In This Issue

As historians explore new terrain and re-plow old ground in recounting and reinterpreting our past, they can take reassurance that their endeavors are merited from the words of the nineteenth-century writer and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”

This issue completes the seventy-ninth volume of the Utah Historical Quarterly and we encourage readers to consider how well served our generation has been by the works of the earlier students of Utah history. At the same time, we might ask how much current studies and interpretations of the past reflect our times and how beneficial our work will be for those yet to come.

The town of Silver Reef was an anomaly in Utah’s Dixie. Where Mormon pioneers endured hardship to build agricultural communities in the desert of southwestern Utah, miners pursued their Eldorado in the silver mines that bored into the sandstone twenty miles northeast of St. George. Our first article in this issue recounts the relationship between miners and farmers, Catholics and Mormons, in this corner of Utah. In this other look at Silver Reef we see the frontier mining town from a different perspective than that presented by previous writers.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the bicycle became an everyday part of Salt Lake City’s transportation and recreational scene. At the same time professional bicycle racing became a popular spectator sport. Several bicycle tracks were constructed including those in the Salt Palace, at Saltair, at Wandemere Park, and in Ogden’s Glenwood Park. The tracks and lucrative prize money drew local and colorful professional racers from across the country. Speed merchants like Salt Lake City’s John Lawson, the bearded Russian Theodore Devonevitch, and the African American Marshal “Major” Taylor, the highest paid cyclist in the world, all found Utahns enthusiastic about their bike racing talents.

St. George Main Street in the 1880s.

UTAH STATEHISTORICAL SOCIETY.

As Utah continues to move further and further away from its agricultural base, it is useful to look back on the state’s agricultural heritage and how an earlier generation of farmers sought to maximize its economic security through cooperation, government support, and adoption of new methods and tools made available through the nation’s land-grant colleges. Following World War II, two competing organizations, the Utah Farm Bureau and the Utah Farmer’s Union, emerged as champions of Utah farmers. Where Utah farmers and their organization had given strong support to Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party’s New Deal during the 1930s, in the late 1940s the Farm Bureau took another course opening the door for the Farmers Union to establish its first local in Utah in Emery County in 1948 and spread quickly to other parts of the state. Political repercussions followed during J. Bracken Lee’s tenure as Governor of Utah (1949-56), the U.S. Senate and House elections of 1950, and unsubstantiated charges that the Utah Farmers Union was a Communist-dominated organization.

Wednesday, May 19, 1943, proved to be a tragic day as the Victory Theater at 48 East 300 South in Salt Lake City caught fire. The city fire department responded immediately, and in the efforts to put out the fire, three firefighters were killed and several others sustained injuries. As the author of our last article in this issue reveals, “No other incident in the history of the Salt Lake City Fire Department caused as much upheaval and discontent as the Victory Theater fire. No other structural fire incident in Utah resulted in more firefighter deaths. No other firefighter fatality incident received more public interest or press attention or became such a hot political topic in Salt Lake City Hall.” As you will read, the Victory Theater fire and the loss of three firefighters caused changes to occur in the city’s building code and within the fire department.

The four articles in this issue of the Quarterly demonstrate once again the diversity of peoples who make our history—firefighters and farmers, miners and freighters, politicians and bureaucrats, judges and bicycle racers, and, of course, all the rest of us with our collective and individual ties to Utah.

COVER: A group of youngsters gather on October 3, 1936, at Salt Lake Cityʼs Victory Theater as members of the Searʼs Victory Popeye Club. UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY. IN THIS ISSUE (ABOVE): Silver Reef in the 1880s looking from the southeast to the northwest.UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.