Letters

Editor,

As an archivist-historian with an interest in late nineteenth century Utah history and a Utah Historical Quarterly subscriber for almost 40 years, I was disappointed to find the Spring 2008 lead article on the legal prohibition of racial intermarriage marred by major errors of fact. The errors are sufficiently substantive to affect the author’s conclusions regarding the origins of the ban on racial intermarriage in Utah. I’m bringing this matter to your attention in the hope that the Quarterly will review and strengthen its procedures for vetting articles and thereby minimize the risks of any recurrence of such errors.

The errors begin with the author’s misunderstanding of the provisions of the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act (“Interracial Marriage in Utah,” p. 117). He states, incorrectly, that the legislation declared plural marriage a felony, disenfranchised polygamists, and barred those who practiced or believed in plural marriage from jury duty or holding public office. Rather, the Morrill Act of 1862 made polygamy a felony. And it was the Edmunds Act of 1882 that disfranchised polygamists and barred them from holding public office, creating the Utah Commission to administer these provisions.

This misconstruction leads the author to state, incorrectly, that the Edmunds- Tucker Act “changed the face of Utah politics” and filled the 1888 territorial legislation “with non-Mormon legislators who took the seats of polygamists displaced by Edmunds-Tucker” (p. 118). Soon after arriving in the territory, the Utah Commission’s application of a test oath vacated territorial and local offices held by polygamists. Their positions were filled by monogamous Mormons who could take the test oath and thereby vote and hold public office. As a result, the Utah territorial legislature continued to be dominated by the People’s Party, which represented the Mormon community. The Liberal Party, which represented the Gentile community, never came close to controlling the legislature at any time during the territorial era, though it gained a small foothold in the 1888 legislature from redistricting mandated by the Edmunds-Tucker Act (the 1886 legislature, as I recall, had a single Liberal Party representative).

Misconstruing the political composition of the 1888 territorial legislature leads the author to claim that anti-polygamist non-Mormons were the authors and primary backers of the 1888 legislation banning interracial marriage (pp. 118-19). They supposedly sought to enjoin various forms of undesirable marriages and pass territorial legislation paralleling Federal anti-polygamy legislation. Throughout his discussion he repeatedly describes the measure as the product of mostly non- Mormon legislators (p. 121). The political composition of the legislature and the final vote in each house (footnote 36) suggest otherwise, namely, that the measure could not have become law without substantial support from the People’s Party.

Finally, the author states that the Liberal Party-dominated territorial government “sought legitimacy” (p. 119) through statehood, polishing its anti-polygamy credentials and mounting a campaign to gain admission to the Union. While a statehood effort did take place, it was exclusively a Mormon-backed effort, as my research on the 1887 convention that produced the constitution (“A Reexamination of the Woodruff Manifesto in the Light of Utah Constitutional History,” UHQ, Fall 1971, 328-49) and that of Edward Leo Lyman on Mormon efforts to achieve statehood in the late 1880s and early 1890s (Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood) demonstrated many years ago. I don’t believe in playing gotcha with scholarship. Minor errors can creep into any published work, and an occasional misspelling or incorrect reference is understandable. Similarly, historians can differ in their interpretation of events. But the errors in this article are neither minor nor simply matters of interpretation. For a Utah historian to confuse the provisions of the Edmunds Act with those of the Edmunds-Tucker Act is like an historian of modern America confusing the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 with those of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And to claim that anti-Mormons controlled the 1888 territorial legislature demonstrates nothing less than a basic misreading of Utah political history. These factual matters could have been easily checked and the errors caught. Federal legislation for that period can be referenced in the GPO publication, Statutes at Large, and Firmage and Mangrum’s Zion in the Courts:A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 usefully summarizes the provisions of each major piece of Federal legislation affecting the Mormons during the territorial era, including the Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker Acts. Election results are a matter of public record, as well as local newspaper reports.

Unfortunately, the appearance of “Racial Intermarriage in Utah” in your journal has given it the patina of scholarly accuracy, and the author’s factual account of the origins of the ban on intermarriage may well be cited by future researchers. This will only compound the initial errors. While nothing can be done in this instance, I hope you and the staff of the Quarterly will reexamine your procedures for reviewing proposed articles and catching substantive errors of fact prior to publication, thereby minimizing the chances of similar problems occurring.

Sincerely Henry Wolfinger

Editor,

I am grateful that the Utah Historical Quarterly editorial staff has given me this opportunity to respond to Henry Wolfinger’s letter concerning my Spring 2008 article, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888-1963.” I thank Mr. Wolfinger for his detailed examination of the article, and hope that I can satisfactorily answer his critiques. Such exchanges between authors and readers only enhance our quest for historical accuracy and understanding, so I welcome this in the best tradition of scholarly debate.

Wolfinger’s first criticism is of my admittedly brief treatment of the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act, particularly when I state that the act “finally put teeth into federal anti-polygamy legislation by declaring plural marriage a felony, disenfranchising polygamists, and barring those who practiced or believed in plural marriage from jury duty or holding public office” (117). This, of course, is an oversimplification of a much longer series of events in Utah and federal legislative history. Wolfinger correctly points out that earlier statutes, in particular the Morrill Act of 1862 and Edmunds Act of 1882, were actually responsible for making plural marriage a federal offense and then disenfranchising polygamists and barring them from holding public office. The Edmunds-Tucker Act, which in many ways helped sound the death knell for Mormon plural marriage, was drafted and passed precisely because these previous laws were deemed insufficiently rigorous or effective; thus my statement that the act “put teeth” into federal law. Nevertheless, like any student of Utah or Mormon history, I am fully aware of the essential precursors to Edmunds-Tucker, and the wording of my sentence, which was intended primarily to provide a bit of historical context for the 1888 Utah marriage law, was not sufficiently precise.

That leads to Wolfinger’s more substantive critiques concerning the provenance of the 1888 law that first outlawed most (but not all) forms of interracial marriage in Utah. Essentially, he interprets my article to argue that by 1888 non-Mormons, organized in the Liberal Party, had overtaken Utah politics to the point at which they could pass punitive anti-polygamy legislation that also included an antimiscegenation component. If this is an accurate reflection of his reading, then I believe that Wolfinger has misinterpreted the basic thrust of my argument.

The 1888 territorial government, as Wolfinger notes, was still dominated by Mormons organized in the People’s Party, albeit monogamous ones in accordance with the strictures of the Edmunds and Edmunds-Tucker Acts. The non-Mormon Liberal Party had begun to make inroads, winning five seats in the territorial legislature that year. Although a fusion ticket did unite some Mormons and Gentiles in local elections in the late 1880s, for the most part the political battle lines were clearly drawn along the boundaries of religious identity. The sixth petition for statehood, drafted along with a new constitution in 1887, was spearheaded by LDS politicians and church leaders, as historians such as Gustive Larson, Edward Leo Lyman, and Wolfinger himself have shown, and most non-Mormons were wary that statehood would permanently enshrine Mormon political power.

Although it is not a detailed treatise on this era in territorial politics, and therefore subject to some of the problems of generalization, I do not believe my article represents a gross “misconstruction,” in Wolfinger’s words, of the political scene in Utah in 1888. I stand by my claims that the Edmunds-Tucker Act “changed the face of Utah politics,” and that the new territorial legislature did include “non-Mormon legislators” who filled seats previously held by polygamous (or pro-polygamy) Mormons (118). I do not argue for Liberal Party dominance, but I do assert the relatively greater (but still minority) voice and influence of non-Mormons in Utah politics in 1888. The two phrases I regret—and retract— along these lines come on pages 119 (“the deposed Mormon majority”) and 121 (“the mostly non-Mormon legislators”). These statements can potentially be read as an affirmation of a Liberal Party majority in the legislature, which of course was clearly not the case. I agree with Wolfinger that these phrases can be misleading— though not intentionally so—and I apologize.

Wolfinger’s most significant critique cuts to the heart of my argument regarding the ban’s origins: that Utah’s anti-miscegenation legislation originated in tandem with the anti-Mormon crusade to regulate marriage in Utah Territory in 1888. Wolfinger believes I falsely argue that “anti-polygamist non-Mormons were the authors and primary backers of the 1888 legislation banning interracial marriage.” It is here that I think he protests too much. As I demonstrate, the 1888 “Act Regulating Marriage” was proposed in the House by Representative E. D. Hoge of Salt Lake City, a noted member of the Liberal Party and a committed anti-Mormon. Hoge’s original draft of the bill did not mention race, but when it came back from the judiciary committee with the amendment “to prohibit miscegenation,” Hoge did not register any objection that his bill had been somehow corrupted. Indeed, the public record reveals nobody—neither Liberal nor People’s Party representatives, nor the non-Mormon governor Caleb West— who complained about the newly added proscriptions on interracial marriages. I never claim that the marriage act was passed without the necessary support from the majority People’s Party, only that it was originated by an avowed Liberal Party member who sought further punitive measures, on a territorial level, against the Mormon practice of polygamy. In light of all the evidence, I uphold my argument that the anti-polygamy campaign opened the door for the creation of anti-miscegenation law in Utah, or, as I state in the article, “The confluence of anti-polygamy and anti-miscegenation legislation thus came as the new territorial legislature drafted bills targeting plural marriage and then extended the law by adding language prohibiting all ‘unacceptable’ forms of marriage” (119).

I also want to emphasize that my article does not privilege either Mormons or non-Mormons in the contest for moral high ground. Quite the opposite — my research convincingly demonstrates that Mormons and non-Mormons alike, from church and political leadership to ordinary citizens, were directly involved in efforts to restrict the right of black and Asian Utahns to marry whites (and vice versa). Anti-miscegenation legislation, it seems, was something that virtually all (white) Utahns could agree upon from its inception in 1888 until its repeal in 1963, regardless of their religious or political affiliation.

In sum, I appreciate Mr.Wolfinger’s close reading of my article, and acknowledge a handful of phrases that lack the standard of precision I strive for in my research and writing. I do not, however, believe these minor glitches add up to, in his words, an article “marred by major errors of fact.” Any errors that do exist are entirely mine, and should not be attributed to any fault of the UHQ editors or staff. In regard to its treatment of the origins and development of antimiscegenation law in Utah, I stand by my article as an honest and accurate history.

Sincerely, Patrick Mason

American University in Cairo

Editor,

The article “‘It was Very Warm and Smelt Very Bad’: Warm Springs and the First Bath House in Salt Lake City,” (Summer 2008), makes mention in footnote 28, p. 217, of an apparent transcription error in An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton, edited by George D. Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books/Smith Research Associates, 1993). However, the entry cited as having the “erroneously copied” text (July 26, 1847, pp. 367-68) does not contain any such error. In fact, the reported misreading does not appear anywhere in the version of Clayton’s diaries edited by Smith and published by Signature Books/Smith Research Associates.

Gary James Bergera Director of Publishing, Signature Books, 1985-2000

Editor,

The erroneously copied reference to William Clayton’s journal as noted in footnote 28 is found in Clayton Family Association, William Clayton’s Journal: A Daily Record of the Journey of the Original Company of “Mormon” Pioneers from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. (Salt Lake City: The Deseret News, 1921), 22. The authors acknowledge that the footnote is incorrect in attributing the reference to George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1993).

Darrell E. Jones W. Randall Dixon