—A scene from the Senate Civil Liberties Committee hearings, July 2, 1937. Utah’s Elbert Thomas co-chaired the committee. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-22973.
4 —A billboard photographed along Highway 89 in Garfield County as part of a state project to document Utah highways signs, December 1965. Courtesy Utah State Archives and Record Service, Series 959, box 3, fd. 14.
UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY
Utah Historical Quarterly (UHQ) is Utah’s journal of record, published quarterly on behalf of the Utah State Historical Society since 1928. The UHQ’s mission, from its earliest issues to the present, is to publish articles on all aspects of Utah history, as well as to present Utah in the larger context of the West. Even as UHQ continues its commitment to themes traditionally associated with Utah history, it challenges readers and authors to think across state lines to the forces of history, physiography, and culture that link Utah to a host of people, places, experiences, and trends beyond its geopolitical boundaries. UHQ seeks a regional approach, reflecting Utah’s geographic and cultural position at the crossroads of the West.
UHQ’s editorial style emphasizes scholarly credibility and accessible language. Manuscripts dealing with any aspect of Utah history will be considered. Submissions based on allied disciplines—such as archaeology, folklore, or ethnography—are also encouraged, so long as the focus is on the past.
For submission and style guidelines visit history.utah.gov/utah-historical-quarterly. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.
UHQ welcomes letters to the editor. Letters are published occasionally and online. We reserve the right to restrict word count and edit content.
EDITORIAL STAFF
Holly George — Co-Editor
Jedediah S. Rogers — Co-Editor
Garrett Elkins, Editorial Fellow
ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS
Rebecca Andersen, Logan
Brian Q. Cannon, Provo
Farina King, Norman, Oklahoma
Jennifer Macias, Salt Lake City
Kathryn L. MacKay, Ogden
Jeffrey D. Nichols, Mountain Green
John Sillito, Ogden
Corey Smallcanyon, Provo
Stephanie Fuglaar Statz, Austin, Texas
James R. Swensen, Millcreek
In 1897, public-spirited Utahns organized the Utah State Historical Society in order to expand public understanding of Utah’s past. Today, the Utah Division of State History administers the Society and, as part of its statutory obligations, publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0 042-143X; eISSN 2642-8652), which has collected and preserved Utah’s history since 1928. The Division, which is part of the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts, also collects materials related to the history of Utah and makes them available online and in a research library; assists communities, agencies, building owners, and consultants with state and federal processes regarding archaeological and historical resources; administers the ancient human remains program; administers the Utah History Day program; offers extensive online resources; and assists in public policy and the promotion of Utah’s rich history.
UHQ is published quarterly in winter, spring, summer, and fall by the University of Illinois Press for the Utah State Historical Society.
Members of the Society receive UHQ upon payment of annual dues: individual, $30; student and senior (age 65 or older), $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100. Visit history.utah. gov/become-a-member to join the Utah State Historical Society and receive your own copy of the journal. Institutional subscriptions are $40 for online only, $75 for print only, or $90 for both. To subscribe, see https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/uhq/subscription.html.
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POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly 300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.
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UTAH DIVISION OF STATE HISTORY UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
BOARD OF STATE HISTORY
Molly Cannon, Logan, Chair
Tara Beresh, Moab
John B. D’Arcy, Salt Lake City
Ken Gallacher, Riverton
Ignacio Garcia, Salt Lake City
Spencer Hall, Salt Lake City
David Rich Lewis, Logan
Margaret H. Olson, Park City
David Scott Richardson, Salt Lake City
ADMINISTRATION
Jennifer Ortiz, Director
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY FELLOWS
Leonard J. Arrington (1917–1999)
Will Bagley (1950–2021)
David L. Bigler (1927–2018)
Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981)
Juanita Brooks (1898–1989)
Olive W. Burt (1894–1981)
Eugene E. Campbell (1915–1986)
Everett L. Cooley (1917–2006)
C. Gregory Crampton (1911–1995)
S. George Ellsworth (1916–1997)
Austin E. Fife (1909–1986)
LeRoy R. Hafen (1893–1985)
A. Karl Larson (1899–1983)
B. Carmon Hardy (1934-2016)
Gustive O. Larson (1897–1983)
Brigham D. Madsen (1914–2010)
Dean L. May (1938–2003)
David E. Miller (1909–1978)
Dale L. Morgan (1914–1971)
William Mulder (1915–2008)
Floyd A. O’Neil (1927–2018)
Helen Z. Papanikolas (1917–2004)
Charles S. Peterson (1927–2017)
Melvin T. Smith (1928–2020)
Wallace E. Stegner (1909–1993)
William A. Wilson (1933-2016)
Thomas G. Alexander
James B. Allen
Maureen Ursenbach Beecher
Jessie L. Embry
Martha Bradley-Evans
Max J. Evans
Peter L. Goss
Michael W. Homer
Joel Janetski
Jeffery Ogden Johnson
Edward Leo Lyman
William P. MacKinnon
Carol Cornwall Madsen
Wilson Martin
Robert S. McPherson
Philip F. Notarianni
Allan Kent Powell
W. Paul Reeve
Richard W. Sadler
Gary L. Shumway
John Sillito
Gregory C. Thompson
Gary Topping
HONORARY LIFE MEMBERS
Kenneth L. Alford
Jill Mulvay Derr
Craig Fuller
Marlin K. Jensen
Stanford J. Layton
William P. MacKinnon
John S. McCormick
Darren Parry
Mae Timbimboo Parry
F. Ross Peterson
Linda Thatcher
Gary Topping
Richard E. Turley Jr.
Outside the Denver and Rio Grande Depot, 1910. Utah State Historical Society
CONTENTS
260 Motel Builders of the Modern West By Susan S. Rugh
278 Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity By Linda Muriel Zabriskie
296 Juvenile Justice and Women’s Clubs Ogden as a Case Study By Sarah Langsdon
312 Hannah Claire Haines, 1891–1974
the Average “Militant Female” By Alison McNeal and David A. Hales
327 Dentistry and Embroidery in 1890s Utah The Work of Kate D. Barron Buck By Christine Cooper-Rompato
DEPARTMENTS
REVIEWS
338 Being and Becoming Ute
The Story of an American Indian People By Sondra G. Jones
Reviewed by Warren Metcalf
339 Sally in Three Worlds
An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young By Virginia Kerns
Reviewed by Sondra G. Jones
340 Truth Seeker
The Life of Joseph F. Merrill, Scientist, Educator, and Apostle By Casey Paul Griffiths
Reviewed by Gary James Bergera
341 American Zion
Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West By Betsy Gaines Quammen
Reviewed by Leisl Carr Childers
In This Issue
American history has witnessed many points of transition and transformation. Among the most remarkable moments of change in the nation’s modern past is that time known as the Progressive Era: those years from the late nineteenth century until the 1910s when Americans faced their brawling, industrializing nation with a clutch of laws and reforms meant to safeguard children, workers, or women; when professionalization came to a host of occupations and group activities flourished; when women became increasingly present in the public sphere. And in this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly with its emphasis on twentieth-century professional associations, child-centered advocacy, and labor rights—we see the saplings of the Progressive Era bearing fruit.
Susan Rugh opens the issue with an analysis of three Utah men who tapped into the growing prosperity of postwar America by founding lodging chains. As she explains, the creation of these little empires was not simply a matter of building motels along the West’s new highways, but rather a story of how the investment of capital and labor—especially family labor— combined with the development of business groups to lay the framework “for an extensive western hospitality network.” The organizations the Utah moteliers nurtured “were a crucial step in the metamorphosis of the lodging industry from small, family-owned motels to the later dominance of the nationwide motel chains like Holiday Inn.”
Our second article steps back to the charged and difficult years of the Great Depression. In it, Linda Zabriskie examines the role of Senator Elbert Thomas on the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, which investigated the illegal use of spies, weapons, and more to discourage laborers from unionizing. Thomas’s experiences years earlier, as a major in the Utah National Guard, prepared him for his role as the committee’s co-chair, and his kindly, cerebral
performance in the hearings elevated his national stature. In this year of 2022, when Americans from Amazon employees to Starbucks baristas have begun to unionize, the work of Thomas and the La Follette committee is entirely relevant.
Next, Sarah Langsdon pieces together a history at once heartbreaking and hopeful, with her telling of how a murder case involving a young boy galvanized women’s clubs in Ogden to fight for a better juvenile justice system. Difficult family dynamics underlay fourteen-yearold Ray Clough’s murder of his father in 1920; those same dynamics meant the teen had no place to stay but the local jail, with adult criminals, while he awaited trial. Well-heeled women who had already taken on the role of “child savers” responded by advocating for Clough and crusading for the establishment of an appropriate juvenile detention center. The effort took decades but succeeded in the end.
Like the women who advocated for Ray Clough, Claire Haines navigated a public world that was not entirely accepting of women. Like the men who established motel chains in the mountain West, Haines knew the importance of business clubs and associations. In 1923, Hannah Claire Haines became the first female certified public accountant in Utah. As David Hales and Alison McNeal relate, her path was one of professional success, marked by more than a little gender-based discrimination. Haines’s career stretched from the 1910s to the 1970s, and despite her difficulties, she gathered a tidy personal fortune and dedicated it to furthering the cause of education—especially for women.
Christine Cooper-Rompato closes this issue with her account of a woman who bridged the private and public worlds of the late nineteenth century with remarkable skill: Kate Barron Buck, musician, mother, fabric artist, and dentist, seemingly all at once.
The swimming pool of the Desert Hills Motel, 1956. Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, photCL MLP 3352
Motel Builders of the Modern West
BY SUSAN S. RUGH
In his “Easy Chair” column in the September 1953 issue of Harper’s magazine, Utah native son Bernard DeVoto reported on a newly popular form of lodging growing up all over the West—the motel. To him the word motel was an “awkward word, a coinage out of the folksiness that named the suburb’s Kan-di-Korner,” but for the motorist it had conveniences that made it superior to a hotel. DeVoto dubbed the motel “the highway’s hotel,” a boon to the motorist who wanted nothing to do with tipping bellboys or crowded lobbies but preferred to carry in his own bags to his spacious air-conditioned room.1 According to DeVoto, motels and their towns sprouted like mushrooms along the highways of the West.
DeVoto’s commentary is valuable for his accurate description and the signal it sent: motels were here to stay. They were everywhere in the West, along the edges of the highways and lining the town sidewalks. As DeVoto makes clear, motels offered a clean private room, along with the privacy and ease of parking right outside the door. This hybrid form of lodging replaced the old tourist cabins and courts with something new and modern, befitting the postwar era. World War II was over, and the consumer economy was heating up. American families took off in their station wagons looking for the authentic West of cowboys and Indians they saw in movie westerns. Traveling businessmen appreciated the desks, free stationery, and a telephone to the switchboard in every motel room. But the neon lights and the swimming pool were put in to attract the pleasure traveler who chose the motel while driving through what DeVoto dubbed “Motel Town.”
The advent of the motel and its impact on Utah and the Mountain West was more complicated than DeVoto suspected. The building of motels at mid-century was spurred by the expansion of the highways and robust consumer spending but could not have taken place without the investment of capital and labor in the family motel business. Three Utah men played prominent roles in the growth of the motel industry in Utah and the Intermountain West: Ray Knell of Cedar City, Bentley Mitchell of Logan, and Ken Orton of Salt Lake City and Phoenix. All three were actively involved in creating business associations that set up the
scaffolding for an extensive western hospitality network. The regional lodging associations were a crucial step in the metamorphosis of the lodging industry from small, family-owned motels to the later dominance of the nationwide motel chains like Holiday Inn.
These three men helped enable the rapid growth of the motel industry in the modern West by founding affiliate organizations on a state, regional, and national level. For the motel entrepreneurs the organizations created networks of friendship that insulated the owners from the uncertainties of expansion in an era of ascendant Fordism.2 In the postwar era of increasing federal control, notably the expansion of the interstate highway system, the trade associations gave the owners a forum to voice their concerns. Small business associations lobbied for relief from the regulatory apparatus of federal oversight. Those associations would later become lifelines to their very existence as family-owned motels became overshadowed by the expansion of corporate lodging chains.
Born in the early twentieth century and reared on farms in Utah, all three of the Utah motel entrepreneurs were embedded in a culture of market capitalism mediated by the Mormon historical experience and values. The Mormon value of cooperation, a hallmark of the faith’s approach to capitalism, was reflected in the construction of the associations.3 The Utah motel men drew upon skills gained while serving as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and through later church leadership experience. Influenced by the Mormon cooperative tradition, they formed networks of business connections to promote tourist lodging. A striking similarity among the Mormon moteliers in their religious practice and family relationships illuminates the cultures of capitalism in the Mormon culture region in Utah and beyond. By seeing the Mormon motel entrepreneurs as embedded in a culture of cooperative and competitive capitalism, we can better understand the forces shaping entrepreneurial tourism in the Intermountain West.4
Utah played an important role in luring tourists to the West. Tourists to Salt Lake City on the Union Pacific Railroad in the late nineteenth century sought glimpses of the private life of
polygamy, but local boosters turned their attention to the impressive architecture and birdseye views of new parks and boulevards. Indeed, Salt Lake City was dubbed the crossroads of the West, and the “See America First” movement originated in the state’s capital city. The expansion of state and federal highways across the West ushered in the automobile age, and Utah became a proving ground for roadside businesses like the motel.5
The history of the distinctively American motel has generally been set within the context of highway travel. Historian Warren Belasco argues that the desire for comfort and convenience powered the tourist court mania and subsequent motel boom. While Belasco’s book provides an excellent history of the genesis of tourist courts, it ends in 1945, before the postwar economic recovery gave a boost to motel construction.6 John Jakle and Keith Sculle propose that motels followed the same place-product-packaging marketing strategy as gas stations and roadside restaurants, relying heavily on branding to provide a reliable sameness to their customers.7 This story of a trio of Utah motel men demonstrates the importance of business associations in explaining the sudden rise of motels, the subject of DeVoto’s 1953 essay in Harper’s Magazine 8
The foundation of modern tourism in the West, from highway towns to mountain canyons, began by building places for tourists to stay. The word motel was coined in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1926, but it was not commonly used as a term until the 1950s, at about the same time DeVoto brought it to the attention of his readers.9 The predecessor to the motel was the tourist court, a group of cabins around a filling station with an open court facing the highway. DeVoto did not think highly of the cabins: “A motel may be dingy or uncomfortable but at its worst it is always better than the highway’s slum structures, the corn cribs and chicken coops called, offensively to our patriotic tradition, ‘Cabins.’”10 The growth of tourist lodgings in Utah followed the same pattern, of maturing from auto camp to tourist court to motel.11
Motels did not “sprout” up, as DeVoto alleged, but many were built on the foundations of tourist courts already on Main Street. Courts changed their painted signs to electric neon
and updated the architecture from homey to modern by building a shared roof and raised portico. Newer motels were built on either side of the highways outside town to lure tired motorists before they reached the downtown business district. The tall neon signs beckoned to the highway traveler who scanned the roadside at dusk to find a place to stay. DeVoto complained that his stay in Motel Town was often sleepless because “the whirr, hum, and flick of passenger cars continue all night.” Because of the glow of the colorful neon outlining the windows and eaves, “The tourist closes the venetian blinds, turns out the lights in his room, and may still read the Gideon Bible without eyestrain.”12 His observations help us appreciate the novelty of the both the architecture and the art form of roadside lodging.
There was money to be made owning a motel in the West as tourism replaced mining and agriculture as a significant economic contributor in the mid-twentieth century. Motel net profits were reported to range from 36 percent in the late 1930s, to around 25 percent in the 1940s. The profit margins resulted from low expenses and almost no debt with dependence on family labor and capital, and the smaller the motel the
larger the rate of profit. In the early 1940s, the Tourist Court Journal, the industry trade magazine, was bullish on the future of motels: “An industry returning 26.80 percent of room sales as net profit . has reached a point where it will attract large and substantial investors.”13 Many of those investors were couples who could command the labor of their children, and could rely on extended family for investment capital. These small, independently owned businesses became known as the “mom-and-pop” motels, family businesses that had a low threshold to entry with the promise of a profitable return.
Ray Knell
The career of Ray Knell of Cedar City illustrates the complexity of building a motel business and developing associations to promote western travel. Born in 1907, Knell grew up on a cattle ranch in Washington County, Utah. In November 1928 he left for a proselyting mission in California, and after his return he married Clara Bentley in 1932. They relocated to Cedar City, and by the time he purchased a small tourist court in June 1944, they had three children.14 The next year he bought adjacent property along College Street to add new wings of concrete block construction with a brick face
A postcard depicting the El Rey Motel, Cedar City, Utah. Colourpicture Publishers, Boston, Massachusetts. Author’s collection.
for a total of thirty-five rooms.15 Knell transformed the conglomeration of apartments into a motel court called the El Rey that met modern standards of motel keepers. By 1950 the El Rey was featured on the front page of Tourist Court Journal, quintessentially modern with its corrugated aluminum sheeting over the marquee entrance. The basements remained apartment-like with kitchenettes, but the upstairs rooms were very much in vogue: fully carpeted, “furnished in modern lime oak furniture,” with venetian blinds at the windows. Bathrooms were “fully tiled with a different color scheme used in each.”16
The El Rey was part of a postwar business boom in Cedar City aimed at the influx of automobile tourists. Four other motels in town were expanding to meet demand, including one owned by Ray’s brother, Rulon Knell, at First South and Main. The Iron County Record proclaimed in May 1946, “When these centers are completed Cedar City will be able to boast of the finest tourist accommodations in this part of the state, with a sufficient number to provide excellent accommodations for a tremendous influx of tourists.”17 Local newspapers pumped
up the coverage of new motels and restaurants to the tourists driving the highways to see the national parks.
Cedar City was the gateway to Bryce Canyon and Zion National parks and the Grand Canyon. In the early twentieth century, tourists took the train to the town depot, where the Utah Parks Company transported them by bus to the remote parks.18 With the advent of automobile touring, the number of rail passengers declined, posing a threat to the town’s tourist economy. The El Rey staff worked hard to fill the rooms yearlong, not just during the summer rush. To appeal to “the traveling man” they installed telephones in each unit, and they held and forwarded mail for their visitors.19 Aspiring to make money from food service, Knell engaged the services of Errol Woodbury and Anthony Atkins, owners of the Big Hand Café in St. George, to run his “ultra-modern café” on the south side of the motel lot.20 The Cedar City Chamber of Commerce published a handsome booklet touting the town as the “Gateway to the Utah National Parks”; a display of hotels and tourist courts assured the prospective tourist of comfortable accommodations, including El Rey.
Gateway to the Utah National Parks. Cedar City, Utah, in the heart of the rainbow canyons. Cedar City, Utah, Chamber of Commerce. Illustrated by T. Roger Blythe, circa 1940, p. 22. Author’s collection
El Rey was an early member of the Best Western referral organization. The published history of Best Western features M. K. Guertin as the founder, with his daughter and descendants in prime of place. In truth, Best Western was not founded just by Guertin, but by a group of men including Raymond Knell and John K. (Ken) Orton, both from Utah. The motel men hatched the plan for Best Western at a convention of the United Motor Courts held in Las Vegas in 1946 or 1947. They were concerned that United Motor Courts (with 500 members in thirty-two states) was too relaxed in its standards and that “the benefits it offered members were insufficient.”21 So the group of entrepreneurs founded the rival Best Western and established standards of cleanliness and comfort in an era of improving amenities in the motel business.
Best Western was a boon to motel owners who wanted to refer guests to a motel of similar quality. A guest at any Best Western motel could ask the management to make a reservation at any affiliated motel for future nights. This was a valuable tool in an era when reservations were made by mail. The first guide advertised: “Why take the chance of getting poor accommodations? Let the manager of any best western motel make a reservation for your next night’s stop, and be assured of the best. Your room will be held for you, regardless of the time you arrive. Ask the manager for details.”22
Best Western certainly benefited tourists, but it was also critical in creating a network of independently owned motels behind a trusted brand. Knell was in on the ground floor of the rapidly expanding group. As one might expect of a founding member, Knell traveled along Highway 30 as far as Chicago to persuade owners to join the Best Western referral organization. He inspected the properties of other members in the same region to make sure they were meeting Best Western standards.23 He also promoted state and regional lodging associations. By 1950 Knell was the director and then the president of the Utah Motor Court Association.24 He was the longtime president of the Utah Motel Owners Association and organized a Highway 91 Association to promote tourism from Nephi to St. George.25
Associational activity offered Ray and Clara Knell the chance to travel widely. As a member
of the national board of governors of the American Motor Hotel Association, he and his wife attended conventions in Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Philadelphia.26 In 1964 the couple took a cross-county drive to Chicago, where he received the award of Royal Motelier at the National Convention of the AMHA, to a Rotary convention in Toronto, and to the New York World’s Fair.27
As his motel business expanded, Ray became a well-known community leader in Cedar City. He volunteered to chair the county chapter of the 1953 March of Dimes, and he urged wide distribution of the polio vaccine.28 Knell was also a member of the Lions Club and the Chamber of Commerce. As a chamber member he selected the local architect L. Robert Gardner to design large signs advertising the town, one at the south and the other at the north entry. He brought business to Cedar City, including state conventions of motel owners and the Utah Lions Club.29 He also served his church as a leader in local Mormon congregation from 1956 until 1961, proof of his devotion to his faith and a sign of his natural leadership abilities.30
Knell was an early entrepreneur in the motel industry, who kept his base in Cedar City yet played an important role in launching Best Western and promoting state tourism efforts. The support of his wife and children allowed him to expand and modernize the business and to better the fortunes of his community. He was content to operate one motel and stay in a highway town, but his work to found and serve in trade associations had an impact on the success of motels not only in the state, but in the western region.
Edgar Bentley Mitchell
Like Ray Knell, Utah motel man Edgar Bentley Mitchell remained in his local Cache Valley to build his future. Born in 1911, Mitchell served a Latter-day Saint mission to Tahiti from 1930–1934, where he gained a facility in the Tahitian language and became proficient enough to translate church scripture.31 Upon his return he attended Utah State Agricultural College; there he met Ruth Maughan. They married in 1936, and he worked on the family dry farm in Hansel Valley. In 1944, he was called back to Tahiti to serve as president of the mission. Ruth, who had lived in New Zealand as a child, joined him
with their three small children in early 1945.32 Mitchell directed the construction of the first substantial Latter-day Saint meetinghouse and a new residence for the mission president in Papeete. Church dignitaries traveled from Salt Lake City for the dedication in January 1950, and the event was attended by three thousand Tahitians, some from as far as 400 miles away.33 While in Tahiti, Mitchell gained managerial skills and public relations savvy, in addition to his missionary work there.
The stint as mission president abroad emboldened Mitchell to undertake grander schemes than to stay on the family farm. Upon his return to Cache Valley in 1949, Mitchell left ranching to build a career as a motel owner. In 1950 he opened the twenty-three-unit red brick Mitchell Motel on Highway 89 near the college campus. The motel’s low profile fit the landscape and allowed guests to drive cars up to the doors of their rooms. Later a second story was added which featured ornamental white wrought iron balconies. A tall neon sign with “Mitchell” stood at the roadway, with m-o-t-e-l spelled out in a sign atop the office wing. A fine combination of traditional materials and modern design, the Mitchell Motel was one of two leading motels in town, along with the Baugh Motel.34
Mitchell was active in many professional associations, and was elected an officer of the Utah Motel Association, Best Western, and the American Motor Hotel Association (AMHA).35 In his brief motel career, Mitchell was more than a regional big wheel. He served as chair of the Board of Governors of the American Motor Hotel Association out of Kansas City, Missouri.
In this role he sought feedback from state governors on industry issues such as the newly approved federal highways and the advisability of affiliating with credit card companies. He heard from owners of motor courts and motels from Reno, Nevada, to Alexandria, Virginia.
He was instrumental in having the convention of the AMHA, which had nearly five thousand members, held at the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City in September 1956.36 The Fourteenth Annual AMHA Convention featured panels such “Protecting Motels in Highway Development,” and “How to Hold Your Guest without a Rope.” Tinged by the distinctively Mormon local culture, the opening day luncheon featured a visit to the Salt Lake Tabernacle for its Thursday organ recital and a Grey Line Bus tour of the city. Saturday evening the convention highlight was a Hawaiian luau with entertainment by the Hawaiian Club of Brigham Young University.37 By the time they left Salt Lake City, the conventioneers would have had a thorough exposure to not only Mormon culture in Utah, but also Pacific Islander dances, as performed by BYU students.
Mitchell was a founding member of the 89’ers International Highway Association, a group of hospitality professionals along Route 89 from Mexico to Canada.38 The 89’ers was organized at the Chamber of Commerce in Flagstaff, Arizona, in September 1955 by a group of hospitality professionals, including owners of motels, cafés, and car dealerships. The center of the 89’ers membership (about 450 people) was Arizona, with about half of the 245 members, and forty-five members in Utah, twenty-nine in
Mitchell Motel, 1301 East Highway 89, Logan, Utah. Kodachrome, Mike Roberts for Intermountain Tourist Supply, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah. Author’s collection
Idaho, and thirty-six in Mexico. A month after organizing, the board of directors met at the Hotel Newhouse in Salt Lake City, a hint that many of the directors might have been Utah Mormons.39
The founding meeting in September 1955 generated ideas for publicity, including the making of a record of two songs, “Treasure Trail” and “Beyond the Border.” The plan was for the records to be played in juke boxes and on radio stations, netting the association royalties. Reportedly the record, “I Get my Kicks on 66” had increased the volume of traffic on Highway 66 by 670 percent. In the first few years of the association, the sky was the limit on plans to expand the 89’ers. They forged ahead with the recordings, sent on consignment to Texas, and waited.40
The 89’ers board of directors met annually in October, rotating its location from Kanab, Utah,
in 1956 to Jackson, Wyoming, in 1957. Those assembled confronted the dispiriting fact that members were letting their dues lapse and local 89’ers clubs were not attracting sufficient new members.41 Mitchell chaired the brochure committee, the hoped-for remedy to the declining membership. Mitchell proposed “a 10 point, two year schedule of continuous promotional activity built around the brochures,” from one end of Highway 89 to the other. He sent out letters to members, soliciting their membership renewal.42
Members of 89’ers gathered at the third annual meeting in Jackson, Wyoming, where they took excursions through the Tetons, enjoyed a chuck wagon buffet supper, and spent a day in business meetings capped off by a banquet of prime rib and “Grand international ball,” all for “just ten bucks.”43 While the businessmen and their wives socialized, the officers kept up the drumbeat of soliciting advertisements for
Mitchell Motel road sign along Highway 89 in Cache County, December 1965. The photograph was part of an effort by the Department of Highways to document Utah highway signs.
Utah State Archives and Records Service, Series 959, box 1, fd. 14, photograph 1050
the brochure and reminding members to send in their dues. An infusion of capital would be needed to finance the printing of 50,000 full color brochures, estimated by Paragon Press to be close to four thousand dollars.44 But there were signs of trouble: the postponement of a motor cavalcade of 89’ers to Alberta in June and the cancellation of plans for a movie promoting Highway 89.45 Exactly when the 89’ers folded is unclear, but it appears that the organization collapsed in 1958 or 1959, a victim of declining membership and a nationwide recession.
The death of Bentley Mitchell may have played a part in the failure of the 89’ers. An experienced pilot, he was returning from picking up a new Cessna 157 in Wichita for a local aviation firm when his plane crashed in bad weather on December 18, 1959, with fatal results.46 His widow, Ruth, was left to rear their six children and manage the motel.
Mrs. E. Bentley Mitchell, as she was known, sustained the success of the Mitchell Motel. Due to its location, the motel won a large share of business from Utah State University. The need to accommodate academic visitors challenged the racial discrimination practices of small town Utah. In 1963 Professor George E. Bohart had reserved rooms at the rival Baugh Motel for the expected guests for an apiculture conference, only to discover a few days before their arrival that the motel refused to rent rooms to African Americans. Indeed, according to Bohart, Mr. Baugh remarked that “negroes were personally repulsive to him.” Disgusted by the motel owner’s bigotry, Bohart cancelled the reservation at the Baugh Motel and arranged for the group to stay at the competing Mitchell Motel, where they did accept guests of color but only if sponsored by the university.47 Ruth Mitchell’s years of missionary work in the Pacific Islands might have made her more welcoming to persons of color; whatever the case, her actions in this incident provide further proof that she was a shrewd businessperson.
As a motelier, Mitchell promoted tourism in the state. She headed a local committee to welcome a group of thirty-four French tourists on a “Visit USA” tour in 1962. She arranged visits with the mayor and the university president, and the tourists were treated to a picnic, square
dance, and marshmallow roast. Their efforts won the praise of Jim Cannon, director of the Utah Tourist and Publicity Council, who said of the Cache Valley locals: “They put into excellent use that good old Utah hospitality we’re always hearing about.”48 The business career of Ruth Mitchell indicates the importance of the men’s wives to the success of Utah’s motel builders.
Bentley Mitchell and his wife, Ruth, used the Mitchell Motel in Logan as the base for promoting motel growth through the West. In his activity as an officer in 89’ers and the AMHA, Mitchell was embedded in national lodging networks that allowed him to influence national trends in motel keeping. Indeed, his influence seems far out of proportion to his actual stake in the industry, but his ability to work within organizations and promote their goals enabled him to wield outsize power within the industry. Bentley’s untimely death ended a promising career, but Ruth carried on his legacy.
Ken Orton
Before Knell and Mitchell built their motels, Utah native John K. “Ken” Orton inauspiciously launched his career in hospitality. Born in 1906 in Sandy, Utah, his interest in travel began when he served a Latter-day Saint mission in Tahiti. Orton was one of ten missionaries in all of Tahiti charged with bolstering the faith of the “Saints” and finding more converts. The elders translated gospel tracts and scripture into the native language and sold copies of the mission newspaper throughout the islands. He was released in November 1927 after nearly three years of service.49 His mission activities gave him valuable experiences in publishing and exposed him to global tourism.
After Orton’s return home, he married Frankie Graves, and they had two sons, Ken Jr. and Russell. He attended a local business college, and in 1930 he joined the staff of the Improvement Era, the major magazine of the LDS church. Within several years he became its manager.50 He got into motels as a sideline. Frankie later recalled, “My husband, by working hard at extra jobs such as keeping books at night, selling old cars, etc., had saved enough money to buy a small café on Main Street. He operated it for a short time, then sold it and bought two homes which
he later sold to purchase the property on South State Street.”51 By the late 1930s he operated two small motels on South State Street in Salt Lake City, the thirteen-room Ken-Ray and the seventeen-room Travelers Motor Lodge. The Ken-Ray was a joint venture with Ray Sudbury, who was married to his wife’s cousin.52 Family capital was vital to getting in on the ground floor of owning a motel.
In 1942, Orton founded Bookcraft Publishing Company, upon the advice of church president Heber J. Grant, who wanted to see a competitor to Deseret Book owned by the prominent Cannon family. The company’s first publication, Gospel Standards, was a collection of Grant’s conference talks. The second book, The Gospel Kingdom, a collection of talks by early church president John Taylor, became a staple of the church’s curriculum for men. Bookcraft found success in selling its books and magazines to the Mormon reading audience. Orton’s son later recalled, “‘It was a real family business in those days. . Dad made the publishing decisions, mother processed the orders and my brother and I helped with the packing and mailing after school.’”53 Orton appears to have been firmly embedded in the center of Mormon business and culture, but he had set his sights on a future as a motelier.
During World War II, Orton was among those individuals from seventeen states who organized the American Motor Hotel Association in Denver in 1943. He was selected as President of AMHA with the goal of lobbying more effectively in Washington, DC to fight rent control regulations that did not allow motel owners to raise rates.54 As president he stated that in addition to promoting the “motor-hotel industry,” the AMHA was also seeking “a solution to some unfair, and unworkable regulations of the rent control program.” Regulation 9A stipulated that a guest who had stayed longer than sixty days had to be offered a monthly rate, a regulation that did not apply to hotels. In a news article in the Tourist Court Journal, Orton explained they needed members to supply funds to open an office in Washington, DC to lobby for their needs. Orton was ultimately unsuccessful in that fight, and motels remained limited in profits because of the regulation that they had to provide cheap housing for the many returning soldiers, and
were prevented from raising their rates. It was not until 1947 that the regulations were lifted; still the importance of AMHA as a voice for motel owners was undeniable.55
Orton’s travel for the AMHA broadened his perspective. The story is told that during the war Ken went to Tucson to watch his nephew play in a football game for the University of Utah. It might have been the climate, but more likely he was attracted to Arizona by the business possibilities emerging in Phoenix.56 By 1946 he had sold his Utah motels for a profit, resigned from the Improvement Era, and found a partner to run Bookcraft, Marvin W. Wallin. The family moved to Phoenix, where Ken bought the forty-six-room El Rancho Hotel at 1300 West Van Buren Street and enlarged it to seventy units.57 His profits from Bookcraft were channeled into his hospitality business at a propitious moment, but he needed more capital for expansion.58
Orton found a business partner, Al Stovall, a transplanted Midwesterner who owned manganese mines. Stovall was originally from a farm in Kansas, a descendant of Scots Irish migrants. He took banjo lessons and formed a traveling band that performed throughout the Midwest at dance halls and theaters. He married, bought a small oil field in eastern Kansas, and invested the profits in his first motel, The Planets, in Ellinwood, Kansas. It was while touring Arizona with his band in 1939 that Stovall shrewdly realized that the world war would require steel. He sold The Planets and put the proceeds into manganese mines in Arizona, expanding to over thirty manganese mines in the West. His businesses supplied a major part of the nation’s mineral supply during World War II, and he reportedly became known as America’s “Mr. Manganese.”59
Millionaire Stovall and motelier Orton were well-matched partners in supplying rooms for the tourists who came to Arizona to enjoy the winter sun. Their motel empire expanded rapidly: Mission Motel on East Van Buren (1946), Royal Palms Inn on Camelback Road (1947), and El Rancho motels in Yuma, Arizona, and Needles, California. But it appears they did not have enough capital to expand as rapidly as they did; in April 1949 the electrical contractor
for the Royal Palms sued the partners for failure to pay them for work done to repair the kitchen, bar, and furnace room, and to construct the north and south units.60 With his partner investors, in 1948 Orton obtained a $75,000 mortgage from Beneficial Life Insurance Company of Utah, perhaps against his life insurance policy.61 Still they had trouble unloading the property and in early 1949 Ken wrote to his son, Russell: “We are still in a mess as far as the Royal Palms is concerned. We have tried to sell it, but have had no takers.” He blamed Stovall for talking him into the venture, although he
thought the overhead was too high for the take. He confessed to his son, “Getting into the motor court business involves a great deal of cash, more cash than perhaps you realize, and each day loans are getting more difficult to make in order to go into this business.”62 A few months later, they were “out of money, and none of the members including myself seems to be willing to put in more personal funds.” It appeared the person who held the second mortgage would have to take ownership and the next month they tried to get a settlement. Eventually, they were able to extract themselves from the situation.63
The dining room of the Desert Inn Motel, Phoenix, Arizona, 1956.
Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, photCL MLP 3352
The round lobby that was a feature of the Desert Hills Motel, 1956.
Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, photCL MLP 3351
Meanwhile, the other motels were doing quite well. El Rancho took in $9,000 gross in May 1949, a 50 percent increase over the previous year, enough to pay for installation of air conditioning units in the ten new units in the back.64 The partners built their brand with the Desert Inn, Desert Hills Motel, and Desert Sun Hotel in Phoenix, supported by investments from two other families, the Miners and the Wesolowskis.65 Later the Miners pulled out, and Vernon and Rachel Lunt, who owned a garage and motel in Salt Lake City, joined the group of investors.66
The Desert Inn would become the prototype for their collection of luxury motor hotels built by Desert Enterprises, Incorporated.67 In 1952 they built the 180-room Desert Hills at 2707 East Van Buren on Route 60 into Phoenix from Tempe. Orton took responsibility for the construction, and it was locally regarded
as “an outstandingly beautiful hotel, with fine dining facilities, swimming, pool, shuffleboard courts and all the other accoutrements of a fine resort.”68 The architecture was typical of the brand’s motels, two-story buildings with open balconies accessible by decorative stairways made of cement blocks accented by weeping mortar, all painted in light pastel colors.69 To bring in more cash flow, Bookcraft published Orton’s Courting America, a guide to fine motels and hotels across the nation. The guide referred to lodging with an array of terms: motel, motor court, and the up-market term motor hotel.70
Orton stepped away from his successful hospitality business when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called him to serve as mission president in Tahiti, the site of his missionary service as a young man. In late March 1953, he and his wife, Frankie, flew to Tahiti.71 One
Cover of the restaurant menu for “Hotel Desert Hills” in Phoenix, Arizona. Courtesy of the UC Davis Library. Amerine (Maynard) Menu Collection, n.d
of his first efforts was to establish better relations with the French colonial authorities; he was successful in obtaining three long-sought passports and in increasing the number of missionaries allowed from eight to twelve. He was instrumental in obtaining a donation of dental equipment from the church. Attendance at the meetings rose.72
With Orton away, the motel business was not as profitable. His son, Russell, took a break from college in Colorado to manage the family motel portfolio. His letters to his father are full of apologies for falling profits and labor problems. He wrote in August 1953, “As you will notice business has dropped off very badly this past month. We were down from last year for the first time. I have been checking and find that it is true all over town but we are going to make a concerted effort to get out more and try to drum up more business.”73 Russell was too inexperienced to run the business and did not have the necessary authority to manage the key employees.
In April 1954 Ken Orton suffered an attack of kidney stones and was released from his
mission a month later. He underwent surgery in Salt Lake City and returned home to recover.74 Back in Phoenix, Orton expanded his empire with a grand motor hotel. In March 1955 Desert Enterprises built the 107-room Hotel Desert Sun on Grand Avenue. A full-page advertisement for the motel in the Tourist Court Journal proclaimed it “One of the Southwest’s most modern motor hotels.” No longer a mere motel, the motor inn’s “distinctive rambling exterior, highlighted by a trapezoid swimming pool, is complemented inside by a large dining room, coffee shop, banquet room, lobby, and private dining room.”75 Barker Brothers, a contract furnishing company out of Los Angeles who had furnished and decorated the hotel, took out a full-page advertisement in Tourist Court Journal. 76 The renowned photographer Maynard Parker highlighted the modernist elements of the motor hotel in the publicity shots.77 Orton and his associates had made the leap from highway motels to luxurious urban motor hotels, complete with dining and meeting facilities that provided venues for local service organizations and private parties.
Orton’s final project was the Tahiti Inn, opened in 1959 at 2950 East Van Buren. The inn project was part of a tradition in the American West of Tiki bars and restaurants reminiscent of the South Pacific, but he must have been partially inspired by his nostalgia for the islands of Tahiti. Sadly, in the fall of 1959 Orton suffered a fatal heart attack.78 After his death, management of the properties fell into other hands as one son became a medical doctor and the other pursued a career in theater management that took him to Los Angeles and New York City.79 The management was turned over to others, but the
Owner John K. Orton poolside at Desert Sun Hotel, Phoenix, Arizona, 1956. Maynard L. Parker, photographer. Courtesy of the Huntington Library, photCL MLP 3352.
A postcard depicting the Tahiti Inn, Phoenix, Arizona, circa 1960. Petley Studios, Phoenix, Arizona. Author’s collection
four families kept their financial interest in the Desert Sun properties until the 1970s and in one property into the 1990s.80 By building the motels as tourism to Arizona bloomed, the legacy owners laid a foundation for the growth of tourism in the West.
From Tahiti to Salt Lake City to Phoenix, Orton rose to become a regional star in the hospitality industry. From the humble Ken-Ray to the cosmopolitan Desert Hills, Orton traveled an upward trajectory, nurturing business associations that helped him amass considerable wealth by building motels in the West. His mission experiences in Tahiti complemented his managerial experience in the growing hospitality industry in desert Southwest. By following his career, we better understand how the humble highway motel gave rise to the fancy motor hotels of the urban West.
The story of the three Utah motel men, with its uncanny parallel in the mission experiences of Mitchell and Orton in Tahiti, helps us better understand the growth of motels in the West, as noted by DeVoto. The men (and their wives) were key players in building business associations that laid the foundation for the automobile tourism infrastructure of tourist courts and motels. Their service experience in church and civic organizations garnered them executive skills valued in the associations they founded and served in the western United States. They were comfortable associating with the motel owners from other states and were adept at forming long-distance business relationships. Their Mormon mission proselyting skills were also put to good use as they signed up new members. Loyal to their own church, they tended to be loyal to organizations they felt would benefit them and others. From their church leadership experiences, they knew how to create hierarchies and maintain order.
The associations they founded helped create a culture of capitalism that softened the edges of competitive enterprise. The interdependent networks of state, regional, and national associations helped preserve their independence in an increasingly corporate economy that was becoming more subject to state and federal regulation. The associations were effective proto chains, offering benefits like making reservations before chains like Holiday Inn dominated
the hospitality industry. The organizations were not mere fraternities, but became lobbying organizations in an era of expansion of federal influence.
The business role of the wives of these three men is more difficult to assess. Clara Bentley Knell and Frankie Graves Orton were known as supportive of their husband’s careers, but only Ruth Mitchell is visible to us because she stayed in the business after her husband’s death. We can only surmise that friendships were fostered as the wives of motel owners accompanied their husbands to professional meetings. The women dressed up for the banquets and attended women-only teas and tours. The conventions gave the small-town bourgeoisie a chance to see the big city, go shopping, and tour museums. The trips also afforded the couples a getaway from the daily cares of being on call day and night for their motel guests. Their trips were written up in the local papers, giving them a cachet that elevated their standing in small-town society. The history of their contributions has yet to be written but is necessary to fully understand the public success of their husbands.
The original motel builders depended on family labor and the capital from extended family networks and investments like life insurance. As family patterns changed and federal highways directed traffic away from small towns, the legacy motels were destined to fade in importance. The number of motels peaked in the 1960s with 61,000 in operation but began to decline by 1965.81 The end of the “do-it-yourself” era led to the shrinking of the number of family-owned motels, and by the early 1960s small owners faced stiff competition from chains like Holiday Inn and Travelodge.82 The legacy motel owners struggled to stay afloat, and they began selling off unprofitable motels in the early 1960s as the chains spread nationwide. Expanding job opportunities for the wives of moteliers, who could make better money at a paid job, and the college-bound children of the owners, were key factors in the decline of the family-owned business. It would be erroneous to conclude that the chains destroyed motels. Instead, legacy motels were relinquished by their founders as property changed hands. Families who wanted to get into the business could do so by purchasing a franchise from a chain with much less risk and a lot less effort.
The original highway motels have met various fates. Ray Knell’s oldest son, Douglas, who had grown up taking pitchers of ice water to the guests of his father’s motel properties, took over the management. After the death of Douglas Knell in 2012, the establishment was sold to become the Baymont by Wyndham Cedar City, part of the largest hotel franchise company in the world.83 Utah State University purchased the Mitchell Motel to serve as its East Campus Office Building.
A large share of the legacy motels was sold to Asian Indian immigrants. Orton’s first property, the Desert Inn, was sold to Surendra G. Patel in 1976. The Patels were part of a wave of immigrants from Gujarat, India, who bought the motels sold by the sons and daughters of those who built them. Today in Utah, there is a Patel motel at every exit on I-15 between St. George and Salt Lake City, and several in every town along the Wasatch front or near a national park. Like their predecessors who founded motels, the Patels rely on family capital and labor, and a strong national business association, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association.84 The integration of the Patels into the western lodging business, and its impact on Utah, is another story.
The Mormon moteliers—Knell, Mitchell and Orton—laid the groundwork for future Mormon hospitality industry giants: Earl Holding and Bill Marriott. Holding, the owner of Little America and Grand America hotels in Wyoming and Utah, built his empire from humble beginnings in Casper, Wyoming, in the 1950s. Marriott’s hotel business did not begin until the 1950s and then primarily on the east coast, but his father’s Utah Mormon roots profoundly shaped his own business values.85 Utah’s motel men in the Intermountain West created the foundation for the transition from small family businesses to motor hotels to the cosmopolitan resort hotels of today’s West.
What Bernard DeVoto would have written about the hospitality palaces of today is open for speculation. However soft his pillow, clean his sheets, or tasty the room service offerings, he would have found something to complain about. And if we were to read one of his columns, we would chuckle and nod our heads in agreement. But he might be sad to see the
deterioration of the mid-century highway motels where at one time the owners welcomed you warmly at the front desk and their children brought pitchers of ice water to your room. Nostalgia for old motels has spurred their adaptive reuse into “hip boutique accommodations.” Renovated motels, with their open balconies, colorful neon signs, and drive-up convenience are attractive to younger tourists searching for an authentic overnight in distinctive locations.86 Perhaps the revival of the old motels will restore a sense of community to motel towns all over the West. And when the tourists raise a glass while relaxing by the pool, maybe they will give a toast to the original motel builders of the West.
Notes
1. Bernard DeVoto, The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), 119–26. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University; student research assistants Mark Lowe, Sam Willis, Heather Budge, and Ellis Diane Benson; and my collaborator in telling the story of Utah’s historic motels, Lisa-Michele Church. And in memory of Thomas F. Rugh, who never tired of driving me around to the fascinating old motels of the West.
2. Lyn Spillman, Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012).
3. The historical roots of the Mormon cooperative approaches toward capitalism spring from the communitarian ideals of early Mormonism, as well as Brigham Young’s resistance to the commercialism spurred by the completion of the transcontinental railroad. See Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958); Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976). For case studies see Matthew C. Godfrey and Michael Hubbard MacKay, eds., Business and Religion: The Intersection of Faith and Finance (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2019). By 1930, Mormon enterprise was fully integrated into the national economy, see Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); for commentary see Jackson Lears, “The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” New Republic, October 18, 2012. The peculiar nature of Mormon capitalism has drawn renewed interest with the disclosures of the immense wealth of the corporate church, see for example, Ian Lovett and Rachel Levy, “The Mormon Church Amassed $100 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2020.
4. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History
101, no. 2 (September 2014): 503–536. My thinking has been influenced by Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
5. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (New York: Knopf, 1957); Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the TwentiethCentury American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long, eds., Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001). For Utah’s role in the expansion of tourism in the West, see Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001); Philip Gruen, Manifest Destinations: Cities and Tourists in the Nineteenth-Century American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); and Susan S. Rugh, “Branding Utah: Industrial Tourism in the Postwar American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 445–72.
6. Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).
7. Belasco, Americans on the Road; John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle, Jefferson S. Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996).
8. Jakle et al., The Motel in America.
9. “First Motel,” Tourist Court Journal, February 1955, 11; “The Great American Roadside,” Fortune, September 1934, 53.
10. DeVoto, The Easy Chair, 122.
11. Lisa-Michele Church, “Early Roadside Motels and Motor Courts of St. George,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80, no. 1 (Winter 2012); Susan S. Rugh, “Selling Sleep: The Rise and Fall of Utah’s Historic Motels,” in Utah in the Twentieth Century, eds. Brian Q. Cannon and Jessie L. Embry (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 65–87.
12. DeVoto, The Easy Chair, 121.
13. “Operating Averages for 1939 Show Slightly Better Returns on Investment for Tourist Courts Examined,” July 1940, 1; “1943 Operating Averages,” September 1944, 13; “1942 Operating Averages,” February 1943, 15, all in Tourist Court Journal
14. Familysearch.org/tree/find/id, s.v., KWCJ-GWG, Raymond Knell; Church History Biographical Database, s.v. “Raymond Knell,” history.churchofjesuschrist.org /chd/landing.
15. “Ray Knell to Enlarge El Rey Motel,” Iron County (UT) Record, October 25, 1945.
16. Dorothy Wade, “Tourist Court with the Bargain Basement,” Tourist Court Journal, June 1950, 6.
17. “Work Progressing Rapidly on Cedar City Tourist Courts,” Iron County (UT) Record, May 30, 1946.
18. Janet B. Seegmiller, “Selling the Scenery: Chauncey and Gronway Parry and the Birth of Southern Utah’s Tourism and Movie Industries,” Utah Historical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 40–55; Thomas G. Alexander, “Red Rock and Gray Stone: Senator Reed Smoot, the Establishment of Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks, and the Rebuilding of Downtown Washington, D.C.,” Pacific Historical Review 72 (February 2003): 1–38.
19. Wade, “Tourist Court,” Tourist Court Journal, June 1950, 6.
20. “Modern Café to Be Included in Motel Building Program,” Iron County (UT) Record, November 22, 1945.
21. Best Western International, The First Name in Hospitality (Phoenix: Best Western International, 2006), 14–15; Douglas Knell, interview by Susan S. Rugh, Cedar City, Utah, July 31, 2010.
22. “A Guide to Best Western Motels,” 1948, Best Western box 1, Hilton Hospitality Industry Archives, Massad Family Research Library, University of Houston, Houston, Texas.
23. First Name in Hospitality, 19, 26, 61.
24. “Motor Court Owners Schedule State Convention in Cedar,” Iron County (UT) Record, August 4, 1949.
25. “Highway Group Organized for Southern Utah,” Iron County (UT) Record, October 20, 1955.
26. “Ray Knells Travel East to Motor Hotel Confab,” October 24, 1957; “Local Motel Operator Appointed to Board of Governors,” January 29, 1959; “State Motel Assn. Chief Attends National Convention,” October 26, 1961, all in Iron County (UT) Record
27. “Ray Knells Return from Rotary Confab,” June 18, 1964; “Ray Knell Accorded Awards at National Convention,” July 2, 1964, both in Iron County (UT) Record.
28. “Vaccinations Urged for Polio Protection by County Chairman,” Iron County (UT) Record, June 28, 1956.
29. “Appointment Made to Fill Junior Commerce Vacancy,” July 24, 1941; “Nominations Made for Chamber of Commerce Elections,” December 14, 1944; “Lions Club Approves Nine New Members,” December 21, 1944, all in Iron County (UT) Record.
30. “Second Ward Bishopric,” February 9, 1956; “Theron Ashcroft Named Second Ward Bishop,” June 1, 1961, both in Iron County (UT) Record
31. Edgar B. Mitchell journal, November 1930–July 1931, MSS 13227, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (CHL).
32. Church News, September 9, 1944, 1, 12.
33. “Tahitian Mission Breaks Ground for New Tabernacle, Mission Headquarters,” February 21, 1948; “Leader in Tahiti—Elder Cowley on First Visit to Mission,” September 1, 1948, 15, both in Church News
34. Chrome Postcard, Mitchell Motel, Mike Roberts for Intermountain Tourist Supply.
35. “Tourist Industry Aids All Utahns, says UMA Office,” Vernal (UT) Express, October 8, 1959.
36. Victor Anderson to Bentley Mitchell, May 30, 1956; Victor Anderson to AMHA Board of Directors, June 12, 1956; R. R. Price to Bentley Mitchell, September 9, 1956; Fred Haverland to Bentley Mitchell, September 10, 1956, box 3, fd. 4, all located in Edgar Bentley Mitchell Papers, MSS 322 (hereafter Mitchell Papers), Special Collections and Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan, Utah (hereafter MCUSU).
37. Fourteenth Annual Convention Program and Motel Show Program, 1956, American Motor Hotel Association; and AMHA News Bulletin, September 1956, box 3, fd. 2, both in Mitchell Papers.
38. Clint Pumphrey and Jim Kichas, “From Tire Tracks to Treasure Trail: Cooperative Boosterism Along U.S. Highway 89,” Utah Historical Quarterly 85, no. 3 (2017): 257–72.
39. Minutes of the First Annual Meeting of Members of 89’ers International Highway Association, Inc., September 23, 1955; Minutes, September 24, 1955, 1; Ar-
ticles of Incorporation of 89’ers International Highway Association, Inc., box 1, fd. 3, all located in Mitchell Papers.
40. Board of Directors meeting minutes, October 24, 1955, box 1, fd. 3, Mitchell Papers. A copy of the record produced by Latin Aire Records, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico is in box 2, fd. 4, Mitchell Papers.
41. Official Minutes, Second Annual Membership Meeting, Kanab, Utah, October 12, 1956; Official Minutes, Annual Board of Directors Meeting, Afton, Wyoming, October 9, 1957, box 1, fd. 4, Mitchell Papers.
42. Official Minutes, 1957, 3, Mitchell Papers.
43. 89’ers International Highway Ass’n Inc., Third Annual Membership Meeting registration flyer; 89’ers International Highway Ass’n Inc., Official Bulletin, May 1957, both in box 1, fd. 11, Mitchell Papers.
44. Bentley Mitchell to Paul Stevig, n.d.; Dean Wallin to Bentley Mitchell, May 28, 1958, box 2, fd. 9, Mitchell Papers.
45. Ernie Saran to the directors, members, and friends of the 89ers . . ., April 26, 1958, box 2, fd. 9, Mitchell Papers.
46. “Guide to the Bentley Mitchell Papers, 1950–1959,” Mitchell Papers, citing Logan (UT) Herald Journal, December 20–21, 1959.
47. Bob Parson, “Civil Rights in Cache Valley, Utah,” 1986, box 4, fd. 21, Utah State University History Records 1862–2019, MCUSU. This incident is evidence of the pervasiveness of discrimination against Black travelers throughout the nation that would be addressed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. See Mia Bay Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).
48. “Logan Residents Prove Again That Hospitality Is Worthwhile,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 7, 1962.
49. Tahiti Papeete Mission history, 1900–1984, September 18, 1927, 125, LR 3039 45, CHL.
50. Paul W. Pollock, Arizona’s Men of Achievement (Phoenix: P. W. Pollock, 1958), 1:68.
51. “Frankie G. Orton—Her Story” January 21, 1962, Family Search, ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KW84-NPL /frankie-lenore-graves-1901–1980.
52. “Frankie G. Orton—Her Story,” 2.
53. Roger Pusey, “Bookcraft Celebrates Its 50th,” Deseret News, September 13, 1992.
54. “Courts Organize,” Tourist Court Journal, February 1944, 8–9.
55. “Incorporation,” August 1944; “Utah Get Tax Increase,” September 1945, 23, both in Tourist Court Journal
56. Pollock, Arizona’s Men of Achievement, 68.
57. “Frankie G. Orton—Her Story.”
58. Articles of Incorporation of Bookcraft, Inc., State of Arizona Incorporation Commission, October 14, 1954, RN 19540041579, Docket 1447, p. 377, Maricopa County Recorder, accessed July 1, 2021, recorder.maricopa.gov /recdocdata/.
59. Pollock, Arizona’s Men of Achievement, 70–72.
60. Notice and Claim of Lien, 1949, RN19490506, Docket 0383, p. 479, Maricopa County Recorder, accessed July 1, 2021, recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata.
61. 1948, RN19480831, Docket 0266, p. 339, Maricopa County Recorder, accessed July 1, 2021, recorder.maricopa .gov/recdocdata.
62. Ken Orton to Russell Orton, February 26, 1949, Orton family letters in possession of Ann Whiting Orton, Salt Lake City, Utah, copies in author’s possession.
63. Ken Orton to Russell Orton, May 23, 1949, Orton family letters.
64. Ken Orton to Russell Orton, May 23, 1949, Orton family letters.
65. Pollock, Arizona’s Men of Achievement, 68; “Frankie G. Orton—Her Story.”
66. 1940 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City Precinct, Salt Lake City, Ward 6, digital image, Vernon G. Lunt, accessed July 2, 2021, familysearch.org.
67. American Hotel Association Directory Corporation, 1955–1956 Hotel Red Book (New York, 1955).
68. Pollock, Arizona’s Men of Achievement, 68.
69. Architectural observations by author in visits to the motel buildings in 2011.
70. J. K. Orton, Orton’s Courting America: A Guide to America’s Finest and Best Operated Motor Courts ([Phoenix]: Courting America, 1951).
71. “Elder Orton Called to Preside in Tahiti,” Church News, February 7, 1953.
72. Tahiti Papeete Mission history, 1900–1984, March 31, 1953, box 2, fd. 2, LR 3039 2; “Church Donates Dental Equipment,” Church News, May 23, 1953.
73. Russell Orton to Ken Orton, August 12, 1953, Orton family letters.
74. Tahiti Papeete Mission history, 1900–1984, May 12, 1954, LR 3039 44.
75. Tourist Court Journal, July 1955, 13.
76. Tourist Court Journal, July 1955, 13. In 1956 Barker Brothers opened a location in Phoenix at 221 East Camelback Road. Advertisement, Tourist Court Journal, May 1956, 5.
77. Desert Hills, Swimming Pool, 3352; Desert Inn, Lobby, 296796, 296809; Desert Sun Lobby, 296812, in Maynard L. Parker Negatives, Photographs, and Other Materials, Huntington Digital Library; “Beauty and the Budget: A Study of the Contract Furnisher, A Staff Report,” Tourist Court Journal, September 1959, 28.
78. F. G. Orton; “John K. Orton: A Memorial,” American Biographical Encyclopedia Arizona Edition: Profiles of Prominent Personalities (Phoenix: Paul W. Pollock, 1969), 3:272; Obituary clippings, October 28, 1959, Orton family collection, copy in author’s possession; Kara Newman, “A New Golden Age for the Tiki Bar,” Atlantic, June 5, 2018.
79. “Obituary: Russell B. Orton,” Deseret News, November 27, 2003, accessed online.
80. Al Stovall as well as his children had an interest in Desert Inn and Desert Hills Hotel into the 1970s, as did Eugene Wesolowski, presumably a partner of Stovall in the mining business. 1940 United States Federal Census, Supervisorial District 3, Pima, Arizona, enumeration district 10–77, sheet 9B, line 55, digital image, Eugene Wesolowski, accessed July 2, 2021, ancestry.com.
81. American Automobile Association, Post-war Travel Trends, Survey by the American Automobile Association [1945], 11, California State Automobile Association Archives, San Francisco, California; James V. Malone, “Motels—A Big Opportunity for Builders,” American Builder, February 1950, 116; Jakle et al., The Motel in America, 18–20.
82. From its start in 1953, Holiday Inn had grown to 300 motor hotels; Howard Johnson had 134; and Travelodge had 216 motels. “Special Research Report on a Dynamic and Changing Industry,” Hotel/Motor Hotel Monthly, October 1962, 17–31.
83. First Name in Hospitality, 61; “About Us,” Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, accessed June 4, 2021, corporate .wyndhamhotels.com/about-us/; Familysearch.org/tree /find/id, s.v., KWZN-L83, John Douglas Knell.
84. “About Us,” Asian American Hotel Owners Association¸ accessed March 18, 2022, aahoa.com/about-aahoa.
85. J. W. Marriott Jr. and Kathi Ann Brown, The Spirit to Serve: Marriott’s Way (New York: HarperBusiness, 1997).
86. Patrick Sisson, “Motel Revivalism: How Hipster Hoteliers Created a New Roadside Attraction,” Curbed.com, June 22, 2018, archive.curbed.com/2018/6/22/17493336 /motel-midcentury-design-hotel-lodging-adaptive -reuse; Christina Poletto, “Upstate Motels Make a Comeback, With an Aim to Captivate,” New York Times, September 3, 2021, nytimes.com/2021/09/03/realestate /catskill-motels-comeback.html.
Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity
BY LINDA MURIEL ZABRISKIE
In 2021, while editing an article on Senator Elbert Thomas and European Jews, I came across Linda Muriel Zabriskie’s dissertation about the senator. The significance of her topic sent me looking for a published version of the dissertation, with no luck. In 2015, soon after completing her doctorate at the University of Utah, Zabriskie unexpectedly passed away. With her family’s permission, we have adapted portions of her dissertation, primarily chapter five, into the following article. Zabriskie prefaced her work by noting the inspiration her grandparents and father provided to this topic of labor history and by dedicating the dissertation to her children, Patrick Newton and Nicole Newton.
–Holly George
GH
In September 1936, senators Robert M. La Follette Jr. and Elbert D. Thomas presented an apparently simple exhibit before their colleagues, a map of the United States with dots concentrated in the nation’s industrial centers. Yet the map told a complicated and troubling story: for the dots represented tear gas sold to corporations, meant as a tool to subdue their striking workers.1 That June, La Follette and Thomas had become the heads of a special Senate subcommittee investigating the mistreatment of workers. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, as it was informally known, continued until 1940 and gathered much attention along the way as it delved into the use by some businesses of spies, munitions, private security forces, and much else to disrupt legal efforts to unionize. This was not least because of La Follette and Thomas themselves but also because of two blockbuster episodes in 1937: hearings into the oppression of coal workers in Harlan County, Kentucky, and the Memorial Day Massacre in Illinois.2 The professorial Thomas, a Democrat who had represented Utah in the Senate since 1932, played a major part in the committee’s work, which would ultimately last for four years.
After Franklin Roosevelt became the president on March 4, 1933, he swiftly began implementing programs to alleviate the immediate suffering caused by the Depression. Toward that end, in June Congress passed the
National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which among other things gave workers the right to organize into unions. The Supreme Court declared NIRA unconstitutional in 1935, but its successor, the National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act, again worked to eliminate obstructions to collective bargaining and to prevent other unfair practices designed to interfere with union membership or policy. The Wagner Act became law in July 1935 and was constitutionally upheld in April 1937. Nevertheless, some employers resorted to well-financed, far-reaching, and illegal acts of industrial espionage and aggression that violated the rights of workers guaranteed in the Wagner legislation. It was in response to this illegal activity that the Senate created the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee on June 6, 1936, which was presided over by La Follette and cochaired by Thomas.
A Progressive from Wisconsin, La Follette was the son of the towering Robert M. La Follette
Sr. and was himself deeply committed to labor organization and collective bargaining. For his part, Thomas had come face-to-face with labor troubles in 1922, when he was serving as a major in the Utah National Guard. That year, coal workers in Carbon County, Utah, joined a nationwide strike when they learned they were facing a 30 percent wage cut. During the strike, both strikers and company guards were killed, the Utah National Guard was called to the coal fields, and Thomas received perhaps his first unadulterated glimpse into the often grim and impoverished world of American labor. Both senators, then, had a predisposition toward workers, as did their staffs—a tendency that business interests were quick to point out during the hearings.3
The initial phase of the committee’s hearings, in 1936 and early 1937, focused on the use of spies, strikebreakers, private security, and even weapons to discourage unionizing. Thomas
Senators Robert M. La Follette Jr. (left) and Elbert D. Thomas (right) display a map showing the use and sales of tear gas and nauseating gas in labor disputes, September 1936. Each pin on the map represents $500 worth of gas or equipment sold. The map was on view in a Senate room where the La Follette Committee held its hearings. Harris and Ewing. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-33850
learned of his responsibilities on the committee in a letter from “Young Bob,” dated June 22, 1936. Although Thomas said he had been unaware of his appointment, “you can count on me to be as helpful as I know how to be.”4
In August La Follette wrote again to Thomas, this time informing him that some of the “detective agencies and companies whom we plan to subpoena next week may not give our investigators access to their files . . . but will appear . . . and refuse to produce the required documents or to testify on the grounds that the Committee is without constitutional power to conduct its inquiry.” It was a resistance that would characterize the battle for economic justice between private business and the government committee through all its days. In order to preclude witness circumvention of the law, La Follette asked for the passage of a resolution giving him standing to hold hearings in Thomas’s absence should he be unable to attend.5 Thus began the most extensive hearings on employer violations of employee rights in American history. Ultimately the committee produced ninety-five volumes of hearings and reports that are one of the most reliable sources of information on labor–management relations in the 1930s.6
Witnesses began appearing before the committee the following month, some more reluctantly than others, and their recollections often concerned the inhumane tactics used by business leaders to prevent union organization. On September 23, 1936, the cover story in the Washington Daily News relayed the testimony of Sam “Chowderhead” Cohen, a 266-pound strikebreaker with a record of fourteen arrests who had attacked workers walking out of a Remington Rand Plant in Middletown, Connecticut. E. K. McDade, another veteran strikebreaker, described the use of live steam and electric voltage on strikers. Two days later the Washington Post reported that A. S. Ailes of Lake Erie Chemical Company revealed that more than $500,000 had been spent on tear gas for use against strikers. The same article recounted bribed (or “greased”) police and plans by Pennsylvania coal companies to plant “sickening” gas in abandoned shafts to drive off “coal bootleggers.”7
Preparatory work on the hearings had not gone unnoticed by the editorial writers at the Post.
On September 23, 1936, the day on which Cohen and McDade had testified, the newspaper published “Afraid of the Light?” The writer encouraged the subcommittee in its investigation, particularly senators La Follette and Thomas, and lauded the Senate for its work in searching out “undue interferences with the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively and to recommend remedial legislation if necessary.”
Condemning the refusal of “recalcitrant” company officers “to submit their files and themselves for examination,” the editorial noted the District grand jury’s indictment of six officers for failure to obey the committee’s order. It was also pointed out that “certain of the agencies undertook to destroy some part of their records on learning the committee’s plan to inspect them.”8 The editorial writer concluded that this “obstinacy appears to indicate only a fear—fear to stand out in the open light for examination.”
“Operating with the precision of a pair of surgeons, Senators Robert M. La Follette (Progressive), Wisconsin, and Elbert D. Thomas (Democrat), Utah, teamed up in alternate questioning of the witnesses,” the article continued. “Figurative scalpel in hand, La Follette cut and probed through the secrecy-shrouded business.”
Dummy committees, called “Citizens’ Committees,” operating on behalf of Remington Rand, General Motors Corporation, Standard Oil, Alcoa, du Pont de Nemours, and Ford Motor Company, had purchased gas and gas-throwing equipment. Senator Thomas devoted himself to “the more philosophical side of the inquiry, questioning the witnesses on their ‘moral obligations’ to society.” Ailes defended the manufacture and sale of tear gas, the Post reported, but added that “We don’t want anyone to get hurt.” The crowd erupted in laughter. “As Ailes left the stand, newsmen nearby were still laughing. He turned to them and snapped, ‘You’re nothing but a bunch of Communists!’”9
The charge that union organizers were “Reds” was certainly not a new one, dating back to the early days of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but the companies accused of illegal activities took up the cry with gusto. Yet none of the witnesses could admit ever having seen a communist, much less define what communism was. “Throughout the testimony Senator Thomas endeavored to secure from
the witnesses a definition,” since they consistently used the term to label the subjects of their labor espionage. None could give Thomas a satisfactory answer. La Follette was typically more blunt (throughout the proceedings the senators used something of a good cop, bad cop technique) and asked, “Frankly, don’t you regard any attempt by men to organize in labor unions as Communistic?” Pinkerton official Joseph Littlejohn of Atlanta replied, “It’s Communistic until we find out different.” At the session’s close, La Follette made it clear that the hearings up to this point were only preliminary, especially pertaining to the Pinkertons. He was right. The best—or worst—was yet to come.10
By the end of January 1937, as the disclosures became more sensational, both senators believed the committee had begun to make progress; and revelation followed upon revelation. On January 14, 1937, the New York City Sun had reported that counsel for the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company testified that the company was forced to provide special protection for its properties because of the failure of Alabama law enforcement in its duties, according to Borden Burr. Senator Thomas pressed Burr for full explanations of the hiring of deputies and explained that only once in 1934 had strikebreakers been used. “A great deal of violence occurred. The State law does not provide protection for life and property during these periods of emergency due to the limited police facilities.” One “slight, dark-haired communist” told the committee he had been beaten by local authorities and sentenced to 180 days at hard labor for possessing “literature advocating overthrow of the government.” In reality, the “communist,” one Jack Barton, carried the Nation, the New Republic, and the Labor Advocate, an American Federation of Labor publication. Likewise, Joseph Gelders stated under oath that Walter J. Hanna, National Guard Captain and reputed head of the secret service of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, had kidnapped and beaten him during the same episode.11
The committee was beginning to attract national attention, the majority of which was positive. In February 1937, however, Thomas did feel compelled to respond to a New York Times editorial in which he had read the following:
“The La Follette committee is running down cases of espionage by large employers, but does it ever think of exposing the tactics of labor union organizers? Would it be at all interested in charges or affidavits setting forth acts of tyranny and even brutality by labor union officials or agents?” Thomas’s response was stern and to the point:
May I, for your information, tell you I have asked witnesses of all types whether labor uses espionage methods. We have not learned of any labor unions that have been clients of any of the detective agencies we have investigated so far. . . . We have learned that one labor group attempted to buy some tear gas but failed. . . . I send you this information not because I am in any sense out of harmony with the spirit of your editorial, but I think you should know that as far as our committee is concerned, we are out to cure evils no matter by whom they are used.
Further, Thomas stated, the editorial implied that the committee thought it good politics to be on the side of the employees. “In my particular case I think that politically my position on this Civil Liberties Committee is a very, very bad one for me. It may be of interest for you to know that not a single word concerning any of our hearings has appeared in the newspapers of my home town, Salt Lake City.”12
Increasingly the committee became concerned with industrial espionage, which in this context referred to the use of spies to disrupt union activities. On January 25, 1937, the New York Times reported that the so-called Corporations Auxiliary Company (CAC) had employed 200 labor spies to prevent strikes and paid its president an annual salary of $75,000. When La Follette and Thomas questioned James H. Smith, the CAC’s handsomely paid president, he explained that their clients liked their services and paid for them—and their best customer was the Chrysler Corporation. Thomas was particularly interested in how, as the witness claimed, the use of union-breaking spies improved production, increased efficiency, and reduced costs.13
When Smith responded that “we deal entirely with the human element and eliminate all reasons for discord, [we] achieve the desired result,” Thomas was insistent: you are in reality selling something you cannot deliver. “It is nothing but industrial espionage to get at this ‘human element’ and so if a spy takes advantage of a weak-minded neighbor, that would be worthwhile information on reaching the human element,” he caustically remarked. “Have you ever made your operatives go to church to see what was being preached, or to a college to see what was being taught?” “All sides would be informed,” the witness rejoined. “The President . . . said nations fell because they did not know what was going on in the realm. I wrote a letter around it and sent it to our clients.”
One can only speculate on how a mind such as Thomas’s interpreted this circuitous logic. In one sharp exchange three days later concerning what the witness maintained as the fundamental honesty of the operatives, Thomas commented, “And you say they are honest. Misleading fraternity brothers and violating the oath they take not to reveal lodge secrets? . . . Can a spy be honest?”14
“Testimony Amazes Senators at La Follette Civil Liberties Committee’s Hearing Today” the Washington Daily News announced on February 9, 1937. According to the United Press, William H. Martin, a former operative for Pinkerton, admitted that he had been assigned to shadow Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward L. McGrady while he was attempting to arbitrate a Chevrolet plant strike in Toledo, Ohio, in 1935. (He had not been, he said, “very successful.”) When Thomas asked Martin how many Pinkertons were in Toledo at the time, he answered, “Oh, there must have been 40 or 50.”
When he asked R. L. Burnside, assistant superintendent of the Detroit office, if he had asked Martin to follow McGrady, Burnside replied no, “But if he says I told him to, I guess I did.” He also indicated that he could not remember why the assignment was made. “It couldn’t have been because you were interested in seeing the strike continue so you could sell more of your services and were afraid he might settle it?” Thomas asked. Burnside denied this.15
After Burnside admitted that he believed a Pinkerton agent would have been justified in
shadowing Governor Frank Murphy should he meet with the president at the White House, Thomas’s questions took a distinctly more ethical direction. Asking the witness if he considered following government officials “proper practice,” the respondent replied that government officials should have no expectation of exemption. Calling Robert Pinkerton to the stand, Thomas flatly asked about the ethical implications of such activity. Government officials, no, he responded. Committee members were fair game. When informed that he had been watched without his knowledge, Assistant Secretary McGrady replied, “I think it is a terrible thing for private detectives to spy on Federal officials on Government business. But we expect it. We know or suspect that we are being watched. We have been told our wires have been tapped.” Clearly the clandestine activity was reaching into the offices of the federal government itself. On that same day La Follette and Thomas examined loaded rubber hose “persuaders” said to have been used by guards at an automotive plant. Two thousand such weapons had allegedly been manufactured in Flint, Michigan.16
On March 22, 1937, Thomas delivered a speech on the National Broadcasting Network that discussed labor problems and illegal activities such as spying, which had damaged the credibility of industry. “One directing officer of one of these labor-busting coercing, public opinion-controlling, and spy-employing organizations testified under oath that he had never talked with a laboring man in his 25 odd years of experience, yet he was respected by the great industrialists as a directing force in labor relations.” Asked what government could do, he answered by saying that “it can lay down broad definitions of what shall constitute fair and unfair labor and industrial practices. It can also define by law what a union is and thus outlaw the racketeer and the dishonest labor leader, bring into existence courts or boards to enforce fair labor practices and thus give the third party with public interest necessary to successful participation.” But Thomas reiterated, “strikes are like war, are outmoded. For this great nation to assume that it cannot solve its labor problems is to admit a failure our history will not deny. The key to the solution is trust, confidence, and mutuality.” Again he repeated
What is a communist? Thomas also repeatedly pointed out to industrialists that instead of spending thousands of dollars on violent and illegal activity, they might be better served by spending a little money “trying to bring about a knowledge of industrial relations.”18
Even as the hearings continued and testimony accumulated regarding beatings, violence, espionage, weaponry, subterfuge, and destruction of company records, worse was to come. In the spring of 1937, an already volatile situation exploded in “Bloody Harlan” Kentucky; and on Memorial Day, a lethal confrontation took place in Chicago, when police shot and killed ten unarmed demonstrators during the “Little Steel Strike.” It was at this point that the La Follette-Thomas subcommittee could turn a spotlight on the oppressive practices used by some corporations against working people and spur the growth and legitimacy of organized labor in the Depression years.
his firm belief in reasonable discussion and the exchange of ideas as the viable (and successful) alternative to violence and illegal activity.17
As the days of the hearings stretched into weeks and more serious criminal behavior was uncovered, the press became increasingly fascinated by the “impresarios of this senate drama . . . unlike as Mutt and Jeff.” La Follette was described as impulsive, incisive, relentless—impassively staring down witnesses while pummeling them with “trip-hammer questioning.” Elbert Thomas, on the other hand, was compared to a kindly country doctor, his academic background evident in his grave tone, “as if he were saying, ‘How long have you had this fever, Mr. Pinkerton?’” La Follette was not shy about “barking” at reluctant witnesses, but Thomas (“no less persistent”) concentrated on the “ethics of industry” and seemed to be genuinely offended by the moral ambiguity of the confessions. “You say you had a duplicate key made without Mr. Jones’ knowledge? . Do you think that was right?” And he was a stickler for accuracy: Is any man who joins a union a communist? he asked.
The events that led up to the Harlan Coal Mine Strike of 1939 began in 1931 when 18,000 nonunion miners, faced with a 10 percent wage cut, went on strike. The next six years were characterized by protests, riots, confrontations with the Kentucky National Guard, interference with the workers’ mail, censorship of reading material, the forced use of scrip, and blacklisting: all of this amidst dangerous working conditions and desperate living conditions. Strikes were sporadic, as were periods of uneasy peace. However, with the opening of the La Follette hearings, Harlan miners saw an opportunity to show their exploitation to the rest of the country.19
Then on April 24, 1937, Lloyd Clouse, a Harlan miner who was slated to testify before the La Follette Committee, was shot and killed. The community was convinced the crime had been committed to prevent his testimony. This act of alleged murder elevated the hearings to a new level. Harassment, beatings, intimidation, coercion, and evasion of the law were one thing. A cold-blooding killing was quite something else. The hearings into the Harlan troubles ran through the spring of 1937 and included extensive—at times jarring—testimony about conditions in the county. A number of young boys from Lloyd Clouse’s family, for instance, provided eyewitness accounts of shootings at union
Utah Senator Elbert Thomas traveling to a Senate session, as he frequently did, on the subway. August 19, 1937. Harris and Ewing. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-23221
men and told of how their elders warned them to keep quiet lest they stir up more trouble.20
The federal government rapidly obtained indictments against a number of Harlan County citizens, inspiring the Pulitzer Prize–winning Herbert Agar to see some cause for hope amidst tragedy. With perhaps too much optimism, Agar wrote: “More than anything that has happened in months, that announcement gives me the feeling we are moving in to a new period in America and that the worst elements in our system are gone forever.”21 Likewise, an editorialist writing in the Birmingham Post in May 1937 deplored the conditions in the “feudal principality as Harlan County, Ky., where private gang-law is supreme over all statutes,” but exulted in the thought that “Senators La Follette and Thomas are giving the people light, and the people will somehow find a way.”22
Without doubt the most dramatic episode came out of the national union campaign to organize steel mills, which led to a strike that spread across seven states and twelve cities and involved over 80,000 workers. Tom M. Girdler, president of Republic Steel, issued a letter to his employees in which he asked, “Must Republic and its men submit to the communist dictates and terrorism of the CIO? If America is to remain a free country, the answer is no.”23 On Memorial Day the situation came to a tragic climax. Strikers and their families, demonstrating in front of the Republic Steel Plant in Chicago, were attacked by police, who fired indiscriminately into the crowd of approximately one thousand workers and their families. The incident was not widely reported until an amateur photographer’s film footage, at first suppressed by police, was released to the public. The La Follette committee, having already viewed the short piece, moved to
Thomas Ferguson, a coal miner union representative, displays a bloody and bullet-torn shirt to the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, April 27, 1937. Ferguson brought the shirt as evidence that he had been shot by Harlan County, Kentucky, deputy sheriffs. He admitted that he could not identify the group of deputies who fired the shot. Harris and Ewing. Courtesy Library of Congress, LCCN2016871622.jpg.
clear the path for a federal investigation and to determine what the scope of its study would be. The discovery of the existence of what came to be called “newsreel” film changed the tenor of the investigation and infused the episode with a heightened sense of urgency.24
Thomas told the Washington Daily News on June 17 that he had viewed the film in three secret showings with other members of the committee and that it indicated “extreme brutality” by Chicago police in their “unprovoked attack on a peaceful group of strike demonstrators.” The film, Thomas said, showed “with great clarity” an attack by about 200 policemen on a crowd of strike sympathizers, including women and children. Ultimately ten men were killed and scores injured when the police charged with pistols and clubs. “I am surprised the number of casualties was not far larger. It is very much to the credit of the group that it showed so much control under great
provocation by the police. The strikers offered absolutely no resistance and showed no belligerence. It was a one-sided fight—if you can call it a fight at all.” A line of policemen charged with swinging clubs, Thomas said, beating the running strikers until “windrows” of fallen bodies covered the ground, adding that there was no evidence that any police were injured. “If this film shows the whole story of what happened,” he said, “the Chicago police stand condemned not only of extreme brutality, but of being bad policemen.” He described having seen men shot in the back and one woman clubbed until blood streamed down her face. Thomas did qualify his statement, however, by adding that the film had been taken at close range and did not show whether anything had occurred at a greater distance to provoke law enforcement.25
Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins moved immediately to create a strike board to settle the steel situation, calling the episode in Chicago an
The Senate Civil Liberties Committee playing to a full house as it screens an amateur film of the Memorial Day riot at Republic Steel, July 2, 1937. Ten people were killed in the melee. Harris and Ewing Courtesy Library of Congress, LCCN2016871947.tif
LCCN2016873807.jpg.
“emergency” that would adversely affect steel production and commerce.26 By July 1 the committee was questioning Chicago policemen, who were on the defensive; La Follette, for his part, was impatient and skeptical of evasive and inconsistent responses. He claimed discrepancies existed between affidavits taken after the fact and testimony being immediately offered.
When one officer, who had signed a document stating that a bullet struck the patrol-wagon door, was asked by Thomas if he had read the affidavit before he signed it. “Sure,” he replied.
“Then you can’t pass the buck to the stenographer,” La Follette snapped.27
Before the hearings concluded on July 3, 1937, a massive amount of testimony was presented, the majority of it related to police conduct and their responsibility as catalysts in an unstable situation. The committee’s report, in turn, carefully
reconstructed information from newsreels, photographs, material evidence, and testimony. The analysis of all this evidence found that some of the police testimony must have been mistaken or perjured, and that the police evidently fired the first shots. The report noted, quite powerfully, that “The dominant impression left by the testimony of these witnesses is that the police attack came without warning, and that the sequence of events, the shooting, gassing, and clubbing, was so telescoped that everything appeared to happen at once. . . . [T]he motion-picture film bears out their testimony.”28 The hearings and report, then, brought at least a measure of clarity to the Memorial Day incident.
On July 3, 1937, La Follette and Thomas announced that their investigation into the Memorial Day incident was concluded. Action now had to come from Chicago’s leaders,
Julius Greenfield testifying before the Senate Civil Liberties Committee. Greenfield, a photographer for the Akron Times-Herald, was an eyewitness to the chaos at Republic Steel. Harris and Ewing Courtesy Library of Congress,
Thomas told the New York Times. But on July 6, he made a curious statement to the press: “Strikes are out of date and I often wonder how any intelligent group can participate in them.” Alluding to the loss of revenue to both employers and workers, he stated, “Even the Reds who are reputed to have a hand in present day labor unrest know they can’t win a strike. History shows that every strike ends up ultimately at the conference table.”29 Then, when addressing the American Osteopathic Association, Thomas disclosed that pending legislative measures would take “steps in the direction of permanent industrial peace.” One measure would provide federal protection to witnesses giving testimony before a Senate committee, a gesture toward Lloyd Clouse; the second would make crossing of state lines by strikebreakers a federal offense.30 In one sense, it could be argued that given all that Thomas had learned about the injustices that had been inflicted on working people, he would have perceived the strike as a hazardous and not necessarily successful last resort. On the other hand, one must also take into account his abhorrence of violence and his intellectual dedication to the belief that reasonable people could reach satisfactory solutions.
Throughout the summer of 1937, Thomas received a remarkable variety of correspondence on the work of the Civil Liberties subcommittee. Some were polite letters requesting the committee report, to which Thomas promptly responded. In every case, he answered the letters with tact and personal attention to individual concerns. A professor of agriculture at Iowa State College commended the committee on its efforts, chastised the Chicago Tribune for falsely reporting that the senators had “hissed” at one of the police officers, and asked for a copy of the hearings on the conditions in Harlan County, Kentucky. As far as the Tribune was concerned, Thomas responded, it would be fine “if they were interested in printing the truth.”31
Lewis J. Valentine, the police commissioner of New York City, thanked Thomas for a copy of the report on the Memorial Day Massacre.32
John Rosenfeld, vice president of the Eskimo Knitting Mills in Philadelphia, was not so sympathetic; complaining of the “destructive activities” of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), he accused the union of closing up Eskimo’s shops “by violence,” “notwithstanding the fact that the girls insisted on coming into work.” Eskimo, he continued, had closed shops, cancelled orders, lost a significant amount of business, and, ultimately, liquidated. Rosenfeld maintained that he believed in a “good living” wage and working conditions, and the selfish motives of the CIO (to his mind) had destroyed a good company. Thomas replied that he appreciated “having the benefit of your thoughts on this subject.”33
Other pieces of correspondence Thomas received that summer conveyed how the committee’s work fit into the broader political and cultural debates of the 1930s. One James H. Beatty, who was writing from a Veterans Administration Facility in Wisconsin, voiced his anger at the “abuse and one-sided-ness” of both Thomas and La Follette concerning “Chicago Police and Communist (Known) C.I.O. Dynamiters and Tyrants, Destroyers and Over-Throwers of American Institutions.” The police, he wrote, were scapegoats, when the real culprits were the “international hijackers” being used by the CIO’s John L. Lewis, whom Beatty described as a “Field Marshall for President Roosevelt.” Beatty went on to accuse the CIO of plotting “collectivism for exploitation purposes . [to] overthrow our Democracy and enslave us all,” and closed by “advis[ing] you men and the Benedict Arnold Governors of some states to return to your people.” Thomas responded: “I wish to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of July first relative to the work of the Senate Civil Liberties Committee. Sincerely yours, Elbert D. Thomas.”34 Beatty’s letter is a reminder that the pro-labor stance of New Dealers did not sit well with those Americans who believed Roosevelt’s administration portended a slide toward communism.
On the other hand, Thomas received significant and enthusiastic responses, understandably, from organized labor, whose support he had enjoyed. His visibility and quiet empathy increased his currency with the working-class community. The United Mine Workers Local Union 6089 from the company town of Columbia, Utah, wrote Thomas requesting copies of the committee proceedings, complimenting its work, and wishing him well in procuring
appropriations. James Jardine, recording secretary of the local, asked the senator’s opinion on the outcome of the investigation. Thomas responded by thanking the union for its support and enclosing two copies of the Memorial Day report. As to the outcome, “That is a very difficult question to answer. The object of the Committee is merely to uncover factual information which will prove helpful in the drafting of legislation that will correct the abuses that are prevalent.” Any speculation on legislative outcome would be premature, he wrote, but “the Committee has been praised in almost every newspaper in the country for ferreting out the information and uncovering conditions which most people had no idea could exist in a Democracy.”35
As the correspondence between Jardine and Thomas attested to, labor questions—and the national measures hoping to solve them—were far from academic exercises for Utahns. On July 16, 1937, Thomas received a telegram from members of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (MMSW), appealing for his help with their employer, the powerful Utah Copper Company. The MMSW was trying to hold an election among workers in Magna and Arthur, Utah. If the workers voted to unionize, they could then bargain collectively with Utah Copper. Such an election had become legal under the Wagner Act, which had also created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The union sent a similar message to the NLRB, complaining that Utah Copper had stymied its employees’ efforts to hold an election. Thomas replied the same day, indicating that the both the NLRB and the Civil Liberties Committee were “terribly overworked.” The end of his response was typical Thomas—even in a telegram: “therefore may I bespeak patience STOP Slow development through changed attitudes will in the long run attain more for all than a sporadic burst STOP The race is not to the swift.”36 By late August, an attorney from the NLRB had arrived in Salt Lake City to conduct hearings into the affair.
Meanwhile, Thomas’s contributions to the La Follette hearings had attracted a consequential amount of attention. Roosevelt had nominated Hugo Black (D-AL), chair of the Senate Labor and Education Committee, to the Supreme
Court, and his confirmation was all but assured. Largely due to his work on the Civil Liberties Committee, Thomas’s name was being mentioned as successor to Black as early as August 1937.37 The Washington News described Thomas as “a scholarly and liberal western Democrat,” and the press almost unanimously predicted that he would succeed Black to the chairmanship. “At 54, Senator Thomas is tolerant, humorous, kindly and popular. In four years as Senator he has emerged as one of the stalwarts of the group of Western New Dealers who are coming to form the shock troops of progressivism in Washington.”38 Utahns were justifiably proud of their native son. “The people of Utah have a real New Dealer in Senator Thomas,” a Salt Lake Times reporter wrote. “As one nationally famous columnist said: ‘He’s a man who knows what he’s talking about. Only recently, when witnesses before the Civil Liberties committee would try to fabricate, he could always detect it.’” Despite this important and prestigious appointment, however, Thomas remained active on the Civil Liberties committee, although it was understood that he would be unable to devote as much time to those duties and to the investigations into the actions of vigilante groups that the committee had planned for that autumn. Thomas’s first challenge as the chair of the Labor committee was to accumulate sufficient support to secure the passage of a controversial bill on wages and hours then before Congress.
Apart from the challenges Thomas would face in chairing the Education and Labor Committee, the La Follette subcommittee had many issues yet to resolve. As in previous months, the editorials and correspondence prompted by the committee’s activities bore witness to the conflicts of the 1930s, as Americans looked for solutions to their ongoing economic crisis and observed the growth of fascism and communism in Europe. An August 1937 editorial in the Philadelphia Record, entitled “the la follette committee must go on,” warned that the Senate would “disgrace itself if it permits reactionary pressure to stifle the La Follette civil liberties committee.” On the meager expenditure of $55,000, the newspaper asserted, the committee had shone its light into the darkest corners of industrial life to expose labor spies, strikebreaking agencies, the “Harlan County
outrages, [and] the Chicago massacre of ten steel strikers,” which had stunned the country and paved the way for legal and punitive action. “They have opened the eyes of millions to the many forces of incipient Fascism in America, and have driven those forces back on their heels.” But this had only scratched the surface. Much work remained in investigating the southern tenant farmer system, Nazi groups, and vigilantism, the author argued, and an additional appropriation of $50,000 to keep the committee going would be the best bargain in the Senate.
Among the most extreme responses to the crises of the decade was William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of America, or the Silver Shirts, an underground fascist organization. Pelley modeled the Silver Shirts on Adolf Hitler’s Brown Shirts and alleged—falsely—that a conspiracy among Jews and communists was to blame for the world’s economic troubles.39 The La Follette committee’s work briefly touched on the Silver Shirts, which perhaps inspired some of Thomas’s constituents to chastise him for investigating a group they believed was keeping America safe from communism.40 E. Hollings of Salt Lake City, for instance, accused Thomas in a two-page letter of attacking the “Silver Shirts,” who claimed to be America’s bastion against communism. Hollings outlined a “secret Jewish government composed of international bankers and Rabbis” operating throughout the world. La Follette, he claimed “is rated by those well informed to be a friend of Communists,” while the Silver Legion stood “for Constitution and is opposed to Communist or Fascist dictatorships.” Excoriating Jews in Utah government (or their friends), Hollings followed by saying “Don’t think for one moment I am bitter against the Jews. Communism and Jewry are synonymous through the world.”41
Thomas responded with his own two pages. He explained why the committee had been formed and informed the writer that three reports had been issued, one of which he sent to Hollings under separate cover. This reading, Thomas wrote, “will tell you exactly what this Committee has done and give in detail all of its inquiries and findings.” Two-hundred-fifty witnesses, “from all walks of life,” had appeared, and legislators, industrialists, workmen, and
professionals everywhere had recognized the committee’s value. “Three states have developed on its findings. Four books have been published about it.” The inquiry into the Silver Shirts, he added, had occurred in the course of the committee’s probe into the subject of employer associations and vigilante groups. Thomas added that “you must well know charges and insinuations that various subversive groups have had anything to do with the formation of this Committee are entirely unfounded,” and closed by inviting Hollings to submit any specific data or complaints and he would be pleased to receive them “and see that they are awarded every consideration.”42
Another member of the Silver Legion, C. F. Allen, believed it was his duty to acquaint Thomas “with this splendid organization that has not once done anything contrary to that wonderful document that has kept us a free people. Our slogan is for Christ and Constitution.” Allen then warned the senator that local people were awakening to the “Jewish question and their connection to Communism that you are now being branded as a red,” which could end his political career unless he “end this Jewish plot.”43 Others followed. Bess Epperson telegraphed Thomas in February 1938 to remark that his activities were “wholly un-American,” as did E. O. Wakefield in a two-page letter. At this point, it would appear that Thomas was becoming impatient. In response he wrote, “Suddenly from my own state come protests that the Committee is ‘Communistic’ misled and an embarrassment to the people of Utah.” Again, he asked for substantive proof: “If you have any specific data or complaints concerning the activities or formation of the Committee, I will be pleased to receive them and see that they are awarded every consideration.”44 Impatient, perhaps—ungracious, never.
Now that the committee needed additional funding, anti–New Deal editors came out against further appropriations. On April 23, 1938, Walter Trohan in the Chicago Tribune accused the committee of having “entered into an unlawful conspiracy with the communistic part and with the Committee for the Industrial Organization to place all American industry under the thumb of John L. Lewis.” The column urged readers to write senators, asking
that the funds be denied.45 Two days later a like editorial appeared, implying that a liberal New Deal conspiracy had “licked” General Motors and Big Steel from the start and contended the “‘Civil Liberties’ is a mask worn by the La Follette investigators to conceal a grossly unjust attack upon the rights of its citizens. It defends no constitutional right. It subverts them. . . . The senate ought to stop it in its tracks.”46
Nevertheless, the majority of the correspondence Thomas received was positive. Labor’s Non-Partisan League, a political organization founded by John L. Lewis, wrote that the committee was accomplishing work of “profound importance, not only to labor but to all citizens who cherish our democratic rights. . . . La Follette of Wisconsin and Thomas of Utah and their staff since passage if the Senate Resolution 266 on June 6, 1937, [have] disclosed both the brutal tactics of employers, typified by thugs and industrial espionage, and the subtle methods of the National Association of Manufacturers and its affiliated organizations” and had made more progress than any committee in recent years.47 Equally enthusiastic support came from the Garfield’s Smeltermen’s Union No. 347, the Order of Railway Conductors, the Utah State CIO Convention, the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, the Trade Union Democratic League of Utah, and John Fitzpatrick, editor of the Salt Lake Tribune. Thomas indicated his intention to drop in at Fitzpatrick’s office and “show you these two editorials and the news story from the Washington Star and the Washington Post. These two very conservative papers reflect the general trend from a spirit of misgiving and uncertainty about what our Committee was trying to do when we started three years ago, to one of appreciation of what has been done. It is nice to receive good words from such strongly Republican, conservative, anti–New Deal papers.”48
One of the more interesting requests that Thomas received came from Frontier Films. The company had been founded as the Worker’s Film and Photo League in 1930 and was sponsored by the Communist International. With the Depression the group came to believe that it needed to capture the struggle of workers on film. Some of the company’s works included Bonus March, The Scottsboro Boys, and
Sheriffed 49 On April 4, 1938, Thomas received a letter from the film company suggesting that the committee become involved in a dramatic reenactment of its findings, particularly the Republic Steel massacre. Frontier believed that a motion picture dramatizing the committee’s findings would bring millions to a realization of labor struggles as no other medium could. A broad sponsorship had been forming, including congressmen Jerry J. O’Connell, John M. Coffee, and Henry G. Teigan, as well as Bishop Francis J. McConnell. Yet Thomas declined to add his name to this list of supporters. Thanking Frontier for its interest, Thomas wrote that since he was a member of the committee, “I think I had better not be a sponsor if you are going to feature our Committee.” He did add, however, “I shall be happy to act later.” Given Frontier’s connection with the Communist Party and the adverse publicity Thomas had already received, he had little other choice.50
In early 1939, it appeared as though the La Follette committee would not receive additional money once its initial appropriation ran out. The committee, moreover, had made powerful enemies. Even so, for some time they had hoped to investigate violations against the rights of farm workers in California and had done preliminary work to that end. Events turned in the committee’s favor that year when Senator Sheridan Downey helped get another $50,000 for the effort and, especially, when the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carey McWilliams’s Factories in the Fields showed the nation the plight of migrant farm workers. The heart of the problem was that laborers had no means to organize, while the growers and their associations had much power and, like their industrial counterparts, many tools: espionage, strikebreaking, weapons, and vigilantism. In late 1939—by which point Thomas had been reelected—the committee moved the hearings to California. It would hold hearings in the state throughout early 1940.51
The initial session in Los Angeles was brief, and on Monday, November 25, 1939, representatives of the farmers there told the committee that no worker blacklists, spies, arms, or violence were used by either Orange or Riverside County branches of the Associated Farmers. Thomas announced he would leave the next
day to meet with La Follette and arrange for the full hearing back in Los Angeles the following month. While there, the University of Southern California awarded him with an honorary doctorate for “distinguished achievement in education and public service.”52 The following month, the progressive magazine The Nation named Thomas among the top twenty-five Americans on its honor roll, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Culbert Olson, John Steinbeck, and Carl Sandburg.53
Cooperation was not so forthcoming in Fresno. In a subpoena hearing preliminary to the start of testimony, Sheriff George J. Overholt of Fresno County declined to bring his office files on the grounds that he had to protect his county. Thomas responded to Overholt’s dissembling with the kindly—but firm—“country doctor” tone he had used in past hearings:
Senator Thomas. Well, if the Senate of the United States assumes that it ought to get certain information for the purpose of passing laws, don’t you think it would be well for the sheriff in a given county, when he has ben subpenaed [sic] by that committee, to find out whether the purposes of the Senate committee are germane to the information which he has?
Mr. Overholt. Possibly; yes.
Senator Thomas. How could it be just “possibly”?
When Thomas asked Philip Bancroft, a self-described farmer and reformed lawyer who belonged to the Contra Costa County organization, if he had engaged in any other business, he replied that he hadn’t engaged in other work in recent years “except to try to prevent the Communists from taking over our farms and interrupting our harvesting.”54
On December 4, 1939, the San Francisco Examiner predicted fireworks, since twenty people scheduled to testify had announced that their papers “are none of the committee’s damn business.”55 Thomas conducted the December 4 hearing exclusively, but La Follette was to join him on December 5. California Governor Culbert Olson, who was friendly to the committee, was slated to testify and elaborate on
labor conditions in California and how they should be changed.
The hearings on December 6 were revelatory. Paul S. Taylor, the University of California economist, provided long and detailed testimony about the structure of California’s agricultural sector and its fundamental difference from farms elsewhere in the United States. This was not a case of small family farms with their hired man; rather, as Taylor put it, “Large employing units, heavily dependent on gangs of laborers to harvest their highly commercialized crops, predominate.” And because the farms operated like factories—factories where the product was perishable and where the growers viewed wages as the easiest cost to control—they were increasingly a site of conflict between labor and management.56
By the end of the month, the improvement of the lot of agricultural workers had become the aim of the committee. James E. Wood, for instance, testified that “The low earnings and instability . . . affect all other aspects of [migrants’] lives, their ability to live in decent, permanent homes, educate their children, maintain health, and in general secure an adequate standard of living.”57 The committee’s efforts to understand the sources of these circumstances included hearing after hearing throughout December 1939, with experts, growers, and others. When Thomas questioned George A. Graham, secretary of the Associated Farmers of Orange County, and Myron J. Bonham of the Associated Farmers of Riverside County, the spectators expected an explosive hearing. They were disappointed, but then they did not know Elbert Thomas. The committee wanted to know about the existence of blacklists, armaments, and labor spies. Labor spies were used. Thomas suggested pensions, and he had long been known for the advocacy of such. The exchange was strained but civil.58
As the hearings drew to a close on January 24, 1940, Thomas told reporters that farm labor constituted one of the greatest problems facing the United States Congress. He had heard Arthur Clarke, executive secretary of the Los Angeles County Associated Farmers, state that milk producers were confronted with strikes just prior to milking time and should not have to have their crops perish under threat of labor
union organizers. Thomas responded by saying that the souls and lives of men were more important than crops—a sentiment that summarized well his response to many issues.59 The California phase of the La Follette committee, in the accounting of the historian Kevin Starr, “issued more than 500 subpoenas, heard 395 witnesses, compiled 2,451 pages of printed testimony, and assembled 1,747 exhibits for entry at the time of testimony, followed by 5,875 supplementary exhibits.”60 As with the materials from earlier phase of the hearings, these documents now constitute one of the most important records of labor relations in the 1930s.
In the end, the La Follette committee’s output included a report in 1938 that asked for more funding, and one in 1940 that condemned industrial espionage, violence, and strikebreaking and pointed out the necessity of legislation. Speaking before the Senate in May 1940 in defense of a bill to eliminate oppressive labor practices, Thomas reflected somewhat on his past four years of investigating labor in America and described the subject as his “constant companion” and, at times, “a nightmare.” The senator insisted that most industrialists were not guilty of bad behavior and that they needed only a hint to make
their operations more upright; and yet, legislation remained necessary to protect against bad actors and “glib” salesmen. With his signature gravity, Thomas said, “Mr. President, this is not a bill merely to help the underdog, and to protect him from evil practices. It is a bill to protect men who have been cheated. . . . The endless chain of easy money, the endless notion of selling disorder by creating more disorder, the endless idea of selling service by creating brutality have all been brought to light.”61
The committee had investigated the five largest detective agencies: the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the William J. Burns International Detective Agency, the National Corporation Service, the Railway Audit and Inspection Company, and the Corporations Auxiliary Company. Most agencies had tried to destroy their records before being subpoenaed, but enough remained to put together a case. Pinkerton, it was revealed, had operatives in almost every union in the country. The committee reported that as late as 1937, labor spies numbered as high as 3,871. Espionage, it seemed, was the most efficient way to gain a foothold and wreck union strength. The committee also reported, “Such a spy system places the employer in the very heart of the union council . . . the names of employees who join the union, all organization plans, all activities of the union—these are as readily available to the employer as though he himself were running the union.”62
Looking into the troubles caused by labor espionage was a major part of the work carried out by the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, but not its entire work. Over the course of four years, the committee brought attention to the system in Harlan, Kentucky, the events of the Republic Steel massacre, and the abuse of migrant farm workers, among other things. All told, it compiled ninety-five volumes of hearings and reports. The committee’s inquiries concerned an inherently contentious subject, and that during a decade when Americans were muddling through their own economic crisis and watching the growth of communism and fascism abroad with alarm. Not surprisingly, then, the committee itself and its second in command, Thomas, received a spectrum of responses. Thomas himself—the man who, as a major in the Utah National Guard, had been
An informal photograph of Elbert D. Thomas, June 7, 1940. Harris and Ewing. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-hec-28775
called into Carbon County labor troubles—had become immersed in American labor relations and had been elevated to the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor. The La Follette inquiry failed to achieve any effective regulatory legislation nationwide, but it nevertheless uncovered illegal and unjust practices that aroused public anger and eventually smoothed the path for union activism and organization. Elbert Thomas, from a sense of justice and fair play, played no small part in that.
Notes
1. “First gas map in America, Washington, D.C. Sept. 24,” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, accessed April 13, 2022, loc.gov/pictures /item/2016878553/.
2. Jerold S. Auerbach, “The La Follette Committee and the C.I.O.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 48, no. 1 (1964): 3–20.
3. Auerbach, “The La Follette Committee,” 3; Allan Kent Powell, Utah History Encyclopedia (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 75, 101–102; Elbert Thomas to Louis Finkelstein, “Spiritual Autobiography,” 26, January 1950, box 1, fd. 1, Elbert D. Thomas Papers, 1933–1950, MSS B 129, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah; “La Follette Civil Liberties Committee,” Encyclopedia of the Great Depression, accessed March 29, 2022, encyclopedia.com.
4. Elbert Thomas to Robert M. La Follette, June 23, 1936, box 25, Thomas Papers.
5. Robert M. La Follette to Elbert Thomas, August 7, 1936, box 25, Thomas Papers.
6. Senate Subcommittee on the Committee on Education and Labor, Hearings Pursuant to Senate Resolution 266, Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, 74th–76th Cong., 1936–1940.
7. Scrapbook 4, p. 99, box 229, Thomas Papers.
8. “Afraid of the Light,” Washington Post, September 23, 1936, Scrapbook 1, p. 65, box 299, Thomas Papers.
9. “Afraid of the Light.”
10. Washington Post, September 26, 1936, Scrapbook 1, p. 58, box 229, Thomas Papers.
11. Scrapbook 1, p. 51, box 229, Thomas Papers.
12. Elbert Thomas to Editor, New York Times, February 4, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
13. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 1, Labor Espionage and Strikebreaking (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1938), 1101–125; “Labor Spy Inquiry Turns to Chrysler,” New York Times, January 25, 1937.
14. Washington Post, January 29, 1937, box 229, 61, Thomas Papers.
15. “U.S. Labor Mediator Was Trailed during Auto Strike Parley,” Washington (DC) Daily Times, February 9, 1937, Scrapbook 2, p. 1, box 229, Thomas Papers.
16. “U.S. Labor Mediator Was Trailed during Auto Strike Parley.”
17. Speech, National Broadcasting Company, March 22, 1937, box 7, Thomas Papers.
18. “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 26, 1937, Scrapbook 2, box 7, Thomas Papers.
19. See John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
20. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 10, Harlan County (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937), 4457–63.
21. Herbert Agar, “A New Deal Indeed,” Louisville (KY) Courier Journal, box 25, Thomas Papers.
22. Birmingham (AL) Post, May 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
23. Tom M. Girdler to Employees, box 29, Thomas Papers.
24. “Girdler May Be Called in Riot Inquiry,” New York Times, June 21, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
25. “Girdler May Be Called in Riot Inquiry.” In reality the seized film had been shot by the Reverend Chester B. Fisk, pastor of the South Shore Community Church, and footage of the riot only amounted to ten feet out of a one-hundred-foot reel.
26. “U.S. Strike Mediation Board Appointed,” Chicago Daily Times, June 17, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
27. “Girdler May Be Called in Riot Inquiry.”
28. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937), 26–28, 29 (qtn.).
29. Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer, July 6, 1937, 5.
30. Address, Elbert Thomas to American Osteopathic Association, July 6, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
31. Geddes W. Rutherford to Elbert Thomas, July 9, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
32. Elbert Thomas to Lewis J. Valentine, box 25, Thomas Papers.
33. John Rosenfeld to Elbert Thomas, June 15, 1937, box 29, Thomas Papers.
34. James H. Beatty to Elbert Thomas, July 1, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
35. UMWA to Elbert Thomas, July 24, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
36. Telegram, box 25, Thomas Papers.
37. “Utahn to Take Black’s Place on Education, Labor Body, Relief,” Deseret News, August 13, 1937, box 25, Thomas Papers.
38. “Thomas Urges Flexibility in Wage Hour Bill,” May 31, 1938, Scrapbook 1, p. 75, box 230, Thomas Papers.
39. Scott Beekman, William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Rightwing Extremism and the Occult (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
40. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 31, “Little Steel” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), 12777–80, 13014–16.
41. E. A. Hollings to Elbert Thomas, January 20, 1938, box 25, Thomas Papers.
42. Thomas Papers.
43. C. F. Allen to Elbert Thomas, January 21, 1938, box 25, Thomas Papers.
44. Thomas Papers.
45. “Civil Liberties Senate Body in Fight for Life,” Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1938, box 2, Thomas Papers.
46. “LaFollette GPU,” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1938, Scrapbook 1, p. 13, box 2, Thomas Papers.
47. Labor’s Nonpartisan League to Elbert Thomas, May 14, 1938, box 25, Thomas Papers.
48. Elbert Thomas to John F. Fitzpatrick, August 15, 1938, box 25, Thomas Papers.
49. Russell Campbell, “Radical Documentary in the United States,” in Show Us Life: Toward a History and
Aesthetic of the Committed Documentary, ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 72.
50. Elbert Thomas to Frontier Films, box 25, Thomas Papers.
51. Patrick J. Maney, Young Bob: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr. (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2003), 217–21; Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 267–69.
52. Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1939, box 25, Thomas Papers.
53. The Nation, December 1939, box 230, Thomas Papers.
54. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 46, Subpena Hearings (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), 17121 (qtn. 1), 17116 (qtn. 2).
55. San Francisco Examiner, December 4, 1939, Scrapbook 1, box 231, Thomas Papers.
57. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 47, 17349.
58. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 46, 17080–97; see also Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Employers’ Associations and Collective Bargaining in California, Report No. 398, Part 4, 78th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1944), 1571.
59. San Francisco Examiner, January 24, 1940.
60. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 267.
61. Senator Thomas, 76th Cong., 3rd sess., Congressional Record 86, pt. 6 (May 16, 1940), 6227, 6228.
62. Frank Morn, The Eye That Never Sleeps: A History of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 186–87.
56. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, Part 47, California Agricultural Background (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), 17215–18, 17216 (qtn.).
Juvenile Justice and Women’s Clubs: Ogden as a Case Study
BY SARAH LANGSDON
The murder of James A. Clough occurred in the early morning hours of August 22, 1920, at his home in Ogden, Utah. The police would come to believe that Clough’s own son—a fourteen-year-old named Ray—had shot him. The circumstances of the tragedy left Ray without anyone to care for him while he awaited trial. Because Ogden had no juvenile detention center, the boy could only stay in the city jail with adult criminals: hardly a fitting environment for a child, no matter his guilt or innocence. The case piqued the interest of local women, many of them socially prominent, who belonged to the Child Culture Club, the Martha Society, and the Children’s Aid Society, among other organizations. While the women’s concern began with Ray Clough and was rooted in Progressive Era–values, their efforts continued well through the 1950s as they worked with court professionals, lawmakers, and the community to establish a robust, functioning juvenile justice system in Ogden.
Social activism and reform characterized the Progressive Era in the United States, which lasted from roughly 1890 to 1920. During this time, members of women’s social clubs worked to create a juvenile court system and involved men in their reform efforts. As one scholar has observed, “Locked out of other career paths, the women of the Progressive Era understood the similarity between their activities in the juvenile court and the rites they were expected to fulfill in broader society as nurturers and caretakers.”1 The first state juvenile courts were established in 1899 in Illinois and Colorado, with a goal to substitute treatment and care for punishment. The women behind the movement saw children as more than small adults, who needed to be treated differently. Progressive women also recognized the need for specifically trained professionals to work with minors. For them, the establishment of detention centers addressed the concern that placing children in adult prisons and jails might make them more antisocial and even put them on a path to criminality.
Prior to the establishment of the juvenile court system, youth were treated the same as adult offenders. The children, when arrested, would be housed in jails next to adults. Youths were seen, moreover, by judges who did not view them any differently in the criminal system than adults.
Judges often sent children sent to industrial schools, which were juvenile reform schools, or to prison depending on their crime. Many clubwomen of the time felt it was their duty to protect these children.
These upper class women represented a cultural phenomenon that the scholar Tony Platt refers to as “child saving,” as the women responded, in part, to “a void in their own lives, a void which was created by the decline of traditional religion, increased leisure and boredom, the rise of public education, and the breakdown of communal life in impersonal, crowded cities.’”2 Both feminists and antifeminists alike regarded the movement to achieve juvenile courts as appropriately within the female domain. It was a reputable task that allowed women to extend their housekeeping functions into the community—and become involved in
politics—without upsetting the ideal stereotype of women’s nature and their place in the home.3
Women began to get involved in the juvenile justice system in Chicago around the turn of the century. The Chicago Woman’s club started to push for reforms to the justice system by removing children from the influence of adult criminals with the establishment of separate courts for children’s cases. The first court was created in Cook County, Illinois, in 1899 and operated in place of parents.4 When the court convened on its first day, several women from the Chicago Woman’s club sat beside the judge to advise him on the juveniles in court and even to take responsibility for the youths.5 The women of this club were examples of the women across the country who saw the welfare of women and children in their respective communities to be of utmost importance.
An eight-year-old boy charged with bicycle theft appears before a juvenile court in St. Louis, Missouri, 1910. Perhaps the woman to his left acted as an advocate for him. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-nclc-04645
With the establishment of the juvenile court system, women advocated for their place in that system and saw their role as mothers toward the community. As the suffragist Rheta Childe Dorr wrote, “But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family.”6 Even though authorities usually did not allow observers into juvenile court sessions, they understood the advantage of having women join in the proceedings to advocate for the welfare of children.7
These responses to juvenile delinquency, which had long been a problem throughout the United States, provide a fitting context for the development of a juvenile justice system in Ogden, Utah. One of the best ways to understand the problem of juvenile delinquency—and the progressive response to it—can be gained by examining the efforts of the women’s clubs of Ogden, who sought to find ways to address the issue. Central to these efforts was the 1920 case of Ray Clough, the fourteen-year-old boy who was arrested and tried for the murder of his father.
When the police arrived at the Clough family home on August 22, 1920, Ollie Clough, the mother, was agitated and unable to give a clear account of what had happened. The body of her husband was found lying face down just off the bed in a second smaller bedroom in their house at 2175 Jackson Avenue. Once the police calmed Ollie down, she told them that two unknown men had broken into the home and argued with her husband. One of the assailants then pulled out a gun and shot him. They threatened to kill her children and asked if anyone else was in the home. Ollie said that her oldest son, Ray, was sleeping in the crawl space under the house because he was afraid of his father. She claimed that the men went to find Ray but were scared off and left the property. When the police questioned Ray, he corroborated his mother’s story—at least at first. He stated that he was sleeping in the crawl space because he was worried about punishment from his father after he was caught stealing from a local store. Two weeks earlier on August 9, Ray had been arrested for allegedly robbing the Sawyer Brothers’ Grocery at 1002 Twenty-Second Street, and his father had picked him up from the police station. Since that day, Ray had only come home late at night or when his father was
at work. He told the police that he was asleep under the house when two men yelling for him to get out had awakened him. A noise outside scared the men and they left. Ray went upstairs to find his mother upset and his father dead in the bedroom.8
Not until much later that day did Ray finally tell the police what really occurred at the home that morning. In order to get Ray away from the situation, Detective Everett Noble suggested that he and Robert Burke should take Ray to the store to get some food for the family. It was in the police automobile that the Clough boy told the facts of the killing. During the trial, Robert Burke, the chief detective for Ogden City, recounted the story that Ray told them. Burke testified that Ray “had storied a little to us,” but that
The reason he did that was to protect his mother. He said he didn’t sleep in the basement but that he was sleeping in the empty house. He said his mother had told him because he broke into the store that his father would kill him if he came to the house to sleep. He said that she had taken the keys out of his father’s pocket in the morning before the killing and had gotten the gun out of the box and given the gun to him in the morning. He hid it in the weeds and that at four o’clock in the afternoon he and his mother had a conversation where his mother told him that his father had been awful mean to him when he was a baby and that she wanted him to kill him. Then he said he went back to sleep in this empty house. His mother came down at twelve-thirty and told him that his father had cut one of his brother’s throat and killed the other and that she wanted him to shoot him. Said he came up, had the gun in the overalls. He walked to the door and shot his father and his father raised up. He said I am going to quit, but mother had a hold of my arm and told me to keep shooting.9
After Ray confessed to the shooting, the police arrested both the young man and his mother for murder in the first degree. Ray was charged on
August 22 for “unlawfully, wilfully, feloniously, deliberately, maliciously, premeditatedly and with malice” making an assault upon James Clough and that “a certain revolver which then and there was loaded with cartridges containing powder and bullet shoot off at, against and upon the body of James Clough.”10 The authorities housed Ray in the Ogden City jail along with adults until he was arraigned—for unlike other juvenile offenders, Ray did not have a responsible adult who was willing to take care of him until his arraignment and trial, and Ogden City did not have a detention center for youths. There was only the State Industrial School, which was for juveniles who had been convicted of crimes against the federal government. Moreover, the family originally lived in Texas and had only moved to Ogden in early 1918, leaving all extended family behind.
Ollie was also charged with murder, and she quickly faced trial. Her purported mental state allowed the courts to call for a speedy evaluation and trial. Newspapers described her as demented in accounts of the murder. During the trial, William Clough, her brother-in-law, testified that Ollie had suffered from periods of alleged insanity for years and that the family had committed her to mental institutions three different times in Texas. He said that she had
once tried to kill his brother with a knife while he slept.11 By August 25, the jury found her insane after a short deliberation and ordered her to the state mental hospital in Provo. She was sentenced to stay hospitalized until a doctor found her sane and then she would be ordered to stand trial. Ollie was taken to Provo where she underwent evaluation and treatment, while her children were placed in state custody. According to an account in the Ogden Standard Examiner on August 23, 1920, “Mrs. Clough was taken to the county jail, while Leo, age 12, Alvin, age 8 and Josephine Clough an infant, were placed under the care of the Martha Society and the Crittenton home.”12 The care of the younger children first brought the case to the attention of Ogden’s clubwomen.
A little background is necessary to understand the situation in Ogden. The Florence Crittenton home first opened in Ogden in 1896 at 2544 Porter to help unwed mothers and their babies. Charles Nelson Crittenton had established similar homes across the country after he witnessed young women with nowhere to go. “Two girls were found in sin who were the first to be converted. They had no door open to them, so Mr. Crittenton opened a home, the Mother mission, then and there, which was the commencement of all the missions.”13 Crittenton purchased the
Ray Clough’s mug shot and arrest record. Courtesy Utah State Archives and Record Service
building in Ogden for the cost of $2,150 and held it in trust for the state.14 Ogden’s home was the only one of its kind in the state and the Intermountain West. Within six months of establishing the home, Crittenton turned the house over to the Woman’s Home Association with the condition that it would serve as a home for girls in Utah who had become pregnant outside of marriage.15 The association relied on state and local government for funding; in 1924, for instance, the home received $1,500 annually from the state to cover the monthly costs of $100.16
The Martha Society began in Ogden in the 1890s as the Ogden Charitable Committee, which divided the city into twelve districts with a woman in charge of the needs and welfare of the people who lived in her district. By 1908, the organization had changed its name to the Martha Society after the death of its founder, Martha Brown Cannon. The society included some
of the well-to-do women of Ogden, such as Julia Kiesel, Eva Lewis, Mary Scowcroft, Thelka Becker, Annie Dee, and Mary Ann Browning. Some of the clubwomen were married to prominent businessmen, such as Edna McIntosh, whose husband worked for the Utah National Bank of Ogden, Bertha Eccles, wife of millionaire David Eccles, and Martha Wright, wife of the president of W. H. Wright and Sons. Several of the women owned businesses themselves, including Frances Glen, who owned the Glen Hotel, and Carolyn Bichsel, who was the president of an investment company. These women came from various religious backgrounds and became involved in the Martha Society because of their desire to become civically engaged and use their influence to help struggling members of the broader community.
In 1913, the women of the Martha Society started a nursery home for the children of working
The women of the Ogden, Utah, Child Culture Club appear in costume, 1917. The sign at the left front reads, “Help a pur woman git a swimin pule fur her big familie of kids.” The class aspects of the organization are clear in this image, in both the fine costumes worn by the club members and tone of the sign. Courtesy Stewart Library, Weber State University, MS 204
mothers. The society covered half the cost of daycare so that the women could work and provide for their families. After World War I, the home grew to include temporary housing for homeless children who had previously been housed in city jail pending adoption or before being returned to their delinquent parents. Years later, in 1948, Robert M. Hoggan wrote, “If the Martha Home had not been established, these children would have to be placed as had happened prior to the founding of the home, in the City Jail, a deplorable condition to imagine for these youngsters of tender age.”17
Both the Martha Home and Crittenton home were part of the state’s juvenile system and received a large portion of their annual operating budgets from the state; they were accordingly subject to yearly evaluations. The law required these annual inspections, which the state superintendent of public instruction, state attorney general, and secretary of the juvenile court commission conducted, along with city and county commissioners and welfare workers. The visits included stops at the State Industrial School and the Children’s Aid Society offices as well.18 The Children’s Aid Society, importantly, was an organization founded in Weber County in 1910 to protect children in a variety
of circumstances; representatives from twelve local clubs—including the Child Culture Club, the Crittenton home, and the Martha Society— composed its membership.19 In 1917, after a visit to the Martha Home, Senator W. W. Armstrong of Salt Lake City stated, “For every dollar that the two state institutions in Ogden ask, and also the three other institutions, the Martha society, the Crittenton home and the Children’s Aid Society association, the state will receive $100 in service and efficiency. I stand for the appropriation of every dollar that the state can stand for these institutions.”20 These were the resources that existed in Ogden at the time of Ray Clough’s trial—institutions and advocates that would eventually work together to form the basis of a more appropriate facility for juvenile offenders.
Ray Clough appeared before court for the first time on August 29, 1920. His attorney, George Halverson, agreed to represent him because the boy was without funds and would have been forced to face trial without any defense. One press account noted that in court, Ray showed no emotion as he was questioned and when asked for his plea, he answered all of the questions in a clear and even tone. The newspaper remarked, using the language and perspective
Children play on a slide at the Martha Home, 1920. Courtesy Stewart Library, Weber State University, MS 52
of its time, that “Ray displayed none of the characteristics of a tough kid or a mental defective. He has an innocent-looking face, with large blue eyes and regular features.”21
The Clough case came to the attention of the Children’s Aid Society at a meeting on September 3. According to the minutes, Elizabeth Barrows and Caroline Bichsel “had visited the young boy at the jail and said that this was really a pitiful case.” In response, the club’s president, Edna McIntosh, asked Bertha Eccles, Frances Glen, and Barrows to attend the trial.22
Two days later, the women of the Children’s Aid Society and Martha Society voluntarily assumed responsibility for Ray and his two brothers. Judge Dan Sullivan said that the members of these two societies believed that Ray Clough, despite the fact that he shot his father, probably committed the crime because he was an impressionable young man who had inherited some mental instability from his mother.23
Because he had no relatives to care for him, the two societies made preparations to befriend the boy and care for his siblings. As the Standard Examiner reported, “The Ogden institutions are now caring for the Clough children, the two younger than Ray being at the Martha Society home while the 15 month old baby is being cared for at a private home.”24 An older sister, Afton Rose, moved from Texas to Ogden to take responsibility for the children.
The women of the Children’s Aid Society, including Bertha Eccles, Edna McIntosh, Frances Lewis, Rose Ensign, Alice Bowman, and Elizabeth Hess, attended the hearing in the police court on September 17, where Ray was bound over for trial in November. They waited for Sheriff Herbert Peterson after the case, “asking that Ray be placed in the custody of some officer instead of being held in jail. Which he gladly promised to do.”25 In the process, the women discovered that Ogden did not have a juvenile detention center for children to be safely housed in while they awaited trials. The women were previously unaware of this because there had been no local children accused of grievous crimes like murder before. As the newspaper reported, “The women accused nobody in connection with the case but they point out that even under the most humane enforcement
of laws relating to juvenile offenders, the condition of a boy in the predicament that young Clough finds himself in is deplorable.”26 Ray had been placed in the city jail alongside the adult male population. During the pretrial proceedings, Ray’s lawyer, Halverson, pleaded the case for having the boy housed somewhere other than with adults. As Halverson argued in court, “I would suggest, if your Honor please, that this boy ought really to be put in the custody of perhaps some officer, so that he would not be confined as the common, ordinary prisoner, and possibly one of the officers might be willing to take charge of him. I believe it would be in the interest of justice if something of that kind were done.”27 Simply put, Halverson and the women of the Children’s Aid Society worried that contact with adult prisoners would have a detrimental effect on Ray.
At the November 18, 1920, meeting of the Child Culture Club, Judge Dan Sullivan spoke about the development of the juvenile court and Utah’s efforts. He mentioned many cases and conditions that needed to be addressed. Elizabeth Hess “moved that the club go on record in a protest against the inefficiency of juvenile laws especially in the case of Ray Clough, a 14 year old boy who had been in jail three months awaiting trial. The motion was seconded and carried.” The clubwomen then moved to prepare a protest for the press and confer with the Children’s Aid Society.28 As a result of this effort, the Federated Women’s Club of Utah—an organization with representatives from each women’s club in Utah, including the Child Culture Club of Ogden—also launched a campaign to work on better laws and conditions for the handling of juvenile offenders. Ray’s case started their long campaign to improve the lives of offenders. According to a front-page press account, the November meeting of the Child Culture Club stirred the women to “indignation” and action—especially the case of “Ray Clough, a 14-year-old boy who has been confined in the city and county jails for three months. This boy is not under conviction of the crime but awaiting trial. Under this strict confinement and environment, the boy’s health and mentality are slowly but surely being undermined.” In their note of protest, the clubwomen asked to know “wherein the blame lies. Is it with the law or is it with the court? If the former, we appeal for
a revision whereby juvenile offenders are not treated as adult criminals. If the latter, may we as representative women of Ogden, plead for leniency on behalf of this boy that he may yet have the chance to become an upright and honorable citizen. Signed, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Children’s Aid Society.”29
As a result of these efforts, it became obvious that a widespread problem existed involving juvenile offenders. Even Judge Sullivan addressed the need for changes. In the Biennial Report of the Juvenile Court Commission in 1920, he stated, “Our biggest handicap here is the lack of a detention home for temporary custody. In the matter of girl cases this need is absolutely acute. Out of the 1,500 cases handled by the court there have been 32 commitments to the Industrial School, out of which number only two commitments were girls.”30 Clough, meanwhile, had no one to take up his case. He stayed in the city jail for weeks awaiting his preliminary hearing when he was bound over to district court. He was then transferred to the county jail because was no other place that was capable of keeping him. Sullivan also argued “If Ogden has a detention home, the boy could have been given a greater degree of attention and even in the event that his trial dragged on for some time, it is not probable that he would have had to experience torments of almost solitary confinement to which he has been subject.”31 To Sullivan, the Clough case was one of the best examples ever to show the public the absolute need of the city to establish a detention home for juvenile offenders.
In October 1920, there was a bit of relief, for Ray had been assigned as a trusty in the jail and was allowed to stay in the quarters of the officer and his family. As Elizabeth Barrows of the Children’s Aid Society reported on October 15, “[Ray] was in better quarters as he is now a trusty. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Hess reported that she had fitted Ray out with clothes.”32 When the sheriff’s office was questioned about the boy’s living conditions, they said that he had not been into the interior of the jail proper. He had been allowed in the sheriff’s office and the connected rooms, along with the kitchen. Clough took all his meals at the table with the sheriff’s daughter, who lived at the courthouse and oversaw all the work of the woman who did the
cooking for her family and the prisoners. After a walking nightmare one night when he tried to injure himself with a knife from the kitchen, Ray was closely watched and slept in a room with an officer in the adjoining room to keep an eye on him. When he was asked by a news reporter if he would rather be in the jail or the state industrial school or another institution, he replied “I would rather stay here.”33
Having been assured that Ray was being cared for in the jail setting, the women of Ogden turned to supporting him through his trial. Women from various clubs crowded into the courtroom during the trial. On the first day, November 26, the courtroom was almost at capacity with many women present. The Ogden Standard Examiner reported: “Following the adjournment at noon, a score of women rushed forward and shook hands with the boy and offered words of encouragement. The boy appeared to appreciate the action of the women but did not converse with them to any extent, simply answering questions with yes or no.”34 The women made sure that Ray knew he wasn’t alone and had motherly figures who would help in any way possible. Such public attention to the welfare of children, it should be noted, fit neatly with broader societal perception that “women were considered the ‘natural caretakers’ of wayward children.”35
The trial continued for three days, with the prosecution calling witnesses from the police department and coroner’s office to discuss what they had seen the day they went to the Clough home and the boy’s actions and demeanor during that time. George Larkin, the funeral director, recalled his experience with Ray who came to see his father’s body before it was shipped off for burial in Texas. In Larkin’s words, Ray said that
The night that he shot his father, she [Ollie] had told him to go down there and sleep. She then went down and woke him up and said his father had killed his two brothers and he would have come up and defend them. He said that on Saturday morning his mother had given him the gun—taken it from his father’s box—to protect himself against his father. Ray said
that when he went up to the house, his mother took him to the room and told him to shoot. He shot once, and his father raised up and made some sound. [Ray] didn’t want to shoot, but she held both his arms and told him to keep pumping the gun. Then he saw his two brothers and that his mother held his arms and forced him to [keep shooting]. He then took the gun and went out in front to throw the gun away and to tell anybody that there had been burglars in the house. [Ray] thought he was not awful in doing that, and that was the story they all held until Detective Noble found the gun in the bush. When they had found the gun he confessed.36
The defense called Ray’s siblings, Afton Clough Rose and Leo Clough, as well as neighbors Florence Hunsinger and W. A. Jones. The witnesses talked about the state of the Clough home and the incidents between the parents, James and Ollie. Additionally, Ray testified on his own behalf, explaining how his father had beaten him once while living in Texas but not again. He said he was scared that, after being arrested for robbery of the Sawyer Brothers’ Grocery store, his father would hit him again. Ollie purportedly used that fear to fuel Ray’s fear of his father and wind him up to a point where he would believe the story his mother told him on August 22. Ollie constantly met with Ray and said that his father intended to kill him if he saw him. She told Ray that he should not sleep at home but instead in a deserted home down the street. As the press account reported, “Ray had been given the revolver by his mother early in the morning with instructions to protect himself against his father.”37 Apparently, Ray had even mentioned to the police that he was sorry for what had happened and had he known that his mother was in the condition she was, he would not have done it. By the time the testimony ended on November 27, a reporter for the Standard remarked that several women in the audience were wiping tears from their eyes after hearing the stories of the Clough family.38
The court case concluded on the afternoon of November 28, 1920. Judge Alfred Agee gave the jury extensive instructions before they retired.
The jury consisted of twelve men from Ogden, who were mostly farmers, as well as a salesman, a bookkeeper, a laborer, and the manager of the Ogden Canyon Sanitarium. One of the instructions was that if definitive proof did not exist that Ray Clough, as a child between the age of nine and fourteen, knew the wrongfulness of his actions, then the jury should acquit him. Agee also instructed the jury that if Ray “did not comprehend his own situation and the circumstances surrounding him, or that he supposed that he was committing an act of necessary self-defense of himself or his mother, you should acquit him.”39 The final instruction from the judge was that if the jury found that Ray killed his father under the influence of his mother, Ollie, that they should return a verdict of not guilty.
The jury left to deliberate but filed back in after only forty-five minutes. With a full courtroom, Judge Agee “cautioned the spectators that regardless of the verdict, no demonstration must follow its reading. Despite this warning, when the court clerk Simon Barlow read the words ‘Not Guilty’ many women shrieked wildly and men applauded.”40 The jury found that Ray killed his father under the influence of his mother. As attested to by the discrepancy between the image of Ollie as the unstable mother who led her own child to commit murder and the well-off clubwomen who tended to Ray in court, there was a class element to the place of different women in Ray’s life. The Clough case exemplified the contemporary idea that clubwomen could provide maternal care toward the poor of their community because the poor needed moral and spiritual assistance as well as economic help.41
Ray was released from custody and went to live at the Martha Home with his younger brothers. The Children’s Aid Society asked Mattie Ritter, the police matron for Ogden City, to find a home to take Ray because they were unsure his older sister could handle all the children since she already had three of her own. The actions of the clubwomen of Ogden in investigating the details of the Clough case and calling attention to the inadequacy of the juvenile laws added interest to the plight of young offenders. As the Standard Examiner reported that day, “Other boys should be told the story in its true light to
avoid any possibility of impressionable minds thinking there was one commendable thing in the terrible tragedy.”42
As a result of their experience with Ray Clough, the clubwomen decided to focus a considerable amount of time and effort on working to improve the juvenile justice system. The women had previously not know about the lack of a detention center in Ogden because they had no experience with juvenile delinquents until this case. The Ogden City commissioners recognized the help the women could offer and asked the federation to create a committee to work on this matter. The Children’s Aid Society reported in its November 4, 1921, meeting that Bertha Eccles had visited the city commissioners to ask for a female worker in the juvenile court, and that Moroni Skeen, Edward Green, and John Child supported having two women
police officers. Edna McIntosh, meanwhile, left a written petition for the commissioners on the issue.43 The Child Culture Club appointed Chloe Douglas to serve on the committee for the purpose of aiding the juvenile court.44
In the wake of the Clough verdict, a flurry of interest developed about the issue of juvenile courts. For example, a 1925 article by W. M. Stewart in the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs Bulletin argued: “It is our duty to help in the solution of delinquency and crime by using every effort to provide wholesome supervised recreation for youth. Not only is he a criminal who commits a crime but also those who make no effort to prevent the commission of crime.”45
At the same time, the members of the Child Culture Club invited Judge Sullivan to one of their meetings to talk about the state of the juvenile justice system in northern Utah. He
An image from the Denver, Colorado, courtroom of Judge Ben Lindsey, a pioneer in the development of juvenile courts. The original title reads “How the kids make their reports to the judge every Saturday morning.” Circa 1910 to 1915. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-137720
noted that Utah was more advanced in its treatment of youth but there was room for improvement and mentioned cases and conditions that needed the attention of the community. The women created a committee with the purpose of aiding the juvenile court immediately.
The committee started to work on putting a female presence in the court system through supervisors and police. On October 18, 1922, at the annual convention of Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs, Maude Dee Porter reported that the Ogden City Federation of Women’s Clubs supported “playgrounds, parks, juvenile court work and hope[d] to secure a woman supervisor in the juvenile court and a policewoman.”46 Petitions for a policewoman were circulated among the women of all the Ogden clubs, and more than one thousand women signed the petition. Ogden City hired its first policewoman in 1925, Addie Sanders. Previously, the city had employed Mattie Ritter as a police matron, a position that entailed different responsibilities than a policewoman. A matron was connected with the police and welfare departments. Ritter had a cooperative understanding with the police department but assisted the juvenile court judge and acted as a consultant; she did not, however, deal with any crimes committed by the adult women of the city. The city hired Sanders to replace Mattie Ritter and assume her duties and, as a policewoman, serve as the police for adult women. Sanders often spoke to the women’s club about the progress of the juvenile court and about being a woman in the police force. As noted in the minutes of the Child Culture Club on March 3, 1926, “Through the City Federation, the club was asked if they were pleased or displeased with the work being done by our local police woman, Mrs. Sanders.”47
By 1931, six other women had successfully passed the policewoman service tests, including Louise Warner, Mary Eckardt, Katheryn Tribe, Frances Reid, Stella Harris, and Grace Shaw.48 Mary Eckardt was hired by Ogden City and served with Addie Sanders until Mayor Harman Peery fired them during his first month in office in 1934 for being connected with corruption. The women fought the claims and asked for Peery to either retract the statements or to prosecute them. Peery explained to a group of thirty clubwomen, “I am not satisfied in any way with the service rendered by the two policewomen in the past
and I have proof to back me up. I am absolutely opposed to putting either one back on the force.”49 He offered to reopen the civil service exam and allow other women to take the test in hopes of being hired by the police department.
The clubwomen often met resistance from the local government. As the Ogden chapter of the American Association of University Women noted, in October 1936 a committee representing the club had visited the city commissioners, but Peery was not present “and the matter was tabled. Three times conferences were held at the mayor’s office, but the mayor regarded us lightly. He claimed none of the applicants were eligible as police women.”50 The women continued to argue that female police officers were needed and to fight to establish the office of policewoman. Even the Utah Federation suggested that women of the clubs should foster the movement of women police in every large city and that women should prepare themselves to become judges in juvenile and family courts. Once Peery was no longer mayor, Sanders was rehired in 1940, having never been charged with any corruption claims.
The need for a detention home in Ogden was at the top on the list for those involved in the juvenile system and the women who worked to solve the issue. As noted, in 1913, the Martha Society started a nursery home for children. During the thirty years the society ran the home, it temporarily housed homeless children who previously would have been housed in the city jail pending outcome of pertinent court cases or returned to their parents. State, county, and city officials inspected the home annually to observe the care of the children. The Martha Home, however, was not equipped to handle all the cases that came through the juvenile system. It was not established to care for children who were facing criminal charges and it was often at capacity with neglected and abandoned children.
The women continued to call for a detention center that could ease the burden of the home. In 1921, a committee of women representing the Children’s Aid Society appeared before the Weber County board of commissions. There, they appealed for a detention home in northern Utah for minors who were being held by juvenile officers while they awaited court charges,
to prevent them from being placed in jail with adult prisoners. “While the board pledged no definite action, it was said that the matter would be taken up with other counties in the northern section of the state with the hope that a detention home could be built and utilized by various counties and share the expense.”51
The juvenile court judges wrote often about the need for a detention center and how the lack of one in Ogden created a great handicap to the system. Judge Lester A. Wade wrote in his biennial report in 1924–1926: “We also need a small detention home in this district. There is a class of boys and girls who have very unsatisfactory home surroundings who require considerable attention from probation officers and others. If a small detention home were established and the court were given more help, we could, I believe, save the public considerable expense and make better citizens out of this class of juveniles.”52 Weber County and Ogden City provided some private rooms in the county courthouse and city hall for detention rooms and gave food and care for the juveniles committed there. Yet this was seen as a temporary solution to the growing
problem of housing juveniles. The lack of proper quarters made it difficult for the court to care for individuals pending the hearing of cases and to handle them without committing to the State Industrial School. The federal government designated that school as a detention and training school for juveniles who committed offenses against the United States. Likewise, Judge Derrah Van Dyke “very much opposed . making provision at the State Industrial School for juvenile delinquents and urged that the court for minor children be kept separate and apart from penal attachments.”53 The State Industrial School, then, offered no real answer to the problem.
The plea for a center came up constantly, and was a point of contention between the juvenile system and the county and city officials. In 1930, a number of city, county, and state officials discussed a joint county-city home, using the lower section of city and county hall. Plans were drawn up at an estimated cost of $7,500.
F. W. Stratford of the county board of commissioners, for his part, approved of the juvenile court system and recognized the need for a juvenile detention home in Weber County. It
At the Martha Home in Ogden, Utah, 1920. Courtesy Stewart Library, Weber State University, MS 52.
was “his opinion, however that when such a place is provided the state should officer the institution. He told of the budgeting system in the county and that there was no money in the budget for the establishment and maintenance of a detention home.”54 The money was never appropriated due to the financial conditions of the Great Depression.
During the Utah State Federation of Women’s Clubs’ annual convention in April 1931, Ogden Mayor Ora Bundy commended the women for trying to solve the problem of delinquent children and urged them to keep working on it.
Utah’s laws are inadequate to deal with this question, he declared. Mostly these children need a different environment, different training and different corrective measures. We need adequate detention homes where examination and treatment may be provided and these faltering children put on the right road. . . . the women of Utah can have a helpful influence in the matter of obtaining needed legislation that will provide some of the means for solving this grave problem.55
Bundy also remarked how the legislature continually cut into the budget for the juvenile court.
By 1933, the juvenile court had appealed to the community for help with the housing of juvenile delinquents. “The juvenile court finds it necessary occasionally to take neglected or dependent children into immediate custody for a short time. Since we have no detention home in Ogden, we would like to hear from someone who will take one or more of these children at a minimum fee until they can be placed in the Martha Society home or other suitable homes in the regular way.”56 Working out ideas for the housing of juvenile delinquents was not an easy proposition. According to current research, “before any community” can create a solution for itself, it must arrive at a new concept of detention altogether, bolster court intake so that youth who do not need to be held “are kept out of detention even for overnight,” and improve community services to prevent children from entering the system in the first place.57 In the early 1930s, Ogden
was still in the beginning phases of such a process, as the women’s clubs of Ogden continued to advocate for the proper care and housing of juvenile delinquents.
In 1934, the State Industrial School was temporarily filling the need for some detention facilities. A plan was proposed for the Weber County Department of Public Welfare to be responsible for the establishment and supervision of a boarding home suitable for detaining children for short periods. Yet a reluctance on the part of the department to enter this field held up the plans indefinitely. The women of the Welfare League of Ogden attempted to help fill the void by taking over the Wiggins Home, a privately run facility in Ogden, in 1946. “Since its opening there have been seventy-eight children, [just] forty since January. We have had to turn several children away because the home is not large enough.”58 The league only contracted with Wiggins for a year due to some concerns of discrimination and restrictions. The women decided to take over the Martha Home, which had closed during the war years, and reopened its doors on November 30, 1947, with the first child arriving the next day. The home operated mostly to care for children whose parents were unable to care for them due to incarceration, but it also offered some minor juvenile offenders a place to stay. In 1948, the group reported on “a meeting held at the Martha Home with representatives from County Welfare, Welfare League, Martha Home, Police Department and Juvenile Court present. The intake policy of the receiving home was discussed.”59 The home operated until July 1959 with a steady referral of cases from the sheriff’s department, the youth bureau, Children’s Aid Society, and the welfare department.
The fight for a juvenile detention center in Ogden continued on for decades before one was finally established by the Weber County Commissioners. In 1940, juvenile detention cells were housed on the eighth floor of the city and county building on Washington Boulevard. They were isolated from other sections of the jail to prevent the juveniles from coming into contact with prisoners. The cells were used to house boys and girls who were being held for investigation. If the youths were sentenced, they were sent to the State Industrial School. In October 1960, the detention center was moved
to 2260 Grant Avenue, an old warehouse. The building was remodeled to contain nine rooms, each with two beds and sanitary facilities. The meals would be catered by some nearby restaurants as there were often only one or two juveniles being held at a time. A police matron ran the building during the day, and a man ran it during the night. The rooms had wooden doors instead of bars to keep away from a jail atmosphere.60 On January 12, 1961, the Women’s State Legislative Council of Utah passed a resolution regarding detention homes. It called for the facilities to be separate from jails and for such centers to come under state control instead of leaving each county to provide its own. Of the twenty-five centers in Utah, only eight were separated from jails.61
The women of Ogden’s clubs were instrumental in the fight for juvenile justice. As a contemporary article in the Standard Examiner noted, “Women have much to do with the growth of the juvenile court system. Women have seen to it that juvenile court judges have been chosen for their special qualifications, such as an understanding of social problems. An understanding of boys and girls, a trained and sympathetic
knowledge of child psychology.”62 What started as the concern over one young man who had a difficult life and faced the charge of murder led the women of Ogden to become advocates for children for decades to come. The women used Ray Clough’s case as an example of why Ogden needed a juvenile detention center and a system that treated and helped children instead of just placing them in custody with adult criminals. They had roots in the Progressive Era–effort by prominent women to use their status and influence to better the world of children in their community.63
Finally, in a postscript to the Clough family, Ollie was found to be sane in October 1924 and sent home to Ogden to live with her daughter Afton.64 She never faced the murder charges for her involvement, because the case was dismissed in 1921. Unfortunately, she was found incompetent again in 1937 and ordered back to the state hospital, where she died in 1955.65 Ray attempted to get his life back together, even remarking in 1921 that he was anxious to get back to school. Life, unfortunately, had other plans for him. He joined the military, only to be discharged on grounds of being mentally
Small children pose atop swings at the Martha Home in Ogden, Utah, 1920. Courtesy Stewart Library, Weber State University, MS 52
unstable. On March 5, 1934, he had terrorized his sister’s home with a high-powered rifle when he threatened to shoot her and her cow.66 He was then sent to the state hospital after being committed for insanity. Just a month later, Ray escaped from the state hospital and fled to California. He was arrested in November 1934 and spent five years in San Quentin State Prison for burglary.67 He lived in California until he passed away in 1981 and was brought back to be buried in Ogden.
The other Clough children didn’t fare so well either. Alvin was arrested in Sacramento in 1927 for robbing two men at the Cliff Hotel. He was also under investigation for other robberies in the city.68 He was involved in Ray’s breakdown in March 1934, as he attempted to flee Ogden via the train with Ray; they were both captured and arrested. Alvin died tragically a few months later during a botched robbery. Leo served in the military and then went to work in the mines in Bingham Canyon. During his employment there, he was injured in an accident and left an invalid. He died in the state hospital in Provo in 1943.69 Josephine disappeared in 1920 from the records. She was not listed as one of the children that Afton took custody of.70 Josephine reappears in her mother’s obituary in 1955 under the name Mary Ella Davis.71 She was married to Waldo Glen Davis and lived in Washington with two daughters and a son. She passed away in 1979.
Notes
1. Clark M. Peters, “Social Work and Juvenile Probation: Historical Tensions and Contemporary Convergences,” Social Work 56, no. 4 (October 2011): 355–65.
2. Tony Platt, “The Child Saver Reconsidered,” Current Issues in Criminal Justice 20, no. 1 (2008): 123–28.
3. David L. Myers, Boys among Men: Trying and Sentencing Juveniles as Adults (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 25.
4. Christopher Mallett and Miyuki Tedor, Juvenile Delinquency: Pathways and Prevention (Los Angeles: Sage, 2018), 30.
5. Elizabeth Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 19.
6. Gwendolyn Mink, “The Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 97.
7. Clapp, Mothers of All Children, 3.
8. “Mother Told Son to Slay, Police Assert,” Ogden Standard Examiner, August 23, 1920, 1.
9. The State of Utah v. Ray Clough, Case 1401, September 17, 1920, p. 21–22, District Court, Second District: Weber County, Criminal Case Files, Series 6954, Utah State Archives and Records Service, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter USARS).
10. Utah v. Clough, 6.
11. “Mrs. Clough is Found Insane,” Ogden Standard Examiner, August 26, 1920, 2.
12. “Wife and Son Are Held for Ogden Murder,” Ogden Standard Examiner, August 23, 1920, evening edition, 1.
13. “Met in the Tabernacle,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 30, 1896, 2.
14. “The New Home,” Salt Lake Herald, March 23, 1896, 7.
15. “Woman’s Home Association,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 25, 1896, 5.
16. “O.K. Given by Auditors,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 20, 1924, 12.
17. Robert M. Hoggan, “Martha Home,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 14, 1948, 2A.
18. “Visitation Set for Wednesday,” Ogden Standard Examiner, July 17, 1932, 5.
19. The purpose of the Children’s Aid Society was to protect children from cruelty, attend to the care and control of vagrants, and care for neglected and dependent children found at any time or place, regardless of color or creed; and to receive children from the Juvenile Court or parents, apparently neglected or in need of protection. The twelve Ogden clubs that had representation in the society were, in full, the Child Culture Club, Historical Society, Home Culture, Tolstoi Circle, Literary Club, Crittenton Home, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Martha Society, Relief Society, Congregational Aid, Baptist Aid, Methodist Aid, St. Joseph’s Sewing Circle, St. Joseph’s Altar Society, New Thought, Episcopalian Guild, Unity Society, and Eastern Star.
20. “Officials Visit Wards of State,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 11, 1917, 10.
21. “Ray Clough Before Court,” Ogden Standard Examiner, August 29, 1920, Sunday morning edition, 9.
22. Minute Book No. 3, March 1919–April 1921, box 1, vol. 3, Children’s Aid Society of Utah Board Minutes, Series 29841, USARS.
23. “Clough Kiddies Taken Care Of,” Ogden Standard Examiner, September 5, 1920, 16.
24. “Clough Kiddies Taken Care Of.”
25. Minute Book No. 3, Children’s Aid Society, September 17, 1920.
26. “Ogden Women Take up Case of Boy Slayer,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 21, 1920, 1.
27. Utah v. Clough, 36–37.
28. 1919–1923 Minute Book, November 19, 1920, Box 2, Child Culture Club Records, MS 204, Weber State University, Stewart Library, Special Collections.
29. “Ogden Women Take up Case of Boy Slayer,” 1.
30. D. E. Sullivan, Report of Juvenile Court Commission of the State of Utah [Salt Lake City: State of Utah, 1920], 29.
31. “Ogden Women Take up Case of Boy Slayer,” 1.
32. Minute Book No. 3, Children’s Aid Society, October 15, 1920.
33. “Ogden Women Take up Case of Boy Slayer,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 21, 1920, 2.
34. “Ray Clough’s Confession That He Shot His Father Is Given to Court by Detective at Trial,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 26, 1920, 14.
35. Platt, “The Child Saver,” 26.
36. Utah v. Clough, 10.
37. “Boy Slayer to Take Stand in Own Defense,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 27, 1920, 1.
38. “Boy Slayer to Take Stand in Own Defense.”
39. Utah v. Clough, Requests for Instructions, 5. The jury members were Lawrence Ritchie, Heber Helm, Albert Treseder, Samuel Grow, William Wade, John Nelson, Brig Robinson, Charles Hussey, Peter Christensen, Edward Barnes, Elmer Taylor, and Jed Ballantyne.
40. “Youthful Slayer of Father Freed by Court,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 28, 1920, 1.
41. Linda Gordon, “Putting Children First: Women, Maternalism, and Welfare in the Early Twentieth Century,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda Kerber (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 65.
42. “Youthful Slayer of Father Freed by Court,” 1–2.
43. Minute Book No. 3, Children’s Aid Society, November 4, 1921.
44. Minute Book, February 17, 1921, Child Culture Club Records, MS 204, Special Collections, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah (hereafter SLWSU).
45. W. M. Stewart, “Division of Social and Industrial Conditions,” Utah Federation Bulletin, March 1925, 14.
46. “Woman Speaks on Immigration,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 18, 1922, 22.
47. Minute Book: 1924–1926, March 3, 1926, Child Culture Club Records. Essentially, after Ritter left, the city no longer employed matrons, leaving those duties instead to the policewomen.
48. “Service Tests Passed By Six,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 17, 1931, 12.
49. “Mayor Willing to Place Women on Police Force, He Informs Delegation,” Ogden Standard Examiner, March 6, 1934, 9.
50. Historian’s Book, 1933–1970, p. 21, American Association of University Women–Ogden, MS 47, SLWSU.
51. “Juvenile Home Wanted Here,” Ogden Standard Examiner, March 8, 1921, 12. Eunice Bowman, Elizabeth Hess, and Fern Smith made up the committee that represented the Children’s Aid Society to the county commissioners.
52. Lester Wade, Report of Juvenile Court Commission of the State of Utah [Salt Lake City: State of Utah, 1924–1926], 108.
53. “Statement of Needs Sought,” Ogden Standard Examiner, April 29, 1930, 16.
54. “Statement of Needs Sought.”
55. “Child Welfare Studies Urged on Utah Clubs,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 16, 1931, 11, 16.
56. “Court Desires Word on Boarding Home,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 14, 1933, 3.
57. Sherwood Norman, “Detention Facilities for Children,” in Juvenile Crime and Justice, ed. William J. Chambliss (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2011), 407.
58. Minutes, March 4, 1947, Junior League of Ogden Archives, MS 28, SLWSU.
59. Minutes, June 28, 1948, Junior League of Ogden Archives.
60. “Move to New Juvenile Quarters Predicted Nov. 1 by Officials,” Ogden Standard Examiner, October 4, 1960, 11.
61. Executive Board Minutes, January 1961, Women’s State Legislative Council of Utah Records, MS 0228, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
62. Julia Blanshard, “Women Did Most to Aid Boys: Juvenile Court System 30 Years Old,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 14, 1929, 11.
63. Platt, “The Child Saver,” 26–27.
64. The State of Utah v. Ollie Clough, Case 1393, p. 8–9, October 16, 1924, Series 6954, USARS.
65. “Notice 5870, Estate of Ollie Clough, Incompetent,” Ogden Standard Examiner, April 28, 1937, 10.
66. “Clough Faces Sanity Tests,” Ogden Standard Examiner, March 7, 1934, 5.
67. California, U.S., Prison and Correctional Records, 1851–1950, s.v. “Loyd Ray Clough,” January 1, 1944, San Quentin, Marin, California, prisoner number 70893, digital image, accessed May 25, 2022, ancestry.com.
68. “Youth Is Charged with Theft from Hotel Rooms,” Sacramento Bee, November 8, 1927, 10.
69. “Leo J. Clough,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 6, 1943, 31.
70. “Notice N. 3349,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 8, 1921, 7.
71. “Ollie Clough,” Ogden Standard Examiner, December 16, 1955, 21.
A photograph marking Claire Haines’s graduation from high school in St. Anthony, Idaho, in May 1909. Haines was one of five graduates, and in 1923, she became the first female certified public accountant in Utah. Giovale Library, Westminster College, no. 002317.
Hannah Claire Haines, 1891–1974: Not the Average “Militant Female”
BY ALISON MCNEAL AND DAVID A. HALES
In the personal papers of Hannah Claire Haines is a document with Haines’s reflection on “sixty years of progress for women,” from 1913 to 1973. In it, she humorously contrasts the women of the two eras, clearly portraying an upward path. In 1913, for instance, a woman “may have earned as little as $10 a week, and $100 a month was a good salary”; but in 1973, “the sky is the limit and no self-respecting secretary would accept less than $400 a month.”1 Haines herself had lived through those decades of change as she forged her own remarkable path in the business world. As the first female Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in Utah and later as the director of Salt Lake City’s Union Bank and Trust Company, she was highly successful in challenging commonly accepted ideas about what a woman’s place in society should be. Haines repeatedly broke through social norms that restricted a woman’s presence in finance or business, and she did so with self-confidence and humor. Today, Haines’s legacy continues because of her support of what she valued and understood most: education, especially for women. Her contribution to expanding the prevailing social views about women in male-dominated workplaces has become clear to us through our study of her unpublished papers. These documents reveal the story of Haines’s challenges and successes, a story that shows how one woman propelled gender equality forward during her eighty-three-year life span.2
Although little is known about Haines’s childhood and family, some clues suggest that she enjoyed a life that allowed her to transcend the gender barriers prevalent in the early twentieth century. Her father, Harrison W. Haines, came from the culture of the urbanized East in Medford, New Jersey, and his family roots in America dated back to 1682, providing him with a pedigree and social standing. Eventually, he became an accountant, working for businesses in Philadelphia.3 After a doctor advised Haines to move to the West for his health—a common medical prescription for respiratory problems—he left the familiar comforts of his eastern lifestyle to settle first in Denver, Colorado. There, on September 16, 1890, he married Anna Becker, Claire Haines’s mother.4
Anna Becker’s German family arrived in the United States about two hundred years after Harrison’s family did. As with a vast number of immigrants before and after her, she grew up in New York City. How she moved from New York, gained her education, became a teacher, and found her way into the Haines’s Medford home as both teacher and governess remains a mystery.5 After Harrison moved west, they married and first settled in Wyoming where he had accepted a job to manage a ranch, even though he surely had to have been considered a greenhorn.6 It was on this ranch near Saratoga, Wyoming, on July 15, 1891, that Hannah Claire Haines was born, almost one year after Wyoming was admitted to the Union.7
Haines began her early childhood with advantages that must have helped her achieve some of her success as an adult. She was an only child, receiving all the attention and encouragement of her two professional parents, one a teacher and the other an accountant. Both served as role models, demonstrating the importance of education, of succeeding by using one’s brains, and of being economically and personally independent in life. From an early age she embraced ranch life, including the indignity of being tossed off her horse “whose habit of unseating her was chronic.”8 When Haines was eight or nine, the family moved to Santa Cruz, California, to provide her with adequate educational opportunities; there she attended the Branciforte School.9 The current successor to that school has the motto, “Use your mind well. Do the right thing. Work hard,” a sentiment that could aptly summarize Claire Haines’s life and personal achievements.10
However, Haines completed her high school education in St. Anthony, Idaho, where her ambitious father had found a better job as the manager of the Riverside Hotel.11 Established schools in Idaho were not widely available then and were often understaffed, one-room affairs.12 In fact, St. Anthony created its schools only in 1883.13 Even in nearby Utah, which had a comparatively better educational system, “public secondary education did not exist until the last decade of the nineteenth century and did not become a viable part of the system until the second decade of the twentieth century.” By 1910, only “58 percent of Utah’s 16- to
17-year-olds were enrolled in high school,” let alone graduated.14 Still, Haines took advantage of every educational opportunity available to her. She attended St. Anthony’s high school and graduated in May 1909, along with four other students.15 Another challenge for the young graduate was that in 1909 women had few career choices, which Haines remembered in later life: “In those days a girl who wished to be self-supporting could . . . teach school, clerk, keep books, nurse or do housework.”16 Her family must have discussed her future job prospects because her father soon urged her to begin training as a nurse. At first, Haines thought of becoming a doctor or a dentist, but she decided to try taking nursing courses first because as she noted, “Father’s requests were unwritten law.”17
In 1910 Haines moved to Salt Lake City to enroll in the Training School for Nurses of Holy Cross Hospital.18 It was the finest hospital in the region. In 1883 the hospital opened a newly built, 125-bed facility, and by 1901 it had established its school of nursing.19 Although this was fifty years after Florence Nightingale had established the first nurses’ training school in London, the curriculum for nursing students, who were mainly women, included drudgery and menial tasks. For example, Haines’s final exam asked her to illustrate how the floor in the hospital should be scrubbed so that it was clean and shining; and, in fact, nursing students did most of the hospital housekeeping.20
Students received some classroom instruction, but most of their training came from the supervising Catholic nuns at bed sides and caring for the patients. There were strict rules. A history of the Holy Cross Hospital states that,
Training consists of one trial after another from the time the nurse first dons her uniform. Her life is arranged to a definite route, and she must eat, sleep, work and study according to the schedule. When she attends classes, she is often too tired to understand what is being taught, particularly when she has been on night duty and had had only three or four hours of sleep.21
The program at Holy Cross was consistent with those of other nursing schools in Utah and
elsewhere in the nation.22 Despite all the demanding physical labor associated with nursing, Haines successfully finished the nursing program and graduated on May 23, 1912; however, she decided nursing was not for her.23
After completing her disappointing nurses’ training program, Haines returned to St. Anthony; she told her cousin she had given up nursing “because instead of the glorious image of Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale and others, it turned out to be a routine of emptying bedpans and sweeping floors; and for that type of work she was not geared.” Not sure what to do next, Haines eventually convinced her father that she wanted to follow in his footsteps, to have a business career, and become an accountant.24 So, in 1915 Claire returned to Salt Lake City, this time with her own ambitious dream, which was very much at odds with the prevailing notion that a woman’s primary place was in the home, married, and with children.
By 1915, women in Utah and the United States faced mixed prospects, what the scholars Jean Friedman and William Shade call an “illusion of equality.”25 On one hand, Utah’s women had received the right to vote almost two decades earlier in 1896. During these years, women also played a growing role in the public realm, and employment and educational opportunities increased. As Miriam Murphy details, the number of women working in Utah as stenographers, typists, bookkeepers, accountants, and clerks rose from 518 in 1900 to 4,168 in 1920. Likewise, the number of women engaged in professional work more than doubled between 1900 and 1910. And the Young Women’s Journal, published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ran pieces advising girls on how to land and keep jobs—this in a recognition that the official end of polygamy had created a “surplus woman problem.”26
On the other hand, the cultural norm of the times, Murphy writes, was that “God intended girls to become homemakers. Their math studies should prepare them for keeping domestic rather than commercial accounts.”27 This opinion was not just the dominant way of thinking in Utah but one commonly accepted all over the nation. Further, legal biases remained prevalent against women well into the twentieth century. One 1873 court case summarized well the prejudice Haines faced as she vacillated in search of an appropriate career to match her talents: “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.”28
Amidst this setting, Haines launched herself into business and took an extension course in accounting at the University of Utah.29 Additionally, she enrolled in two correspondence courses from the Walton School of Commerce in Chicago, established in 1910 by Seymour Walton, who was respected and experienced in the accounting world. A major contributor to the Journal of Accountancy, Walton was famous for “The Students’ Department” section, which was of interest to young accountants. As his obituary notes, “In the courses of his long association with the accounting profession Mr. Walton did more to raise the standards of accounting education and to stimulate the highest
Claire Haines in her nursing uniform, 1912. Haines completed nursing school at Holy Cross Hospital but soon decided a career in nursing was not for her. Giovale Library, Westminster College, no. 002320.
professional ethics than almost any man of his time.”30
Although its tuition was costly, the Walton School offered a popular payment plan.31 Haines spent $190 for her courses. She was determined to become a CPA, but she needed to work for two years as an accountant before she could even take the required exam. This simple requirement proved to be a bigger challenge in achieving her goal of becoming certified in accounting than actually taking classes. When Haines visited accountants in Salt Lake City to find a position, she recalled, “They laughed me out of their office. It hadn’t been done; it couldn’t be done. That was their philosophy.”32 Being a CPA had a “men only” sign on it, and any woman who wanted into the profession was “slightly cracked.”33 No wonder that even with a degree, it was difficult for women to find employment at a public accounting firm.34
Haines’s challenges to getting into the profession were typical of the experiences of other women and of the gender stereotypes at that time. An account of the gradual rise of women in a male-dominated profession, compiled for the American Woman’s Society of Certified Public Accountants to honor its seventy-fifth anniversary, notes that:
Of course, a woman did not have to be a CPA to work in accounting. In 1870, the U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Division, reported that women working as bookkeepers, accountants and cashiers totaled 893 or 2.3 percent of the total. By 1900, their number had risen to 74,895 or 29.1 percent of the total. In contrast, by 1910 only 13 women were reported to be CPAs in the U.S.35
As John Carey points out in his study of how accounting evolved into a profession, before the late nineteenth century, “the terms ‘bookkeeping’ and ‘accounting’ were often used interchangeably” and it was usually a male occupation.36 However, about the time that Haines sought to enter the profession, the two endeavors began to separate into more clearly defined career paths. I. S. Broo, writing in 1942 about women in accounting, noted that the assignments of bookkeepers and accountants
bifurcated. Bookkeepers kept recording data but—particularly with the creation of the income tax in 1913—the accountant became “not only a keeper of records, an auditor, and an expert who prepares statements for management, but also a business analyst who interprets the figures for management.”37
This two-tiered system might have created space for women in the profession, but only at the ground floor, doing the requisite drudgery. Bookkeeping was classified a “trade” and was considered “menial” labor or “women’s work.”38 However, with the downgrading of bookkeeping into a clerical skill and with the explosive growth in the recruitment of women for clerical work, the number of female bookkeepers rapidly increased.39 Firms continued primarily to hire women as clerks, bookkeepers, or secretaries, but not as accountants. One female accountant, Jennie Palen, observed that “an accountant’s office was about as hard for her to get into as Fort Knox.”40
Why did women experience such difficulties in entering the accounting profession? Obviously, there was the widespread prejudice against women. As Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes in her historical analysis of popular images of women, in the 1920s, women who worked outside the home “did so only under duress or because they were . . . ‘single.’”41 Accounting firms maintained that they did not hire women because men would not accept women as supervisors, nor would male clients accept women as auditors.42 Male employers justified their hiring preferences by pointing to the widely shared perception that women did not have the “emotional makeup, analytical reasoning, or the long-term commitment to the job required for a manager.”43
In addition, current research has explored the problem of gender stratification, a practice used for years to allow women to do only certain jobs, thus limiting their professional choices. Haines had already once given up on becoming a doctor and now, because of gender stratification, becoming a certified accountant seemed out of reach. C. R. Lehman wrote that natural talent and interest could not be recognized using such “a narrow lens,” which offered “jobs not on the basis of people’s interests, their education, or abilities, but rather upon the basis
of class, race or sex. . Moreover, gender stratification has often prevented women from receiving horizontal transfers within a firm that would provide them with the skills needed for promotion.”44
The educational system itself presented another obstacle by discriminating against women being educated in fields believed to be better suited for men. Usually, bookkeeping required only a high school diploma, while accountants needed further degrees. Yet until World War II created a shortage of accountants, some institutions of higher education discouraged or even excluded women from enrolling in accounting courses.45 Even schools that did accept women accounting majors added unnecessary hurdles such as requiring them to take their classes at night.46 Gender bias exhibited by education leaders in Ivy League schools also seemed particularly repressive and passionate. Such deep-seated attitudes, in fact, kept women out of some of these institutions well into the 1970s and early 1980s.47 As with the colleges themselves, professional honor societies also refused to admit women, even those with CPAs, to membership. For instance, Beta Alpha Psi, a society founded in 1919 to honor students in “financial information” majors, finally amended its constitution in 1950 to permit eligible women and minority students to become members.48
Although these obstacles could have been disheartening, they had the opposite effect on Haines, who said they told the wrong person that it could not be done. “I had just enough mule in me that I decided I would do it and the obstacles only made me more determined.”49 Her attitude was not surprising to those who knew her. Josephine Starling, a cousin, wrote that “the family agreed that Haines had a will and mind of her own.”50 Haines declared, “I’ve heard actresses say their work got into their blood and that’s the way accounting was with me. I just had to get into the game. . . . Any woman who works for her C.P.A. must have a natural aptitude and interest in the subject, coupled with a persevering ambition to obtain that degree.”51 Thus, by the time she turned thirty, on December 16, 1921, Haines had received a certificate for completing the course in Advanced Accounting and on March 23, 1923,
she received a diploma after completing the course in Advanced Accounting and Business Law.52
When Haines returned to Utah in 1915, it is not known what positions she held or for whom she worked. It is only known that she worked in various offices around Salt Lake City and by 1919 she was employed at the Utah Light and Traction Company.53 In an interview with Maxine Martz, Haines admitted that she felt she had “sneaked in the back way,” taking a job as an office secretary and managing to get enough experience in accounting to take the CPA exam.54
While Haines was back in Salt Lake City pursuing a business career in accounting, Governor Simon Bamberger appointed her to the State Board for the Registration of Nurses on January 12, 1918. This appointment came as a surprise because although she had graduated from nurses’ training in 1912, she was not a practicing nurse. Nevertheless, on the state board, she replaced Ella Wicklund, who had accepted a position with the Red Cross in France to help with World War I, and became the organization’s secretary-treasurer.55 By March 25, 1919, Bamberger reappointed Haines to the board, and in July 1921 James Hammond, director of the Department of Registration, extended Haines’s appointment.56
Haines’s position as secretary-treasurer for the board was an important one. All nurses had to pass an exam to be certified to practice in the state of Utah. Haines scheduled, administered, and corrected the exam, and notified individuals of the results. She was also responsible for the board’s finances and apparently did a good job, since the board ended 1918 with a surplus of funds.57 In this position, Haines advocated for establishing a standard curriculum and educational program for training nurses in Utah. In addition, she assisted in campaigning to recruit young women to the nursing profession.58 Because of her state-level influence, the nursing community gained respect and confidence in her. She represented the board at the National League of Nurse Education convention in Chicago in 1919 and Kansas City in 1921. In 1922 she represented the Utah Nurses’ Association at a national nurses’ convention in Seattle.59
During the years that Haines served on the board, she was involved in a variety of other organizations. She was very active in the Red Cross in Salt Lake City. In addition, she served on a committee that compiled a statewide directory of all nurses in Utah hospitals as well as individuals who either had knowledge about nursing or were “mentally” and “physically” able to undertake nurse training.60 Haines was also active in the Utah Nurses’ Association and was elected its vice president in 1923.61 She routinely looked for opportunities to ensure that women’s voices were heard and that women were acknowledged for their work and contributions. For instance, she advocated that the Red Cross place a flag at the Utah State Capitol Building to commemorate the service of Utah’s military nurses, in addition to the two flags already there for Utah soldiers and sailors.62
Giovale Library, Westminster College, no. 002321.
In spite of her public appointments, in 1919, when Haines was working for the Utah Light and Traction Company, she had to scrupulously watch her personal monthly budget. She wrote a letter to her parents explaining that the company was going to raise her salary by $10.00 per month, starting from the first of the year. She calculated that with her regular monthly salary of $120.00 and with the $10.00 a month she was receiving for her work with the State Nurses Board, and the fee she received, she would be making about $150 a month.63
In 1921 Haines found a better position in the Salt Lake City office of Haskins and Sells, an internationally known accounting firm. As her father had done, her work record shows that she had achieved steady success and career advancement. After two years with the firm,
An undated studio photograph of Claire Haines. Lignell and Gill, Photographers, Salt Lake City.
she took the difficult two-and-a-half-day CPA exam in 1923.64 Her achievement was publicly noted in local newspapers. One article stated that “Miss H. Claire Haines has successfully completed the examination for certified public accountant . with the distinct recognition of being the first woman to be licensed in this profession in the state. She was the only woman of three taking the recent examination to be passed.”65 And in a letter she wrote to her parents, her personal relief and excitement in achieving her dream poured forth:
I am walking on air this morning. I just got word that I passed my examination and am now an honest to gosh CPA in Utah. Oh, I am so happy, happy, happy. The first woman to try it in Utah and to pass the first time when so few get through it at all. Now I hope I’ll get some recognition from the firm that has been so long in coming. . . . The exam was given in 27 states and a total of 607 people took it. Of that number, 143 passed, 140 were conditioned on one subject and 324 failed altogether. . . . When I read those figures I wondered if there wasn’t a mistake somewhere that I got through.66
Another letter dated July 16, 1923, from J. T. Hammond, director of the State of Utah Department of Registration, officially confirmed her license to practice as a CPA in Utah. Hammond wrote, “I want to congratulate you upon the fact that you passed with such a high percentage being between eighty and eightyfive.”67 Her certificate was the twenty-fourth issued to any accountant in the state and “a testimony to the strain her assault on the business world imposed on the ranks of the CPA.” And Utah was obviously not prepared to issue such a certificate to a woman because on the official document wherever “he” is listed, a small typewritten “s” precedes it.68
In a 1923 interview, after she was notified that she had passed the exam, Haines stated,
It has been a long hard road, with innumerable discouragements and disappointments. Much of the joy of having received the degree of C.P.A. comes from the knowledge that it
may encourage other girls to do the same thing or better. There are comparatively few women certified public accountants in the United States, but there is no logical reason why women should not be as successful in the field as men, once the business public become accustomed to women in the line of endeavor.69
In this public interview, Haines was confident and self-assured. She understood she had paved the way for more women to follow. As she later recalled, the male-dominated accounting profession was so opposed to women entering it that if her test had revealed her name instead of the number assigned to it, she believed she would not have passed.70 In fact, amazingly, Haines remained the only woman Utah CPA for thirty-four years.71
From the time that she was certified until her death in 1974, Haines continually moved from one increasingly important and lucrative position to another. In 1924, before her thirty-third birthday, she received a letter from Charles H. Landers, a trustee of the Seymour Walton Medal Foundation, stating, “Your success in the May 1923 Utah C. P.A. examination evidences your attainment of a high standard of accountancy training, and as a student of the Walton School of Commerce, you are entitled to the Gold Medal of the Seymour Walton Medal Fund,” which she received in a separate mailing.72
When Haines launched into her professional CPA career, she ingeniously combined her knowledge of accounting with nursing. In 1924, her two-part article for the Trained Nurse and Hospital Review focused on allocation of costs and budgeting for schools of nursing and opened up unique business opportunities for her.73 Not only was her article published in a professional journal, but she was also sent a thank you note from the Lakeside Publishing company and paid the handsome sum of twenty-five dollars or a sixth of her monthly income.74
Administrators at the Salt Lake City office of Haskins and Sells soon recognized Haines’s ability, and in 1924, she was transferred to company headquarters in New York City. She was with Haskins and Sells for only a short time
before she moved to the accounting department of the Electric Bond and Share Company, a large holding firm for several public utilities.75 However, as lucrative as this career path was, Haines was unhappy in New York City. One portrayal of her declared, “She rapidly tired of too many people, the desperate bustle and crowded subway trains.”76 A friend told her about a job opening at the Bead Chain Manufacturing Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which manufactured chain strings for lamps. The company offered Haines a job, and, in three short years, she was promoted to the position of assistant treasurer.77 Her next move— to Chicago in 1929—showed additional signs of success; there, after a short time, Haines became the owner of a business with a small staff specializing in hotel and property management accounting.78 Although little is known about this development, it was interrupted again by her private life.
Owing to her aging parents’ health, Haines moved back to Salt Lake City in 1935.79 There she established a private accounting practice in the Union Bank and Trust building. After having been a budding entrepreneur in Chicago and considering herself “something of an individualist,” she worked alone doing a variety of jobs including tax work, setting up fiscal systems, auditing books, and consulting with local Utah businesses. Haines loved the challenge of finding solutions to accounting problems, and she liked not being pinned down to any one industry or field. Working in her own business
offered her the independence and freedom to demonstrate creativity, talent, and intellect, a freedom not always available to women. In addition, as she noted near the end of her career, “Nobody can tell you when to quit.”80
Even though professional accountants did not advertise in that era, Haines soon built an active practice. In her words, “You hang out your shingle and wait for people to come to you. After that it is by ‘personal endorsement,’ a satisfied client telling friends about the CPA’s services.”81 Over the years, Haines attracted many clients, although her gender in a male-dominated field did create a few memorable, even humorous moments. On one occasion, when she went to audit the books at a garage, the bookkeeper disappeared, vanishing from the office. She finally found him hiding behind a car in the garage. When she asked him why he was hiding, he told her that he was not going to work for any “blankety-blank woman.” Haines telephoned the client and told him what had happened. As she recalled, “That bookkeeper was looking for a job the next morning.” Another time she caught a woman with “her hand in the till,” who called her a “Blank old Blister.”82 Laughing at the incident, Haines simply shrugged off the salty language aimed at her.
On a more serious occasion, however, one of her employers called her a “militant female,” a name leveled at her when she asked for better pay and better work, in line with that of her male colleagues. She was accustomed to
Claire Haines (left) and three other women, October 1951. The office door behind them is labeled “Salt Lake Tribune / Salt Lake Telegraph.” Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Collection, no. 7912
derision because of her gender and could tolerate being called a name or two, but she explained that “the ‘militant female’ bit has always rankled because it has been proved . . . beyond a shadow of doubt that accounting is an excellent field for women and one in which many women have excelled. We’re here; we’re going to stay.”83
Haines’s success as an accountant with her own business led to more success and recognition. In 1954, she was appointed the director to the Union Bank and Trust in Salt Lake City, the same bank where she had first rented space to set up her own accounting practice. This appointment was big enough news to warrant a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune: “S. L.’s Only Woman Director Appointed to Bank Position.”84 In addition, it thrust her into prominence and into working with a select circle of men, bankers whom Haines realized had helped Union Bank grow “from a very small savings bank in 1938 to a commercial and savings bank with resources of almost ten million” in less than sixteen years.85
Haines not only created a groundbreaking career path for herself—she also consciously worked to be a role model for younger women to follow in her footsteps. She felt that it was her duty to foster and support women, declaring at one point, “If we can help other women, that is one of the best reasons I know for belonging to BPW,” or the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation.86 Haines’s professional career included membership in numerous organizations, and she served in leadership positions in many of them. For example, she was the only female member of the Utah Society of Public Accountants. She also belonged to the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs and served as president for two years from 1942 to 1944 and later as the parliamentarian. In 1954, she was honored at the annual state convention and given a pin for her twenty-five years of service.87
Over the years, Haines continued to be involved in health and civic issues. In 1943, while serving as president of the BPW, she wrote a lengthy piece for the Salt Lake Telegram as part of a series in which the newspaper asked “civic-minded Salt Lakers” what the city needed. In it, she admonished the city leaders to take immediate action to eradicate the rats that
were abundant in the “underground portions of our business district in abandoned gas and water lines,” further reminding officials that “rats carry diseases and are dangerous when our city is crowded with military personnel and war workers.” Haines’s second recommendation was that the city meet the wartime population spurt with a new public safety building, which would include the Salt Lake City jail, because the present building was “unnecessarily unpleasant and its facilities obsolete.”88 She also spoke out regarding these issues in other forums.89
In view of her attitude to help young women succeed in business, it comes as no surprise to learn that Haines supported scholarships for Westminster College, a private liberal arts college in Salt Lake City. She was partial to Westminster College because from its conception it advocated for the importance of women’s education. She encouraged both young men and women to follow their career dreams.90 Many
This photograph appeared in the August 1954 Membership Bulletin of the American Institute of Accountants. The original caption read “Mrs. Harold L. Child, president of the Salt Lake CPA auxiliary, confers with Miss H. Claire Haines, Utah’s only lady CPA, and Mrs. Charles N. Griffin, dance chairman of the affair.”
June 3, 1954. Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake Tribune Collection, no. 24845–6
students sent letters of thanks to her for the financial support they received. One wrote, “Dear Miss Haines, I would like to sincerely thank you for giving me the opportunity to attend Westminster with the help of your gift. Without help from scholarships I wouldn’t be here.”91 Typically, Haines responded to these notes of appreciation. But one, to Miss Jimmie Pierce, stands out because it captures Haines’s respect for education and her sense of responsibility to Utah’s youth. In part, she stated:
Thank you for taking time to give me a “progress” report on your Westminster school activities. It is good to know that one of the scholarships that I have given has been of real benefit to a young woman who is seeking an education. For many years I have felt that the best investment any young person could make was the acquisition of knowledge. You have my very best wishes for whatever career you
have in mind; there are so many fields open to women that the choice should be yours to enter any profession you like and feel you are well suited for.92
Over the course of her life, Haines worked long hours, not only mastering difficult material in the classroom but also overcoming many challenges because of her gender. Her experiences and her determination to succeed represented a life philosophy that was down to earth but required a backbone. Her “common sense” advice was solidly rooted in learning, as illustrated in one of her many invited speeches:
Learn a new skill so as to be prepared for the next opportunity which is probably on the way. Learn to get along with people; many promising careers never got off the ground because of individual inability to cope with other people. Don’t be afraid of responsibility; it stretches our brains. Learn to
A certificate and pin from the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs marking Claire Haines’s golden anniversary with the organization. July 1969. Giovale Library, Westminster College, Haines Papers
control emotion: tears are misplaced salty water. Learn to develop your own talents and individuality; you may be more of a person than you think. Develop self-confidence; stand up and be counted.93
Another speech, given in rural Utah in 1937 to the Roosevelt Business and Professional Women’s club and entitled “The Business Woman as a Citizen,” was declared “a brilliant address.” In that speech, Haines revealed her passion for education; she urged women to become more politically engaged and to take up leadership roles in government and business:
We are attempting to interest and educate all women in government and around their sense of responsibility. Intelligent leadership among women must be developed. We, ourselves, must take a larger part in civic activities and make ourselves available for public office. . . . Women because they are women must not expect special consideration in the business world and if we are discriminated against in business why not turn more creative or get into businesses for ourselves.94
Claire Haines did not indulge in self-pity or excuse herself from tough decisions because of the social limitations put on women. Instead, she believed challenges required a cool head to allow for creative solutions. Frequently, she urged women to use their brains, to think through the accepted truisms of the day. She mentored women by challenging them to “take a personal inventory now and shake the dust off our brain cells. Develop an inquiring mind; a lot of things we think we know as fact aren’t, so we don’t want to be a nation of sheep.”95
Haines left behind a legacy that continues to affect many people. Her life spanned eightythree years, stretching from 1891 before Utah became the forty-fifth state of the Union, to 1974, two years after the Equal Rights Amendment was enacted. She had succeeded in a male-only career, where in her own words, “The men just did not know what to do with me—whether to accept me as one of them or to treat me with kid gloves.”96 However, she knew that even though she had dedicated her whole
life and soul to her career, she had not totally broken the glass ceiling. As she reflected just a few years before her death, “Men keep women in sub executive position[s] in their businesses, especially in Utah, and women are still ‘pioneering’ for executive, top positions in many areas of business and professions.”97 If Haines were alive today, she probably would not be surprised that the number of women who are the chief executives of Fortune 500 companies has never risen above 8 percent.98 But perhaps, instead of being overwhelmed by the odds, she would quietly take up the challenge to lower the glass ceiling for women by showing both genders how to overcome stereotypes.
Along the way, Claire Haines amassed a large personal fortune, but she also made a name for herself as a leading philanthropist in the Salt Lake City area, giving the equivalent of
Claire Haines and Tayeko Okino. In August 1957, Okino became the second woman to be certified as a public accountant in Utah. She graduated in accounting from the University of Utah in 1949 and was employed by Karl F. Buell and Associates in Salt Lake City. At the time, Okino was the only Nisei woman CPA in Utah and possibly in the United States. In 1957, of some 56,000 CPAs in the nation, only 900 were women. Salt Lake Tribune, August 2, 1957, 12a
one-and-a-half million dollars in today’s dollars to organizations supporting professional women, children, and education. To Westminster College in Salt Lake City, she donated both money toward the construction of Malouf Hall, the home of the School of Nursing, and a $125,000 contribution, which in 2015 reached a value of $234,663. Her philanthropy continues to offer $10,500 per year in student scholarship support.99
However impressive Haines was as a benefactor, her chief importance lies in the nonmaterial aspects, since she was one of the many women who inspired others to fulfill their own dreams. While her mother was a teacher, a socially acceptable job for women in the 1890s, she took a cue from her father and crossed over into the all-male world of accounting in Utah. By the 1970s female accountants were widely recognized, and in 1974, the year of her death, Haines was invited to receive an honorary membership in the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Still, when the invitation arrived, it was addressed to “Mr. Haines.” How Haines responded is inspirational in itself: “But, correction, please: I am ‘Miss’ Haines rather than Mr. Haines. . . . It is gratifying to note that women have won a place for themselves in the profession.100
Haines died of a heart attack, but to the very end, she was thinking about the importance of education and other good causes. The last line of her obituary reads: “Contributions may be made to Westminster College in her name.”101 Hannah Claire Haines, philanthropist, Utah’s first woman CPA, and promoter of education and women in business: she will be remembered.
Notes
1. The authors wish to thank Sandra Brimhall for her assistance with an earlier presentation and edition of this paper. “Claire Haines’ Observations on 60 Years of Progress,” typescript, Hannah Claire Haines Papers, 1884–2015, MSS-014 (hereafter Haines Papers), Archives, Giovale Library, Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah.
10. “Branciforte Small Schools Campus,” accessed February 18, 2021, sccsbssc.ss8.sharpschool.com/about.
11. St. Anthony High School graduation announcement, box 1, fd. 6, Haines Papers.
12. “Public School Buildings in Idaho,” National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form, July 1991, accessed May 3, 2021, history.idaho.gov/wp -content/uploads/2018/09/Public_School_Buildings _in_Idaho_64500196.pdf.
13. “Historical Sketches of St. Anthony, Idaho,” Idaho Genealogy Trails, accessed February 20, 2021, genealogytrails .com/ida/fremont/history/history_stanthony.html.
14. Frederick S. Buchanan, “Education in Utah,” accessed February 19, 2020, uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia.
15. St. Anthony High School graduation announcement.
16. “Benefactress Honors Students . and Vice Versa,” box 1, fd. 16, Haines Papers.
17. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 2.
18. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 3.
19. Finding aid, The Holy Cross Hospital Nursing School Records, 1901–1973, accessed April 27, 2021, history.utah .gov/finding-aids/data/B01352/b1352.html.
20. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 3.
21. “History of the Holy Cross Hospital School of Nursing from Beginning to End: 1901–1973,” n.d., n.p., box 2, fd. 4, Holy Cross Hospital Records, 1875–1973, Accn. 588, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
22. Polly Aird, “Small but Significant: The School of Nursing at Provo General Hospital, 1904–1924,” Utah Historical Quarterly 86, no. 2 (2018): 102–127; Jessie Embry, “Diploma Nursing at Salt Lake City Religious Based Hospitals, Utah Historical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2008): 281–99.
23. Holy Cross Hospital Nursing School diploma and graduation announcement, box 2, fd. 3, Haines Papers; Starling, “Haines Biography,” 3.
24. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 3.
25. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade, Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1976), 313.
26. Miriam B. Murphy, “Gainfully Employed Women, 1896–1950,” in Women in Utah: Paradigm or Paradox?, ed. Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005), 192–93.
27. Murphy, “Gainfully Employed Women,” 195.
28. Jo Freeman, “The Revolution for Women in Law and Public Law, accessed January 18, 2022, jofreeman. com/lawandpolicy/revlaw1.htm.
29. Paul Gabrielsen to David Hales, April 2, 2021. Claire Haines is listed in the 1917–1918 University of Utah general catalog as an unmatriculated student taking an accounting class. She took a business law class in 1922.
30. “Seymour Walton,” Journal of Accountancy 30 (1920): 58–59.
31. “Correspondence Enrollment [Form] Walton School of Commerce,” photocopy in possession of the authors.
33. Maxine Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World,’” Deseret News, May 5, 1962, 6a.
34. “Accounting: Historical Perspectives,” accessed April 4, 2021, encyclopedia.com/finance/finance-and-accounting -magazines/accounting-historical-perspectives.
35. Barbara Guerra and Marilyn J. Huset, “American Woman’s Society of Certified Public Accountants 75th Anniversary: 1933–2008,” accessed April 21, 2021, us.aicpa .org/content/dam/aicpa/career/womenintheprofession /downloadabledocuments/awscpa-75th-anniversary -journal.pdf.
36. J. L. Carey, The Rise of the Accounting Profession from Technical to Professional, 1896–1936 (New York: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 1969), 45–46.
37. I. S. Broo, “Women in Accounting,” Accounting Forum 14, no. 2 (1942): 913.
38. L. M. Kirkham and A. Loft, “Gender and the Construction of the Professional Accountant,” Accounting Organizations and Society 18, no. 6 (1993): 513.
39. Charles W. Wootton and Barbara E. Kemmerer, “The Changing Genderization of the Accounting Workforce in the U.S. 1930–90,” Business and Accounting and Financial History 10, no. 2 (July 2000): 172.
40. Jennie Palen, “Women in Accountancy, 1933–1952, Accounting Forum, May 1953, 51.
41. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at Night: The American Housewife between the Wars,” in Decades of Discontent: The Woman’s Movement, 1920–1940, ed. Lois Scharf and Joan M. Jensen (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 178.
42. M. C. Gilda, “Women’s Place in Accounting,” Illinois Certified Public Accountant 14, no. 3:3.
43. C. Golden, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 113.
44. C. R. Lehman, “Herstory in Accounting: The First Eighty Years,” Accounting Organizations and Society 17, no. 3/4 (1992): 279.
45. E. Lasseter, “The President’s Message,” Woman CPA 8, no. 1: 270–271; Charles W. Wootton and Wanda G. Spruill, “The Role of Women in Major Public Accounting Firms in the United States During World War II,” Business and Economic History 233, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 242.
46. H. Brown, “Women Accounting Societies,” Accountants Digest 10, no. 2: 142–43. Women had difficulty breaking into all educational opportunities and professions that men previously had occupied or had access to, not just accounting. Although, for example, women served as nurses and midwives for centuries, they were not allowed to enter medical schools in the United States for many years. The Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, the New England Female Medical College, and others were all founded so women could receive medical training. In addition, women in other professions faced even more restrictions than Haines did in accounting. For instance, in Utah and other states, married women were not allowed to teach. Some institutions even had strict rules about teachers not wearing makeup, dyeing their hair, smoking cigarettes, dressing in bright colors, or appearing in public without a male escort. Raymond Bial, One-Room School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). See David A. Hales, “School Days and School Marms,” Utah Historical Quarterly 67,
no. 2 (Spring 1999). After graduating from Snow College in 1931, Lucile Roper Hales got a job in her hometown when a single teacher married. She herself had to give up teaching when she married in 1940. Returning to teaching in 1947–1948, she became pregnant but was allowed to continue since she “did not show.” In 1974 she was required to retire because of mandatory teacher’s retirement at age sixty-five.
47. Nancy Weiss Malkiel, Keep the Damned Women Out: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), xv–xviii, 460, 461, 482, 483. Alumni, especially older men, were greatly opposed to admitting women to their Ivy League schools. The following comments from Dartmouth alumni are characteristic of the feelings of men from other schools: “If women were to be admitted, Dartmouth would lose its uniqueness, its vitality and greatness”; and, “For God’s sake, for Dartmouth’s sake, and for everyone’s sake, keep the damned women out.” Even after women were admitted to Dartmouth there was much hostility expressed toward them.
48. S. H. Wescott and R. E. Seiler, Woman in the Accounting Profession (New York: Markus Wiener, 1986), 5; “BAP 100 Years,” Beta Alpha Psi, accessed March 19, 2021, 100years.bap.org.
49. Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World.’”
50. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 1.
51. Glenn Perrins, “Figures a Field for Women,” box 1, fd. 9, Haines Papers.
52. Walton School of Commerce certificate, box 2, fd. 9, Haines Papers. In June 1914 Claire also received a certificate from the Polytechnic Business College, Los Angeles, California, for completing a correspondence course in shorthand. Box 2, fd. 4, Haines Papers.
53. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 4.
54. Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World.’”
55. “Claire Haines Now on Nurses’ Board,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 13, 1918.
56. Simon Bamberger to H. Claire Haines, March, 25, 1919, box 1, fd. 8, Haines Papers; “Governor Submits List of New Appointments,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 8, 1919; “Examining Bodies Named by Hammond,” Salt Lake Telegram, June 11, 1921. The board had various names over the years: State Board for the Registration of Nurses, Board of Trained Nurses, and State Board for the Examination and Registration of Nurses. Haines’s work on the board must have taken a fair amount of time, but it appears that this was in addition to her fulltime employment. It is known that she was working for the Utah Light and Traction Company in 1919 and that she was being paid $10.00 per month for her work on the board.
57. “Nurses to Apply Prior to March 1,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 24, 1918; “Examiner Is Busy,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, July 4, 1920; “Examining Nurses,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 29, 1920; “Nurse Examiners Have Money Left,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 7, 1919.
58. “Officers Elected by Nurse Examiners,” May 4, 1919; “Nurses Training Standard Urged,” December 8, 1919, both in Salt Lake Tribune
59. “Nurse Examination,” July 5, 1919; “To Represent Utah,” April 5, 1921; “Nurses to Attend Seattle Meeting,” June 23, 1922, all in Salt Lake Telegram
60. “Red Cross News and Notes,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 19, 1918. Haines continued to honor nurses. In 1943, when she was serving as president of the Business
and Professional Women’s Club, the organization held a banquet honoring former members serving in the armed forces and nurses corps. “BPW Plans Banquet for Ex-Members in Armed Forces,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 13, 1943.
61. “Tributes Paid to Nurses by Mayor Neslen,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 1, 14, 1923.
62. “Service Flag Suggested for Utah Nurses,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 11, 1919.
63. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 4.
64. Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World.’”
65. “First Woman Accountant Is Licensed in State,” box 1, fd. 9, Haines Papers.
66. Starling, “Haines Biography,” 5.
67. J. T. Hammond to H. Claire Haines, July 16, 1923, box 1, fd. 9, Haines Papers.
69. “Woman Passes Auditor’s Test,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 8, 1923.
70. “Pioneer Utah CPA Wins Recognition,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 14, 1969.
71. “‘Unique’ CPA Ends Waiting for Practicing Counterpart,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 2, 1957. See also, “Nisei Woman Passes Utah CPA Exam,” Utah Nippo, August 7, 1957.
72. Charles Lander to H. Claire Haines, June 30, 1924, box 1, fd. 9, Haines Papers.
73. H. Claire Haines, “Allocation of Costs and Budget Making for Schools of Nursing, Part One,” January 1924: 28–32; and “Allocation of Costs and Budget Making for Schools of Nursing, Part Two,” February, 1924: 134–38, both in Trained Nurse and Hospital Review.
74. E. M. Anderson to H. Claire Haines, February 25, 1924, box 1, fd. 9, Haines Papers.
79. Hallberg to Hales. Her aged parents were living in Salt Lake City. Harrison W. Haines died on November 22, 1937. He had lived there for about nineteen years before his death. Anna Haines died on June 17, 1946, in Salt Lake City.
80. Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World.’”
81. Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World.’”
82. Martz, “Woman CPA In ‘Man’s World.’”
83. “Excerpts from Notes of Speeches Given by Claire Haines,” box 1, fd. 1, Haines Papers.
84. “S.L. Only Woman Director Appointed to Bank Position,” Salt Lake Tribune, November, 17, 1954; Eleanor Knowles, “Presenting . Miss H. Claire Haines Bank Director,” Deseret News, November 24, 1954.
85. “Excerpts from Notes of Speeches Give by Claire Haines.”
86. “Excerpts from Notes of Speeches Give by Claire Haines.”
87. “BPW Award Winner Announced,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 20, 1954. Additionally, Haines’s private papers document her membership in the following organizations: the Business and Professional Women’s Club of the American Institute of Accountants; the American Women’s Society of Certified Public Accountants, in which she was a founding member and later the vice president; the National Association of Bank Auditors and Controllers; and the Utah State Federation of Businesswomen’s Clubs, where she served as treasurer for four years. She also held memberships in the Society of Women Accountants, the Women’s Conservation Council, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Service Core of Retired Executives, and the Women’s Republican Club. Perrins, “Figures a Field for Women.” Haines was one of a few women accountants to have her biography included in The Accountants’ Directory and Who’s Who, 1925 (New York: Prentice-Hall and the American Society of Certified Public Accountants, 1925).
88. “Clubwoman Proposes Campaign against Rats,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 23, 1943.
89. “Summary Describes Salt Lake Needs,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 19, 1943.
90. “Benefactress Honors Students.”
91. Gayle Rust to Claire Haines, October 15, 1974, box 1, fd. 14, Haines Papers.
92. H. Claire Haines to Jimmie Pierce, June 30, 1969, box 1, fd. 14, Haines Papers.
93. “Excerpts from Notes of Speeches Given by Claire Haines.”
94. “State B.P.W. Leaders Urge Women to Public Offices,” Roosevelt (UT) Standard, March 3, 1937.
95. “Excerpts from Notes of Speeches Given by Claire Haines.”
96. Knowles, “Presenting . Miss H. Claire Haines.”
97. “Pioneer Utah CPA Wins Recognition.”
98. Alexis Benveniste, “The Fortune 500 Now Has a Record Number of Female CEOs, a Whopping 39,” CNN Business, September 10, 2020, accessed April 27, 2021, cnn.com/2020/09/10/business/fortune-500-women -ceos-citigroup/index.html.
100.H. Claire Haines to David H. Lanman Jr., July 10, 1974, box 1, fd. 15, Haines Papers.
101. “Hannah C. Haines, CPA Dies at 83,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1974.
Dentistry and Embroidery in 1890s Utah: The Work of Kate D. Barron Buck
BY CHRISTINE COOPER-ROMPATO
Perhaps few women in late nineteenth-century Utah could better represent the bridging of the public and private spheres of life than Kate Diantha Barron Buck: a Salt Lake City dentist who won a blue ribbon and a bronze medal at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as well as a blue ribbon at the Utah Territorial Fair in 1894, for her extraordinary silk embroidered map of the United States. Buck worked on her “Columbian Centennial Souvenir Map” for over a year, and the process of its creation is documented by the map itself and by items that have been preserved in tandem with the map.1 The fair encouraged the emergence of the well-rounded post-Victorian woman, one who was both an exemplary home keeper and who pursued a more public life through education and political societies.2 Buck, the creator of the map, was an excellent example of just such a woman, exceptionally skilled in fiber arts and working in a predominantly male field of dentistry. Her example demonstrates some of the challenges and rewards of being a successful public figure in the western United States.
Kate D. Barron Buck of the Happy Hour Dental Company
Kate Diantha Barron was born in 1859 in Wisconsin. Her mother, Lucretia Stratford, and her father, Alonzo Barron, a mechanic, had ten children.3 When Kate was in her late teens, she married Marion Newman Buck, a thirty-year old musician, in Mankato, Minnesota. By 1880, she was living in Lenox, Iowa, where she and her husband were listed as music teachers in the census.4 Kate had two children: Claude Enoch, born in Davis City, Iowa, in 1881, and Grace Elizabeth, born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1888. During the 1880s, Kate and her husband both became traveling dentists who visited and worked in a number of midwestern and western states. By the 1890s, the family had moved to Salt Lake City, where they resided for ten years and ran a dental practice before moving to California, where they lived for the remainder of their lives.
After their marriage, Marion worked as a church organist and a member of an orchestra, and he also gave music lessons. In 1884, newspapers give the first notice of a new collaboration between the Bucks, a dentist
named George Stone and his wife, and Genette Weaverling, also a musician. The Bucks, the Stones, and Weaverling traveled through Kansas and Nebraska under the name of “Prof. Buck & Co’s Happy Hours Imperial Organ and Musical Convention Troupe.” The set up was brilliant—while the Bucks and Weaverling gave music lessons and sold organs, George Stone fixed teeth and made dentures. The family performers offered concerts that served as advertisements for Stone, and because dentists were in such demand during this period, many towns they visited welcomed them.5
Living the life of a traveling musician, wife, and mother—publicly, in the eye of so many people—could have its drawbacks. Certainly it must have been difficult for Kate Buck to move from town to town via train or wagon, carting all the necessities of caring for her husband and young son, along with musical supplies and Stone’s dental equipment. Kate’s marriage seems to have been display on least one occasion in 1884, when a newspaper reported a brief and public breach in the relationship. (A reconciliation occurred quickly, also reported by the paper). By
the end of the year, Mrs. Stone had died, and the company of four—Stone, the Bucks, and Weaverling—formed the Happy Hour Dental Company. The company advertised itself as offering painless dental care through the use of electricity applied to the gums and “muriate of cocaine” to facilitate extractions.6 Cocaine muriate, or cocaine hydrochloride, was a powered substance used in a number of late-nineteenth-century medical applications, including eye surgeries.7 Any additional dental work that needed further care would be completed the next time Happy Hour was in town. Newspapers advertised vocal lessons and concerts given by the troupe, along with the various costs of their labor for tooth extractions, fillings, and dentures.8
By 1885, newspaper advertisements identified all four members of Happy Hour—Marion and Kate Buck, George Stone, and Genette Weaverling—as dentists; it seems the music, still an integral part of their work, now shared equal booking with dentistry. The two women were described as both assisting the dentists (Marion Buck and George Stone) as well as being
Figure 1. Kate Diantha Barron Buck’s “Columbian Centennial Souvenir Map.” All images courtesy of the Dalby Mars family unless otherwise noted
dentists in their own right, and advertisements asserted they were all “perfect ladies and gentlemen.”9 During the nineteenth century in the Midwest, it was not necessary for dentists to earn a formal degree in their field: they could become dentists by apprenticeship, which is what Marion, Kate, and Genette all seemed to have done under George Stone. Although Kate and Genette were at times referred to as “doctor,” this did not indicate an official dentistry license. In fact, the first license for a man to practice dentistry in Kansas was probably not issued until 1885; the first woman in Kansas was granted a dentist license in 1887.10
Having women in the dental practice was seen as a benefit, for women dental assistants and dentists were thought to be particularly suited to working with women and children. As a Kansas newspaper from 1887 noted, “The ladies of this vicinity will have the privilege of having their dental work cared for by the ladies of the Happy Hour Dental Company.”11 Local writers often praised the ability of the two women; for example, an 1886 Nebraska paper declared the troupe to be “First Class Dentists in every particular. Especially Miss Weaverling we think she is the best gold Dentist in Nebraska. Mrs. Buck has few equals and no superior, in fact the Company is composed of the Finest Dentists.”12 The idea that female dentists were especially attuned to women and children as patients reflects a heated argument in the late nineteenth century about the presence of women in the field of dentistry. Debates raged in the dental journals about the relative abilities (or perceived lack of abilities) of women, with detractors claiming that women did not have the physical stamina or concentration necessary to work on adult men, arguing that they were more suited to the mouths of children and women.13 Kate Buck and Genette Weaverling turned gender to their advantage in their advertising, as a way to attract even more clients.
During the late 1880s, the Happy Hour Dental Company expanded its geographical range throughout Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, and probably Arizona, where Kate gave birth to Grace in 1888. The Nevada papers in particular made much of the “Lady Dentists.”14 An Elko newspaper in 1888, for example, noted that “the only Lady Dentists in
Nevada will be at the Gem Hotel.” As the advertisement emphasized, the women were “members of the Happy Hour Dental company and also members of the Kansas dental association” and therefore must be “excellent workmen.”15
Just over one year later, in December 1889, the dentists were ready to settle down in Salt Lake City and open an office downtown.16 Happy Hour dentistry continued to practice in Utah throughout the 1890s, with their clinic located at 212 ½ State Street until they moved in 1896 to 46 ½ West Second South.17 The second “gentleman dentist,” a Dr. Ellis, left the practice in 1895, leaving the original three—the Bucks and Weaverling—who were all referred to as doctors in advertisements.18 Throughout the 1890s, the Happy Hour dentists readily promoted all their dental abilities and painless practices in the Salt Lake City newspapers. Although many of these notices did not mention gender, others called attention to the benefits of female dentists.19 During the 1890s, it is quite probable they still continued to travel as dentists.20
What was life like for Kate Buck in the 1890s in Salt Lake City? She was an active dentist, with two children, who helped run a business and still traveled as a dentist. Her household included her family, Genette Weaverling, and other boarders. And during 1892–1893, Buck somehow found the time to envision and design her embroidered map; to write to the governor of each state, as well as the wife of a former president; and then to create the map with its more than 10,000 stitches. Buck achieved a certain amount of fame in Salt Lake City in 1893, since before shipping the map to the fair, Happy Hour displayed it at its State Street dental clinic, where large numbers of people reportedly gathered to admire her needlework.21
The turn of the century saw the Bucks and Weaverling leave Utah for southern California. Around 1901, Kate Buck moved from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles County, most likely with Weaverling.22 Marion was still listed in the 1902 Salt Lake City directory, as the manager of a mining company.23 According to family records, Marion also moved to southern California and eventually bought or built a house the couple would call “Linger Longer.” In February 1903, a fire damaged much of the block where Happy
Hour Dental Company was situated, but Happy Hour was one of a few businesses saved in the Central block.24
In order to practice in California, Kate needed state certification, so she attended dental school at the University of Southern California, along with Genette Weaverling. Both women graduated in 1903, just one year after the first female graduate, Minnie Madeline Steinhilber.25 Kate became active in the Southern California Dental Association, for which she gave presentations and acted as treasurer. Throughout the early decades of the century, the Bucks, as well as Kate’s mother, Lucretia, lived in Los Angeles County.26 Dentistry seemed to support much of the extended family circle. For many years Kate lived with her daughter, Grace, who also lived and worked as a dental assistant with Weaverling. Weaverling had married Benjamin Harbour in 1904 and she practiced as an orthodontist after her marriage. Kate and Marion’s son Claude also became a dentist in California, and he appears to have worked alongside his mother. After Genette’s husband died in 1930, she moved in with Kate until her death.27 When Kate died in 1942, her obituary highlighted her civic engagement, including her past presidency of the Los Angeles Professional Women’s Club and her leadership in the local Community Farm Movement.28
The life of Kate D. Barron Buck was one of remarkable achievement: as one of the early women dentists working in partnership with her husband and another woman dentist in Utah and then as one of the first women to graduate from dental school in California. Her achievements extended to her artistry with textiles, as she designed and completed an extraordinary embroidered map celebrating Utah as part of the United States. In creating her map of the states from fabric almost exclusively worn by women from prominent political families, Buck succeeded in emphasizing the important role of women in creating the country.
The Columbian Centennial Souvenir Map
The organizers of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago set out with a purpose to highlight the work of industrious Victorian women, and the fair featured a number of
inventions and creations by women, both national and international. Many of these were exhibited in the Women’s Building, as well the buildings for transportation, horticulture, and the individual states. The Women’s Building was designed to celebrate women’s achievements in a range of areas, such as art, literature, music, and science, and it included large assembly halls for meetings and lectures about suffrage, dress reform, women’s rights to education, and so forth. The design and implementation of the building was governed by a board of “Lady Managers,” which was appointed by the all-male World’s Columbian Commission; the board included a white female representative and alternate from every state and territory in the United States. The board had to rely on a network of state-level committees to organize their submissions but chose not to reject anything once it was sent, leading to a crowded display of approximately 80,000 objects, ranging from literary masterpieces to a dishwasher.29
Women throughout Utah Territory submitted their agricultural products, handicrafts, and inventions to the state-level committee, the Territorial Board of Lady Managers, for inclusion in the Women’s Building. During 1892 and early 1893, notices about the Territorial Board of Lady Managers and their acquisition of items for both the Women’s Building and the Utah Building regularly appeared in local newspapers. For example, in March 1893, the women of Lehi contributed a small table made of onyx and silver that weighed over 1,000 pounds.30 Other submissions ranged from straw hats, mineral samples, and dishes made from Utah sulfur, to an “insect carving” from St. George— that is, “a block of wood, eaten by insects, that closely resembles fantastic carving.”31
Utah provided the main contribution to the “silk and silk fabrics” division displayed in the Women’s Building. Its Women of Utah: Silk exhibit of the territory was extremely popular and won a prize; the women created a miniature silk factory demonstrating how silk was made, from worm to dress.32 In addition, the thousands of people who entered the Women’s Building passed under “pale cream silk curtains embroidered with Sego lilies” made by Utah women.33 This Utah industry attracted much positive attention. The historian Reid Neilson has argued that the fair
gave Utahns an opportunity to “exhibit the best of Utah and Mormonism to a domestic and global audience,” presenting themselves to the world as “progressive Victorians” and “patriotic Americans” who were eager to take on the responsibilities of statehood.34 Buck’s award-winning silk map exemplified such efforts to promote Utah as an industrious and patriotic member of the United States.
Buck’s embroidered map of the United States formed part of the “silk and silk fabrics” display in the Women’s Building, but it was not connected with the Women of Utah: Silk exhibit of the territory. The map, which was displayed in an oak frame, hung in the Women’s Building in the northeast stairway.35 The map features the United States, including Alaska in the upperright-hand corner and Hawaii as represented by a bow on the flag in the upper-left corner. Black silk thread outlines the individual states. North of the states are sewn the words “Dominion of Canada,” and Mexico is labeled as well. A legend in the lower-right-hand corner features photographs printed on fabric, the process for which, called “diazytope,” had only been invented two years earlier in London (fig. 2). This legend appears to have been the last element added to the map, except for the frame.36 The legend features a photo of Buck on an octagonal piece of satin sewn on top of what appears to be another photograph on fabric of a document describing both the circumstances of its creation as well as the individual names of all the governors who contributed to the map. One name, William McKinley of Ohio, appears to have been added at some point in pen. Tiny print at the bottom of the legend includes specific details about individual states’ contributions.
As the map legend asserts, Buck undertook and completed the map between February 22, 1892, and April 8, 1893, and it was “designed and entirely made by her.” One of the first steps she apparently took was to write to each state’s governor, as well as to the president of the United States, to ask for a piece of fabric from which she could cut the pattern of their state. According to an explanatory document preserved with the map, “Mrs. Buck wrote to each governor, explaining her project and requesting a piece of silk from his wife’s inaugural or other important dress. If the governor was a bachelor,
he would send a piece of his favorite silk tie.”37 Buck enclosed a pattern of each state in her request so that governors would know how big or small a piece of fabric to send.
As the explanatory document records, all the states responded, although “for some a second request was necessary.” The original letters from the governors’ offices that accompanied the swatches of fabric have been preserved, with the signatures of governors or their wives, daughters, and secretaries. Utah’s territorial governor, Arthur Thomas, signed both his response to Buck and the bottom of the map’s legend, which also includes the signature of the Salt Lake Tribune editor, C. C. Goodwin. A Salt Lake Tribune article identified the fabric sent by Thomas as coming from a dress of the governor’s late wife, Henrietta Reinberg (fig. 3).38
The map legend explains that the portions from New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, and
Figure 2. Detail of the map’s legend, with Utah Governor Arthur Thomas’s signature and a photograph on fabric of Kate Buck.
Mississippi were made from the silk of governors’ ties. Two states, Washington and Iowa, came from the dresses of governors’ daughters, and the remainder came from the dresses of first ladies, with the exception of Tennessee; that fabric “was presented to [the governor] by a friend, Mrs. Hooper, and is a fragment of a dress worn by her aunt at the reception in honor of Lafayette when he visited America in 1824.” Newspaper articles offer a more specific location for that reception, at Andrew Jackson’s Nashville Hermitage. In addition, a silk bow in the upper left corner holds a small flag in place; according to the legend, it “was contributed by Mrs. Caroline D. Kinney of the Hawaiian Islands, and is from a dress worn by Mrs. Schuyler at the Inauguration of Washington in 1784.” “Mrs. Schulyer” was probably the wife of Philip John Schulyer, major general in the Continental Army and then the first senator of New York. Because Indian Territory did not have a governor, Buck wrote to the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, Caroline (Carrie) Lavinia Scott, for a piece of fabric; the president’s wife also supplied the silk for the District of Columbia.
The map itself features the states and territories, with rivers, lakes, and mountains marked. Originally, Buck indicated water with light blue silk, but this has faded over time. Since the early 2000s, when an archivist cleaned and preserved
the map, it has been displayed privately, in its original frame with museum-quality glass. The map is in extraordinarily good condition and all states are clearly visible, although the faded embroidery thread can be somewhat difficult to read in places. The states show a number of cities and geographic features; Buck reportedly made her pattern working from a three-by-five foot linen map.39 For example, Utah is delightfully detailed and shows the cities of Logan, Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, Panguitch, Manti, Huntington, and St. George, as well as rivers, mountains, and the Great Salt Lake, complete with Antelope (and smaller) islands (fig. 4).
Wyoming contains several cities of note as well as impressive mountain chains, and Nevada’s lakes and mountains are clearly visible when the pale cloth is examined closely (figs. 5 and 6).
Midwestern and southern states are particularly intricate; see, for example, Illinois, whose detail might reflect Buck’s own time in the Midwest or perhaps the growing importance of the region’s cities (fig. 7).
States in New England have the fewest named cities, either because they were the furthest from Buck’s experience or because the smaller
Figure 3. Letter from Utah’s governor, Arthur Thomas, dated March 24, 1893.
Figure 4. Detail, Utah.
fabric squares were not as conducive to stitching words on. Looking for a state’s individual cities and towns must have delighted and amused viewers from across the country at the world’s fair, as they searched and found (or didn’t find) their hometowns. The Evening Tribune of Grand Haven, Michigan, recorded that “In the Woman’s Building at the World’s Fair is a map made of bits of silk sent by the governors of the different states to Mrs. Kate D. Barron Buck. Grand
Haven occupies a conspicuous spot on the map with Detroit and Grand Rapids and Saginaw, but Muskegon is not in it.”40 How disappointed Muskegon residents must have been!
Buck’s map received an award in the “Educational Department,” a category that included prizes for other items such as “Ninety volumes high school and class work” from the Salt Lake City public schools and “Charts, photos and manual training” from the agricultural college in Logan.41 After the fair ended in October 1893, Buck traveled to California at some point, for in April 1894, she copyrighted the map with the Library of Congress; this copyright was documented through a photograph, perhaps a copy of the souvenir photograph from the fair.42As the copyright notes that Buck was applying from San Francisco, it is possible she attended the Midwinter International Exposition there, which was held between January and July in the Golden State Park. It does not appear that Buck exhibited the map in California, for the official catalogue of the exposition does not name her.43
Later in 1894, Buck sent souvenir photographs of the maps to the governors; the map itself was valued at a whopping $20,000.44 The Relief
Figure 5. Detail, Wyoming.
Figure 6. Detail, Nevada.
Figure 7. Detail, Illinois.
Society in Salt Lake City also reported that it received a souvenir photograph, so it is possible a copy of this early image exists in some archives in the state.45 The map was then exhibited at the Utah Territorial Fair in October 1894, where it won a blue ribbon (figs. 8, 9). The next public notice of the map did not occur for almost eighty years; then, in 1970, the San Diego Public Library displayed Buck’s work in its central building.46 No public notice of the map seems to have been made after that date, and today it remains in the care of family members.
The documents that are preserved with the map include elaborate patterns for individual states; these pen drawings, at least of the northeastern states, are much more detailed than what Buck sewed on the map. See, for example, the drawing of Massachusetts, which contains a number of cities that did not make it onto the silk map (fig. 10). As mentioned above, the small size of
the New England states may have limited what Buck was able to include. Also with the documents are maps drawn in pen of Africa, Australia, and India, which suggests Buck might have originally planned to create a world map for the World’s Columbian Exposition; these maps could also represent the beginnings of a second project, one that was never finished.
Buck’s silk embroidered map has much in common with late-nineteenth-century map quilts and indeed might have been inspired by them. Some of these quilts differentiated states by fabrics and were related to the crazy quilt, a popular style that used a variety of fabrics, including silk. For instance, the Utah Museum of Fine Art recently presented the Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts, which was organized by the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and included a crazy quilt–inspired map of the United States (fig. 11).
Figures 8 and 9. Awards for Kate Buck’s embroidered map: a blue ribbon from the World’s Columbian Exposition, a bronze medal from that fair, and an award from the Utah Territorial Fair.
Figure 10. A detailed drawing with pen and paper of Massachusetts.
Figure 11. Crazy quilt map, 1886, by an unidentified artist, possibly from Virginia. Silk and cotton with silk embroidery. Schecter Lee, photographer. Courtesy American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. C. David McLaughlin. Image ART521288
Map textile projects might have been popular in nineteenth-century schools, as shown by an 1891 quilt from Wisconsin that was stitched by a thirteen-year-old girl as a “class project.”47 Likewise, in 1893, a man in Tennessee had in his possession an heirloom made by his grandmother in 1819 when she was a fourteen-year-old girl at school; it was a “white silk quilt on which a map of North Carolina was worked with needle and thread. . . . The map is perfect, having counties, towns, rivers, sounds, etc. displayed. . The quilt will be taken to the world’s fair.”48 This suggests that another building at the world’s fair might have displayed a silk map project.
As the American Folk Art Museum explains, map quilts (and by extension, other map textiles, such as Buck’s embroidery) invite viewers to “trac[e] the paths of individual stories and experiences that illuminate larger historic events and cultural trends.”49 Women’s fabric maps of the United States may have manifested a nationalistic urge to celebrate the country’s growing size. Perhaps the concept of the Columbian exhibit encouraged Buck to see a map of the United States as a fitting celebration of Columbus’s four hundredth anniversary. Moreover, by creating the map from the textiles of governors’ wives, Buck was emphasizing how women’s roles and work made up the fabric of the United States. In doing this, however, it must be recognized that the lands of Indigenous people were symbolically formed from the clothing of white politicians and their families, who for generations had stolen the land from them.
One goal of the Women’s Building committee was to showcase women’s role in industry and invention and to promote women’s education and ability in the face of arguments that women were the weaker sex. In displaying Kate Buck’s embroidered map and giving her an award, the fair judges recognized the skills and talent of a remarkable young wife, mother, dentist, artist, and musician, who excelled in both the private and public spheres.
Notes
1. Kate D. Barron Buck’s map is privately owned, and I would like to thank the Dalby Mars family for generously sharing their photographs, documents, and stories. I would like to additionally acknowledge and thank the Kansas Dental Board and Claude Zachary, of the University of Southern California, for the informa-
tion they supplied. I also owe special thanks to Andrea Matlak, archivist and metadata librarian for the American Dental Association Library and Archives, for her aid with locating sources.
2. Wanda M. Corn, Charlene G. Garfinkle, and Annelise K. Madsen, Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
3. 1860 United States Federal Census, La Crosse Ward 1, La Crosse, Wisconsin, roll M653_1417, page 239, digital image, Kate D. Barson, ancestry.com; see also the family tree at ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree /26763978/person/380098279636/facts, both accessed June 6, 2022.
4. 1880 United States Federal Census, Lenox, Taylor, Iowa, roll 366, page 30B, enumeration district 213, digital image, Kate Buch, accessed June 6, 2022, ancestry.com.
5. Burr Oak (KS) Herald, June 26, 1884, 4.
6. Mulvane (KS) Record, March 28, 1885, 5.
7. W. W. Seely, “Additional Points in the Use of Cocaine Muriate,” JAMA3, no. 24 (1884):656, doi:10.1001/ jama.1884.02390730012001e.
8. Argonia (KS) Clipper, May 2, 1885, 5; Miltonvale (KS) News, September 3, 1885, 4.
9. Argonia (KS) Clipper, May 2, 1885, 5.
10. According to the Kansas Dental Board, “the first license to practice dentistry was issued in Kansas on September 15, 1885. . Of course, most licensing records predate the age of digitization, so the data can be highly limited to handwritten entries in antiquated licensing books. The records, however, are all originals. At that time, most dentists were trained through a preceptor. As time progressed, dental training occurred at formal educational institutions and universities.” The board found no record of Kate Buck, Marion N. Buck, or Genette Weaverling, although it did locate licensing entries for F. N. Buck and A. B. Buck. Kansas Dental Board (Topeka, KS) to Christine Cooper-Rompato, email, February 20, 2021.
11. Irving (KS) Leader, March 31, 1887, 2.
12. Guide Rock (NE) Signal, October 2, 1886, 5.
13. For a comprehensive overview of the literature, see An Historical Review of Women in Dentistry: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. Constance Boquist and Jeannette V. Haase (Rockville, MD: United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1977).
14. “Lady Dentists,” Silver State (Unionville, NV), June 20, 1888, 4; Daily Independent (Elko, NV), July 2, 1888, 4.
15. Daily Independent (Elko, NV), July 7, 1888, 3.
16. Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 31, 1889, 5.
17. “Removed,” Salt Lake Herald, June 18, 1896, 9.
18. “Dissolution of Partnership,” Salt Lake Herald, May 7, 1895, 8; for just the three dentists listed, see InterMountain Advocate, February 28, 1896, 4.
19. Salt Lake Times, April 24, 1890, 4.
20. San Diego (CA) Union, November 23, 1898, 10.
21. See the newspaper article “An Elegant Bit of Work,” supplied by Dalby Mars family. Buck’s family obligations also must have extended to her mother, Lucretia; in the early 1890s, Lucretia, then a widow, joined her daughter in Salt Lake City, where she worked as a music teacher while living in a separate residence. By 1896, however, Lucretia had relocated once again. U.S., City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, City Directory, s.v. “Liucretia W Barron” (1892) and “Lucretia W Barron” (1893, 1894), accessed June 7, 2022,
ancestry.com.
22. The 1900 census lists Kate Buck as living in Salt Lake City, as does the 1901 Salt Lake City directory. In 1902, Kate does not appear in the directory, which also records that Genette F. Weaverling had moved to Los Angeles (862). 1900 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City Ward 5, Salt Lake, Utah, roll 1685, page 2, enumeration district 0054; U.S., City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, City Directory, s.v. “Mrs Kate D Buck” and “Genette F Weaverling,” both accessed June 7, 2022, ancestry.com.
23. U.S., City Directories, 1822–1995, Salt Lake City, Utah, City Directory, s.v. “Marion N Buck,” accessed June 8, 2022, ancestry.com. The 1901 Salt Lake City directory lists Marion Buck as both the manager of Happy Hour Dental and a mining operator (163). The 1902 directory lists him as the president of “Copper Mountain M & M co, res. 250 south state,” with Dr. W. H. Hopkins as the proprietor of Happy Hour Dental Company. By 1903, Marion no longer appears in the directory.
24. “Damage Incident to Fire in Other Buildings Adjoining Atlas Block,” Salt Lake Telegram, February 11, 1903, 6; Deseret Evening News, February 11, 1903, 2.
25. Both Kate Buck and Genette Frances Weaverling graduated from the USC School of Dentistry in 1903. According to a University of Southern California Special Collections archivist, Claude Zachary, “Minnie Madeline Steinhilber graduated in 1902, so she would be the first woman graduate.”
26. See the family tree of “Lucretia Wilson Stratford,” at ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/26763978/person /380098279636/facts.
27. William E. Wilson, “Obituary: Genette Weaverling Harbour,” Angle Orthodontist 6, no. 4 (1936): 277.
28. “Dr. Kate Diantha Buck,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1942, 8.
29. Corn et. al, Women Building History, 66–67, 76, 80.
30. “Utah Women’s Work,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, March 3, 1893, 8.
31. “Utah Women’s Work.”
32. “Utah Crowned,” Evening Dispatch (Provo City, UT), January 2, 1894; Moses Purnell Handy, ed., Official Catalog (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1893), 31; “Utah at the World’s Fair,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 18, 1893, 8.
33. Woman’s Exponent (Salt Lake City, UT), April 1, 1893, 4.
34. Reid L. Neilson, Exhibiting Mormonism: The Latter-day Saints and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–52, 6.
35. Handy, ed., Official Catalog, 31; “List of Utah Awards,” Salt Lake Herald, December 31, 1893, 6.
36. “An Elegant Bit of Work.”
37. “Map Data,” typescript, circa 1960, in possession of Dalby Mars family.
38. “Artistic Needle Work,” Deseret Evening News, April 10, 1893.
39. “An Elegant Bit of Work.”
40. Evening Tribune (Grand Haven, MI), September 26, 1893.
41. “World’s Fair Commission,” Salt Lake Herald, January 17, 1894, 3.
42. Library of Congress, copyright no. 20960, April 24, 1894, issued to Kate D. Barron-Buck. Buck’s copyright document, which is in possession of the Dalby Mars family, notes that she “deposited in this Office the title of a Photograph, the title of description of which is in the following words, to wit: Columbian Centennial Souvenir Map of the United States.” Russell Mars to Christine Cooper-Rompato, email, January 19, 2021.
43. Official Guide to the California Midwinter Exposition in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California (San Francisco: G. Spaulding, 1894).
45. “Editorial Notes,” Women’s Exponent (Salt Lake City, UT), January 15, 1894, 7; E. A. McDaniel, “Elaborate Silk Map of the United States,” Utah at the World’s Columbian Exposition (Salt Lake City: Salt Lake Lithographing), 81.
46. San Diego (CA) Union, September 8, 1970, 18.
47. For images of map quilts and other map textile art, see “Map of United States Quilt,” American Primitive, americanprimitive.com/folk-art/map-united-states-quilt; for the 1891 “class project” map quilt, see Ellen Kort, Wisconsin Quilts: Stories in the Stitches (Cincinnati: F & W Media, 2011), with a photo included in the blog Material Culture, October 29, 2017, barbarabrackman .blogspot.com/2017/10/. See also “Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts,” American Folk Art Museum, folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/handstitched -worlds-cartography-quilts/; “Stories from American Made: Map Quilt—Stitching Our Way from Sea to Shining Sea,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, crystalbridges.org/blog/, all accessed June 8, 2022. For other textiles exhibited at fairs, see, for example, Bismarck (ND) Tribune, May 9, 1893, 3; and “Miss Kirby’s Columbian Quilt,” Cincinnati (OH) Post, July 20, 1893, 2.
48. Tombstone (AZ) Epitaph, February 1, 1893, 3.
49. “Handstitched Worlds.”
REVIEWS
Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People
Sondra G. Jones
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xiii + 559 pp. Paper, $29.95
Tribal histories often suffer from a tendency to focus on one people in conceptual isolation from closely related neighbors. Ute history has long been plagued by this balkanization, as the Numic-speaking people ranged across a wide swath of the western slope of the Rockies, the Wasatch, and the basin and range provinces in between. Over the centuries, numerous kinbased clans coalesced into historic bands, then further reduced into the three composite Ute tribes that exist today. Historians have treated them as discrete peoples, widely divided by worldview and geography. Sondra Jones’s marvelous book is a welcome relief from that approach. At last, we have a history of the Núu-ci, or “The People,” as the Utes call themselves, that examines them holistically and collectively.
Being and Becoming Ute is impressive on several levels, not the least of which is its comprehensiveness. Beginning with their emergence from the southwest corner of the Great Basin around AD 800, Jones narrates the many adaptations and transformations of the Ute people to the present day. Interestingly, the description becomes denser as it moves forward in time. Rather than becoming bogged down in the nineteenth century, as many such histories do, Jones’s rich chapters engage the cultural, economic, and resource conflicts that have confronted the Uintah and Ouray Utes, Southern Utes, and Ute Mountain Utes in recent decades. The author does not shy away from complex issues, examining, to cite two examples, the jurisdictional issues in the Uintah Basin and the political and environmental battles that accompanied Anima-La Plata reclamation project. These and many other complicated events receive thorough, measured treatment.
This is not to suggest that the critical events of the nineteenth century are shortchanged. The narrative becomes quite gripping as Jones relates the disastrous events following the socalled “Meeker Massacre,” the expulsion of the White River Utes, and the forced march of 1,400 Uncompahgres from their homelands to the desolation of the Uintah reserve. The author is similarly unsparing in describing the extermination campaign against the Timpanogos Utes in Utah Valley or the subsequent campaigns of the Utah Territorial Militia against Wakara’s Utes and later against Black Hawk’s band of cattle thieves. If there is one deficiency, it is Jones’s uncritical acceptance of the trope that Mormon leaders and settlers treated the Indians better than did the colonizers in surrounding territories. From a doctrinal perspective, that is undoubtedly true, but as a matter of application, Jones admits that the result was no different. Atrocities committed by the Mormon militia or settlers are blamed on “moral disintegration among hard hit Mormons” (164) and “nervous and poorly trained militias” (166). Conversely, we learn that the non-Indian colonizers of the San Luis Valley and the white residents of Meeker, Colorado, were simply people motivated by racism.
To be fair, the author is more concerned with the actions of the Utes than the motivations of those of who oppressed them. The later chapters focus on the pivotal events of the past century and the social and legal changes that impacted Utes on all three reservations. In this regard, Jones masterfully distills key federal policies, such as the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which “finally untied their hands” and allowed the Utes to represent and negotiate for their own people (418). She pays considerable attention to the termination policy and Senator Arthur V. Watkins’s campaign to sever the trust relationship with the Utes at Uintah and Ouray, resulting in the disastrous disenrollment of 490 members of the Uintah Band. Jones treads carefully here, and rightfully so, as the event left deep and lasting wounds and produced many distortions of
history. This treatment tries too hard to be objective, as Jones does not quite want to admit that the two Colorado Ute bands, the White Rivers and the Uncompahgres, seized the opportunity to evict a large percentage of the Utah Utes from their own reservation. All of this was done using the false dogma of blood quantum, employing a standard of measurement that, if applied to, say, the Southern Utes, might have terminated most of the members. In the end, the focus remains on those who stayed on the rolls and on the many problems of the survivors: not the least of which concern the retention of language, culture, and vitality, as the contemporary Ute tribes find themselves awash in judgment money, energy royalties, and in the case of the two Colorado tribes, gaming revenue. Jones concludes on a hopeful note, believing that the resilience and adaptability that the Utes demonstrated in the past will carry them forward.
–Warren Metcalf University of Oklahoma
Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young
By Virginia Kerns
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2021. 371 pp. Paper, $34.95
The tale of Sally, an Indian captive purchased in 1847 and raised in Brigham Young’s household, appears most commonly in Utah histories as little more than a quick anecdote or a brief footnote. Typically, her story is used to illustrate the brutality of Utah’s Indian slave trade, the short-lived practice of indenturing Indian children, and Mormon attempts to proselyte and “civilize” Utah’s Indigenous people.
The best-known of many versions of this story describes a young Bannock girl being rescued from brutal Ute raiders for the price of a rifle. Once cleaned up and fed, she was delivered into Young’s household where she learned English and was trained to behave properly and work hard. An arranged marriage with the Pahvant chief, Kanosh, ended tragically when she was murdered by a jealous wife.
This was the accepted story.
But in Sally in Three Worlds, Virginia Kerns provides historians with a long-needed corrective to this error-riddled Utah lore. To do this, Kerns spent seven years poring through memoirs, diaries, journals, and newspapers, as well as consulting histories written by Utes and Paiutes, published interviews, oral traditions, and memoirs of nineteenth-century travelers. To understand Sally’s people, she also delved into the standard ethnographic and linguistic literature about Numic culture. Then, using an ethno-narrative style, Kerns retells the story of Sally, vividly describing the world of Mormon settler-colonizers and especially that of the privileged world in the Lion House, a house full of women, where Sally lived. Extensive endnotes (which demand to be read), meticulously note sources and expand on passing details glossed over in the text. Kerns’s ethnographic research supports most of her educated guesses about how she imagines the “wild” Sally might have perceived the foreign world in which she found herself.
Kerns takes her readers on a journey of discovery to find the real Sally—she was neither a child nor Bannock, had not been captured by slavers, and was not adopted into the Young family (but would be their unpaid servant). And, though she was coerced into marrying Kanosh, she was not murdered.
Kerns’s primary goal is revisionist, writing a corrective biography of a complex woman in a unique situation. However, the book has two equally important purposes: to illustrate the Indigenous culture of Utah’s Numic people (in passing) and to examine the colonizing narrative of wild-versus-tame as it impacted Mormon settler-colonists and Sally in particular.
To illustrate Sally’s Numic culture, Kerns has avoided stuffy ethnographic discourse. Instead, she provides glimpses of the Indigenous world through intermittent side excursions in which—through Sally’s eyes—she compares and contrasts the stark differences between a previous wild life (now rapidly disappearing) and the “civilized” world of the Lion House.
Throughout the book, Kerns also analyzes the narrative of “wild versus tame” that permeates
America’s ongoing history of conquest and its relentless push to transform the wild (natural) wastelands by civilizing, domesticating, and subduing it, to make it productive. This was progress. In Utah, settler-colonizers transformed and subdued the wilderness by methodically replacing all that was wild and native (grasses, animals, and even names), with imported and domesticated (tame) plants and animals. Wild waters were tamed by diverting them for irrigation, and wild Indians were tamed through acculturation. Kerns sees this narrative in microcosm in the captive, Pidash, who was equally transformed, scrubbed clean of the wild, and remade into the tame persona of the civilized woman named Sally.
But Kerns also notes that transforming the wild and natural disrupted a delicate ecological balance. For example, with waters diverted, fish and bird-rich lakes and marshes died. Hunters killed wildlife, and without predators, pests proliferated. A similar balance was lost for Sally. Successfully tamed and civilized, she was unable to function when forced back into a native environment. Within eighteen months of her return to the Pahvant, she too “dried up,” succumbing to loneliness, depression, and deadly pneumonia.
Sally in Three Worlds has been written for a broad audience including western and Utah historians, as well as readers interested in Indian–Mormon relations or the polygamous household of Brigham Young. But while the information is excellent, reading this book was sometimes problematic. Kerns’s focus on the immediate context of Sally’s world meant much of the historical context of Utah or Indian–Mormon relations was mentioned only in passing (if at all); references to specific people (other than in the Young family) were often skimmed, poorly identified, and explained only in the endnotes or appendixes. So, a Utah history this is not, nor should it be read as such. But it is an intriguing sociocultural look at Utah’s early settler-colonizers and the Lion House’s complex polygamous world. And its revisionist focus on Sally is a solid contribution, explaining the complexities of one Indian woman and her struggles to adapt to the three worlds that formed her.
–Sondra G. Jones Brigham Young University
Truth Seeker: The Life of Joseph F. Merrill, Scientist, Educator, and Apostle
By Casey Paul Griffiths
Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University / Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2021. 347 pp. Paper, $28.99
Casey Paul Griffiths may be the foremost historian of the educational experience of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including its universities, junior colleges, and Seminary and Institute program. Griffiths is knowledgeable, insightful, and balanced. His study of Joseph F. Merrill (1868–1952), a seminal player in the beginnings of the LDS education endeavor in the twentieth century, is an important contribution to LDS history generally and to LDS educational history in particular.
Born before Utah statehood to a future apostle of the LDS church, Merrill straddled Utah’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultures. After graduating from the University of Deseret in Salt Lake City, he pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins, becoming among the first Utah-born PhD recipients. He returned to Utah in 1893 and taught physics and chemistry at the University of Utah and later headed its School of Mines (now College of Engineering). He married Annie Laura Hyde in 1898. A year after Hyde’s death in 1917, he married Emily Traub, a recent convert to the LDS church.
At the University of Utah, Merrill weathered several controversies, both political (he was a Democrat) and educational (notably the 1915 confrontation between faculty and the university’s president). He was an early champion of LDS education and helped to found the first released-time high school LDS seminary in 1912. In 1928, the LDS church hired Merrill to head its church-wide school system. He helped to develop the first college-age institute and spearheaded a program encouraging church educators to gain advanced degrees at prestigious schools, primarily the University of Chicago. Merrill helped church education survive the beginnings of the Great Depression. In 1931, he was called as an apostle and, from 1933 to 1936, presided over the church’s European
missions. After a life of church service, he succumbed to a heart attack in 1952.
In Griffiths’s hands, Merrill emerges as one of the more liberal members of the LDS church hierarchy. This is not to say that Merrill was anywhere close to being a radical. But it seems clear that Merrill’s embrace of education stood in contrast to the rigid conservatism of other more vocal and activist apostles. In fact, I cannot help but wonder how the intellectual climate and culture of Mormonism may have been affected had the ecumenism of Merrill and other like-minded LDS general authorities prevailed over the fundamentalist retrenchment initiatives of apostles Joseph Fielding Smith, J. Reuben Clark, Harold B. Lee, Bruce R. McConkie, and Boyd K. Packer. The prevailing argument in LDS church education circles today is that Smith, Clark, et al. saved the church from a left-wing turn to secular apostasy. But, having read Griffiths, I now wonder if Merrill’s brand of liberalism was perhaps a better longterm strategy for securing a more intellectually savvy church membership, one less susceptible to, or at least better adept at navigating, socalled “faith crises.”
I am sure I reveal more about my own biases, but I am surprised that Griffiths’s fine biography was published by Brigham Young University’s Religious Studies Center and the church’s Deseret Book Company. Griffiths’s approach seems to be too even-handed, too warts-and-all for such “official” imprimaturs. That Griffiths’s study survived in-house review suggests that either I have been blinded by my own prejudices or that the BYU College of Religious Instruction (where Griffiths teaches) and the LDS church’s publishing house are more supportive of a wider range of scholarship than I expected.
Consider the following, for example. After the death of his first wife, Laura, by cancer, Merrill was depressed. Hoping to recover and move on, Merrill remarried sixteen months later. He soon discovered that he had acted too impetuously. In passages that seem almost too intimate to share, Griffiths quotes Merrill as lamenting:
How many times have I repented! How much bitterness has come into my life? . . . The joy, the sweetness, the delight of living with a congenial com-
panion can hardly be realized by those yoked together whose temperaments are as widely different as Millie’s and mine seem to be. . . . If she could only come back to me—the mother of my children—the best wife that ever lived, the most loyal devoted, helpful companion ever given to man. . . . If only [Millie] were sympathetic, amiable! . . . I trusted too much. I took too much for granted. I hope too much. I acted hastily. . How long shall my miseries continue? I do not know (148).
Relations between Merrill and Millie improved, but the decision of Griffiths and his publishers to quote Merrill at his most vulnerable speaks to their trust in their readers’ compassion.
Griffiths’s study deserves to be read by anyone interested in LDS history, Utah history, and LDS educational history. It also sets a high bar for LDS church–affiliated biographies.
–Gary James Bergera Smith-Pettit Foundation
American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God and Public Lands in the West
By Betsy Gaines Quammen
Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2020. 370 pp. Paper, $18.95
American Zion, according to historian Betsy Gaines Quammen in her recent book of that title, is both a place and an idea central to understanding the Bundy family, their brand of ideology, and the actions they took at Bunkerville and the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge less than a decade ago. Quammen’s account of the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which the Bundys operate is clearly and accessibly written for a general audience unfamiliar with the interior American West and its diverse array of public lands.
Produced by Torrey House Press, a publisher known for works that unapologetically promote environmental activism, American Zion takes seriously the thoughts and rationale of the Bundys but does not hesitate to condemn
their actions. Quammen’s book sits alongside a growing body of work on the Bundys and public lands by the likes of journalists and scholars such as Peter Walker, Michael J. Makley, James Pogue, Christopher Ketcham, John Temple, Anthony McCann, James R. Skillen, Jacqueline Keeler, and John L. Smith.
Quammen’s contribution is positioning the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members (Latter-day Saints or Mormons) at the center of the story. Outside of the region the western writer Wallace Stegner called Mormon Country, it is difficult for Americans to imagine how important Latter-day Saints, their church, and their faith have been to the development to the interior American West. Mormon settlers built irrigation structures, developed ranching operations, and populated mining towns with permanent residents in the geography between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, the Columbia Plateau, and the Mojave Desert. Quammen, as well as the LDS church itself, readily recognizes that settlement directly displaced and dispossessed Indigenous peoples, but her focus is on the mindset of those settlers. The Mormons of the past brought with them into Zion, the place where they believed God had granted them a homeland, a grudge against the federal government, a stubborn endurance despite constant persecution by mainstream Americans, a belief in the dominion of humans over nature as evidenced by irrigation projects and ranch operations, and a gun-toting militancy born of self-preservation. These are the tenants of faith, according to Quammen, to which the Bundys and others like them adhere.
Mainstream Latter-day Saint doctrine today exhibits few of these early characteristics, and Quammen does an admirable job parsing the differences between past and present. But her emphasis on the continuum of belief between early Mormon leaders and the church’s deeply conservative faction, represented by Ezra Taft Benson and Cleon Skousen, tie these leaders to other Christian fundamentalists. Catholic Paul Weyrich and Southern Baptists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, along with Benson and Skousen, adhered to the same tenants: that God is an active participant in the lives of individuals who often undergo faith-promoting
experiences; the Constitution is divinely inspired but few truly understand its power; evil is actively at work in the world, and the federal government is held hostage by it; and the apocalyptic war against evil is coming and God’s chosen must defend their faith, family, and freedom. Quammen takes these beliefs seriously and details how they manifested in the actions of people such as Cliven Bundy.
For some readers, American Zion will not resonate. Those more familiar with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will likely chafe at the emphasis on the fringe aspects of the religion. However, Quammen does counterweight her examination of the deeply conservative elements with descriptions of other Latter-day Saints of influence, such as the historian Juanita Brooks whose history of the Mountain Meadows Massacre accurately laid responsibility at the feet of church leaders; Senator Reed Smoot, who co-sponsored the legislation that birthed the National Park Service and Zion National Park; and environmental writers such as Gina Colvin, Joanna Brooks, George Handley, and Terry Tempest Williams.
Similarly, environmental historians of the American West will notice the absence of literature that would have provided greater nuance to her discussion of multiple use on public lands, the development of recreational tourism, and the consequences of working landscapes intersecting with recreational ones in the rural West. Notably missing are Hal K. Rothman’s Devil’s Bargains (1998), Art Gomez’s Quest for the Golden Circle (2000), Evelyn Schlatter’s Aryan Cowboys (2006), Joseph Taylor’s Persistent Callings (2019), and my own The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin (2015).
However, Quammen did not write American Zion for those already familiar with the history of Mormonism and the American West. Her audience is outside Utah and outside this region, and the book’s utility is in helping those unfamiliar with this place and its past see beyond the caricatures.
–Leisl Carr Childers Colorado State University
CONTRIBUTORS
CHRISTINE COOPER-ROMPATO received her PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Connecticut. She is professor of English at Utah State University, where she teaches and researches medieval literature and religious studies. Her most recent book is Spiritual Calculations: Number and Numeracy in Late Medieval English Sermons (2022), and she is currently working on several projects involving the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s reception in the nineteenth century. Cooper-Rompato also publishes on American history, and her articles on the earliest women patent holders in Utah and Utah in the Green Book appeared in earlier volumes of UHQ.
DAVID A. HALES is the former director and librarian of Westminster College’s Giovale Library. He is professor of Library Science emeritus, University of Alaska Fairbanks. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University, a Master of Library Science from Drexel University, and a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been active in many professional organizations and has served as president of four associations. Hales has delivered papers at library science and history conferences and has published extensively in library science, genealogy, and history journals, including UHQ and Alaska History. He is the co-author of Alaska Sources: A Guide to Historical Records and Information Resources.
SARAH LANGSDON is head of Special Collections and associate professor at Weber State University, where she has worked since 1999. She holds a Master in History from Utah State University and a Master of Library Science with a focus on archives from San Jose State University. She is the co-author of five books on the history of Ogden, including Legendary Locals of Ogden, Utah and Ogden: The Charles Maccarthy Photographs. She is active in organizations such as the Conference of Intermountain Archivists, Utah Manuscripts Association, and the Oral History Association. Langsdon’s research interests include the history of Ogden, Twenty-Fifth Street, women, crime, and oral history.
ALISON MCNEAL is professor emeritus, Slippery Rock University. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Kent State University. At Slippery Rock, she helped to establish two interdisciplinary minors, one in Asian Studies and another in European Studies through the support of federally funded NEH grants. She has reviewed scores of books for Choice, ranging from critical theory to Gender Studies. McNeal taught in China and went to the Middlebury Language School for Mandarin Studies in 2012. Currently, she facilitates a community book group for her local public library and belongs to a poetry circle.
SUSAN SESSIONS RUGH is professor of American History and dean of Undergraduate Education at Brigham Young University. Her book, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations, received national attention for its nostalgic portrayal of midcentury road trips. Her 2006 article, “Branding Utah: Industrial Tourism in the Modern West,” won the Best Utah History Article Award from the Utah Division of State History and the Michael P. Malone Award from the Western History Association. She has received research fellowships from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage and was recognized by Utah Humanities with the Mayor’s Award in the Humanities.
LINDA MURIEL ZABRISKIE was born and educated in Mt. Pleasant, Utah. In 1968, she graduated from Utah State University with a degree in English; she went on to teach at Delta High School, Wasatch Academy, North Sanpete High School, Beaver High School, Milford High School, Roland Hall, and at Kearns High School for twenty years. At the age of sixty-six, Zabriskie received a PhD in History from the University of Utah. In addition to her dissertation about Elbert Thomas, Zabriskie wrote about the First Presbyterian Church in Mt. Pleasant, for which she had a special affection, and Wasatch Academy, with which she had a long relationship. She passed away in December 2015.
UTAH IN FOCUS
The Labor Temple band, standing in front of the Salt Lake Union Labor Temple at 151 South 200 East, Salt Lake City, Utah. The ensemble represented the Salt Lake Labor Temple Association, which in turn supported labor organizations in Utah and provided office space for them at the temple. On October 16, 1926, these men played along the streets of Salt Lake City to promote a private showing of The Contrast, a 1921 movie produced by Labor Film Services that depicted a contest between radical coal miners and industrialists.
Contemporary newspapers and flyers show the importance of brass bands to many communities, as their music lightened workloads, boosted events, and raised money. They provided entertainment at resorts, political rallies, holiday gatherings, bazaars, and parades and comfort at funerals and memorial services. The number of organized brass bands in Utah in the early twentieth century also speaks to their social and cultural value at the time. Most commonly, bands were established by individual cities, businesses, associations, schools, and government organizations. Utah State Historical Society, Shipler Commercial Photographers Collection, no. 25484.
