The First 100 Years: A History of The Salt Lake Tribune 1871-1971 by O.N. Malmquist

Schism Within a Schism ON THE SURFACE, the new daily Salt Lake Tribunebegan publication with somewhat brighter prospects of success than its predecessors.

The talented staff of the weekly Mormon Tribune had been ostensibly strengthened by Godbe's appointment of Oscar G. Sawyer as editor-in-chief. But Sawyer, an experienced journalist trained on James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald, quickly became the focus of a schism between the schismatic elders who founded the newspaper and the gentiles who had joined with the New Movement group to bring about economic and political reformation in the territory.

Under Sawyer the newspaper became pungently antiMormon—a course that was distasteful to Tullidge, Harrison and others associated with the enterprise. Although they had been placed outside the pale so far as the church was concerned, they did not consider themselves anti-Mormon. On the contrary they regarded themselves as missionaries seeking to bring the church into conformity with the laws of the land and thereby save it from destruction and its membership from hardships more severe than those they had already suffered.

Tullidge's reaction to the Sawyer appointment was later expressed in his history of Salt Lake City with the comment: "... a Utah journalist ought to have perceived the unfitness of the New 20