Utah comes of age politically: a study of the state's politics in the early years of the twentieth century BY J A N S H I P P S
A
cause can be a valuable asset to a man who sets out to save souls, or sell newspapers, or get himself elected to public office, and at the beginning of the twentieth century in the United States neither the preacher, the journalist, nor the politician lacked suitable crusade objectives. In 1896 William Jennings Bryan had applied the techniques of the tent meeting to convention politics, transforming thereby an economic question into a moral matter. Afterwards many Americans began to look on government as a means for the remedying of social ills. It was soon quite the fashion to decry the "Shame of the Cities," censure the dispensers of demon rum or to denounce the Rockefellers and Pierpont Morgan, and condemn the meat packers, the oil magnates, the railroads, and trusts in general. When it became clear in 1904 that there were still men living in Salt Lake City who could, as Ray Stannard Baker put it, "take a [street] car Dr. Shipps teaches American history at the Denver Center of the University of Colorado. She is continuing her work on the study of the Mormons in politics. The research on this paper (read at the Utah State Historical Society Thirteenth Annual Meeting, September 17, 1965) was made possible by a fellowship grant from the American Association of University Women.
