Chapter 2 - Schism Within a Schism

Chapter 2 - 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 anti- Mormon—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 York Herald Bohemian to take the editor-in-chiefship of The Mormon Tribune."

Tullidge attributed Harrison's resignation as editor-in-chief to an unwillingness to serve as a subordinate on a paper which he and his compeers had founded, although he conceded that the editor was worn out and suffering from health problems, the reason publicly given for the resignation.

The depth of the incompatibility thus introduced into The Tribune organization can be imagined from a recitation of a few incidents involving the schismatic elders and some conjecture about Sawyer and his supporters.

The aim of The Tribune and the Liberal Party, as Sawyer would see it, was to break Brigham Young's economic and political grip on his people. This was not likely to be accomplished by the New Movement people (about one of twenty on a basis of election returns) without outside help. The obvious source of outside help was the federal government. So the obvious strategy was to continue and intensify the campaign to arouse the federal government to action.

The Achilles heel of the church, as an outside journalist would likely see it, was polygamy. Trained, as he was, in the school of the era's master in newspaper sensationalism, Sawyer could see that polygamy was a sure-fire reader interest issue. Whatever it might have been to spiritual-minded Mormon elders who entered into the practice, it was sex to the outside world. And, since the beginning of communication media, practitioners of the art of arousing human emotions had found nothing which could be used more effectively than sex.

It was polygamy, for example, which gave currency to the phrase "irrepressible conflict." When Stephen S. Harding, the federally appointed territorial governor, delivered his message to the legislature in 1862, he might have applied the phrase to the economic or the political controversies. But he chose to apply it to polygamy by saying:

I lay it down as a sound proposition that no community can happily exist with an institution as important as that of marriage wanting in all those qualities that make it homogeneal with institutions and laws of neighboring civilized communities having the same object. Anomalies in the moral world cannot long exist in a state of mere abeyance; they must from the very nature of things, become aggressive, or they will soon disappear from the force of conflicting ideas. This proposition is supported by the history of our own race, and is so plain that it may be set down as an axiom. If we grant this to be true, we may sum up the conclusion of the argument as follows: either the laws and opinions of the community by which you are surrounded must become subordinate to your customs and opinions, or, on the other hand, you must yield to theirs. The conflict is irrepressible.

Back during the presidential election of 1856, it was John C. Fremont who campaigned on the Republican Party platform which called for the abolition of those "twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."

It may have been politics which prompted successive threats of military action against the Mormons, but it was polygamy and the charges of insurrection linked to the practice which were used as justification. It was polygamy which could be used to heat up and inflame public opinion back in the states to a point which would compel politicians to resolve the long smouldering and politically annoying "Utah problem."

Moreover, if the job couldn't be accomplished with polygamy, certainly it could not be accomplished with publicity about a cooperative mercantile institution which was hurting the business of some non-Mormon shopkeepers; nor by complaining that Mormons outnumbered their opponents by about twenty to one in elections.

Whether this was the line of reasoning which prompted Sawyer to broaden the scope of the attack on the church is, of course, conjecture. But it is plausible conjecture.

The resentment his editorial policy generated among the schismatic elders who founded, and who were still writing for, the newspaper can be imagined from their known views on polygamy.

Godbe, at his own expense, had traveled to Washington in 1870 to intercede with President Ulysses S. Grant, Vice- President Schuyler Colfax and Rep. Shelby M. Cullom for moderating changes in the latter's pending bill to prohibit polygamy and punish polygamists. He also succeeded in convincing Cullom to refrain from pressing for passage of the bill in the Senate, although the congressman explained that he was bound to vote for it in the House.

When Governor J. Wilson Shaffer was sent to Utah by President Grant in 1870 with the implied instruction to settle the "Utah problem" by military rule, and armed force if that proved necessary, he sought the advice of New Movement leaders, including Godbe and Eli B. Kelsey. Kelsey, in his first interview with the new "war governor," eloquently pleaded the case against an anti-polygamy crusade:

I will present my own family case. It is that of tens of thousands in their family relations. My wives entered into marriage relations with me with the purest of motives, and from a conscientious religious conviction. They have children by me. Before I will forsake my wives and bastardize my children, I will fight the United States down to my boots! Governor Shaffer, put yourself in my place: What would you do?

The Civil War general paced the room for awhile and then turned to Kelsey with his reply: "By G-d, Mr. Kelsey, were I in your place I would do the same."

Similar sentiments were expressed to General Phil Sheridan, sent to Utah by President Grant as an observer. On the basis of reports subsequently sent to Washington by Governor Shaffer and General Sheridan, the administration modified its initial policy to one designed to avoid, if possible, a rupture with the Mormon leaders.

A Liberal Party convention in 1871 was thrown into chaos and the prospective campaign aborted over the issue of polygamy. The schismatic elders were infuriated by the attacks on polygamy, and symbolically exploded when Judge Dennis J. Toohy of Corinne, who later became a small shareholder and a director of The Tribune Publishing Company, denounced the church on ecclesiastical and moral grounds:

Here in Utah . . . sensuality and crime have found a congenial home; here immorality has been lifted up where virtue ought to reign. If I had time I could prove the leaders, not the people, were to blame for this. The people of Utah were originally as good as people elsewhere; but have they found freedom and equality in Utah? No; no more than in Turkey; less than in Ireland, and a great deal less than in any kingdom on the globe. . . . The best blood of Europe has been seduced to come here to Utah, and bow down before a false shrine; all except the people of old Ireland, where the Catholic religion holds them true. Not an honest Irishman ever became a Mormon, not one. The Irishman who could become a Mormon and obey their priesthood—what flattery to call him a man.

The widest rift between Sawyer and the founding editors of The Tribune was undoubtedly over the question of polygamy. The schismatic elders, as unapologetic polygamists themselves, had neither the background nor the will to attack the doctrine. While some of the New Movement group favored abolition of the practice as a pragmatic concession to public sentiment in the outside world, they resented the use of the ecclesiastical doctrine of plural marriage to inflame opposition to Brigham Young's economic policies.

But to Sawyer, and the next succeeding ownership of The Tribune, there could have been no doubt as to the potency of the doctrine as a weapon in the battle for public opinion in the national arena. This had been dramatically demonstrated two years earlier by the Pratt-Newman debate in the Mormon Tabernacle.

Dr. J. P. Newman, a Methodist minister and a chaplain of the United States Senate, construed a suggestion by a Salt Lake City newspaper editor that he debate the issue in the Tabernacle as a challenge from Brigham Young and, with a great fanfare of publicity, accepted the "challenge." But the head of the church was not about to give Washington's most conspicuous antipolygamy crusader the prestige and national prominence which would arise from a direct encounter with the great religious leader and colonizer, Brigham Young.

Brigham coolly informed Dr. Newman that he was unaware of having issued any challenge. The minister nevertheless came to Salt Lake City and there ensued several days of publicitygenerating argument over who was willing and who was unwilling to debate. The upshot was that Brigham Young designated John Taylor or Orson Pratt as his representative. Dr. Newman protested that he wanted to debate the head of the church himself, but finally agreed to meet the substitute. The exchange of correspondence was published in the New York Herald, the local press and other major newspapers throughout the country.

The proposition agreed upon was: "Does the Bible sanction polygamy?" Professor Orson Pratt, a leading theologian of the church and one of its most eloquent orators, was the Mormon spokesman. Thousands attended the discussions; major newspapers sent special correspondents to the city to cover the event, and the telegraph company's press business reached an unprecedented level.

The debate was one of the big stories of the period, both locally and nationally, and it received some attention internationally. Some papers covered it in the language of the prize fight ring, giving a blow-by-blow account of the verbal exchanges - a feint to the chin with this Biblical quotation, a solid punch to the midsection with that quotation; a counter-punch with another quotation, and so on.

Judging from press reaction outside Utah, it appeared that neither Dr. Newman nor Professor Pratt scored anything close to a knockout. But it was Tullidge's opinion that Professor Pratt won on points:

Each day's apostolic fight was glorified with a verbatim report in the New York Herald, and every leading newspaper in the country devoted its columns to a daily synopsis of the arguments. Never before, in the whole Christian era, had polygamy been so elaborately and ably discussed between two divines, and certainly never was a religious debate so extensively published and read. Millions of readers followed the arguments . . . and it is safe to estimate that quite two-thirds of them yielded the palm to the Mormon apostle and were convinced, though against their inclination, that upon strict Biblical grounds Mormon polygamy could not be successfully met.

Because of the differing notions regarding polygamy and other ecclesiastical issues, it can easily be deduced that an explosion was. building up within The Tribune staff. To the discerning reader the conflict was disclosed in an erratic editorial policy which sometimes reflected Sawyer and sometimes the founding elders. The Sawyer critics fumed and waited for an opening to bring the schism to a head. It came when someone charged that Chief Justice James B. McKean, an anathema to both orthodox and schismatic Mormons, had been allowed to write editorials sustaining his own decisions in The Tribune. Justice McKean, incidentally, was a somewhat controversial personality within the legal profession nationally, as well as in the Utah Territory. His judicial competence had been questioned by numerous individuals, associations and publications who did not question his personal integrity. One of his most widely publicized actions was to assert in court, when Brigham Young was being tried for bigamy under a territorial statute, that "while the real title of the case at bar is called The People Versus Brigham Young, its other and real title is Federal Authority Versus Polygamic Theocracy." The principle of trying a system in the form of an individual, and under a statute which was certainly of doubtful application, prompted many commentors to brand the proceedings as a crusade rather than a judicial trial.

At the insistence of Harrison, now a director, Tullidge and George W. Crouch, an ex-Mormon elder associated with the Godbeite movement, a meeting of the directors and staff was called. Participants included J. R. Walker, David F. Walker, Henry W. Lawrence, Benjamin Raybould, John Chislett, Sawyer, Crouch, Harrison and Tullidge. Harrison presented the case on behalf of those protesting the editorial direction taken by Sawyer. The case, as summarized by Tullidge:

Mr. Harrison stated the case, and in very severe language denounced the course which the managing editor had been taking. He stated the object for which the paper had been started—namely, to maintain the cause of freedom and the rights of all classes, without distinction of Mormon or gentile; that it had been specially named Tribune, as explained in its opening issue, to signify its character-Trie Tribune of the People; that it was not the organ of radicals, nor the enemy of the Mormon people, but rather it was designed to protect and defend them. At first it was called The Mormon Tribune, to show its mission in this respect, though since it has changed its name to The Salt Lake Tribune, so that it might more fully represent all classes, yet remain true to its original aims. Mr. Sawyer, he said, had been brought out to Salt Lake City, by Mr. Godbe, with the expectation that he would carry out the design of its founders; that he, Harrison, had resigned the editorship, and control of the paper, to give himself a temporary rest, with the said understanding; that Mr. Sawyer, having obtained control, had turned The Salt Lake Tribune in a new direction and given it other aims and purposes from those for which it was established; but above all he impeached the managing editor on the specific charge of having permitted Judge McKean to write editorials sustaining his own decisions.

Sawyer told the directors that they were merchants; that they knew nothing about journalism whereas he was a trained journalist. The upshot of the meeting was the resignation of Sawyer, who gave as his reason a "journalistic incompatibility" between himself and the directors.

Fred T. Perris, who had been serving as business manager, was placed in charge of both business and editorial departments but the schismatic elders who founded the paper were in fact at the editorial helm of what looked, at that juncture, to be a fiscally sinking ship doomed to fall into the hands of salvagers.

Despite Sawyer's departure to other journalistic ventures, there was still friction within The Tribune organization and its chief backers. Some influential non-Mormons whose support was vital to the fiscal success of the newspaper felt that it was hopeless to simultaneously attack some policies of the church and defend others.

Viewed in retrospect, it appears that the founders were somewhat less than realistic. Leonard J. Arrington, in his Great Basin Kingdom describes them as "talented Mormon intellectual liberals.' " 10 But they obviously lacked the pragmatic toughness to challenge the great Brigham Young, who was revered by the orthodox Mormons; admired by many non-Mormons in the territory, the states and abroad for his extraordinary accomplishments as a colonizer, and reluctantly respected by many who hated him.

Godbe, a native of London, was bound to a shipping company prior to his conversion to Mormonism. He had traveled extensively in Asia, Europe and Africa and was a self-educated man of the world. On the basis of his achievements, he was far above the average in business ability. He became wealthy as a merchant after arriving in Utah; was a confidant of Brigham Young until he launched the New Movement; and was responsible for some sizeable and profitable mining developments after he abandoned the publishing business. But his journalistic ventures were fiscal disasters. Tullidge estimated that his losses in this field exceeded $200,000, which was a fortune in that era.

Both Tullidge and Harrison were talented writers. But they were apparently too independent-minded for strict orthodoxy and too idealistic and sensitive for effective leadership.

On the plus side a good case could be made for the proposition that their formula for settlement of the Utah problem was substantially the formula which eventually did settle it—elimination of the closed economic and political society and a repudiation of the practice if not the doctrine, of polygamy. Had they been able to foresee the course of future events their sense of defeat would have been softened by the vision of ultimate victory. But while their ends were met, they clearly at that time did not have the stomach for the means.

In any event their crusading journalistic venture never really got off the ground financially and by mid 1873 the publishing company was without funds and in debt. At this point the salvagers—who came to look more like scavengers to the founding elders and orthodox Mormons—appeared in the form of three journalists from Kansas.