UTAH'S STRUGGLE FOR STATEHOOD BY S. GEORGE E L L S W O R T H
President Iverson, the Honorable Mr. Toronto, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen: That the beginning of an annual public celebration commemorating the achievement of statehood by Utah should come sixty-seven years after the event suggests to me that there may have been something about the events of those times that some people wanted to forget, and it suggests, too, that enough time has passed that we of this generation can look back upon those times without the feelings of bitterness and sorrow attendant upon the events of the 1880's and 1890's. We have matured a great deal to be able now to celebrate that singular event, and view with pride and appreciation the decisions and actions which made statehood possible. The achievement of statehood was the most significant event in all Utah's history after that first great decision of courage made during the last week of July 1847 — "This is the place." But the courage necessary and the hardships attendant upon the conquest of the waste places of this land in those first years of permanent settlement were small and few compared to the trials and persecutions and troublous times which preceded the even greater decisions of courage and foresight that made possible the attainment of statehood in Utah. Utah achieved statehood forty-nine years after the beginning of permanent settlement by the Mormon pioneers, forty-six years after her first application for statehood, and thirty years after her population exceeded 60,000 total, a figure often required by Congress for statehood. She was the forty-fifth state when she might just as well have been the thirty-fifth. Statehood was her rightful honor — on the basis of conquest, settlement, population, production, and loyalty. But Utah — or for that matter, any territory of the United States — could not become a state in the Union until Congress had fully satisfied itself that all local institutions — political, economic, and social — were in harmony with those of the United States at large. The struggle for statehood by Utah or any of the other of her neighbors was a struggle to maintain on the one hand some semDr. Ellsworth, associate professor of history at Utah State University, presented this address at the Statehood Day celebration, January 4, 1963, at the State Capitol.
