The Americanism of Utah

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 44, 1976, No. 1

The Americanism of Utah

BY RICHARD D. POLL

EIGHTY YEARS AGO tomorrow morning the superintendent of the Western Union office rushed out into East Temple Street with a shotgun and fired two resounding blasts into the crisp winter air. So the people in downtown Salt Lake City first learned of the union which tonight we commemorate. President Grover Cleveland, according to the telegraph message, had just proclaimed the linking of the State of Utah and the United States. The negotiations had been long and tempestuous, the people of the prospective state at times ardent and at times obstreperous and the national populace often indifferent or downright hostile. But now at last the obstacles had been removed and the friends of both partners rejoiced together. As the editor of the Deseret News expressed it: "God bless and prosper Utah as an inseparable part of the American union now and forever!"

We celebrate tonight because that union has been a good one. There have been sad times and hard times, but no regrets. Now, as the United States approaches her 200th anniversary, those of us who are citizens of both state and nation have much to be thankful for, much to anticipate, and much to remember. This Bicentennial Statehood Day observance gives us opportunity for a little of each.

We meet in a very appropriate place. Here, on January 6, 1896, the public ceremonies of statehood took place, beneath a similar flag and heralded by a similar youthful chorus. And surely this tabernacle must rank with Faneuil Hall, Constitution Hall, and Independence Hall as a shrine in which the special heritage and destiny of the United States have been repeatedly extolled. What a fitting platform on which to renew the ties that bind this forty-fifth state to the nation, and to draw from 200 years of history those lessons which may be most profitable for the century ahead.

What a distinguished company! I am reminded that Dr. John A. Widtsoe once said that whoever would tell the story of Utah's heritage must combine the attributes of a prophet, a historian, and a poet. If he were here tonight, would be accept two politicians as the equivalent of one poet?

My theme is "The Americanism of Utah." My plan is to highlight two centuries of our history, seeking the threads which are most common to the total American experience. As for the centrifugal elements which seemed at times to push Utah away from the national mainstream, I will be less concerned with their nature than with why they did not prevail. I will argue that even when Utah was most different, she was in most respects not so very different. I will suggest that any disposition to emphasize differences has long since given way to a desire to be the most American of all.

To begin, I invite you to go back with me 100 years. Let us browse through the files of the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News for early July 1876 to see how our country's Centennial birthday was observed in some of the thirty-eight states and in the territory of Utah—a territory which had already waited twenty-six years and would have to wait another twenty to see her star appear on the American flag.

The purpose of this journey into the past is twofold. First, the nostalgia buff in all of us—even young people with short histories—enjoys looking at the quaint and sometimes comic ways that things were done in the good old days. But more than this, a look at the local scene on July 4, 1876, can help us understand that special relationship between Utah and the United States of which this flag in this tabernacle is peculiarly symbolic.

The focal point of the national celebration was, of course, Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exposition drew more than fifty thousand visitors daily. A parade of five thousand Grand Army of the Republic veterans launched the festivities on July 3, and the Congress, which had recently addressed itself to the reconstruction of the Union, held a brief commemorative session in Independence Hall on the morning of the fourth. Crowds jammed Independence Square as the public ceremonies began at 10 A.M. The four thousand invited guests on the elevated platform included Governor and presidential-candidate Rutherford B. Hayes; Generals Joseph Hooker, Philip Sheridan, and William T. Sherman; and the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II. Vice-President Thomas W. Ferry presided and Sen. William M. Evarts eulogized the Founding Fathers. (Three years later, as secretary of state, he would invite the governments of Europe to deny to Mormons the right to emigrate to this land of liberty.) A namesake descendant of Richard Henry Lee read the Declaration of Independence as the original document was displayed on the podium. Patriotic toasts and declamations rounded out the program; mammoth fireworks and the ringing of the new Liberty Bell rounded out the day.

Parades, fireworks, and oratory also marked the event from Boston to San Francisco. Southern communities were at particular pains to proclaim their loyalty to the ideals of 1776 and 1789—even as Southern governments and Northern courts were shelving the Fourteenth Amendment and leaving an unfinished legacy of the Civil War for Bicentennial Louisville and Boston. The Tribune gave front page space to a Centennial greeting from Prussia's Emperor William I to his "great and good friend," the United States of America. Another headline story had first reports of General Custer's disaster on the Little Big Horn—an oblique reminder that Jefferson's "unalienable rights" are still not equitably enjoyed by the original Americans.

But what of Utah on that 1876 Fourth of July? The biggest celebration occurred in Ogden, sponsored by citizens of the community with some support and encouragement from elsewhere in the territory. William N. Fife was the marshal of the day. The Utah Central Railroad carried an eleven-car special from Salt Lake City, full of celebrants. Both the Tribune and the News described the colorful parade which marched from Tabernacle Square to the Utah Northern Station. Behind the Fourth Infantry Band from Fort Bridger came a procession of floats, costumed riders, bands, choirs, and carriages with distinguished citizenry. Tableaux representing the landing of Columbus, the Pilgrims, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, all the states and territories, "Little Old Folks," and the various trades and industries of Utah testified to the preparatory efforts of many people. The "Red, White and Blue" was represented by three young ladies in colored riding habits, "mounted on finely caparisoned horses," and the "Goddess of Liberty" was surrounded by thirteen other attractive young women. (Pretty girls made pretty parades, even when their knees and navels were covered.)

At Kay's Grove, a half-mile by train or foot from the UNRR station, the crowd gathered at noon for a local version of the Philadelphia commemorative exercises. The invocation, in the sardonic view of the Tribune reporter, was "long enough to satisfy the average of humanity for the next hundred years." The two-and-a-half hour gathering must have been long enough for most of the people who sat or stood under a mid-ninety-degree July sun. The Centennial oration was given by lawyer Charles W. Bennett. The Declaration was read, a historical sketch of Weber County was presented, and Territorial Gov. George W. Emery gave a response to the Centennial toast which was "eloquent and forcible" to the Tribune scribe and "very appropriate to the occasion" in the eyes of the Deseret News correspondent.

Following the patriotic meeting, a band concert, dancing, and other activities regaled the crowds. A baseball game between the Willard City Longstrikes and the Salt Lake City Deserets was "hotly contested" for three hours, the Deserets winning the pitchers' duel by a score of 31 to 13. Bottled spirits produced hilarity and a touch of mayhem among the spectators when the game was over.

Although there were activities in Provo and other smaller Utah towns, the territorial capital had no official celebration. Salt Lakers who did not make the trip to Ogden had several holiday options. The Odd Fellows, the Red Men, and the Knights of Pythias sponsored a short parade to Fuller's Hill and a short program. Frederick Auerbach conducted the service and J. C. Hemingray gave the customary eulogy, "celebrating in fitting terms the heroic sacrifices made by our forefathers." The hundreds of vacationers who went to Lake Point found the food less abundant than the sunshine and "paid as high as fifty cents for a common sandwich and twenty-five cents for a drink of whiskey," according to the Tribune. "The Royal Illusionists," a magic show performing matinee and evening at the Salt Lake Theatre, was another entertainment possibility. Also available were a "Ladies Centennial" exhibition in the Constitution Building and diversion at places with names like Glendale Gardens, Lindsay Gardens, and Spring Lake Pleasure Grounds. In the judgment of the Tribune correspondent, those Utahns who went up into the canyons on family picnics had "the best time of any of the celebrators in Zion."

It seems clear that July 4, 1876, saw many Utahns sharing the same Centennial sentiments and enjoying the same Centennial pastimes as their contemporaries in Philadelphia and throughout the land. And well they might. For as Dr. S. George Ellsworth reminds us in the textbook used by many of today's young people: "The history of Utah and the history of the United States have always run side by side. Utah history cannot properly be considered separately. . . ." To test this judgment, let us go back to the recorded beginnings.

Last fall we read accounts about jeep-mounted scholars retracing the Escalante trail—or as my friend Ted Warner correctly insists—the Dominguez-Velez de Escalante trail. They remind us that Utah's documented story is just as old as the United States. But for accidental delays, the two Franciscan priests and their eight companions would have left Santa Fe on the very day that our Founding Fathers were pledging to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. The little band of missionary explorers entered Utah as General Washington, defeated on Long Island, was turning New York City over to Lord Howe's redcoats. The prospects for American independence were not bright when Dominguez and Velez de Escalante bade farewell to a band of Indians in Utah Valley on September 25, 1776, promising to return within a year. Had they done so, State Street might now be El Camino Real, and Utah's history might be merged in the American chronicle with New Mexico or California.

Spain's failure to plant mission and presidio in the valleys of Utah meant that the region knew only occasional, transient contact with white men until the fur trappers arrived a half-century later. From the British Northwest, Mexican Santa Fe, and American Missouri the Jim Bridgers, Jed Smiths, Etienne Provosts, and Peter Skene Ogdens converged in the mid-1820s on what journalist Samuel Bowles would later describe as "a region whose uses are unimaginable, unless to hold the rest of the globe together, or to teach patience to travelers. . . ." For twenty years the mountain men harvested beaver and geographic lore, putting the name of the Ute Indians on part of the land but leaving few monuments. The trappers' rendezvous in Cache Valley and at Bear Lake were socially and economically indistinguishable from those held within the presentday boundaries of Utah's neighbors; the patterns of trade were similar in each, and liquor was available both by the bottle and the drink.

The people of Utah's first seven decades—from the Spanish trailblazers to Fremont, Miles Goodyear, and the Donner party—were in many ways distinctive, but they clearly belong to the main lines of the historical development of the United States.

What shall we say of the people of the next half-century—the pioneer settlers and state builders? How American were they?

We must not forget the thousands who came to Utah in the territorial period to build railroads, man military posts, found business houses, dig mines, operate the stage lines, explore the rivers, and fill the appointive offices of government. They w^ere as American as the melting pot, the gold rush, the business cycle and the political machine. They were as American as ambition and greed, scientific curiosity and pragmatism, Hanukkah and Lent. These Gentile Utahns never numbered more than 20 percent of the territorial population, but they provided many of the closest connections between Utah and the Union.

Nor should we overlook the Utes, Paiutes, Gosiutes, Shoshonis, and Navajos who were already here in 1847. Under the influence of the policy that it is better to feed the Indians than to fight them, they were exposed to such well-meant experiments as Indian farms, Indian missions, and the adoption of women and children. But in the end they were pushed onto reservations under conditions hardly different from their tribal kinsmen elsewhere in the West. Both the Black Hawk War and the Battle of Bear River show that the "good Indian-dead Indian" syndrome was present in Utah Territory. This is sad, but in the nineteenth century it was not un-American.

Turn with me now to the territory's Latter-day Saints—from 1847 to 1896 the most numerous and stubborn human facts in the Utah story. Had they been permitted to express their convictions and capabilities in isolation, they might have produced a unique and autonomous theocratic society. But this was not to be. Even as Brigham Young led the Mormon vanguard to the Salt Lake Valley, Gen. Winfield Scott was advancing on Mexico City. Whatever may have been the hopes or expectations of the LDS leaders when they picked the Great Basin for a haven, the American victory in the Mexican War subjected them to the vicissitudes of national and sectional politics. Under territorial government they were tied to the United States in a subordinate status. In this context, what should be said of their Americanism?

Let us first dismiss the grotesque stereotypes of anti-Mormonism and the unworldly images of Sunday School folklore. We are dealing with people—men and women seeking happiness for themselves and their children in Spartan circumstances. Their religion profoundly influenced their lives, but it did not lift them out of their surroundings, their century, or their fundamental humanness. Whether they had been gathered from Europe and the East or born in the mountain Zion, they reflected and they related to the world outside Utah in many ways.

Potatoes were planted by the Great Basin pioneers as they were planted elsewhere. Adobes were made, horses were shod, hams were smoked, candles were dipped, flour was milled, pottery was fired, wine was pressed, and cloth was woven according to the techniques of the time. There were Mormon substitutes for tea but no uniquely Mormon ways for making soap. (I may hear from a DUP spokeswoman with a correction on this.) Even irrigation was not original to Utah, though substantial additions to its technology were developed here.

Pneumonia, Indians, smallpox, and childbed fever were hazards to health as they were throughout the West. The pioneers of Utah called in the elders when they were sick, but they also called in herb doctors like Willard Richards and Philadelphia-educated physicians like Romania Pratt and Ellis Shipp. Midwives performed many medical tasks according to nineteenth-century understanding; some were up on the importance of sanitation and others were not. A diphtheria epidemic took 749 lives in Salt Lake City in 1880, Mormons and Gentiles alike.

Women were as busy in Utah as in other parts of America and doing mostly the same things. They produced impressive quantities of poetry, quilts, articles on woman suffrage, silk pillow covers, corn puddings, burial clothes, and babies. They were frequently breadwinners as well as homemakers. Their interest in secular culture was sometimes criticized by conservative community leaders, but the minutes of the Polysophical Society and the files of the Woman's Exponent show the scope and quality of their strivings. How plural marriage affected the 10 or 15 percent of Mormon women who entered the practice needs more study than it has received; spokeswomen like Emmeline B. Wells and Belinda Pratt contended vigorously that they were not oppressed. Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, who served in Utah's first state senate, maintained that a plural wife was not as tied down as a single wife: "If her husband has four wives, she has three weeks of freedom every single month." It is not improbable that such imported ideas as romantic love and female emancipation contributed to the waning interest in polygamy—even as today they make the concept of a shared spouse as uncomfortable to granddaughters of plural marriage as to their non- Mormon counterparts in soap opera audiences and ERA demonstrations.

In so many ways the Latter-day Saints of Utah Territory were involved with the business of America. They manned the Pony Express stations and helped build the transcontinental railroad. Few of them fought in the battles of the Civil War, but the same Lot Smith who harassed government operations in the Utah War commanded a cavalry unit which patrolled the overland telegraph in 1862, and when Lincoln died the people of Utah mourned. Their cities may have reflected Joseph Smith's plan for the City of Zion, but the buildings which replaced the first dugouts and cabins showed such contemporary styles as Federal and Gothic Revival. Even the houses of worship were derivative in design, as such lovely structures as the Pine Valley chapel and the Brigham City and St. George tabernacles attest. The Salt Lake Theatre was Greek Revival in architecture and American eclectic in programming—a very important bridge to the world beyond the Wasatch.

If the boys of Orderville preferred store-bought pants and the daughters of Brigham Young favored eastern fashions, it proves no more than that they were aware of their era. If men of the priesthood bought and read the Tribune and their wives shopped in stores owned by Gentile Jews, they were merely responsive to crosscurrents that were blowing in Utah. (Despite the editorial antagonism, 80 percent of the content of the Deseret News and the Tribune was interchangeable.) A stranger watching the Centennial activities in Ogden in 1876 would have found it very difficult to tell which of the participating Americans were Latter-day Saints and which were not.

Yet, one looking at the record of those activities from the perspective of a century is struck with a difference which invites attention. Where in the News and Tribune are the fulsome Centennial editorials so characteristic of the national press of the time? Where in the accounts of the ceremonial gatherings are the names of Brigham Young and the other top-echelon LDS authorities—the real leaders of the people of Utah? The News offered neither editorial nor explanation, though it reported what happened more concisely and precisely than its rival. The

Tribune had only a brief patriotic comment on the Fourth, and its next issue noted that "the celebration of Independence Day in this Centennial Year . . . was in this city characterized by no very enthusiastic display." Was there substance or foundation for the jaundiced editorial charge that "our city fathers, who hold all fleshly government in contempt, . . . can see but little to rejoice over in the power and progress of our country?"

From the days in Nauvoo when Joseph Smith first taught the concept of the political kingdom of God and called the secret Council of Fifty to assist in its planning, the Mormon attitude toward the government of the United States had been ambivalent. On the one hand, both the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants affirmed that America was a "choice land," its divinely inspired Constitution deserving of the full allegiance of devout Latter-day Saints. On the other hand, the government was expected to give way before the millennium to a theodemocracy manned by priesthood holders and like-minded non-Mormons. For a generation the church leaders in Utah conducted their relations with the government in Washington on the premise that they were dealing with a transitory institution. During the Utah Reformation, when the church was only twenty-six years old, Brigham Young anticipated the coming of the political kingdom in these words:

In the days of Joseph it was considered a great privilege to be permitted to speak to a member of Congress, but twenty-six years will not pass away before the Elders of this Church will be as much thought of as the kings on their throne.

President Young and his successor, John Taylor, preserved the shadowstructure of the State of Deseret and periodically restaffed the Council of Fifty because, as Young put it in a message to the ghost legislature in the midst of the American Civil War:

Our government is going to pieces and it will be like water that is spilt upon the ground that cannot be gathered. ... I do not care whether you sit one day or not. But I do not want you to lose any part of this government which you have organized. For the time will come when we will give laws to the nations of the earth. . . .

Given this telescoped time frame, together with the frequently perverse behavior of federal officials, it should not be surprising that Utah's early leaders were as outspoken in commenting on the nation's misfortunes as they were in celebrating its founders and its constitutional principles.

There is a danger, however, that the kingdom doctrine may be called up to explain too much of Utah history. In the first place, enthusiasm for the doctrine does not appear to have been uniformly high or consistently maintained among the church leaders. Long before the polygamy manifesto of 1890 and the political manifesto of 1896 many of them had begun to adjust their millennial expectations to an extended timetable." In the second place, it is not clear that the doctrine and the associated activities of the Council of Fifty were widely enough known to determine the political attitudes and deportment of the Mormon rank and file. They followed their leaders, but their leaders were as likely to be pragmatic in politics as to be doctrinaire.

Many of the problems which beset Mormon Utah on the long road to statehood are explicable in thoroughly American terms. Howard Lamar has described the Mormon predicament in these terms:

. . . building on themes and premises in the American tradition they have taken a different but essentially American path. . . . From the beginning they demonstrated that, like the Federal Union with its theory of divided sovereignty, the so-called American tradition was ambivalent, contradictory, and subject to many interpretations. . . . Certainly it is clear that in trying to establish cultural and institutional pluralism in the United States in the nineteenth century the Mormons came up against deepset conformist beliefs, in defense of which anti-Mormon Americans proved to be willing to suspend civil rights, use force, and violate traditional constitutional limitations on the powers of government.

In espousing plural marriage and church control of the economy and polity of Utah Territory, the Latter-day Saints found themselves under increasing attack from a national government and public which branded these practices as immoral and un-American. Until their leaders moved to suspend the practices for the sake of statehood and self-government, loyal and devout Mormons were as expedient as circumstances and conscience required. They were neither the first nor last Americans to appeal to a "higher law."

When Lot Smith, about to put the torch to a government supply train during the guerrilla warfare phase of the Utah War, met the plea, "For God's sake, don't burn the trains," he coolly replied, "It is for his sake that I am going to burn them." Comparable convictions sent John Brown to Harper's Ferry three years later.

When some unknown Utahns flew the American flag at half-mast over some of the public buildings of Salt Lake City on July 4, 1885, their symbolic protest against unpopular laws stemmed from motives not unlike those which many years later produced black armbands and inverted flags as protests against an unpopular war.

When John Taylor called for civil disobedience after the passage of the Edmunds Act in 1882, he was in the same American lineage as Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Deseret Telegraph girls who used their technological marvel to warn polygamists that the United States marshals were coming were in tune with the antislavery conductors of the underground railroad. As George Q. Cannon donned his prison stripes for a publicity photo at the Utah Territorial Penitentiary, he might have quoted Thoreau: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison."

When many patriotic citizens of Utah used every stratagem to evade laws which violated their convictions, they were also quite American. As John Henry Smith, later president of Utah's Constitutional Convention, confided to a friend: "Everyone of us may have to go to the pen. I feel perfectly willing to do so if needs be, but I had much rather stay out." He acknowledged using his Gentile connections to do so. Others went to Mexico and Canada and into the Mormon underground—actions matched by nonconforming Americans before and since.

The nature of Utah's participation in the 1876 Centennial should be interpreted in this context. Railroads, mines, and commerce were undercutting the socio-economic order of the pioneers, and it was becoming clear that neither cooperatives nor united orders would reverse the trend. As for the political order, the battle to end church control of the instruments of representative government was already joined, and a zealous judge had only a year before subjected Brigham Young to the humiliation of a night in jail and three weeks of house arrest in a case which was subsequently dismissed. With George Reynolds convicted of polygamy and John D. Lee about to be retried for something which happened at Mountain Meadow eighteen years ago, what was there for the devout, conservative Mormon to celebrate? That Utah's biggest commemoration of America's centenary took place in Ogden—the Mormon city where the old and new orders were in most intimate contact—is symbolic.

The next twenty years changed matters radically. Petitions, politicking, and civil disobedience only strengthened the national resolve to make the Mormons of Utah conform to conventional American norms for church-state relations and marriage. Presidents, Congress, the Supreme Court, the press, ministers of many faiths, and reformers of many kinds supported the cause. Legislation disfranchised at least twelve thousand voters and stripped the church of its property. The courts stamped more than thirteen hundred Utah polygamists as criminals. Both the stigma of adverse publicity and the lure of widening contacts with the world beyond Utah took their toll on the popular will to resist.

This is not the time to detail the political probings and soul searchings which preceded the compromises required for statehood. They began even before President Taylor died in hiding in 1887. When tacit indications of a new position on plural marriage and energetic lobbying in Washington did not reverse the national tide, President Wilford Woodruff took the decisive public step. Acting, as he said, "for the temporal salvation of the Church," he announced in September 1890 that the church would no longer perform plural marriages. By the voice of the people this policy was sustained at the following October conference. The abandonment of the kingdom-of-God-related policies of political solidarity and economic self-sufficiency quickly followed.

Though some clung to the old priorities, it was for most Utahns as if a great load had been lifted. Since the millennial fulfillment of what Thomas O'Dea has called "the theocratic and separatist aspects" of Mormonism was apparently to be postponed, the burdensome conflict of political loyalties could now be resolved in favor of the "democratic and patriotic motives which were equally genuine and equally well grounded in Mormon doctrine."

A few years were still required to pass the political and procedural hurdles to statehood. Politics came first, because once Utahns began to be thought of as Americans, presidents and congressmen naturally wanted to know how they would vote. This intermingling of the statehood decision with national political considerations was regrettable but thoroughly in the American tradition, and the lobbying activities of Utah's behind-the-scenes negotiators show that they, too, knew how the game is played. An enabling act was finally pushed through Congress in 1894, and a constitutional convention was held the following spring. Utahns overwhelmingly approved the proposed constitution, with its female suffrage and its prohibitions on polygamy and the mingling of church and state. They chose a slate of Republicans to man the new government; the governor-elect was Heber M. Wells, a son of that Daniel H. Wells who commanded the Nauvoo Legion when the forces of the United States were forbidden to enter Utah Territory almost forty years before.

Meanwhile Presidents Harrison and Cleveland were persuaded to grant amnesty and pardon to all who had previously been guilty of violating the antipolygamy statutes but were now in compliance with less stringent court interpretations. The attendant restoration of civil and political rights was gratefully accepted. After all, Brigham Young had accepted a presidential amnesty for his people back in 1858, and a whole generation of more-or-less repentant Confederates had done so after the Civil War.

So everyone could come to the statehood celebration in 1896, and unlike the Centennial affair of two decades before, everyone wanted to be there. President Wilford Woodruff's invocation was read by George Q. Cannon, who had pursued the goal of statehood as a delegate to Congress, a temporary resident of the territorial "pen" and a first counselor in the LDS First Presidency. It included this petition and pledge:

Thou knowest all hearts and art our witness that in the misunderstandings and differences that have occurred the people of these mountain vales have been loyal upholders of the Constitution of our country and those republican institutions which thou didst inspire the fathers of the nation to institute and establish. We desire, our Father, to maintain them inviolate. And now that we have acquired, through thy blessing, the power to aid in their preservation, we pray thee to bless us so to do and to secure that liberty to others which we prize for ourselves.

In reviewing the long struggle for statehood, Governor Wells congratulated both the state and the nation:

The State, because of the great benefaction of Constitutional government bestowed by a wise and generous Congress; the Nation, because of the addition of a new commonwealth, pledged to the. perpetuity of the Union, and possessed of infinite treasures which the State, upon her admission, lays at the feet of the Nation.

For purposes of this Bicentennial synthesis, the eighty years of Utah history which have followed that happy day can be handled briefly. They span a generation in which the distinctive elements of the territorial period were eliminated or papered over as rapidly as possible, and two more generations in which the state and nation have become so interlocked that one might ask what meaningful distinctiveness remains.

Of the transitional years between 1896 and the end of the First World War, Charles Peterson recently wrote:

Most Utahns, particularly its Mormon society, wanted statehood and the symbol of belonging to the larger society of America that it implied, with a fervor that is difficult for us to grasp. . . . Once they had achieved this membership, they went about the business of proving that they merited it with enthusiastic and sometimes uncritical energy."

All thoughts of self-sufficiency were abandoned as Utah's land, water, and minerals became the basis of an economy whose prosperity depended on markets elsewhere. Strawberry Reservoir water began to flow to the orchards and celery and sugar beet fields in Utah Valley. Hydro-electric power, in whose development Utahns pioneered, began to flow to the cities on the Wasatch Front and the mines and smelters of the Oquirrh Mountains. Immigrants flowed in increasing numbers into the mines and mills of Carbon County and the Salt Lake Valley, exciting fears of trade unionism and other "alien ideologies," and a Utah firing squad gave Joe Hill to the folklore of the labor movement. Seven billion dollars worth of copper began to flow from what Leonard Arrington has aptly called "the richest hole on earth." A level of prosperity was achieved which Utah did not enjoy again until the Second World War.

If statehood did not immediately erect a "wall of separation" between church and state, the political problems of B. H. Roberts and Reed Smoot reinforced the resolve of most Utahns that elections and government should be conducted within the conventional framework of American politics. The pendulum swings which still characterize Utah elections appeared early; from William Jennings Bryan to William Howard Taft and back to Woodrow Wilson was quite an oscillation in twenty years. Public differences of opinion between LDS General Authorities on such issues as the Eighteenth Amendment and the League of Nations further emphasized that the day of authoritative Mormon positions on political questions was past. Full-fledged support of the national effort in the Spanish-American War, the Pershing expedition into Mexico, and the First World War set the direction which Utah would follow in more recent conflicts. There is a touch of symbolism in the fact that one of Utah's first West Point-trained professional soldiers was a grandson of Brigham Young, Col. Richard W. Young.

There is, Dr. Ellsworth's text reminds us, "little uniqueness to Utah's history after 1920." The nation's depressions were our depressions, only they were a little more severe because of the dependent nature of the state economy. Utah's agriculture never recovered from the postwar collapse of 1920-21 until another world conflict brought a world market, and her mining reached 1918 production levels only briefly in the late twenties before being hit by the Great Depression. For the 35 percent of the working force who were unemployed in 1932, even potatoes at a half-cent per pound and hamburger at two pounds for nineteen cents were hard to get. In 1938 Utah had 32 percent more workers on WPA projects and 45 percent more young men in the CCC than the national average. The 1930s were the third consecutive decade in which more people moved out of Utah than moved in.

Economic conditions made Utah so solidly Democratic that she voted four times for Franklin Roosevelt and gave a former governor, George H. Dern, to his cabinet. They also kept the governor's office in Democratic hands for six consecutive terms—a record, so far. Hard times may also have produced the thirst which made this the deciding state in ratifying the repeal of the "noble experiment" of Prohibition. The failure of Utah's voters to heed the strictures of LDS President Heber J. Grant against both repeal and Roosevelt are evidence, if any more is needed, that church control of politics was a thing of the past. The much-heralded welfare program incorporated the new and continuing church approach to secular affairs—helping the Latter-day Saints out in the world rather than gathering them in out of the world.

I shall not speak tonight of what has happened in Utah since the Second World War—of Fort Douglas or Hill Field, of Canyonlands or Snowbird, of Geneva Steel or Thiokol, of the Utah Symphony or Ballet West, of the Brigham City Indian School or the NAACP, of urban sprawl or energy shortages, of soaring divorce rates or whether Johnny can read. They are all parts of Utah today, and they collectively testify— both activities and problems—that the integration of Utah and the United States is complete.

What, then, has the 80-year-old State of Utah to say to the 200- year-old nation of which she is a part? From the many lessons which may be found in her history, I suggest these:

This desert was made to blossom and these mountains were made to yield up their treasures by people w4io were wdlling to work.

This state exists because the diverse and stubborn peoples who came here were finally willing to compromise.

The temples, cathedrals, chapels, and synagogues which dot this commonwealth testify that Utah was built by people of faith.

This chorus of young people reminds us that Utah has sent out legions of musicians, teachers, soldiers, missionaries, scientists, businessmen, travelers, and public servants—creating a worldwide impression which contrasts sharply with the images of a century ago.

This flag and this service in this place certifiy, as did those inauguration exercises in 1896, that any ambivalence which Utah's founders may have felt toward the United States has been transformed into commitment in their heirs, I hope that I speak for—and to—all Utahns when I propose this challenge: We believe that we live in a choice land, founded by men and women of vision and valor. We believe that our nation's past and future success are related to the character and dedication of her people. If we do not celebrate and teach these things, we cannot expect the people of our sister states to do so. Properly presented and applied in our civic and personal lives, they can be our birthday present to America.

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