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Part II - 100 Years of the Utah State Historical Society
Continued from Part I
Auerbach's most controversial involvement with the Society concerned his immense library of western books on which he had lavished a large fortune. During his tenure on the Board of Control, he evidently allowed it to be understood that the Society would inherit his library upon his death, for in fact he had taken advantage of his status as president of the board to acquire some bibliographic rarities.47 It was not to be, for Auerbach left no will, and his sisters decided instead to have the collection catalogued by Brigham Young University bibliophile Wilford Poulson and sold at auction. It was an immense blow to the Society, whose limited funds would not allow purchase of even a significant portion of the collection when forced to compete with the large acquisition budgets of the major libraries that would be bidding Matters were even worse than that, as John James, Jr., who became the Society's librarian in 1952, recalled, for anticipation of the Auerbach donation had significantly retarded the Society's book purchases, and James then had to start an acquisition program that was already seriously behind.48
Alter's other co-worker was Marguerite L. Sinclair, surely one of the most remarkable people ever associated with the Society. Little is known of her background or of her personal life outside the Society. She spent some years caring for an "aged brother-in-law" with whom she was very close; in fact she characterized him as "the only father I have known for years. So I am an orphan now. And it isn't any fun!" Perhaps because of that domestic obligation, she put off marriage until she was about fifty, when she married Herbert A. Reusser of Oakland, California, and left Salt Lake City She may have met her future husband while on an emergency trip to California seeking relief from chronic asthma attacks that had, at least on one occasion, required hospitalization A truly glamorous beauty who could have passed for a 1930s movie star, Sinclair was also a talented singer who sometimes entertained state legislators while soliciting appropriations for the Society and also sang at annual meetings and on radio shows advertise his "Old Trails, Old Forts, Old Trappers and Traders," which appeared in the Quarterly in 1941, a "rehash of baloney." Morgan thought Auerbach a lazy researcher whose "curiosity was underdeveloped." Morgan to Marguerite Sinclair, March 15, 1943, Morgan Papers, Utah State Historical Society.
ing the Society's programs. Her hundred-watt personality won many memberships and friendships for the Society, and her seemingly bottomless energy often kept her at her desk until late at night, putting together a new issue of the Quarterly or answering letters requesting historical information. With Alter and Auerbach only occasionally present in the office, Sinclair provided the administrative continuity that helped the Society secure a firm place in Utah cultural life.49
It is unclear why Sinclair came to the Society. She apparently had no formal training in history, though that was also true of Alter and Auerbach. She had previously been employed—at a higher salary—by the federal government, and it is not unreasonable to speculate that the Society offered her a chance to step out of a routine job and into management. As things turned out, she generated some real organizational momentum and stamped her personality on the Society as no one but Alter had previously done.
Controversy attended her hiring. The dramatic Democratic victory in the election of 1932, which sent Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House and elected the Democrat Henry H. Blood as governor of Utah, reverberated down through the lesser state bureaucracy as the party filled any positions not under the civil service system with loyal Democrats Seeking to replace Flora Bean Home as secretary treasurer and librarian, the Board of Control of the Society was told by telephone that "the State Board of Examiners (which approves all State employees) would probably not look with full favor on any applicant, especially from Salt Lake County, not formally endorsed by the District, Precinct, County and State Democratic Party Organization." The canny Sinclair, a Democrat, had taken care to attach just such an endorsement to her application. Evidently challenged on the matter, the board then had to assure its critics that Sinclair's hiring had been based on her qualifications rather than her politics: "The Board condemn [s] any suggestion of political partisanship or influence, in the choice of officers or employees of the Society."50 In view of the earlier directive from the State Board of Examiners, the protestation rings more than a little hollow On the other hand, as Glen Leonard observes, Sinclair's influence on the hiring process was a clear demonstration of her competence in the area most needed by the struggling organization: "its new agent proved that her most capable asset was, after all, that of lobbyist."51
Her salary also aroused controversy Sinclair demanded $120 per month, which she pointed out was $15 less than her previousjob with the federal government Unfortunately, it was also no less than four times the salary Alter, whom she was replacing, had been drawing—a big pill for the depression-era legislature to swallow. Alter, Auerbach, and board member Levi Edgar Young of the history department of the University of Utah rushed to argue that the rate of pay was the same as that given Alter, for he had been part-time. A compromise was eventually reached: Sinclair would get her salary if she could collect the amount beyond that previously appropriated for Alter from membership and subscription receipts; travel and office budget and Quarterly appropriations were not to be touched. If those collections were to fall short of $120 in any given month, Sinclair was expected to take leave without pay. 52
It was a direct challenge to her ability to sail her own boat through the still-stagnant waters of Utah's depressed economy, but the audacious Sinclair accepted. And succeeded. There is no record that she ever missed a minute of work for lack of salary, and in fact she continued, to the very end of the depression, to negotiate raises: to $135 in 1939 (her previous salary with the federal government), and to $175 in 1941. The Society prospered as well through her labors. In 1939 Sinclair reported, "A good deal of time was spent by the Secretary when the Legislature was in session, in the interests of the Society, conferring with legislators and other influential persons, whose friendships were important in getting the new $5000 appropriation." Nor was that the end. As Glen Leonard points out, "while entertaining legislators with her musical talents, Miss Sinclair boosted the Society's budget during the 1940s past the ten, twenty, and then thirty thousand dollar marks." Finally, one can also easily imagine her hand in the Society's move from what Auerbach had called the "dog house" quarters in the basement of the Capitol to third floor quarters adjoining and including a portion of the Law Library/53
DALE L MORGAN AND SCHOLARLY RESPECTABILITY
At the time of Sinclair's hiring, she told the board "of her visits to libraries in the east to study cataloging and filing; and of installing the [Dewey] Decimal Classification, letter and other filing systems." This does not seem to indicate formal training in library science, but it does indicate an interest in studying the field on her own and reflects her enthusiasm for working at the Society. Her energy and intelligence enabled her to learn on the job, but she needed guidance, and she found that in Dale L Morgan, the extraordinary western historian who made the maps that guided the Society on its first voyages into scholarly respectability. Although Morgan worked at the Society briefly to arrange the records of the WPA Historical Records Survey and Writers Project, typically he served as an unpaid writer, editor, and bibliographer during late-night work sessions at home in Washington, D.C., or Berkeley, California.54
Morgan's career triumphed over a sequence of tragedies that would have stopped almost anyone. Born in Salt Lake City, he was the oldest of four children. His father died when he was five, and his mother had to support the family on her meager salary as an elementary school teacher. His most serious setback came when he contracted spinal meningitis at age fourteen and lost his hearing "The loss of my hearing pretty well broke up the world I had lived in . . . , " Morgan recalled as an adult; "it confirmed a tendency to introspection and living in a personal world; it broke me out of most social contacts and faced me with various difficult problems of adjustment, not least among which was a grave doubt as to my competency to survive in the kind of depression we had during my high school years."55 Locked in a silent world, Morgan turned his deafness into as much of an advantage as he could. During his long, productive career as a historian, he was able to work singlemindedly in any environment, oblivious of distractions.
Morgan studied art in high school with the goal of a career in commercial art and advertising, which seemed the most promising of the depression-era alternatives he could envision. But he must have shown promise already as a writer, for his senior English teacher found college tuition for him through the state Vocational Rehabilitation Department. Although poverty continued to dog his four years at the University of Utah ("I rarely had a nickel to rub one against another," he recalled), he did considerable writing in addition to his art studies, which enabled him to recover "a measure of self respect and confidence in myself."56
After graduating from the U, Morgan struggled to find work in art but found his writing ability in greater demand. He accepted employment with the WPA Historical Records Survey in Ogden and then split his time between that and the WPA Writers Project. He finally took over the latter in 1940 and produced Utah: A Guide to the State. By the time it was published, Morgan was attracting national attention as a researcher and writer, and Farrar 8c Rinehart offered him a contract to write a history of the Humboldt River for their Rivers of America Series. His historical career had begun. From then until his death in 1971 he developed a record as one of the mightiest literary engines in western history, producing dozens of books and articles and thousands of letters As Everett Cooley observes, "Dale compressed more projects into his too short life than many of us would do were we given a dozen lives "57
Morgan's research energy, mastery of complex detail, and literary productivity have made him, in the eyes of modern admirers, something of a historiographical demigod. Upon closer examination, however, it seems that Morgan's competencies were quite myopic, so that for every causative force in history that he could focus upon, many others escaped his vision entirely. His myopia was a reaction against the Mormon culture within which he grew up, a culture more inclined to interpret itself in myth and symbol than in factual accuracy Thus Morgan trained himself in skepticism, rejecting unfounded myths and dedicating himself to a rigorously empirical method He naturally gravitated toward those aspects of history that could be conclusively explained by such a method, specifically western exploration and immigration. In his studies of the fur trappers, explorers, and pioneers, Morgan was content to establish a factually accurate but superficial narrative of movement through time and space, avoiding for the most part those larger (but vaguer) questions of motivation, personality, and psychology, and ignoring literary and other cultural matters altogether.58 This is the view of the historical process that Morgan largely imposed upon the Utah Historical Quarterly during the 1940s and early 1950s.
Morgan found the Historical Society receptive to his view of history, and his correspondence indicates the dominant role he played during World War II and the decade following Some of his letters provide answers to difficult reference questions passed along by Sinclair; others contain lengthy acquisition lists for the library; still others recommend special issues of the Quarterly. Morgan found the Society's original goal of publishing primary sources in the Quarterly much to his liking. The first step in writing history, the veteran employee of the Historical Records Survey realized, is to gain access to the sources. Those sources were in short supply in Morgan's day, and he followed up on the Quarterly's tradition of devoting entire issues to translations or edited versions of entire diaries. Following his interest, those diaries were always from the period of exploration and settlement and more often than not were from the pens of non-Mormons or pre-Mormon explorers. The best examples were volumes 15 and 16, which completed publication of all extant diaries from the twoJohn Wesley Powell explorations of the Colorado River, a project begun in 1939 with the diary of Almon Harris Thompson. Morgan's great labor of love was volume 19 (1951), called Westfrom Fort Bridger, which contained copiously annotated editions of all extant diaries of the 1846 pioneers. Begun by local businessman J Roderic Korns with the help of Morgan and Charles Kelly, the project, still unfinished at Korns's death, was carried to completion by Morgan.
Finally, Morgan contributed two other massive pieces of research to the Society. Both projects were largely accomplished during his lunch hours and other free time while employed by the federal government in Washington, D.C. One was his laboriously typewritten transcripts of all articles on the Mormons and the Far West from eastern and midwestern newspapers during the first half of the nineteenth century Carbon copies of this voluminous but still underused resource went to several research libraries, including the Utah State Historical Society The other was his gargantuan bibliography of Mormonism, begun at the same time and still far from complete at his death The Society took over those card files and tried to keep them current during Morgan's later years, but eventually the project passed to Brigham Young University, whose greater resources under Chad Flake, director of Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library, finally brought it to publication in 1978.59
By the time Morgan moved to Berkeley in 1954 to work at the Bancroft Library, the Society was beginning to pass beyond its elitist and amateurish beginnings, and he was in major part responsible for its development. His energy, his literary flair, his impeccable scholarly standards, and his creative imagination—all spiced with an identifiable quotient of egotism—had led to establishment of the Quarterly as an outlet for authentic scholarship, to the beginnings of a fine western history library, and to the beginnings of a manuscript collection with his arrangement of the WPA Historical Records Survey and Writers Project records which had come to the Society when the WPA disbanded in 1942
At the midcentury mark, then, the Utah State Historical Society still had a stake in two worlds. On the one hand, it was still run by what Charles S Peterson has called "citizen historians"—dedicated and energetic amateurs without academic training in history (Alter, Auerbach, Sinclair, Morgan—none had so much as a bachelor's degree in the field).60 On the other hand, "citizen historian" is not a pejorative term, particularly in Utah, where some of our best histories have been written by such people. One need only mention the names of Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Charles Kelly, Leonard Arrington, Wallace Stegner, and Bernard DeVoto to make the point, but many others could be included. Nevertheless, professional, scholarly standards of research and writing were only beginning to emerge, and much of the Society's approach to state history echoed Peterson's memorable summation of the view of a sister institution, the Kansas State Historical Society, at a similar point in its development. It was, he said, "undeviatingly committed to the grandness of Kansas, frankly promotional, thoroughly interested in beginnings, successful in collecting Kansas newspapers, wild about heroes, artifacts, sites, trails, and Indian wars, and willing to bend the truth for good cause." Its publications, like those of Reuben Gold Thwaites in Wisconsin and Hubert Howe Bancroft in California, reflected and fed "the popular taste for quantity, beginnings, and . . . uncritical, action-driven, maledominated, fact-based narrative."61
As we have seen, under Dale Morgan's influence, the Utah State Historical Society was beginning to mature beyond those unsophisticated beginnings But it had a way yet to go as the Society passed its fiftieth anniversary. Two events would significantly accelerate its maturation. One was World War II, which marked the end of the Federal Writers Project that had nurtured Morgan's development as a historian and also sharpened Utahns' focus on the distinctive features of Utah regionalism. The war began shifting the Utah mind from its preoccupation with local and regional matters to a global perspective and a concern for larger moral and historical issues Eventually this larger perspective would interest Utah historians in the state's place on the national and international stage and broaden their interest to include larger themes than heroes, Indian wars, and trails which, in Peterson's phrase, "seemed increasingly anachronistic in the post-World War II time of global crisis."62 The other great postwar turning point was the appointment of the first academically trained historian as director of the Society.
Arlington Russell Mortensen was born in 1911 in the John R. Winder home at 49 North West Temple across from Temple Square in Salt Lake City. His parents, who had met while on missions for the Mormon church (he was editor of Liahona magazine and she was a secretary), were both in their thirties before marrying and beginning a family. "They were both old maids before they married," he said. Although his eccentric parents were not the iconoclasts he later became, they were, as he recalled, "'different' people in away," and he must have inherited from them an inclination to blaze his own trail through life.63
Mortensen grew up with one foot in Utah and the other in southern California, where his parents took him as a child. The elder Mortensen became a contractor in Santa Monica and built many houses there and in other suburbs of Los Angeles. During the late 1920s Mortensen's father and a partner developed a mine in southern Nevada and put Russ to work in it—illegally, for he was only in his late teens. The mine went broke, but the father found work on the new Boulder Dam, which helped them through the early depression years. Mortensen's education was also divided between the two states. After high school in Santa Monica, he returned to Utah for college, graduating from Brigham Young University in 1937. He taught secondary school in Utah for a time before enrolling in UCLA for graduate work in history. His studies there were under John W. Caughey, a student of Herbert E. Bolton, who had studied with Frederick Jackson Turner—an intellectual lineage Mortensen was proud to recite.64 His UCLA years were busy ones. In addition to his graduate studies, he taught history at San Bernardino Valley College, did research for his dissertation—a history of the Deseret News—at the Huntington Library in San Marino, and fathered six children with his wife, Bessie Burch Mortensen
During his research at the Huntington he met Juanita Brooks, who was there working on the diaries of John D. Lee which she published with Robert Glass Cleland in 1955.65 One evening as they were finishing their work for the day, someone asked Mortensen if he could give Brooks, who had no transportation, a ride to Santa Monica. They had much to talk about, not only as a couple of expatriate Utah historians but also because Mortensen happened to be a descendant of John D. Lee.66 In addition, as scholars, both were engaged in clearing off the mossy myths of Mormon history through objective investigation of the new corpus of primary sources that had been vastly enlarged by the WPA Historical Records Survey and the collecting efforts of Brooks herself. They were firm friends and allies ever after, particularly during their association at the Utah State Historical Society. With Mortensen as director and Brooks as a board member, the two stood shoulder to shoulder through many battles as they brought the organization to scholarly and institutional maturity.
Tragedy visited Mortensen's life at about the time he finished his doctoral work, for his wife died, leaving him to raise their six small children alone. Fortunately, opportunity opened at the Utah State Historical Society almost at that moment, enabling him to meet his heavy obligations. J. Cecil Alter, who had moved to Cincinnati in 1941, attempted to continue as editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, but his absentee management worked poorly, and he abandoned it in 1945 By 1949 he found it necessary to resign from the board. In the same year, Marguerite Sinclair resigned her position and moved with her new husband to California These departures left a gaping hole at the Society, and the board began looking for someone big enough to fill it.67
Juanita Brooks saw a great opportunity to continue and even increase the momentum generated during the 1940s by Sinclair and Morgan. As a member of the Society's board, she energetically advocated Mortensen's application for the position of editor-secretary (the combined positions of Alter and Sinclair). "That's the man," Mortensen remembered Brooks telling her fellow board members, "That's the man. . . . She supported me with a passion." He was hired on August 29, 1950, at a salary of $4,000.68 He was not only the first Ph.D to lead the Society but also the first person with any academic training in history at all to have been involved in management of the organization.
Mortensen brought a personality as well as a Ph.D He was the storm center of the universe he inhabited, an imperious, abrupt iconoclast whose intellect and energies pulled him in a hundred ways at once His cross-grained skepticism probably had its roots in the eccentricity of his parents, from whom he learned that a happy and productive life did not necessarily require conformity. That skepticism would have been encouraged by his historical training, in which he was taught to put all sources, authorities, and orthodoxies to the test.
When Charles Kelly, another iconoclastic historian whose career we will examine shortly, died in 1971, Mortensen perceptively memorialized him in words that eerily apply to Mortensen himself:
Mortensen "was a difficult person in lots and lots of ways to live with," his widow, Dorothy, remembers,
Juanita Brooks, Historical Society board member and the author of seminal works in Mormon history, urged the hiring ofRuss Mortensen as director.
Finally, Stanford J Layton, a Mortensen graduate student in later years at the University of Utah, points to "his gregarious nature and noisy personality, his spontaneous and contagious smile, his earthy language and endless similes, his sense of loyalty to his profession and colleagues, and, always, his candor." If Mortensen's personality could be a steel trap, it was also a magnet. "His office was always a lively center of business and conversation," Layton continues:
One might well wonder what kind of gremlin dust was in the Utah atmosphere to bring to office almost simultaneously the famous renegade governor, J Bracken Lee (1949), and that scourge of the orthodox, A. Russell Mortensen (1950). Although the two were from opposing political parties, it is perhaps not too surprising that they liked and respected each other, nor that Lee sometimes drew upon Mortensen's vivid writing and historical expertise for speeches. Together, they brought welcome dashes of color to Utah life during the drab Cold War years, and the Utah State Historical Society flourished as never before, achieving its first real professional and institutional maturity. When Lee moved out of the governor's residence, the Thomas Kearns mansion on South Temple, the Society moved in. The Utah Historical Quarterly drew more and more upon scholarly authors, yet never lost its common touch, and under Mortensen's marketing enterprise made considerable progress toward becoming a popular magazine as well. He founded the State Archives and hired another Ph.D., Everett L. Cooley, to head the new program. The shaky annual meetings became a regular event, and John James began building the Society's collection of books, manuscripts, and photographs. As a result of all these developments, the Society became the primary focal point for an amazing outpouring of scholarship, as people like Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Wallace Stegner, Charles Kelly, Stanley S. Ivins, and a multitude of others poured into the Kearns mansion to use the Society's collections and to publish their research in the Quarterly. At the center of all this activity was its great engine, Russ Mortensen, and it is impossible to dispute Stan Layton's observation that "it is axiomatic among Utah historians today that no one had a greater impact in shaping the image, standards, and traditions of the Society than this dynamic and talented man."72
One of Mortensen's most useful accomplishments was to secure adequate quarters within which the Society could conduct the ambitious programs he had in mind for it As we have seen, the Society had already moved from the "dog house" in the State Capitol basement to room 337. Although 337 was a significant improvement, it was still cramped. Upon entering the room, the visitor was greeted by a secretary in a small reception area in front about ten feet square where she had a desk and file cabinets, then directed to a larger inner room where most of the activity took place. Mortensen's desk was at the rear, with his back to the window Also in the room was another secretary and, after 1952,John James, the librarian. In an adjacent room was a bookkeeper and a typist. "It was of course most unsatisfactory, "James recalled. "Dr. Mortensen had no privacy; no one had any privacy. His secretary was a moderate [sic; "marvelous"?] typist. When she would get going it would sound like a machine gun When Dr Mortensen had visitors or I had visitors, often we would have to take them out into the hall of the capitol to talk to them."73
The library and manuscript collection were extremely modest; the library consisted of about 1,500 volumes occupying three glassfront bookcases in the room withJohn James, and the manuscript collection was little more than the WPA Historical Records Survey materials that were being arranged by Dale Morgan.74 Obviously the Historical Society had reached a limit on its growth and would have to move if it were to expand.
An opportunity presented itself to Mortensen's resourceful imagination in 1951 when he read a story in the morning Tribune to the effect that Governor Lee disliked the official governor's residence, the Kearns mansion at 603 East South Temple. Lee apparently wanted to move out and was looking for another use for the building. Mortensen reported for work that morning full of enthusiasm for acquiring it as the new quarters for the Society.75 It would be a long-term project, though, for Lee and his family remained in the mansion until the end of his second term.
The career of Thomas Kearns (1862-1918) is one of Utah's Horatio Alger stories, a classic vindication of the American Dream of rags to riches through hard work and a little luck Kearns's parents were Irish immigrants to Ontario, Canada, where he was born. An apathetic student, he left school as a teenager and joined the Black Hills gold rush of 1879, worked as a freighter and miner in Tombstone, Arizona, and then moved to Park City, Utah, where he worked in the mines for seven years and did some prospecting of his own in his spare time. In one mine he observed an undetected vein of silver ore leading into the unleased Mayflower property. He seized the opportunity and netted an estimated fortune of $1,600,000.
Kearns's new wealth gave him entry to the upper level of Utah society as well as politics. After cutting his political teeth as a member of the city council of Park City, he made the gigantic leap to a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1901, the same year that he purchased the Salt Lake Tribune. By 1902 he and his wife,Jennie Judge Kearns, had built an imposing mansion on South Temple, joining nouveau riche mining magnates and other wealthy residents who were turning the street into an architectural showpiece. The three-story French Renaissance structure built of oolitic limestone (as was the Park Building at the U. and William Randolph Hearst's fabulous San Simeon mansion in California) quickly became a notable landmark and center for Salt Lake's high society.
In 1937 Mrs. Kearns donated the mansion to the state of Utah. The building's impressive elegance and convenient location suggested its use as the Governor's Mansion—a role it filled for some twenty years. Governor Henry H. Blood lived in it during part of his tenure, and then it was occupied by Governor Herbert B Maw for eight years As we have seen, Governor Lee grumblingly lived there during his two terms but objected to the building's lack of privacy and other inconveniences as a home (there was no elevator linking its basement and three stories, for example) Lee's proverbial contrariness in this instance worked to the Historical Society's advantage.
Mortensen presented his case to the Historical Society board on August 18, 1951, with all the enthusiasm he could muster. He had talked to the administrator of the Kearns estate and to the governor and found them both strongly in support of the idea. "Although it would require a large sum of money to maintain this building," Mortensen admitted, "if the Historical Society should ever acquire the Governor's Mansion, it would be in a much better position to demand more money Also, the Society would have sufficient room to house donations of private collections and libraries, which in turn would bring about more contributions." The legislature, however, was more impressed by the expense than the opportunity and indicated a preference for retaining the site as a governor's residence It did appoint a committee to explore the possibility of designating larger quarters for the Society in the Capitol.76
Mortensen acquired a powerful ally in 1954 with the appointment of wealthy lawyer, businessman, and history buff Nicholas G Morgan, Sr, to the board. Morgan was born in Salt Lake City in 1884 to a family of Mormon pioneers After graduating from the University of Utah, he took a law degree at Georgetown Law School in Washington, D.C., and was admitted to the Utah Bar in 1910. He enjoyed an active legal career as Salt Lake County attorney and then as law clerk for future President William Howard Taft and Utah Senator Reed Smoot. His business interests included the presidency of Morgan-Walton Oil Company and development of oil fields in Wyoming and Utah.77
Morgan was fiercely proud of his pioneer heritage and collected a significant library of books, maps, and photographs of Utah history. At the time he joined the Board of Control of the Historical Society, he was also national president of the Sons of the Utah Pioneers Though not known as a writer, he published biographies of his pioneer father and of Eliza R Snow Perhaps his most ambitious historical venture was the dismantling of the old Salt Lake City Hall (renamed the Council House) and its removal from First South and State streets to its present location on Capitol Hill.78 Although, as we shall see, Mortensen had reason later to view Morgan as "an opportunist," Mortensen saw his own opportunity to take advantage of Morgan's wealth and political skill to the Society's benefit. If Morgan would use the Society to promote his own ends, that was part of the bargain.
Upon his appointment to the board on October 22, 1954, Morgan immediately announced his intention to donate his library to the Society. It was a significant collection, which John James estimated at
about 3,000 volumes, and although the Society already had perhaps 80 or 90 percent of them, it almost doubled the collection. Complete runs of several scarce Mormon periodicals were a particularly valuable accession. To house this large collection, let alone administer it properly, required larger quarters. Additional staff would also be needed to catalogue these works and the large number of photographs
Morgan was adding to the sizable group of WPA photographs in the Society's possession.79
Morgan headed a committee to pursue acquisition of the Kearns mansion, a role he accepted with alacrity. His strategy was to approach the matter through the Kearns heirs, getting their approval first and then presumably getting them to join him in lobbying the legislature. He was confident enough of its eventual success that his report on May 19, 1956, induced the board to postpone the annual meeting from October to the following February, hoping that the gathering could then be held in the mansion His optimism was not misplaced, for the board minutes of August 14 report passage of House Bill 225, which gave the mansion to the Society and appropriated an annual budget of $10,000 for its maintenance.80
THE KEARNS MANSION YEARS
Mortensen's enthusiasm and vision and Nicholas Morgan's energy and political savvy had carried the day. The Kearns mansion would house the Society for over twenty years. 81 To be sure, working in the mansion had its disadvantages. "I remember John James was not all that enthusiastic about it," Dorothy Mortensen notes, "because it had to be converted to library use." She added:
In subsequent years, long-suffering librarians like Martha R. Stewart developed a stamina that other jobs in their profession would not have required, hefting books and manuscript boxes up those long flights of stairs. Not until the Society moved into its present quarters in the renovated Denver 8c Rio Grande Depot would the stacks be located on the same floor as the reading room, with elevator access to the basement overflow area.
The mansion's less than ideal configuration notwithstanding, most staff members adapted readily, losing their discomfort in their delight as they happily welcomed the rapidly increasing flow of patrons to their elegant new quarters, the first appropriate facility the Society had known. It is worth lingering over the mansion years, for although the Society in later decades developed much larger collections, a broader spectrum of programs, and a better trained staff, employees and patrons have come to look back upon that period, and not without good reason, as a sort of golden age.
Although the Quarterly continued to improve as the Society's most visible activity, most visitors to the mansion came to use the rapidly expanding library, and their research there produced a steady stream of books and articles, some of which have achieved classic status. Presiding over the library was John W. James, Jr., who, during his twenty-year tenure, would leave the stamp of his unique personality on the Society and its holdings. Born in 1917 in Salt Lake City, he attended East High School and majored in history at the University of Utah Handsome and outgoing—indeed, charismatic—he was a prominent figure in the social life of those two institutions. But his outward charm, as his long-time friend Helen Z. Papanikolas has observed, masked his intellect, his scholarly depth, and the "stoic view of life that came to be associated with him later" as advancing rheumatoid arthritis made his last years an agony. 83
After graduating from the university, James migrated for a time to New York City in search of an interesting career, income not being the most important thing. He realized years later that while in New York he had been living, unknowingly, right across the street from the auction house that was selling off the Auerbach collection—an ironic coincidence for the future librarian of the Utah State Historical Society Eventually he returned to Salt Lake City While talking with one of the librarians at the U., he learned of an opening at the Society and applied for it. He found that Mortensen wanted to balance the gender composition of the staff, for he was the only male, but that he also wanted a "thoroughly trained" person to take charge of the embryonic library. James, who had no library training or experience, promised to undertake six months' training at the U. library if hired, and Mortensen agreed to the proposal. "I felt I was very lucky to get the job, "James reminisced thirty years later. "I stayed with it for twenty years and thoroughly enjoyed it."
An indefatigable reader and bibliophile, James set a sagacious course toward building the collections that had previously grown slowly, as we have seen, in anticipation of receiving the Auerbach collection. He persuaded Mortensen to let him begin cataloguing the books in the Dewey Decimal System, which all other Utah libraries were using at the time, and to improvise a similar system for the photographs In October 1957 Margaret D Shepherd (later Lester), who had worked at the Salt Lake City Public Library, was hired to help catalogue both books and photographs, but she soon shifted completely to photographs and brought the cataloguing system there to its ultimate maturity.84
As the collection of published materials grew, so did the manuscript collection. Although the great expansion of the manuscript collection occurred during the administration of Everett L. Cooley (1961-69), James could report during the Society's first year in the mansion that it possessed 350 manuscripts, including such Mormon pioneer collections as the diaries of Hosea Stout and John Bennion and the letterbooks of William Clayton, in addition to correspondence of Colorado River explorer Frederick S. Dellenbaugh and photostatic copies of the papers of mountain man Jedediah S. Smith.85 At about that time, James made the archivally unorthodox but nevertheless practical decision to dismantle the WPA collection, removing the hundreds of pioneer diaries and reminiscences collected by the Historical Records Survey and cataloguing them as individual manuscripts for greater accessibility
The result of this collecting and cataloguing by an expanded and professionally competent staff was an increasingly tempting collection that lured both scholars and buffs to explore its depths and byways. The mansion's elegant but intimate and comfortable environment made it a social as well as an intellectual center for Utah and western historians, who found it a place where they loved to linger as well as work. Staff and patrons from that era remember the daily coffee breaks that became a famous institution at the Society. Everyone present on a particular day would be invited to go down to the kitchen and gather around the large, blue linoleum-topped table and compare notes over a cup of coffee Scholarly Utah history was yet in its infancy, and as researchers broke virgin ground in the Society's collections they found a ready audience and plenty of proffered help in interpreting their discoveries around the kitchen table. As Everett Cooley reminisced,
Although the Society long ago left behind the kitchen table and the coffee pot, the tradition of conviviality has never died. Late in life, while the Society was in its transitional quarters in the Crane Building on Second South during renovation of the Rio Grande Depot, John
James painfully climbed the steps one morning a week to help catalog manuscripts and brought some of the old tradition to the midmorning break, his deformed fingers grasping a bottle of Coca Cola and his dark eyes shining as he confided an entertaining bit of historical gossip. Although the quiet hum of computers has replaced the cacophonous clack of typewriters, the Society library has always been a noisy place to work—for better or for worse!— as researchers shed the decorous silence maintained at other institutions and happily debate their findings with infrequently met colleagues.
Perhaps no patron made more of a contribution to shaping the Society during the mansion years than Juanita Brooks. More than just a patron, she was also an employee and a board member who joined with Dale Morgan and Russ Mortensen to make the Society a center of rigorous and objective scholarship. There was little in her outward appearance to suggest the depth of her intellect and her courage. "She looks like the meekest kind of member of the [LDS Ladies] Relief Society," Dale Morgan reported to Fawn Brodie, and Mortensen added that "She's the most unsophisticated person every minute of her life. She's just a country girl."87 Indeed, much in her background seemed to predestine her for the life of a housewife. She was born in Bunkerville, Nevada, on the Mormon frontier, poorly educated, early married, and quickly widowed. There were few reasons to suspect that she would become a foremost Utah and Mormon historian But she became entranced by the history of her people, particularly by the hushed rumors of the tragic Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, the long shadow of which loomed over southwestern Utah generations later.
In time Brooks became a teacher, earned a master's degree in English from Columbia University, married a widower with a family of his own, and set out, as an avocation during the desperate days of the depression, to collect the historical records of her region. Arising early to get some writing done before having to get her husband and children off for the day, Brooks maintained a grueling schedule. Aware that her literary career was highly unconventional for her time and place, she kept an ironing board set up so she could instantly shift to a less suspicious task if unexpected visitors appeared. But the cat was out of the bag with the appearance of The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1950, a book that scandalized southern Utah by its impertinent subject and frank admission of Mormon guilt while establishing Brooks as a first-rank researcher and interpreter of western history. Other scholarly successes followed—edited versions of the diaries ofJohn D. Lee, Hosea Stout, and Thomas D. Brown, and a biography of Lee. Her later years produced a lesser group of biographies (including her own) and family histories.88
Brooks's most significant enterprise during her affiliation with the Society was editing the Hosea Stout diaries, a lengthy and expensive collaboration between the Society and the University of Utah Press that almost failed from lack of funds but in the end provided access to one of the most important documents in Mormon history. Stout, an early convert to Mormonism, was associated with the church's rougher side as bodyguard to Joseph Smith, as chief of police of Nauvoo, Illinois, and as a member of the Danite band But he also moved in the highest circles of the church and was privy to much of its inner workings. When the Society acquired the tiny volumes of Stout's diary in 1957 from a granddaughter, it was immediately apparent that here was a historical source of paramount importance. The Society hired Brooks to annotate the diary for publication which eventually was undertaken by the University of Utah Press after Mortensen became its director. Apparently no one fully realized the richness of the diary and the extent to which appropriate annotation would have to go, for at the end of two years the project was still incomplete By then Everett Cooley had taken over as director of the Society, and he was able to raise donations from Stout family members and others to see the project through to completion. It stands today one of the great monuments of Mormon and Utah scholarship, perhaps the greatest Mormon diary in the history of the northern part of the state, as John D. Lee's (also edited by Brooks) is for the southern part.89
Another of the Society's regulars during the mansion years was Charles Kelly. A transplanted midwesterner whose father had been an Elmer Gantry-type preacher, Kelly's hostility to religion spilled over into an irascible skepticism about human nature in general. The combative Kelly needed enemies as foils for his barbed pessimism, and he found a plentiful supply of them in Mormon country After moving to Utah following World War I, he divided his time between his home on Salt Lake City's Avenues and Wayne County, where he became the first superintendent of Capitol Reef National Monument.90
A printer by profession, Kelly made history his hobby. No doubt aggravated by the pious Mormon version of Utah history that was prevalent in his day, he set out to show that the state had a rich non-Mormon heritage as well, both before and after 1847 Through a voluminous and often heated correspondence with Dale Morgan and Roderic Korns, Kelly and his colleagues blazed the first trails through Utah's role in the fur trade, the California immigration, and the exploration of the Colorado River. On his own, Kelly investigated the careers of Butch Cassidy and other infamous outlaws. Not content with library research, he cranked up his Model A Ford and followed the Donner party across the salt flats, jumped into a boat and retraced Major John Wesley Powell's trips through Glen Canyon, and tracked the Hole-in-the-Wall gang to their hideouts in eastern Utah
Beginning with Salt DesertTrails in 1930, his self-published study of the Donner party, a torrent of books and articles poured from his pen. No ivory tower scholar, Kelly also found popular outlets for his vivid prose in periodicals like Arizona Highways and Desert Magazine. Perhaps his most original work was his 1936 biography of the mountain man Caleb Greenwood.91 Greenwood's career was interesting not only because of his dramatic achievements as a trapper, explorer, and guide, but also because he was already in his sixties when he first crossed the Mississippi, an age when most people of his time were retired. As a historical study, Kelly's book is remarkable for its creative method of writing a biography of a man who was illiterate and thus left no original sources Kelly's method can be stated concisely in the biblical metaphor (which he would have hated) that the rain falls on thejust and the unjust alike: if a party of trappers of which Greenwood was a member got into a pitched battle with Indians or was trapped in a snowy mountain pass, one can assume that Greenwood fought or suffered with the rest. In addition, his companions who were literate sometimes recorded Greenwood's participation in their ventures.
Kelly's contributions to the Historical Society were immense. Beginning with his editorial participation in volumes 15-17 of the Quarterly, which published all the journals available at that time of the two Powell explorations of the Colorado River, Kelly went on to contribute Quarterly articles of his own and to help shape Westfrom Fort Bridger, volume 19 (1951) Late in life he donated the bulk of his papers to the Society, and in 1960 the Society made him an Honorary Life Member. His visits to the mansion on Tuesdays with his wife Harriette during his twilight years were always memorable events, and many a coffee break was enlivened by his caustic wit and irreverent anecdotes. In a heartfelt memorial tribute, Mortensen observed that "all who truly love and are uplifted by the vast open spaces of the Great Basin, the high plateaus of the Colorado, and the mountains in between, forever owe a debt to Kelly for the written legacy he has left behind."92
Finally, one of history's unsung heroes, Stanley S Ivins, did most of his painstaking research on Mormon polygamy at the mansion and donated his vast collection of notes on that and other aspects of Mormon fundamentalism to the Society. Although the Ivins name itself is of course well known in Utah, primarily through Stanley's father, Anthony W. Ivins, an apostle of the Mormon church and leader of the post-Manifesto polygamist colonies in Mexico, Stanley's contribution to Utah history is much less well known, mainly because he published little of his voluminous research. Instead, he is remembered as a great research mentor at the mansion, one who quietly and generously shared his encyclopedic knowledge of Mormon history and bibliography with any who sought him out.93 Like his colleagues Juanita Brooks and Dale Morgan, Ivins was a "citizen historian," as Charles S Peterson calls them Although schooled in animal husbandry as a young man, Ivins found himself in comfortable enough financial circumstances that he never had to earn a living. Instead, the life-long bachelor was able to divide his time between supervising his family's investments and single-mindedly researching Mormon history.
Ivins's active participation in the Mormon church seems to have ended with the death of his father in 1934. Thereafter he was able to study the Mormon culture in which he had been raised pretty much as his friend Dale Morgan was able to do: as an experienced and knowledgeable, but objective, bystander His urge to understand polygamy was the initial spur to his research and always commanded his primary attention, but his interest broadened to other aspects of Utah and Mormon history, and he published articles on the Utah Constitution, the Deseret Alphabet, and the history of education
As age caught up with him, Ivins became a less constant presence at the Society than he had been in the 1940s and 1950s, but his ever-accumulating knowledge turned his weekly visits each Thursday during the 1960s into major events. Everett Cooley recalled,
Even the nearly omniscientJohn James kept a running list of baffling reference questions for resolution during those weekly calls.94
One of Mortensen's most visible achievements was to give the Utah Historical Quarterly a facelift and to support it with a vigorous promotional campaign While the Society was still housed in the State Capitol, he became aware of a dearth of informational literature on Utah. A blind man who ran a small stand selling postcards and other odds and ends outside the Capitol cafeteria complained to Mortensen that tourists were constantly asking for souvenir publications on Utah, but he had nothing to offer them. In fact, the only literature they were able to find was Mormon promotional material available at Temple Square. Mortensen conceived the idea of large printings of special issues of the Quarterly with just that market in mind.
As we have noted, there had always been a certain market for both individual issues and bound volumes of the Quarterly outside the Society's membership, but the publication's rather drab black and white format and typography and the specialized focus of many of its articles naturally limited its popular appeal. It was Mortensen's goal to turn the Quarterly, at least in its special issues, into a popular magazine with mass market appeal. To accomplish that, he first engaged a professional design artist to modernize the typography and format to increase its attractiveness and make it easier to read. Then he commissioned some of the best historical writers available—including T Edgar Lyon, Dale Morgan, David E. Miller, Everett Cooley, Jack Goodman, and Mortensen himself—to contribute a group of articles on the general theme of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake The articles were engagingly written and focused on subjects of perennial tourist interest—the Great Salt Lake, the evolution of Salt Lake City, and Temple Square.95 Color was obviously necessary to generate popular appeal, but it was too expensive for the regular Quarterly budget, so Mortensen raised private donations for color pages.
Finally, a distribution system was necessary beyond the Society's office and the notions stand at the Capitol. Magazine distributors around the city were willing to handle the special issues, but they had had no experience with publications of permanent value; they were accustomed to ripping off the covers of unsold copies for refunds each month and replacing them with current issues, so Mortensen had to make sure they left the Quarterly issues on the stands until they had sold. And sell they did. "Next to the Bible and the Book of Mormon," Mortensen recalled, the Valley of the Great Salt Lake issue "had the biggest sale of any publication ever published in Utah." Mortensen's boast was scarcely an exaggeration, for the publication eventually sold over 100,000 copies.
*To be continued in Part III
NOTES
47 Marguerite L Sinclair disclosed this fact in anti-Semitic rage when she learned that the Auerbach library was being taken over by his sisters and would not come to the Society after all When the Society was offered a set of the Journal of Discourses, she reported, Auerbach had stepped in and bought them up "before our very noses." Since he was president of the board, she continued, "I had to let him see the list and pass on the sale, and Jew that he was, he put a fast one over, AS USUAL I was and still am, just sick about it!" Sinclair to Dale Morgan, August 8, 1946, Morgan Papers, Utah State Historical Society.
48 John James, interview with Eric Redd Most of the collection went to Yale and to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley The University of Utah acquired some few items like a run of the Frontier Guardian.
49 Sinclair's personality and the meager biographical facts given here emerge in her correspondence with Dale L Morgan in the Morgan Papers at the Utah State Historical Society, especially Sinclair to Morgan, February 2 and August 10, 1944 See also Herbert W Maw, "In Memoriam: Marguerite L Sinclair Reusser, 1898-1976," Utah Historical Quarterly 44 (Fall 1976): 397-98 John James, Jr., who became librarian at the Society in 1952 and met her several times in her later years, remembered her as "a very charming, interesting woman."John James interview with Eric Redd, p 20.
50 Board Minutes, May 28 and October 1, 1937.
51 Glen M Leonard, "The Utah State Historical Society, 1897-1972," Utah Historical Quarterly 40 (Fall 1972): 306.
52 Board Minutes, May 28, 1937.
53 Board Minutes, April 8, 1939, and April 5, 1941; Leonard, "The Utah State Historical Society, 1897-1972," pp 306-307 Dorothy Mortensen, who worked at the Society in its third floor quarters, recalls that the Society occupied the Law Library except when the legislature was in session, at which time the staff had to retreat into its adjoining room. Dorothy Mortensen, interview with the author, October 9, 1996, p. 5.
54 Board Minutes, May 28, 1937 The biographical data on Morgan that follow are drawn primarily from Everett L. Cooley, "In Memoriam: Dale L. Morgan, 1914-1971," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (1971): 85-88; and John Phillip Walker, ed., Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986), pp 7-21.
55 Morgan to Juanita Brooks, April 12, 1942, in the Papers of Juanita Brooks, Utah State Historical Society; reprinted in Walker, Dale Morgan, pp 25-29.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., Cooley, "In Memoriam," p. 88.
58 Will Bagley and Harold Schindler, for example, claim that Morgan's laborious transcripts of western newspapers enabled him "to write on virtually every aspect of western history with authority far and above that of any other scholar." WestfromFort Bridger, rev ed (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994), p ix For a contrasting view see Gary Topping, "Personality and Motivation in Utah Historiography," Dialogue: AJournal of Mormon Thought 27 (Spring 1994): 75-79.
59 Chad Flake, ed., A Mormon Bibliography (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1978).
60 Peterson, "Speaking for the Past," p 753.
61 Ibid., pp, 752, 754-55. The reader who checks these references will see that I have telescoped several passages.
62 Ibid., p 759.
63 A Russell Mortensen interview with Levi Peterson, September 9, 1985, pp 23-24.
64 Stanford J Layton, "In Memoriam: A Russell Mortensen, 1911-95," Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (1995): 176-79. As a Mortensen graduate student, Layton, managing editor of Utah Historical Quarterly since 1973, continued the academic genealogy.
65 A Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries ofJohn D. Lee, 1848-1876, 2 vols. (San Marino , California: Huntington Library, 1955).
66 A R Mortensen interview with Levi Peterson, p 8; Dorothy Mortensen interview with the author, October 9, 1996, p 8.
67 Board Minutes, September 30, 1948; July 27, 1949.
68 A R Mortensen interview with Levi Peterson, p 8; Board Minutes, August 29, 1950.
69 A R Mortensen, "In Memoriam: Charles Kelly, 1889-1971," Utah Historical Quarterly 39 (1971): 200.
70 Dorothy Mortensen interview with the author, p 30.
71 Stanford J. Layton, "In Memoriam: A. Russell Mortensen, 1911-95," Utah Historical Quarterly 63 (1995): 178.
72 Ibid., 177.
73 John James, Jr., interview with Eric Redd, August 9, 1972, p 1; Dorothy Mortensen interview with the author, pp. 5-6.
74 Dorothy Mortensen interview, pp 5-6; Joh n James interview, pp 1-2.
75 Dorothy Mortensen interview, p 9.
76 Board Minutes, August 18, 1951; March 28, 1953.
77 Press Club of Salt Lake, Men ofAffairs in the State of Utah (Salt Lake City: Press Club of Salt Lake, 1914); The Pioneer, January-February 1972, p 8.
78 Ibid.; Joh n James, Jr., "In Memoriam: Nicholas G Morgan, Sr., 1884-1971," Utah Historical Quarterly 40 (1972): 5.
79 Joh n James interview, p 4 James's memory late in life may have inflated the size of the Morgan library, which the Board Minutes of January 11, 1958, give as 2,000 volumes The minutes also refer to 2,300 uncatalogued photographs from Morgan and the WPA, and 1,000 uncatalogued maps, which probably came from Morgan.
80 Board Minutes, April 9, 1955, May 19 and August 14, 1956.
81 Of course the accession of Scott Matheson to the governorship in 1977 marked a retur n to gubernatorial occupation of the mansion, a utilization that continues to this writing.
82 Dorothy Mortensen interview, p 10.
83 Biographical data here come from Joh n James, Jr., interview with Eric Redd; Hele n Z Papanikolas, "In Memoriam: Joh n W. James, Jr., 1917-1981," Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (Fall 1981): 391-92; and the author's own memories of John James during the last two years of his life.
84 With adequate crossreferencing, the decimal system has continued to function reasonably well for single photographs but has become increasingly cumbersome for books, especially in local history collections where most volumes fall in the narrow spectrum from 917 to 971, necessitating lengthy decimal differentiations for individual volumes.
85 Board Minutes, January 11, 1958.
86 Everett Cooley interview with Eric Redd, p 20.
87 Walker, Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism, p 47; Mortensen interview with Levi Peterson, p 12.
88 Levi S. Peterson, Juanita Brooks: Mormon Woman Historian (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988) Bibliographic data on Brooks's publications begin on p 479.
89 Ibid., pp 311-13; Everett L Cooley, introduction to Juanita Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier: The Dairy of Hosea Stout, 2 vols (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1965), 1: vii-viii.
90 Biographical data on Kelly come largely from an unpublished autobiography and diary in the Kelly Papers at the Utah State Historical Society See also Mortensen, "In Memoriam: Charles Kelly, 1889-1971," and Gary Topping, "Charles Kelly's Glen Canyon Ventures and Adventures," Utah Historical Quarterly 55 (1987): 120-36.
91 Old Greenwood (Salt Lake City: Western Printing Company, 1936).
92 Mortensen, "In Memoriam: Charles Kelly, 1889-1971," p. 200.
93 Biographical data on Ivins comes from "Tribute to Stanley S Ivins," Utah Historical Quarterly 35 (1967): 308-9; and Ann Hinckley's biographical introduction to her "Register of the Stanley Snow Ivins Collection" in the Society library.
94 "Tribute to Stanley S Ivins," p 308; Hinckley, "Register," pp 11-12.
95 The Valley of the Great Salt Lake issue was 27 (summer 1958) Information on production of this issue is from the A R Mortensen interview with Levi Peterson, p 6; and the Dorothy Mortensen interview with the author, pp 18-21.
