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The election of 1914 was a watershed event in Utah, particularly in the United States Senate race. Republicans had controlled Utah’s congressional delegation, the governor’s seat, and both houses of the state legislature for years. Senator Reed Smoot had survived a harrowing challenge to retain his seat after a four-year investigation and had handily won a second term in 1909 shortly after the Senate voted to let him stay.1 By 1914, however, cracks had begun to appear in this monolithic Republican control in Utah, and changes were in the offing. The United States had ratified the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, with Utah the only state voting affirmatively against it.2 The amendment provided for the popular election of U.S. senators rather than by state legislatures, and 1914 was the first Senate election in Utah to which the amendment applied.3 Although Utah was one of only two states in which the incumbent Republican president William Howard Taft received more votes than his two opponents in 1912, the combined votes for Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Progressive candidate Theodore Roosevelt substantially exceeded the number of votes cast for Taft.4 Thus, Democrats and Progressives believed they might be able to unseat Senator Reed Smoot, particularly if they could find a way to work together. When Smoot ran for his third term in 1914, some members of his “Federal Bunch” political machine were at odds with each other, President Wilson was popular, and the GOP had lost many partisans to Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party. Democrats and Progressives believed that they could continue to chip away at Republican majorities in state offices as they had in 1912.5 Smoot faced a popular election for the first time, and he had a formidable opponent in the Democrat-Progressive “fusion” candidate, James H. Moyle, a prominent Mormon lawyer, businessman, and longtime Democratic leader. Smoot’s narrow victory over Moyle is one of the most intriguing campaign and election stories in Utah history. Just before the election, the Salt Lake Tribune mused that Senator Smoot “entered the campaign with every condition adverse.” Smoot was a
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The 1914 Reelection of Senator Reed smoot
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Separation of prophet and state?
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