34 minute read
A State is Born
A State is Born
BY RICHARD D. POLL
It was January 4, 1896.
In Cuba a revolution against Spain was being suppressed with ruthless brutality. In South Africa the Boers had just smashed the Jameson raid. In the Near East the Turks were massacring Armenians by the tens of thousands. In London, Washington, and Venezuela the air was full of Secretary of State Richard Olney's assertion that "the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law...."
In Victoria, Colorado, nine miners were entombed. In Gillette, Wyoming, an alleged cattle rustler was shot by a sheriff. In Eureka, Utah, a claim jumper was reported, and at the Colorado state line 11 tons of illegally slaughtered Utah venison were impounded. Before the Salt Lake City courts was a lurid adultery case, involving a prominent businessman, an attractive secretary, and a janitor with a private eye.
But the headline story in Utah's capital was this:
So did Salt Lake City herald the tidings that ended almost a halfcentury of fretful waiting and made Utah the newest of the United States. From the Bear River to the Virgin, from Brigham City to Bluff, a quarter of a million citizens forgot the distinctions between Democrat and Republican, Mormon and Gentile in the bright prospect of self-government. Forgotten were the unsuccessful statehood applications of 1849, 1856, 1862, 1867, 1872, 1882, and 1887. Forgotten — at least for the moment — were the Utah War, the laws against polygamy, the battles between the Liberal and People's parties, the Utah Commission, and the harrowing years of the "Underground." "The P'orty-fifth Star Shines Resplendent," headlined the Salt Lake Tribune, and faces pink and beaming on that crisp midwinter morning testified "Amen!"
Once the deadlock between the determination of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be different and the non-Mormon insistence that some differences are impermissible had been broken by the Woodruff Manifesto in 1890, matters had moved steadily toward that happy day. The local political organizations disbanded, and Mormons, who still comprised almost 90 per cent of the territorial population, found that Gentile office-seekers were easier to vote for when they bore national party labels. The million dollars worth of L.D.S. Church property escheated to the federal government under the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 and earmarked for public education was returned, somewhat shrunken in value; while the establishment of a territorial system of free schools soon drew thousands of students away from the competitive denominational academies. Utah residents began to be appointed to prominent territorial positions, including the election-supervising Utah Commission, and on July 16, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed the Utah Enabling Act which set in motion the state-making machinery.
The Constitutional Convention brought 59 Republicans and 48 Democrats to the county civil court room of the brand-new Salt Lake "Joint Building" (City and County Building) for deliberations which extended from March 4 to May 8, 1895. The delegates were predominantly Mormon, and Apostle John Henry Smith was elected president. But their spirit was non-sectarian and largely non-partisan, and the document which they produced was distinctive in only a few respects. The longest discussion concerned woman suffrage, which had existed in Utah from 1870 to 1887 and which the draft constitution proposed to restore. Democrat Brigham H. Roberts spoke so eloquently in opposition that an unsuccessful effort was made to move one session to the Salt Lake Theatre to accommodate the crowds wishing to hear him. Both parties had promised votes for women in their 1894 platforms, and the suffrage article was adopted handily, 75 to 14.
The members of the Constitutional Convention of 1895, with the president, John Henry Smith, in the center of the group, and the site of the convention, the Salt Lake City and County Building, at the bottom of the page.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
As required by the Enabling Act, the Utah Constitution contained an ordinance, irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of Utah, separating church and state and banning plural marriages. Twenty-seven counties were identified, Daggett and Duchesne being still part of Uintah and Wasatch respectively. State salaries were fixed with a $2,000 top for executive officers and $3,000 for judges, the state debt was limited to $200,000 after existing territorial debts should be paid, and an eight-mill ceiling was placed on property taxes for state purposes. The frugality of pioneer Utah was one thing which did not change with the Woodruff Manifesto.
More than 80 per cent of the 49,717 registered voters made their way to the polls on Tuesday, November 5, 1895, to give overwhelming approval to the constitution and to select officers for the nascent state. Contests were close, but the Republicans won every state-wide race and a commanding majority of seats in the legislature. Heber M. Wells won the governorship; he was the son of that redoubtable Daniel H. Wells who was a counselor to Brigham Young, the commander of the Nauvoo Legion during its Utah existence, and in the Tribune's language, "the Father of Republicanism in Utah." Clarence E. Allen, a non-Mormon attorney, shaded B. H. Roberts for Congress in the only competition whose outcome may have been affected by the presence on the ballot of a Populist slate of candidates. The University of Utah could claim a victory over Brigham Young University in that John R. Park bested Karl G. Maeser for state superintendent of public instruction.
The election returns being certified by the Utah Commission on December 5 and the constitution being delivered to the President on December 16 by a delegation headed by Territorial Governor Caleb W. West and Territorial Delegate Frank J. Cannon, it remained only for the Chief Executive to issue the official proclamation of statehood. Utahns hoped that the event might be marked by a public ceremony in Washington, and West, Cannon, Junius F. Wells, and Congressman-elect Allen were on hand for the purpose. But Cleveland, possibly piqued by the outcome of the Utah election, chose to treat the proclamation as a routine executive document, signing it in the privacy of his office at 10:03 A.M., eastern time, and then permitting his secretary to pass the pen to the delegation which had just arrived, breathless, in the antechamber.
The language of the proclamation was, in fact, routine, outlining the steps which had been taken and declaring that the terms and conditions prescribed by the Congress of the United States to entitle the State of Utah to admission into the Union, have been duly complied with, and that the creation of said state and its admission into the Union on an equal footing with the original states is now accomplished.
The nation-wide reception of the event appears also to have been restrained. The Washington Evening Star expressed a common reaction when it editorially reviewed the "Mormon Question" and then concluded: "There is a general feeling of gratification that Utah is now at long last a member on equal terms with other sister States and that the struggle and contest of long years past is over."
If the depression- and winter-ridden nation was calm, the new state was not. It was Saturday, and impromptu parades, patriotic meetings, and general hilarity prevailed in every town and village — except in Monroe, which was mourning the death of a prominent citizen just back from a mission and had postponed its merrymaking. While committees under the general direction of the three, state party chairmen, Republican George M. Cannon, Democrat O. W. Powers, and Populist R. A. Hasbrouck, put finishing touches on plans for Monday's formal inaugural activities, people in northern Utah weighed the Union Pacific's offer of a round-trip ticket at a one-way price for those wishing to attend the ceremonies. Henry Dixey's performance in "The Lottery of Love" drew only a fair crowd to the Salt Lake Theatre, but after the performance a small fire on the roof of the venerable structure finished off the day with a touch of excitement.
Sunday's quiet in the capital city was punctuated by scores of sermons which rejoiced in the opportunities of a new year and a new era. Five Seventh Day Adventists were baptized in the Sanitarium sulphur pool, and four Mormon ladies returning from a funeral were injured when their hack ran away on North Temple. During the evening a streetcar conductor named Brigham W. Young was waylaid, knocked unconscious, and robbed while walking to report that his car was disabled. According to the Tribune, "No arrests were made for violating the Sunday liquor law, and as the officers were on the outlook for offenders, it is presumed the saloon men were all good boys. . . ." State legislators and other prominent people from around the state gathered at the Cullen, Walker, Templeton, Knutsford, and Grand Pacific hotels, while visitors of lesser means or humbler aspirations moved in with relatives to await the morrow.
Inauguration Day, January 6, dawned cold and clear, to the tooting of whistles, the tolling of bells, and the clanging of trolleys carrying participants and spectators to the parade which was the first main event. Robert T. Burton, who 38 years before had led cavalry of the Nauvoo Legion against Johnston's Army, was the parade marshal, and the 16th United States Infantry, troops and band from Fort Douglas, marched amicably behind him in the long procession from South Temple down West Temple to First South, east to State, south to Fourth South, west to East Temple (which was beginning to be spoken of as Main Street), and back to Temple Square. Those were the days of marching organizations, and behind the state officials in their horse-drawn vehicles came, among others, Utah National Guard units, Held's Band, the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, firemen in black helmets and red shirts pulling an old-fashioned hand pumper, Knights of Pythias, Masons, Odd Fellows, the Ancient Order of United Workers, Scandinavian societies, members of the German Turn Verein performing on parallel bars on a float, and lastly "citizens on foot, horseback and in carriages."
Estimates placed the throng in and around the tabernacle at 15,000 when Acting Territorial Governor Charles C. Richards called the inaugural exercises to order shortly after noon. The crowd had earlier invaded the reserved seat section, and many cardholders were compelled to stand during the two-hour proceedings. The vast dome of the tabernacle was adorned with a 132 feet by 78 feet American flag, made by the ZCMI overall factory out of 1,296 yards of bunting and so heavy that it required eight men to carry it; through the cut-out shape of the forty-fifth star, five "32-candlepower" electric lights beamed down on the congregation. Between the great pipes of the organ had been constructed an American eagle and below it the dates "1847-1896" and the word "Utah"—"a magnificent electrical creation." A chorus of a thousand children, each with a small flag, was prepared to express its patriotic sentiments in the national anthem, "America" and a number specially written for the occasion by its director, Evan Stephens.
Because of the ill health of the 89-year-old Mormon President, Wilford Woodruff, his invocation was read by his first counselor, former Territorial Delegate George Q. Cannon. Present on the stand, Woodruff later confided to his journal: "I feel to thank God that I have lived to see Utah admitted into the family of states. It is an event that we have looked forward to for a generation."
The honor of reading the statehood proclamation fell to Joseph L. Rawlins, the territorial delegate who had helped to guide the Enabling Act through Congress; he now presented the pen with which Cleveland had signed that act to Governor Wells. Then, as National Guard artillery boomed a 45-round salute from the capitol site a mile to the north, Chief Justice Charles S. Zane administered the oath to the state officials and the youthful choir sang Stephens' "Utah, We Love Thee."
The inaugural address of the handsome, 36-year-old Wells combined the conventional felicitations with an extensive and informative review of Utah's long struggle for statehood. A survey of economic resources and potential, appeals for silver legislation and a railroad from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, and a word of congratulation to the enfranchised ladies brought him to his peroration:
With the benediction by the Reverend T. C. Iliff, the crowd scattered to its holiday diversions while the members of the legislature made their way to the "Joint Building" for a special session. Republican strategy called for holding the first regular session the same evening, presumably to install the officers of the two houses before the Inaugural Ball. But the Democrats balked, and the two-thirds vote necessary to force the issue failed by one vote in the Senate because George Sutherland, later congressman, senator, and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, was reportedly too ill to attend. So the House of Representatives, "influenced by the pangs of hunger," adjourned; the Senate grudgingly followed, and the business of legislating for the new state was postponed until Tuesday.
While parties and programs were held in many communities, Salt Lake City, whose center was within a day's carriage drive for half of the state's population and within an hour's train ride for most of that half, was the social Mecca on the evening of Inauguration Day. At the Grand Opera House a capacity crowd paid 25¢ to 50¢ to witness a drama of contemporary life, "The Silver Lining"; the Lyceum attracted an overflow, at prices from 15¢ to 35¢, to see Harry Corson Clarke clown in "My Awful Dad." The dressing rooms at the Salt Lake Theatre were dark, the orchestra seats were covered with a spring floor which was level with the stage, and tickets were 50¢ and 75¢ to watch and $1.00 to dance at the Inaugural Ball. Guests of honor, of course, were admitted free. The ball was something to remember. "Nothing ever attempted in Utah in the way of electric displays has approached this superb illuminative triumph," was the Deseret News judgment of the multi-colored moving and flashing rendition of "Utah" which adorned the proscenium arch, beneath which a 20-piece band, under the direction of Anton Pedersen, performed a promenade concert while celebrities and ordinary citizens filled the galleries and loges. At 9:30 Governor Wells escorted his mother to the gubernatorial box and then, his wife on his arm, led the gala assembly in the inaugural grand march, for which Professor Pedersen had written special music. So stylish an array of ladies' gowns had not been seen before in Utah. A varied program of lancers, waltzes, quadrilles, two-steps, a minuet, a schottische, a varsouvienne, a polka, and something called a Wentworth, followed, and one presumes that it was a tired but happy company which left the theatre after midnight to the farewell strains of "Virginia Skedaddle" and "Home Sweet Home."
On this same Monday evening, in Murray, a man was run over by a horse-drawn sleigh. The two occupants of the vehicle were arrested for drunken driving. Truly it was as the Deseret News said: "Inaugural Day has been celebrated as no other in the history of Utah."
Still, there had been many days — almost 50 years full of days — since the pioneer leader had said, "This is the right place. . . " And the meaning of that special day in 1896 is not perceived if it is seen only in terms of the ceremonial donning of new political garments. That memorable day was a bridge from pioneering yesterdays to promising tomorrows ; it was a doorway through which the people of Utah moved to amalgamation in the life of America; it was a road sign reading: "This way into the Twentieth Century."
How was it with Utah on that historic day in January, 68 years ago? How far had she come, and where was she going? Her people —who were they, and what were they up to? What should be said in reply to the telegraphic question posed that day: "While on the Summit how looketh the Promised Land?"
On joining the Union, Utah was already more populous than five of her sister states. Of her people, 8 out of 10 were American-born and nearly 9 out of 10 were Latter-day Saints. Apart from approximately 3,000 Indians, mostly on reservations, the 571 Negroes and 768 Chinese counted in the 1895 territorial census were the largest racial minorities. Perhaps 2,000 polygamous families remained, but a considerable number of single men in the mining communities produced a small male preponderance in the total population of 247,324.
Few of Utah's citizens lived in cities, although the inaugural festivities demonstrated that the capital's 50,000 people enjoyed many of the amenities of urban life. A maze of power and telephone lines in the downtown area; a university and eight academies; a limited distribution of natural and manufactured gas; 68 miles of street railway; three daily newspapers; three theatres and two businessmen's clubs; a just-finished gravity sewage system with seven miles of mains; and a three-year-old fun spot, Saltair, perched on piles in Great Salt Lake, were further evidences of the march of progress. But progress marched on unpaved streets if it moved very far from the heart of town.
Twenty-seven years as a railroad center had brought Ogden 15,000 inhabitants, 10 miles of street railway, two academies, one of the first hydro-electric projects in the United States (nearing completion), and some of the most eventful Saturday nights to be found outside the mining camps. Provo, with only 400 students in its Brigham Young Academy and the Geneva steel plant not even dreamed of, was a quiet county seat with 6,000 people; its street railway was only six miles long, but it was steam powered. Logan, with 5,000 inhabitants, was beginning to orient its life around its eight-year-old land-grant college. As for the rest, the towns of Utah were either unpaved and unexciting farming centers, whose chief buildings revealed the industriousness and occasionally the artistic imagination of the pioneers, or unpaved and uninhibited mining camps, which might be gone tomorrow but were notoriously here today.
Farming and mining were the main businesses of the new state, and neither was doing well as 1896 began. The 30-year decline in prices which brought Populism to the farm belt had one more year to go, and the Panic of 1893 had added mining distress to agricultural depression. Property values aggregated approximately $100 million in the state, but if absenteeowned railroads and mines were deducted, the accumulation of a halfcentury's effort averaged out at less than $300 per capita and at least half of that was in real estate. For Utah the affluent society was still two world wars in the future.
Approximately one-third of Utah's employed population was engaged in agriculture. 26 All but 2,232 of the 19,916 farms were declared by Governor Wells to be free from encumbrances, but with wheat 46¢, corn 58¢, potatoes 32¢, and apples 40¢ per bushel; sugar beets and lucerne about $4.00 per ton; wool 7 1/2¢ per pound; and sheep $1.50 per head, few mortgages were being lifted during the winter of 1895-96. The New Year edition of the Tribune estimated that the value of all farm crops had declined by almost one-third between 1890 and 1894, and there had been little recovery since. These facts bear significantly on Utah's performance in the 1896 presidential election, which will be considered.
Reminiscent of the pioneer quest for self-sufficiency are 40,000 pounds of cotton and almost 3,000 gallons of wine produced in the Virgin River country in 1895 and 10,000 pounds of silk cocoons reported a year later. Recalling another dream, which failed in the 1850's but was now becoming a reality under L.D.S. Church sponsorship, are the 40,000 tons of beets processed by the Utah Sugar Company in the year before statehood. Although dry farming had begun in the 1870's, 89 per cent of the 467,162 cultivated acres (1894) was irrigated by methods largely developed in the founding generation. And although the church was moving toward the abolition of tithing in kind, some produce still moved into the market through the tithing offices and script-using cooperatives like the cotton factory at Washington and the Provo Woolen Mills. Mormon Utah's bumper crop was children, and the declining support capability of agriculture was beginning to produce that export of young manpower which would characterize the first four decades of the twentieth century.
The state of mining in Utah can be inferred from Governor Wells' appeal for silver legislation and the endorsement of bimetallism by both Republican and Democratic platforms in the pre-statehood election. At approximately 65¢ per ounce, Utah's mines had produced only $4,854,300 in silver in 1895, and that largely from a few spectacular enterprises like the Centennial-Eureka and Bullion-Beck in the Tintic District and the Silver King and almost-exhausted Ontario at Park City. The total value of nonferrous metal production for the year was $8,464,500, down almost $4 million from 1890. Gold discoveries in the Camp Floyd District of the Oquirrh Mountains and the resulting rush which led boomers to speak of a "New Johannesburg" when they incorporated Mercur two weeks before Inauguration Day did not disguise the facts that many mines were closed in 1895 and 1896 and that extensive unemployment was avoided largely because of the disposition of miners to move on when jobs disappeared.
Too insubstantial yet to cast a shadow, the mining undertaking with the greatest long-run potential was going on at Bingham. While the operating mines there were still concentrating largely on the precious metals and the townspeople were rebuilding from a series of disastrous fires, "Colonel" Enos A. Wall and Samuel Newhouse were piecing together the claims which would become the foundation for Utah's greatest single productive enterprise, the Bingham copper mine. Except for Carbon County and Emery County coal, Great Salt Lake salt, and a very limited production of Gilsonite, sulphur, and building materials, the other nonmetallic minerals which would eventually justify Lincoln's description of Utah as "the nation's treasure house" were either undiscovered or unappreciated.
The railroad network in January, 1896, was substantially what it had become in 1880 with the completion of the Utah Southern Railroad extension to Milford and Frisco and the Horn Silver Mine. The Union Pacific now owned 543, the Denver and Rio Grande 485, and the Central Pacific 157 of Utah's 1,225 miles of standard-gauge road; 150 miles of narrowgauge track wound into the mines. Local stage lines still served parts of the state, and a gun battle between a sheriff's posse and two young horse thieves in City Creek Canyon in August, 1895, was additional evidence that the frontier had not yet fully passed. Telephone poles had started sprouting in 1879, and communities from Logan to Eureka were linked together by the Rocky Mountain Bell Telephone Company, but there were yet no rural phones. Western Union, which joined Utah with the two coasts, would wait four more years before buying the Deseret Telegraph Company, the locally-built enterprise which had spread the warning through southern Utah when the United States marshals were coming during the days of the "Underground." Salt Lake City had enjoyed houseto-house mail delivery for a decade, but such novelties as airmail and zip codes were hardly in the science fiction.
Other sectors of the Utah economy did not escape the impact of the nation-wide depression. On the contrary, hard times accelerated certain profoundly significant changes in the quality and direction of Utah's business enterprises.
Like agriculture during the territorial period, industry, with the exception of mining and transcontinental transportation, had been largely in Mormon hands and devoted to the self-sufficiency of what Arrington has aptly titled "The Great Basin Kingdom." The larger cooperative projects, like iron, sugar, and cotton, had fallen short of expectations, and most of the local manufacturing was in shops employing only a few hands. The 880 industrial concerns reported in 1894 had an average capital investment of about $6,000, product value averaging approximately $8,000, and a total employment of 5,054 people; the Provo Woolen Mills, with 150 employees, was the largest remaining example of pioneer industry.
Unlike agriculture, industry was reflecting the revolution in economic policy taking place in the L.D.S. Church as that organization struggled out from under a great burden of debt accumulated during the Edmunds- Tucker period and came to terms with late nineteenth century American capitalism. The concern for the material development of the region remained, but the isolationist goals and communitarian methods largely disappeared. Numbers of existing church concerns, like the Salt Lake Street Railroad Company, Salt Lake City Gas Company, and Provo Woolen Mills, were sold or secularized. And the new church-supported projects recruited outside capital and functioned in conventional, even conservative, business fashion. The Utah Sugar and Inland Crystal Salt companies, the hydro-electric development on the Weber River and the electric and gas utilities in northern Utah, the Saltair resort and the railroad serving it were all products of this expedient reinterpretation of the strictures against mingling Zion and Babylon. In the new State of Utah, laissez faire was a non-sectarian slogan, with non-sectarian reservations for the protective tariff, of course.
At the counters and in the counting houses of Salt Lake and Ogden some of the earliest overtures toward Mormon-Gentile peace had been made, and by 1896 the chambers of commerce and the 40 Utah banks had replaced the Schools of the Prophet and Zion's Board of Trade as centers of business planning. Like the manufactories, most commercial establishments were small; the 1,974 stores reported in 1894 employed 5,023 people and had an average capital investment of over $7,000 and average sales of $17,000.
Many Mormon-owned stores throughout the state still called themselves "Co-ops" and did much of their purchasing through ZCMI Wholesale, but the secularizing process already referred to in industry was also taking place in trade. The reincorporation of Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution as a million-dollar corporation on September 30, 1895, is a notable example. Originally founded in 1868 as the cornerstone for a self-contained Mormon commercial structure, it had been considerably more profitable than its industrial counterparts; on an initial investment of $220,000, not all cash, and sales of $76,352,686, it had generated $1,990,- 943.55 in cash dividends and $414,944.77 in stock dividends in 25 years. In 1891 it had discontinued tithing its earnings and opened stock ownership to non-Mormons, and the new company functioned substantially as its Gentile competitors in the merchandise field.
How business functioned, and how Utahns lived in the 1890's, can be discovered from the advertisements in the daily and weekly newspapers. They reveal a variety of goods and services now long forgotten and a level of prices almost beyond belief.
"Brain Workers pronounce Vin Mariani the Ideal Tonic, Unequaled by Anything in Fortifying, Strengthening and Refreshing Body and Brain," was the commercial for an all-purpose patent medicine. "Manhood Re- stored," was the guarantee of Cupidene, one of many virility potions; "Indapo, the Great Hindoo Remedy," was another. For those who preferred to see a medical practitioner, Dr. C. W. Higgins promised: "All classes of fits cured. Tapeworm removed with head or no pay." Dentist J. B. Keysor daily advertised: "Good set of teeth — $5.00. Better set — $8.00. Best set, no better made no matter what you pay — $ 10.00."
"All Our Underwear at One-Third Off" must have drawn crowds to Siegel Clothing Company, where the finest full length union suits in "Switz Conde" cost $2.75 but "natural mixtures" could be had for $.60. Auerbach's was clearing ladies' tailor-made suits at $3.85, footwarmers at $.50 a pair, children's shoes at $1.00 a pair, and ostrich feather boas from $1.75 to $10.00. Lipman, Nadel and Son offered "Your choice of any suit or overcoat in the store at only $10.00," while ZCMI was featuring the Charter Oak ranges and stoves in which were baked many of the pies and cakes that our grandmothers used to make. There were no supermarkets, and the corner grocers usually relied on handbills rather than newspapers to call attention to their 10^ beefsteak, 15^ butter, and assorted penny candy.
It should be remembered, however, that those were the days when $2.00 was a good day's wages, and the youngsters in a workingman's family did not always have pennies to spend on luxuries.
Unlike their parents, children could go to school without tuition, the free school system having been established on a territory-wide basis in 1890. Almost 90 per cent of the 74,551 school-age children attended at some time in 1895, and the pattern of available education was changing rapidly from year to year. The non-Mormon denominational elementary and secondary schools, which had numbered more than 50 and rendered invaluable service in upgrading the quality of the territorial educational effort, were now suspending operations, leaving only a handful of secondary schools and colleges like Rowland Hall, St. Mary's of the Wasatch, and Wasatch Academy to carry on in the twentieth century. The Mormon academies at Provo, Logan, Ephraim, Vernal, Ogden, Castle Dale, and Salt Lake City were, on the other hand, vigorously expanding in secondary education and the normal course training of teachers, fields in which they matched public school enrollment until the first World War. The big growth, however, was in public elementary schools, where nearly 60,000 children were enrolled and almost 35,000 were in average daily attendance. Superintendent John R. Park would shortly call for the consolidation of districts and a far greater financial outlay than the $500,000 which had been the annual educational outlay during the depression years.
Most aspirants for university degrees and professional training still left Utah, but in Salt Lake City, Logan, and Provo, institutions of higher education were taking shape. The University of Utah, started with high hopes in 1850 as the University of Deseret, was still largely concerned with secondary and normal courses and adult education, and it had not yet begun to move from its buildings at First North and Second West to Fort Douglas. But 500 students were now in attendance, the 1895 graduation exercises had seen nine baccalaureate degrees awarded, and President James E. Talmage and faculty, whose names now identify many campus facilities, were trying to build a university on an annual budget of $35,000.
The faculty and 400 students of the Agricultural College of Utah, at Logan, might have complained at their $22,000 appropriation in 1896 if they had not also received a federal grant of $25,000, which raised their total budget from the level of the Reform School in Ogden and the School for Deaf, Dumb, and Blind almost to a par with the Insane Asylum in Provo, whose $50,000 appropriation the first statehood year was the largest to any public institution. The Asylum augmented its income by boarding "idiots and morons" at $4.00 per week. Governor Wells' first message to the legislature, incidentally, raised the possibility of closing the Reform School since recent experience had shown that only one out of four of its inmates was rehabilitated. Instead the institution was relocated and named the State Industrial School a year later, and the institution for the deaf, dumb, and blind was moved from Salt Lake into the abandoned quarters in Ogden.
If the churches were giving up some of their economic and political activities and transferring many of their educational functions to the state, they were by no means inactive. Most of the major Christian communions were represented in the church notices in the Salt Lake papers, and St. Mark's and Holy Cross hospitals were already important examples of the testimony of the deed. That Mormon-watching was still a mission of some of the Gentile ministry had been apparent in the recent election and would become even more conspicuous when B. H. Roberts finally won a congressional election two years later. But the effort to rescue the Saints from their religious "delusions" had lost its thrust, and the new policy of peaceful coexistence was symbolized by the prayers which opened and closed the inauguration ceremonies.
For the L.D.S. Church, the traumatic consequences of the ordeal of the 1880's were yet more apparent than the new interests and emphases which would prevail in the twentieth century. Charges that the Mormon Church still controlled politics and that plural marriage had not really been abandoned had frequently to be denied, and the effort to define and enforce policy in these matters produced some stresses within the leadeship and laiety. Efforts to carry on missionary, temple-building, educational, and business-promotion activities in the face of depression-shrunk tithes and rising debts contributed to an institutional cautiousness in matters financial which persisted through two generations. Priesthood and auxiliary programs had changed little in recent years, though the monthly fast day would be moved from the first Thursday to the first Sunday in 1896, and "Nickel Sunday" was shifted from September to October in 1895, the thirtieth year of Mormon Sunday Schools. Twenty-five of the 37 L.D.S. stakes were in Utah; the 48 wards in the Salt Lake Valley were all in the Salt Lake Stake, over which Angus M. Cannon had presided for 20 years. Plans for observing the sesqui-centennial of the coming of the pioneers included the construction of a monument to Brigham Young, for which $11,914.23 had been raised by popular subscription before Inauguration Day. The unveiling of the monument at the corner of South Temple and Main would be a highlight of the 1897 celebration and, in a symbolic way, an affirmation that the era of pioneer Mormonism was at an end.
In the realm of Utah politics, to which this "look from the Summit into the Promised Land" now turns in conclusion, the problems of transition from the pioneer era were particularly apparent. For it was one thing to dissolve the People's and Liberal parties and quite another to impliment the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state to the general satisfaction.
Because the Republican party had sponsored the anti-Mormon legislation of the territorial period and had given considerable support to the Utah Liberals, the widespread assumption had been that most Mormons had Democratic leanings. So strong had been the belief in this predisposition that in the early 1890's L.D.S. Church authorities had actually urged some of the Saints to change their political allegiance. At stake conferences apostles had asked for volunteers to the Republican cause, and key individuals had been "called" to join that party.
Ironically, as soon as the Republican party stopped assailing the Mormons, a number of factors began to move Utah toward the G.O.P. column. With the gradual abandonment of the idea of a self-sufficient communitarian society, the economic and social philosophy of Mormonism moved appreciably toward political conservatism. The Mormon Church and many of its prominent men were interested in such enterprises as wool, sugar, and non-ferrous mining, which sought the tariff protection that Republican administrations were most likely to provide. Railroad and banking connections produced similar tendencies. The Panic of 1893, the tariff cuts in the Wilson-Gorman Act, and the adamant opposition of President Cleveland to legislation for the depressed silver industry were enough to offset the pro-Mormon measures of his administration, and Republican Frank J. Cannon won the territorial delegate's seat in the 1894 election.
So it was that in the 1895 election of state officers the charge of Mormon Church meddling in politics came not from the Republicans but from the Democrats. The fact that both of President Woodruff's vigorous counselors were undeniably Republican in sentiments, if "independent" in label, offered irresistible temptation to Democrats whose hopes for victory had been dampened by their minority status in the Constitutional Convention. George Q. Cannon had been the only territorial delegate to identify himself with the Republican side in the House of Representatives in the pre-Manifesto years; his son was now a prominent contender for a Senate seat, and he himself was also mentioned as a possible senator despite public denials of interest. Second Counselor Joseph F. Smith invited the raising of the church-state question by indirectly suggesting in a special L.D.S. priesthood meeting on October 7 that two of the general officers of the church, Roberts, the Democratic candidate for Congress, and Moses Thatcher, a Democratic candidate-designate for the Senate, had violated church rules by seeking those offices without consultation with their ecclesiastical superiors. It is impossible to determine what effect the ensuing editorial and oratorical controversy had on the election; Woodruff issued a denial of intent to control anyone's politics, and the Republicans swept the election as has been noted.
All of the elected officials appear to have entered on their duties with genuine resolve to avoid conflicts over religion. The first state legislature was predominantly Mormon, the margin being better than three to one in the 45-member House of Representatives and slightly less than two to one in the 18-member Senate. But organizing followed party rather than sectarian lines, and the election of United States senators by joint vote of the two houses followed the tacit understanding which each party had reached during the previous year's political activity. Mormon Frank J. Cannon was one Republican choice and Arthur Brown, a non-Mormon attorney of Salt Lake City, was the other. The same unwritten rule gave Utah one Mormon and one Gentile senator until the Seventeenth Amendment established popular election for that office in 1913.
That the new government had new business is reflected in the first Senate Joint Resolution, which memorialized Congress to remonetize silver, the first House Joint Memorial, which asked Congress to annex the Arizona strip to Utah, and the first gubernatorial budget message, which placed expenditures for 1896 at $394,302.58 and anticipated that the stilldepressed economy would produce $404,230.00 in revenues. If further evidence is needed that Utah politics at least temporarily tabled local differences in the face of pressing state and regional needs, it may be found in Senator Cannon's fiery speech in the 1896 G.O.P. national convention, announcing the walk-out of the silver Republicans, and in the fact that 83 per cent of Utah's votes in the following presidential election went for William Jennings Bryan and his silver slogan, " 16 to 1."
January 4, 1896, was more than the birthday of a state. It was the wedding of Utah and the nation. From the bride's point of view there was one disappointing detail — the ring should have been made of silver.
Greeting to young Utah from over the Sea.
Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands,March 11, 1896
Governor Heber M. Wells.
God bless the new State of Utah and its first chief Standard Bearer. May the young governor of the infant state be equal to his task and profit by the example and precept of his late illustrious father — the hardy pioneer and the staunch defender of truth and innocence. May his son likewise in the dignity of his present high and responsible position as Utah's chief executive make a record that for purity of purpose, justice and right, may never be ecclipsed by any subsequent governor. And as the name of George Washington is honored above all the other historical names which now constitute the long list of "Presidents of the United States," so may the name of Heber M. Wells at the head of the future long list of "Governors of the State of Utah" always be entitled to special mention and honor, when our great grandchildren shall peruse the closing pages of Utah's Nineteenth Century history, and commit to memory the names and deeds of those illustrious ones who first led the vanguard of a pure and Christian civilization in to the "Vallies of the Mountains," and strove for its maintenance in the midst of great difficulties for nearly fifty years, when at last freedom and relief in the shape of statehood came to the sons and daughters of those same famous pioneers, who themselves, at least most of them, were called to the great beyond before the boom was obtained.
Your friend,Andrew Jenson
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