white house and his effect on american history. as we close out, some thank yous to the eugene v. debs foundation itself.

debsfoundation.org is their website. charles king, indiana state university, the cunningham memorial library special collections here at the university and our affiliate time warner cable. thanks to all of you for helping us put this program together. from terra haute, indiana, the eugene v. debs museum. next sunday we continue our "contenders" series featuring charles hughes who ran for president in 1916 against woodrow wilson. watch "the contenders" on

american history tv each sunday at 8:30 a.m., 7:30 p.m., and 10:30 p.m. through labor day weekend. now former u.s. congresswoman pat schroeder on women in politics and the 1970s. she was a 32year-old mother of two children. in this speech at the history colorado center in denver, she talks about the obstacles that women and other mishts faced in the 1970s and her work as a representative at the heath of the women's movement. >> thank you, thank you, how wonderful. you're marvelous, thank you.

i'm so glad to be here. i'm just glad it's not the natural history museum. i'm feeling a little bit like an artifact because exactly three weeks ago i got a pacemaker put in so i'm feeling more like a historical artifact as it goes. i have actually retired from the book publishers, i should have yurp date the you on that. i'm going to take life a little easier.

when i think of history in colorado it has been fairly unique compared to a lot of other places. so often you always think that things happen where you move the spoon a little bit and then a little bit and then a little bit, and finally it falls off the table. but it takes a very long time to change things. but i've always noticed in colorado, in our history, sometimes these movements start somewhere else but we grab them by the histoorns and say, let's finish it, so we push the spoon off the table sometimes a little faster. so colorado always fascinated me that way. and i just wanted to talk a few things about even the women's movement. in 1840 in london there was the world anti-slavery meeting. and many quakers went from the united states.

now, the quakers th errs had ha fight in philadelphia. they were very much involved in textile-making and the fight among the quakers was some said, you can't use cotton because it is grown by slaves. the others said, we're in business, where are we going to get cotton if we don't get from it the south? the ones who said, you can't use cotton, got mad and moved north. they started making fine wool. i remember my grad mother had it. they made a fortune. because they created what they called finger shawls. they were so light, you could pull them your finger. your ring finger. they were very, very light. ring finger shawls were great, made them rich. a group of them from that northern new york area boarded sailing ships and went to

london. pretty amazing. for this event. and among that group happened to be lucretia mott and several other activists in the kraker movement and the anti-slavery movement. and they got there and the english told them they couldn't sit on the main floor, they were women for heaven's sakes, they could have to sit up in the gallery. well, after a little further along, they tried to push some movements to say, well, can't women vote, or can't we be participants? and they all got thrown out. so going home on the ship, you can imagine these women were kind of riled up and it tables a long time to sail back from london. so they decided, okay, enough already. so they put together in 1848 in seneca falls the very first meeting in the history of the world where a group of women got together, and men too, and came out with this declaration and women are citizens, amazing, and

all these other things. a declaration of sentiments. i'm sure many of you have seen it. well, you know how fast that moved. 1848. meanwhile, let's now flip to 1876. when colorado comes into the union. now, we didn't do what wyoming did. wyoming put it in when they came into the union. and they kind of cheated. the understanding was they put it in because every time a new school marm showed up there were huge fights among the cowboys because there weren't very many women and they thought this would attract more women to wyoming. in colorado what they did say when they came into the union was that women would be allowed to run and vote for school board. so that was kind unique. other states weren't doing that. but the women weren't really happy here. so a group of women went to chicago where they were getting ready to celebrate the big bicentennial celebration and as

you know, there was a whole separate women's area. that's a whole interesting story in and of itself. because they kind of got thrown out. they kept reminding the people that this was to celebrate christopher columbus coming over and they kept reminding queen isabella gave him the jurls. they said, never mind, we don't need women's stuff here. they said to the women, could you come help us? we want to vote for equal rights. to vote, be able to vote, suffrage in accompany colorado. they said, are you kidding? we're up to our ear in alligators here, we can't do it. nevertheless, the women got it on the ballot. in 1877, it was voted down. sadly. but that was only one year after they came into the statehood. well, women didn't stop. the unions here then allowed women to vote. and the union votes, which was very good, and didn't happen a lot of places. and in 1893, boom. colorado passed it.

marvelous. men voted. only men could vote. and thank you, men, they voted to give women the vote. and colorado and new zealand were the only two places then on the planet, because they both gave women the right to vote that year. which was really quite unheard of. in 1894, a few women got into the legislature, which was pretty amazing. in 1912, maybe some of you have seen former senator pat pascoe's book, she wrote a wonderful book about helen ring robinson, the first woman elected to the colorado senate. and she was the second woman elected in the united states to a state senate. a very distinguished woman. and part of a huge progressive movement that was sweeping colorado at that time.

unfortunately, there was a little backlash that happened that maybe some of you have heard about, ludlow and all the little labor violence up there and the governor would refuse to send out the national guard, tubally president wilson had to call out the troops of that. robinson was very involved with that. she was involved with children's rights, with equal pay, with minimum wage, with all these good progressive issues. and she even got molly brown to donate $1,000, which in those days was a whole lot of money, to help the ludlow families that had been affected by this terrible event that went on. and after her four years in the senate, she said enough, it's gotten too crazy up there. i said to people when i was reading senator pascoe's book that we ought to send that book around to a lot of people who are currently in office because

it was really pretty rugged back then too. and it gives you a little context. she did live through it. well, then in 1916, montana sent wonderful janette rankin. and she immediately went there and voted against the war. she got defeated and went back again, you know, right before world war ii, went back and voted against that war too. she was consistent. but there's a marvelous picture in the national archives of her being sworn in on the house floor. there is not another male other than the ones that had to perform the ceremony on the floor. but the entire gallery is ringed in women in white dresses, the suffra suffragettes. four years later finally the rest of america finally got the vote. it also kind of shows the colorado women have these massive progressive spurts and

then we would have a real swing back. there was awhile, as you know, even the klan was very strong in colorado and parts. but throughout all of this, we always had that western thing of people being able to do what they wanted to do. we weren't nearly as sexegrated, i should say, or there wasn't quite the class war. i was looking at a few things colorado had here for the women that were firsts. maria litch long was the first woman who ran an amusement park for ages. anna lee aldridge, the first woman professional jockey. dr. florence sabe bin was an amazing woman in public health and did a lot of research there. and actually, i was so proud when i got to congress because colorado had one of the few women statues in the hall.

dr. sabin was there. all the rest had sent guys, just about. so that was very nice that they recognized it. dr. justina ford. an african-american woman. got her medical degree in 1899. delivered 7,000 babies. and it wasn't until 1950 that the denver medical society allowed her to join. which wasn't too pretty. but nevertheless, she went on and did her job. virginia neil blue was the state treasurer. republican in 1966. ruth stockton was a republican and very strong in the house. penny chennery tweety. these were all women who did really incredible thing is. not to mention condoleezza rice,

madeline albright, golda meir. i think there was something in the water. when you start looking at the number of women who came through here that really went on, it's really quite wonderful. we also know about a third of our cowboys were african-americans, which is great. so we have had this in our history all along. and in the west, i think we've always been kind of proud of that, that it's been more frontier where you can come come and you were what you could do. we didn't really care about your pedigree. then of course we get to world war ii. and colorado until then had been kind of a nice, quiet little place and a whole lot of people discovered colorado. and post world war ii there was this huge influx of people coming in. and then the '60s hit, which we all remember is fairly turbulent.

we had the king, the king assassination, the kennedy assassinations, civil rights, the war on poverty, we had all sorts of incredible musical changes with the rolling stones and everybody else coming out. the beatles. in fact, people are still playing that music. so, you know, couldn't have been that bad, i guess. and jim and i moved here in the '60s. and i remember we were really quite offended because when we first moved here there was an awful article in "the new yorker." and that article said, the people in colorado really -- you know, they're very closed, they made their money out of the ground, they didn't make it with their brains, and they're not preserving their history. it was really -- i don't know if anyone remembers that article because everybody was passing it around. it was just like, oh! we thought we didn't like new york, and now we really don't

like new york. but new york -- washington -- or colorado looked very placid to the rest of the world. at that time. because it really was fairly settled. granted, there were people moving in but they hadn't made their real impact yet. we're waiting for that for the '70s, right? but jim and i, for example, met, and you all know her, dana crawford, that wonderful woman who is like a force of nature who decided by god, they were going to save lower downtown, or she was going to die trying. we became early investors in larimer square with her and many others. and many of us all started meeting and gathering about lots of other issues. so still when you entered 1970, things looked fairly calm on the surface, really. joe coors was probably the citizen most people knew from

colorado. he kind of identified the state. everybody wanted to come here and get his beer. he was one of the great minds of the 13th century. so everybody -- [ laughter ] everybody was like, well, that number what the state's about. and we had in congress -- or in the senate we had peter dominic and gordon allen and byron rogers and wayne aspen who was considered this mega powerhouse, he never met a water dam he didn't like, he was on every kind of project you could think of. the colorado river basin, the arkansas this, the colorado that, the arizona this. he was everywhere and he was considered one of the most powerful people there as the chairman of the interior committee. and we had don bronsman and we had frank evans. so that was 1970 and we were the

second-most conservative delegation voting in the house. but it fit with joe coors and so that's how the world kind of saw us. well. all these young hopeaholics that moved in, there were so many of them that the permanent settlers here didn't have time to encircle them and tell them to chill out. and they all came in and they all had selected colorado by choice. they thought it was the greatest place on the planet and they were going to make it. they were really going to follow all these things people had taught about in the '60s. the rumble started in 1970 when craig barnes decided to run against byron rogers who had been there 20 years. craig won by 30 votes out of 54,406.

you forgot that, didn't you? 30 votes. he defeated this old-time -- you know, who had been there and everybody assumed would be there forever. that was like putting your finger in a light socket. people were like, whoo! craig didn't go on to win the final, obviously. aspenall got challenged and nobody was everybody supposed to challenge the chairman of the interior committee when he had so much power and was doing so many wonderful things, damming up every stream in colorado, how could they do that? well, that person didn't win. but it was like, oh! like he'd worn a bathing suit to church. you just don't do that. who are these new people coming in here? then in 1971, a part of denver elected the first latina to the state house, betty benevites.

hispanics are feeling their oat. fair housing became a huge issue. people are saying, we can't have segregated housing, and park hill became kind of this wonderful example of how people could all live together and people were looking at it as a model. the anti-war things all started. and all of our delegation was voting for the war. so it was quite a shock to them to see all of this movement back and they tried to say it was just the colleges but they were suddenly finding even oilmen were all petitioning. so the war wasn't going too well. common cause really had its roots here. wonderful craig barnes took common cause and started the sunset and sunshine laws. imagine the idea of being able to see what the government does. you know.

this whole idea that wasn't a fungus, you know. you could bring it out from under the shade. so sometimes you should really have a sunset on some of these things you didn't need them for ever. so that all went along. and then of course the environment. the environment became huge. remember the earth days. earth days were fabulous. everybody was out participating. dennis hayes became a local hero. the sierra club named a dirty dozen of the dirtiest members of congress and wayne aspenall led the list. horror. how could these dirty easterners be doing that? he had some terrible names for them, which i won't recite. but i remember the head of the sierra club said, this man has killed dream after dream of those of us who really want to preserve and conserve. so all of that started and 1972

comes. then we had the e.r.a. coming along and we had the liberalization of abortion, some actions on that. these were all things that were just quite amazing. then comes 1972. well. wayne aspenall gets another opponent. merson. merson's the person they used to say. he was endorsed by all sorts of people, everyone from the "new york times" to "reader's dige digest." you begin to get some kind of a view how part of the world looked at the colorado delegation, that they were a little out of touch. you didn't get the "reader's digest" real often in these things. so he was -- and he did win but he then went on to lose to jim johnson.

my dear husband was in a law firm that was nice and quiet. floyd haskell was one of his partners. and jim started out as the campaign manager for floyd haskell's senate race against gordon allit, basically on an anti-war thing. that was fun, i baked cookies, we went to the opening. as things developed, i ended up running against mccovitt. jim had to drop out of haskell's -- it blew up the whole law firm, actually. the other law partner was mr. tweety and his wife had these damn horses that were winning. so tweety did say to me the difference between a horse race and a plit wall race was in a horse race, the whole horse ran. but he was a republican, yeah. so again, all these partners who

were democrats running out there, so what could he do? door, dear thing. he was a very popular guy that we'd had reapportionment and they had made these districts poefl as safe as possible for them. and we had an ugly primary and stuff. i really never thought i'd win or i probably wouldn't have run. everybody kept saying -- jim was on the committee looking for someone to run and everybody they went to said, are you kidding? mcgovern's running that year, he doesn't have coattails, he's wearing a bikini! which was true. so he kind of came and said, you know, just do it, we'll tell the kids what you did when you get old be -- you know. the rest is history, we ended up winning as you well know. but it was a wonderful movement and many of you were in it. i can't thank you enough. i remember we phoneyed the whole thing. people would say, who is your media team? we'd say, it's kitchen table media. literally we had friends like

chuck bartholomew sitting around our kitchen table trying to figure out what to say or do. it was put together with chewing gum and rubber bands and our average campaign contribution was $7.50. we had gone back to see the democratic congressional campaign and they said, you're it? you won the primary? we said, yes. they said, we're not putting anything in there. so yeah, we were very pure. we were total colorado. it was marvelous. but also on the ballot was the olympics. and that no one could believe. there had never been any place before or since that turned down the olympics. and we didn't turn them down, we absolutely smashed them down. i mean, 59.4% we smashed them

down. that's a huge landslide. so '72 was quite an amazing year. aspenall was defeated in a primary. immediately became a republican. and start wlad he called the sagebrush revolution. i don't know if any of you remember that. it was, give all the federal government back to the locals, i'm done with all you people. and i beat mccovitt. people of like, what is this rumble from the rockies? surely it must be this little temporary thing. now, jim had a lot of fun. one of the things i remember most was the night that i got elected, he was in such shock, he had to go down to the election commission at 2:00 to make sure it was right. because he was just -- it was like, oh, what have we done to our lives? he had a very good friend, dick tucker, who was a journalist

from "the rocky mountain news." they decided to have some fun. they sat down and wrote an article about jim like you might write about the normal candidate's wife in that time. the sparkling blue-eyed brunette in his navy-blue blazer. and they thought they were so funny. and "the rocky mountain news" carried it and our phone started ringing off the wall the next day, people saying, we will not have them treat jim that way. we kept saying, think about what you just said. every single woman hassed that that story written about them. and actually, when i announced, they will never forget the newspaper said, "denver housewife announces for congress." they wouldn't even put my name. they could have at least put "housewife schroeder." i was actually a lawyer. but i was a housewife. so it was -- that whole campaign was kind of an educational campaign of the press and everybody.

well. then 1973, we got arie taylor, the first african-american woman in the legislature, who was terrific. that was just a build to 1974. when all of us came back, got elected again, and dick lamb got elected governor, and hart got to go to the senate, and warren took on brochman, and george brown became the first african-american elected statewide in any state after the civil war. so it's pretty amazing that this state did all of that. when you think about that, and you think about that narrow little window of time, we were pushing the spoon right off the edge, boom. and so the rumble from the rockies became a roar. and all sorts of people were coming out here saying, what is going on? i always say that