Book Reviews

REVIEWS

Finally Statehood! Utah’s Struggles, 1849–1896

By Edward Leo Lyman

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2019, xii + 470 pp. Cloth $34.95

In 1999, Davis Bitton referred to the work of Edward Leo Lyman as “fundamental” to understanding how Utah became a state. Professor Lyman’s voluminous work in this area is must reading. His groundbreaking Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood, published by University of Illinois Press in 1986, along with articles published in various journals remain important, but his new volume, Finally Statehood! Utah’s Struggles, 1849–1896, is his most significant contribution yet. Lyman provides the reader with a firehose of new information, insights, and analysis into the issues and controversies of Utah Territory’s seven statehood attempts.

As Lyman details better than anyone has before, even as Mormon Utah worked to be admitted to the Union in its earliest attempts, the illegal shadow state of Deseret was operating at a high level. Brigham Young so deeply believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ that he made sure that the government of Deseret was in place to rule if that happened. Federal authorities were bound to be suspicious given that Young and others ran political affairs through an undisclosed secret state and did not always hide their actions.

One of the attractions of this book is its rich introduction to the large cast of characters from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, territorial appointments, U.S. Congress, presidential administrations, railroad barons, and, perhaps most intriguing, lobbyists, journalists, and other influencers of public opinion. Lyman discusses the different strengths and weaknesses of those who led Utah’s repeated statehood battles in Washington—from the diplomatic, suave, and educated John M. Bernhisel, whose efforts were sometimes undermined by Utah’s legislature, to the rougher William H. Hooper,

who would become discouraged and largely ineffective. Though unsuccessful in achieving statehood or stopping passage of all anti-polygamy legislation, the territorial delegate and high-ranking church official George Q. Cannon made many friends and built many bridges in Congress that eventually bore fruit in the late 1880s and 1890s. The later delegates—John T. Caine, Joseph Rawlings, and Frank J. Cannon— are also covered well. More groundbreaking, Lyman introduces us to many of the important characters in Washington who influenced federal policy toward Utah, some highly critical of the Mormons and Utah, but many others far friendlier than generally acknowledged.

Professor Lyman presents hobgoblins of the Saints in Utah Territory such as James McKean, Robert Baskin, and George Maxwell with insight and aplomb, but he also explores national leaders’ criticism of these local antagonists of the Mormons, who sometimes took things too far. He is equally critical of unreasonable positions and actions taken by Latter-day Saint leaders.

Finally Statehood! makes clear that Mormon leaders were sometimes willing to bend to further statehood ambitions, as evidenced by the election in 1864 of a non-Mormon (though friendly) territorial delegate. In the late 1880s, as the Edmunds-Tucker Act threatened to undermine and perhaps even destroy the Church of Jesus Christ, church leaders quietly encouraged monogamists within their ranks to assert they did not believe in polygamy to avoid being prevented from voting and exercising other civil rights.

Perhaps the book’s most important contribution is an extended discussion of how church leaders, with the encouragement and direction of prominent railroad owners, found a way to radically alter public opinion toward Mormons in the late 1880s. This involved relatively widespread “boodling” (an amusing nineteenth-century term for bribery). Central Pacific railroad barons Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford, with substantial financial contributions from the church, bribed prominent newspapers and wire services to report favorably on the Mormons. These reports countered negative articles written by the Salt Lake Tribune reporter and Associate Press correspondent William Nelson. The railroad owners’ aid was hardly charitable—they understood that church members represented an enormous future customer base. Church leaders had previously balked at bribing politicians and, perhaps, judges, but journalists seemed to be a different story. Lyman chronicles with ample documentation the church’s part in changing the tide of public opinion. The juxtaposition of the church taking innovative action to ingratiate itself with the federal government and the national population, while at the same time polygamists (famously including George Q. Cannon and Francis M. Lyman) were serving prison terms, is striking.

Concurrent with the public relations campaign, church leaders also encouraged monogamous Mormons to take loyalty oaths, to hide belief in plural marriage, and to take action to preserve their political involvement and influence. They did this to maintain political power that was eroding from restrictions imposed on Latter-day Saints’ civil rights mostly because of their unusual marriage practice. Lyman argues that this led to a gradual weening of younger Mormons from their leaders, which facilitated far fuller political independence over the coming decade with the radical alterations of Utah’s political landscape.

Another of the book’s important contributions to the literature of Utah statehood is its inclusion as an appendix the full text of Republican leader James Clarkson’s 33-page letter to Wilford Woodruff written in July 1894, just after both houses of Congress approved the enabling act to make Utah a state on a bipartisan basis. Lyman, who scouted out this letter in a Midwestern archive in the 1980s, finds the long epistle to be one of the most important sources for understanding the attainment of statehood by Utah.

The book’s final chapters lay out how the ultimate attainment of statehood played out. Lyman tells this important story as well as anyone. Through wrenching Supreme Court decisions in 1890 that upheld severe legislation and through even harsher laws being considered, LDS leaders came to realize that the political rights of church members and the institutional survival of the church would be seriously threatened if polygamy were not officially abandoned. Political changes in Utah in the early 1890s were also critical to statehood. Lyman masterfully tells the story of the end of the People’s and Liberal Parties, the political intrigue that continued for several years, the careful balancing act LDS leaders had in wooing both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the internal disputes that they sometimes faced. Mormons who were becoming avid members of the national parties felt more like Americans than ones who had voted as a bloc as members of the People’s Party.

Although a must-read for anyone serious about understanding how Utah became a state, Finally Statehood! is not without faults. The book sometimes jumps around temporally from one period to another and back again without warning. References are occasionally missing or a bit jumbled. Important conclusions are not always documented as well as one might hope. Lyman seems to believe that the important Supreme Court 1890 opinion that helped precipitate Wilford Woodruff’s issuance of the Manifesto was the decision in Davis v. Beason, a February 1890 decision in which the court unanimously found constitutional an Idaho law that prohibited people from voting who believed in polygamy based on their religion. Davis v. Beason is certainly an important free-exercise decision which largely followed Reynolds v. United States. I believe, however, that more significant was the May 1890 Supreme Court decision of Late Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints v. United States, which found the Edmunds-Tucker Act constitutional with its disincorporation of the church, its forfeiture of most church property to the United States, its application of the proceeds from the sale or use of that property, its restrictions on civil rights, and various other important provisions.

There are a few surprising, though admittedly minor, mistakes in the book. An example is that Lyman asserts that George Q. Cannon was let off easy on unlawful cohabitation charges to which he pled guilty in September 1888 and that he received only a 75-day sentence, citing Abraham Cannon’s journal as evidence. In fact, as Abraham Cannon correctly recorded, Cannon pled guilty to two counts of unlawful cohabitation, resulting in what amounted to a full six-month sentence and a $400 fine (which was more than the statutory fine for one offense).

Despite these, Edward Leo Lyman’s Statehood Finally! should be read by every person interested in understanding how Utah became a state. It represents the culmination (to date) of the work on the subject from the leading expert. It adds information and insights into important roles national leaders played, identifies a number of Utahns whose pieces of the story have been ignored or missed, provides the surprisingly large part the Central Pacific leaders played, provides a plausible explanation why Isaac Trumbo was not one of Utah’s first Senators, and confirms and documents (though alters) suspicions many of us have had for years about the church’s involvement in “boodling.”

Kenneth L. Cannon II —Independent historian, Salt Lake City, Utah

Cannon is a member of Signature Books’ editorial board but took no part in the publisher’s considering or accepting the book for publication, or editing or marketing the book.

Prehistoric Suns: Ancient Observations in the American Southwest

By Steve Mulligan

Albuquerque: Fresco Books in association with the University of New Mexico Press, 2020, 156 pp. Cloth, $65.00

Many people in Utah seem to believe that the history of the state began in the nineteenth century. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, most forget the enduring legacy of those who inhabited this place long before the arrival of mountain-men, pioneers, and dot-commers. Some of the most important reminders of Utah’s long history are Native American petroglyphs and pictographs found across the state. Left by an assortment of ancient peoples, including the Fremont and Ancient Puebloan cultures, “Rock Art” has captivated the interest of a wide variety of individuals including archeologists, historians, artists, and average travelers who have tried to decipher the meaning of these seemingly immutable and inscrutable works.

Photographers have recorded Native American rock glyphs across the American Southwest for nearly 150 years, and their work has played an important role in how it has been seen and understood. Yet photographers often look at these works of stone and pigment as primitive yet powerful works of art, devoid of utility. The act of photographing these sites, therefore, is a form of artistic appropriation in which, as Lucy Lippard has argued, the photographer acts as a surrogate for the “original artist.” 1 While appreciating the inherent beauty of the work, other photographers see more than art for art’s sake. For decades the photographer Craig Law has documented panels in distant, difficult-to-reach climes in order to know more about these prehistoric cultures and the context in which they lived. His project may still seem like a pilgrimage, but with different intentions and outcomes. Hoping to produce an archive for future scholars, Law’s work successfully integrates “anthropological and artistic data.” 2 The same may be said of the recent work of Utah-based photographer Steve Mulligan.

For more than fifteen years Mulligan has tirelessly crisscrossed the western United States, and Utah in particular, recording the ways in which rock imagery acts as celestial calendars intricately recording, through light, equinoxes, solstices, and other astronomic phenomenon. Prehistoric Suns is the culmination of this work that links, in stunning fashion, the fields of astroarchaeology and photography. As fellow Moab-photographer Tom Till noted, Mulligan has the ability to see “beyond the obvious beauties to other secreted, subtle realms.” 3 This is exactly what he has accomplished in this book. Many of the sites in the text are well known and have been recorded by other photographers. What sets his work apart, however, is that it is not what a site looks like but what it does that interests Mulligan. He records carefully placed spirals capturing the light and shadow of a solstice or equinox. Sun-daggers cut across rock panels as a calendric act in which light seems to impregnate stone. In other photographs he documents other visual references to the sun, moon, and stars, a further indication of these ancient cultures’ profound understanding of the interaction between the heavens and earth. It is a project, Mulligan admits, that has drawn him “into a world of intuitive observation and ancient insight.” (7)

Remarkably the photographer always seems to be in the right place at the right time, which prompts one to marvel at his ability to cover so much time and space in pursuit of fleeting, yet profound moments. Yet Mulligan is quick to acknowledge that this is a collaborative effort and he received assistance from astroarcheologists, scholars, Native American guides, and friends with local knowledge of certain sites. The photography, however, is his contribution, the product of a photographer at the top of his craft. Through his use of film—a bit of photo-archeology in an increasingly digital age—Mulligan produced black and white images that magnify the book’s essential elements of light and stone. Using a large-format camera, moreover, he created images that are both informative and beautiful and would satisfy the needs of an archeologist and the desires of an art collector or curator.

Prehistoric Suns features two contextual essays by Ken Zoll, director of the Verde Valley Archeology Center, and Natalie Cunningham, a writer and astrophysicist, as well as short essays by the photographer that provide insight into his experiences. In one, he described photographing the early morning light of a summer solstice on a petroglyph on Land Hill, near Santa Clara, Utah, noting the crammed scene behind his camera with a “drum circle, several flute players, and several dozen onlookers.” (72) More essays would have been a welcome addition to the text, providing, as they do, a greater understanding of how these sites continue to function as places of interest and worship.

If photography is fundamentally a product of light and time, then few books come as close to the essence of the medium. Prehistoric Suns is a spellbinding work of art and science, and readers will find themselves returning to it again and again and sharing the images with friends and family (as I did). Most importantly, it will bring home the fact that the history of this place is far more beautiful and complex, intelligent and sophisticated than most could fathom.

James R. Swensen —Brigham Young University

Notes

1. Lucy Lippard, “Foreword,” in Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1988), x.

2. Lippard, xi.

3. Tom Till, “Foreword,” in Steve Mulligan, Terra Incognita (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

Standing on the Walls of Time: Ancient Art of Utah’s Cliffs and Canyons

By Kevin T. Jones; photographs by Layne Miller

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019, 144 pp. Paper, $19.95

Petroglyphs (pecked, carved, etched, or incised images on stone) and pictographs (painted images on stone) are among Utah’s most compelling wildland attractions, scattered across the cliffs and canyons of multiple counties in the state. Individual images may date to eleven thousand years ago. Large panels may be nine thousand years old. Utah rock imagery represents some of the nation’s most important and enduring prehistoric symbols, with direct connections to modern Native American tribes descended from Ancestral Puebloans, Utes, Paiutes, Navajos, Shoshones, and others.

Chronicling this wealth of original art has been the work of the Utah Rock Art Research Association and hundreds of volunteers. Related books include Polly Schaafsma’s The Rock Art of Utah, Jonathan Bailey’s Rock Art: A Vision of a Vanishing Cultural Landscape, Sally Cole’s Legacy on Stone: Rock Art of the Colorado Plateau and Four Corners Region, Winston Hurst and Joe Pachak’s Spirit Windows: Native American Rock Art of Southeastern Utah, and Steven Simms and François Gohier’s Traces of Fremont: Society and Rock Art in Ancient Utah.

In Standing on the Walls of Time, Kevin Jones and photographer Layne Miller follow protocol by not revealing locations of rock art panels; superb photographs document diverse sites. Where the book differs from other volumes is in Jones’s writing. Having been state archaeologist of Utah for seventeen years, Jones knows all of the time sequences and stylistic details to identify rock imagery panels by date and culture groups, but he chooses not to do so.

Jones, who campaigned for rock art to become a state symbol under Utah Code 63G-1–601, writes that “academic researchers . . . work to identify patterns in the iconography to learn about past cultures and their geographic and temporal positions as expressed on stone . . . [but] this book represents a departure from nearly all of these approaches.” (3) Instead, Jones challenges readers to enjoy rock imagery not as some form of primitive communication “or mere folk art” but to recognize its “deserved status as fine art of great value and historic significance.” (3)

This is a refreshing approach. Jones wants the book’s photographs to reach readers on an emotional, not an intellectual, level. His essays, interspersed with Miller’s extraordinary close-up and landscape photos, draw you into different millennia. The book succeeds because it encourages readers to interpret rock art for themselves rather than learn about it through the mediated words of archaeologists. The book’s photographs show these works as both playful and profound.

Florence Lister has said that archaeology gives us only 20 percent of ancient cultures and cannot recreate songs, dances, ceremonies, and other cultural practices. Jones concurs. “The most important ways people identify themselves, those items of their behavior that distinguish them from others, are not generally expressed in the concrete objects that may be accessible to archaeologists,” he writes. “We cannot dig up beliefs. We cannot dig up stories. What are we left with? We sometimes find clothing. We do find tools and can learn about prehistoric economies, but what a shallow understanding that leaves us.” (24)

Standing on the Walls of Time takes a relevant, new approach. “I am saying that rather than try to decipher the ancient artist’s meaning, we can try to find the meaning the art has for us,” Jones writes. (25) Thus, both the essays of Kevin Jones and the photographs of Layne Miller allow the reader to make up his or her own mind and to become deeply engrossed in the world-class rock art imagery prevalent in Utah’s canyon country.

For the enthusiast, all of Utah’s great styles are represented here: Barrier Canyon, Glen Canyon Linear, Archaic, Fremont, San Juan Anthropomorphic, Ute, Navajo, and Paiute. Cowboy and sheepherder glyphs are missing, but that’s a different cultural overlay. For Utah’s prehistoric and historic Native inhabitants, this book is a blessing with a plea for preservation. Panels have been protected in Nine Mile Canyon and in Range Creek, but politicians shrank the boundaries of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, leaving irreplaceable panels at risk.

Rock art, on site and in situ, and thousands of years old, is one of Utah’s great gifts to the world. Jones and Miller understand that. The University of Utah Press has produced a beautiful, timely, and affordable volume that makes a strong case for rock art appreciation and protection. Recommended for libraries and public land gift shop venues, Standing on the Walls of Time is a book that all Utahns should be proud of and all visitors should purchase.

Andrew Gulliford —Fort Lewis College

Thunder from the Right: Ezra Taft Benson in Mormonism and Politics

Edited by Matthew L. Harris

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. viii + 247 pp. Paper, $27.95

While the broad brushstrokes of Ezra Taft Benson’s life (1899–1994) are generally known among Mormon watchers, only in recent years have historians taken him up as a subject of serious study. To a large degree this is symptomatic of the field of Mormon history, which has focused most of its considerable energies on the nineteenth century. Michael Quinn, Greg Prince, and Gary Bergera were among the first historians to critically analyze Benson as a prominent, and controversial, apostle and then president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thunder from the Right goes a step beyond these previous historians’ work, viewing Benson not just in his Latter-day Saint setting but in the broader context of the rise of conservatism in twentieth-century American politics and culture. This volume thus sheds important light on Benson that speaks to his significance beyond Mormon history, narrowly construed.

Matthew Harris has emerged as the foremost historian of Ezra Taft Benson’s political life and legacy. Many of the themes that are featured in this edited collection are further developed in Harris’s 2020 monograph, Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right (University of Utah Press). Even with the publication of this latter book, however, Thunder from the Right remains a distinctive contribution in its own right, with substantial and original offerings from several outstanding historians. The footnotes alone make the book a valuable resource, pointing to a wealth of primary sources and secondary scholarship. Each of the volume’s contributors is to be commended for their fine scholarship, and Harris is to be congratulated not only for bringing together such a strong cast, but also conceptualizing the book’s organization so that each chapter offers genuine depth while contributing to the volume’s overall breadth.

The book opens with Matthew Harris’s outstanding introduction, providing a rich yet concise biographical sketch of Benson. Harris emphasizes that Benson can only be understood if we recognize that in his mind religion and politics were truly inseparable. His “conservative constitutionalism” (2) focused on values of self-sufficiency, hard work, faith, American exceptionalism, free markets, limited government, and individual liberty under the law. Benson’s conservative political ideology is more fully fleshed out in excellent essays by Brian Cannon, Robert Goldberg, and Matthew Bowman. Cannon shows how Benson’s neoliberal agricultural policies were rooted in his deep-seated commitment to family farms and a somewhat nostalgic yeoman ideal. Whereas Cannon emphasizes Benson’s agricultural roots, Goldberg places him within the changing landscape of twentieth-century American conservatism, revealing Benson to be both a catalyst for and product of the movement’s evolution and internal diversity. In an essay deeply attuned to subtle nuances and change over time, Bowman demonstrates how Benson believed that threats to political and economic freedom would lead to an erosion of private and public morality. Freedom was fragile, always under attack by godless communists and other threatening forces, and so Americans—and Latter-day Saints in particular—needed to be vigilant in their efforts to protect liberty.

Gary Bergera and Newell Bringhurst reveal Benson to be a political animal at heart. Bergera’s essay focuses narrowly but insightfully on the ways in which Benson rhetorically deployed, and manipulated, the story of his 1959 meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. What could have been a cynical assessment of Benson’s “confabulations” (61) becomes a more useful reflection on history, myth, and memory. Bringhurst zeroes in on Benson’s repeated flirtations with running for the U.S. presidency in the 1960s. Benson emerges here as coy and cagy—a political operator who was unable to pull himself away from the allure of Washington politics for nearly a decade after he returned to full-time church service.

In retrospect, Benson’s views on race and gender have not aged well. These two topics are the subjects of penetrating but fair essays by Matthew Harris and Andrea Radke-Moss, respectively. Harris traces Benson’s dire view of the civil rights movement, influenced substantially by the conspiratorial views of J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Welch. Benson’s outspoken disdain for the movement made him an outlier even within the generally conservative church leadership, and eventually earned him the censure of Joseph Fielding Smith, Harold B. Lee, and Spencer W. Kimball. Radke-Moss, the lone female contributor to the volume, examines Benson’s domestic ideology from the 1950s through the 1980s. She argues that his teachings in the 1980s—for instance, about women in the workplace—were not only conservative but reactionary. Importantly, Radke-Moss recognizes the significance of Benson’s wife, Flora, in enabling and actively promoting the notions of soft patriarchy and anti-feminism that have been important shapers of modern Latter-day Saint discourse about gender, marriage, the family, and women’s roles in church and society.

The volume concludes with an essay by J. B. Haws that offers the best critical assessment that I have read of Benson’s years as church president. He reveals a complex legacy, with church growth and globalization and an increased emphasis on the Book of Mormon on the one hand, but increased polarization (on both the left and right) and controversies over Mark Hofmann’s forgeries and Benson’s own debilitated status on the other. While Benson no longer spoke in explicitly political terms, the church’s new emphasis on “moral issues” was a form of politics in an era characterized by the rise of the Religious Right.

Those interested in a faith-promoting profile of a prophet should look elsewhere. But for

readers interested in Ezra Taft Benson’s significance as a historical figure at the intersection of twentieth-century religion and politics, Thunder from the Right is an original and richly rewarding contribution.

Patrick Q. Mason —Utah State University

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation

The Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0042–143X) is published quarterly by the Utah State Historical Society, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, Utah, 84101–1182, and the University of Illinois Press, 1325 South Oak Street, Champaign, Illinois, 61820. The co-editors are Holly George and Jedediah S. Rogers, with offices at the same address as the Utah State Historical Society. The magazine is owned by the Utah State Historical Society, and no individual or company owns or holds any bonds, mortgages, or other securities of the society or its magazine.

The following figures are the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding twelve months: 1,365 copies printed; 1,006 mail subscriptions; 55 other classes mailed; 1,061 total paid circulation; 51 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 253; total, 1,365.

The following figures are the actual number of copies of the single issue published nearest to filing date: 1,315 copies printed; 956 mail subscriptions; 54 other classes mailed; 0 dealer and counter sales; 1,010 total paid circulation; 51 free distribution (including samples) by mail, carrier, or other means; total distribution, 1,061; inventory for office use, leftover, unaccounted, spoiled after printing, 254; total, 1,315.