Robert Newton Baskin and the making of modern Utah
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Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2013. 408 pp. Cloth, $45.00
In my view, the most significant portions of John Gary Maxwell’s Robert Newton Baskin are his essays on Baskin’s life after Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto and the Mormons began the long process of ending the practice of polygamy. Maxwell tells us how Baskin left the anti-Mormon Liberal Party long before such luminaries as Orlando Powers. He reconciled himself with prominent Mormons such as George Q. Cannon and William H. King, he distinguished himself as mayor of Salt Lake City, he served as chief justice of the Utah State Supreme Court, and he worked to promote tax-supported public elementary school education in the state. As Maxwell points out, James Allen and I were two of the few who recognized Baskin’s significant role in improving Salt Lake City’s public utilities infrastructure. The city had woefully underfunded its street, sewer, and water systems prior to Baskin’s tenure as mayor. Recognizing this, he successfully promoted such needed improvements. Maxwell praises much of Baskin’s work in promoting anti-Mormon legislation before these events. Most of the bills he drafted failed to pass. Baskin wrote failed bills introduced by Illinois Senator Shelby Cullom and Iowa Congressman Isaac Struble. Instead, Congress passed two other pieces of legislation that incorporated some of Baskin’s ideas, the Poland Act (1874) and the Edmunds Act (1882). Baskin also helped to write a bill introduced by Cullom and Struble that would have enacted for the territories something like the Idaho Test Oath, which prohibited believers in polygamy from voting. Maxwell seems to have favored this bill, but it
seems to me to have been ill conceived. The Cullom-Struble bill would have permitted the disfranchisement of American citizens for their privately held beliefs rather than for their illegal acts, as the Edmunds Act did, but Congress never passed it. Personally, I am relieved that the federal government’s prosecution of illegal acts led President Wilford Woodruff to review the practice of polygamy and to receive inspiration to begin the process of abolishing polygamy. Imagine, however, the prosecution of people today under Baskin’s bill who believe in or oppose same-sex marriage or who believe in or oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps the most controversial section of Maxwell’s excellent biography is the discussion of Baskin’s role in the investigation and prosecution of the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Baskin believed that Brigham Young had ordered the massacre. The available literature on that question is mixed and, given the variety of ways in which historians can weigh evidence, it will most likely remain so. Juanita Brooks (The Mountain Meadows Massacre, 1950), Ronald Walker, Richard Turley, and Glen Leonard (Massacre at Mountain Meadows, 2008), and John Turner (Brigham Young, 2012) have argued that he learned of the massacre only after the horrible deed took place. Sally Denton (American Massacre, 2003) and Will Bagley (Blood of the Prophets, 2002) have written that Young ordered the massacre. Neither Baskin nor Maxwell seems to have understood that although no courts martial were held on the perpetrators, the federal government could have conducted trials with Young’s assistance as early as 1859. In 2006, I pointed out (Brigham Young, the Quorum of the Twelve, and the Latter-day Saint Investigation of the Mountain Meadows Massacre) that after trying to conduct an investigation, Young, the church leadership, and some federal officials proposed to arrange for trials at Cedar City. In 1859, the same year that Judge John Cradlebaugh investigated the massacre in Iron County, Young sent George A. Smith and Amasa Lyman to Cedar City. The two of them released the principal perpetrators from their church positions and told them to prepare for trials. At that time, expecting
