Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 90, Number 1, 2022

By Tonya Reiter

By John Sillito

By Alan J. Clark and Henry McAllister

By Brandon Plewe

Gary Topping

REVIEWS

77 Railroading Religion

Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West

By David Walker

Reviewed by Brooke R. LeFevre

78 Frontier Religion

Mormons and America, 1857–1907

By Konden Smith Hansen

Reviewed by Christopher Carroll Smith

79 Wonders of Sand and Stone

A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments

By Frederick H. Swanson

Reviewed by Angela Sirna

80 John Hance

The Life, Lies, and Legend of Grand Canyon’s Greatest Storyteller

By Shane Murphy

Reviewed by Frederick H. Swenson

82 Watchman on the Tower

Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right

By Matthew L. Harris

Reviewed by Joseph R. Stuart

In This Issue

Two years ago—in the winter 2020 edition of Utah Historical Quarterly—we published a series of essays addressing race and religion in twentieth-century Utah. As we shared with readers then, we had not planned a thematically orchestrated issue. Beholden to the historical research submitted to our editorial office, we often look for ways to group like articles, and sometimes the results pleasantly surprise us. Like the winter 2020 issue, the edition before you continues the conversation about the African American experience in Utah.

However serendipitous may be the configuration of articles in the current issue, both social and academic trends likely account for heightened attention to racial and ethnic communities here in Utah and nationally. In legislative halls, classrooms, and public discourse, we collectively question socioeconomic disparities between racial groups, unequal representation in public institutions, healthcare access and public health outcomes, educational opportunities, and a host of other issues faced by people of color. Where do social and cultural disparities come from, and how are they perpetuated? How have individuals from underrepresented communities created for themselves spaces where they can act out their own futures? How have individuals and institutions historically responded to voices and acts of protest? Although not new, such questions challenge us to consider anew the forces of history that create the world we inhabit. This edition of UHQ contributes to an understanding of pressing questions and issues, primarily concerning race, that we care about today.

We lead out with Tonya Reiter’s history of an ofttold, 1939 attempt by white residents of Salt Lake City to establish a segregated “Negro district” outside the boundaries of their own neighborhood—the spurious action of unsubstantiated rumors. Although Salt Lake City did not then formalize de jure segregation in housing, de facto segregation and racially discriminatory

practices that preserved white property values at the expense of Black citizens—like those written in real estate codes—were prevalent at midcentury. We live today under the shadow of such practices, if one compares neighborhood demographics and property values. As we see from the findings of another essay in this issue, these disparities go back decades. Based on data from the 1900 US census, Brandon Plewe’s spatial analysis of ethnic groups in Salt Lake City at the turn of the twentieth century underscores the decisions and forces acting on immigrants arriving in an increasingly diverse urban city.

We also feature the quixotic campaign in Utah of Henry Wallace, the liberal former-vice-president-turned-third-party candidate who spoke assiduously for the kind of progressive policies advocated by some on the left today. As thoroughly detailed by John Sillito, the Wallace candidacy animated a core group of supporters, concentrated in the universities, concerned about social justice and civil rights.

Our next piece is a history of the prominent Pentecostal church, the Church of God in Christ, by Alan J. Clark and one of its pastors, Henry McAllister. While some readers may know something about the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Church in God in Christ and its long struggle to carve a place for itself primarily in Salt Lake City and Ogden finally gets attention in the pages of our journal.

A group of professors and students at Brigham Young University is currently working to encourage amends for their institution’s connection to slavery and racial discrimination. Grace Soelberg’s essay, our fifth, is one perspective among a multitude of others on applying the weight of history to address contemporary concerns.

Finally, we close the issue with Gary Topping’s homage to D. Michael Quinn, a prolific scholar and friend to many.

Not In My Neighborhood: The 1939 Controversy over Segregated Housing in Salt Lake City

BY TONYA S. REITER

In the fall of 1939, a large group of residents living in one of Salt Lake City’s central areas, a part of the larger Sumner neighborhood, reacted to a rumored petition that requested a zoning change to create a “negro residential zone” in their part of town and encourage more Black families from outside Utah to relocate there.1 These residents did not name the plan’s proponents, nor is it possible to be certain, even now, who might have suggested Salt Lake City segregate housing. At the time, the protesters insisted that an unnamed group of Black people were responsible for the petition asking for the zoning change. It is possible the Sumner residents and property owners may have learned about a new federal housing program under investigation in Ogden, Utah where members of that Black community had proposed that it be sponsored by the city.2 They could have been aware that if sponsored by Salt Lake City, a federal program would change their neighborhood and bring more low-income residents into their area. These predominantly white residents of the Sumner neighborhood, under the leadership of Sheldon Brewster, reacted to the rumored petition by drafting their own petition to the Salt Lake City commission asking city officials to comply with three demands; the most controversial of which was that their neighborhood be spared and some other part of town be zoned as a Black district.3 The NAACP responded to the petition’s call for a racial housing zone by voicing its members’ opposition to segregation. In addition, an ad hoc group of Black Salt Lake Valley residents, including Mary Lucile Perkins Bankhead, gathered at the City and County Building to assert their constitutional right to own property and live in any part of town. Lucile Bankhead’s retelling of the story of the proposed segregated district and the response of the wider Black community was central to keeping the memory of this event alive.

This episode in the story of Utah’s race relations has been recounted many times, but not fully, and often with misremembered and inaccurate details. The most recent version published and many older retellings set

the Black protest at the Utah State Capitol.4 However, this was an issue proposed and debated at the city level, despite the leader of the Sumner neighborhood group, Sheldon Brewster, being a member of the Utah State House of Representatives.

From newspaper articles, city commission records, transcriptions of the 1939 petition, and later oral histories, it is possible to draw a more complete picture of what took place, correct the historical record, and illustrate how city officials responded to the competing demands of their constituents. Rumor, fear, and misunderstanding each played a part as citizens on both sides of the color line tested the limits of the power of local officials to control city housing based on racial identity.

On Wednesday, November 1, 1939, “an overflow crowd” of more than one thousand property

owners and residents of central Salt Lake City “jammed the Sumner School auditorium” to protest a rumored petition for a “negro residential zone” that, if granted, would be formed between 600 and 900 South Streets, bounded by Main and 500 East Streets.5 The organizers of the meeting, who owned real estate in the neighborhood, “summoned” other property owners by door-to-door canvassing and distributing printed circulars. Local resident Sheldon Riser Brewster took charge of the meeting and was chosen by the group to head a committee authorized to meet with “representatives of the negroes and attempt to work out an amicable agreement for establishing a special zone elsewhere in the city,” as well as meet with the city commission to protest the currently proposed district.6

A seven-person committee representing the Sumner residents drafted a petition and

Construction of an addition on the Sumner School on 640 South 300 East in Salt Lake City, August 1918. It was in the school’s auditorium where residents of central Salt Lake City gathered on November 1, 1939, to protest a rumored petition for a “negro residential zone” in their neighborhood. USHS, Shipler Commercial Photographers Collection, MSS C 275, photo no. 18942

presented it to Mayor John M. Wallace and the city commission. Petition No. 1133 called for “relief from a condition” that they found intolerable. More than one thousand signatories attested to problems associated with an “influx of Negroes,” the most egregious of which, according to the white residents who addressed the Sumner School gathering, was the depreciation of property values.7 The petitioners recommended three remedies, which the city commissioners considered:

1. Order the immediate closing and disposal of the social club known as the High Marine Club.

2. Deny the zoning of our district, either officially or unofficially as a Negro District.

3. Appoint a committee to investigate the Negro problem as it exists in Salt Lake City, who will learn how the matter has been handled in other cities, and establish a district where the needs of the Negroes can be agreeably supplied.8

Sheldon Brewster was a natural choice to head the committee created by the neighborhood protesters. The section of town under dispute lay mostly within the boundaries of the Salt Lake City Third Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which consisted of a nine-block area. Brewster was the bishop of that ward in 1939. Not only was he an ecclesiastical leader, he was a community organizer and had been a Democratic member of the Utah House of Representatives since 1936. He served in that position until 1942. Given his experience, he was well-acquainted with the workings of local and church government. In addition to his active political involvement, he was a real estate investor, owning apartments and later a motel. He served as an officer in the Salt Lake Executives Association.9 His interest in central Salt Lake City grew out of his own experiences living there in the 1920s and 1930s and his desire to see what, in his opinion, had been one of the city’s nicest neighborhoods restored and beautified.

Brewster was interviewed for an oral history in 1974, in which he shared his memories

of the events of 1939, his view of his former neighborhood, and his beliefs about urban renewal.10 Brewster spoke about the apartment building he built and occupied from 1924 to 1961, located at 851 South 200 East, and his love for the area and its historical importance: “There were a lot of other historic homes, beautiful homes, some of the wealthy people of the city lived in the area. Then later they, as they died, or their children moved elsewhere, it became a rental area and was really starting to run down. . . . We formed an organization called the Central Civic and Beautification League . . . for the purpose of preserving the area as a residential area.”11 Brewster explained that although banks considered the central part of the city to be blighted and the city planned to turn the area into a manufacturing and industrial center, as homeowners and renters improved their properties, they were able to convince the city to retain residential zoning. Therefore, the banks became more willing to lend money for home remodels and improvements.12 What began as an effort for conservation and renewal took on a racially biased aspect in 1939, despite the neighborhood’s diverse character.

The central area of the city designated by the petitioners was part of Salt Lake City Municipal Ward 1, as enumerated in the 1940 US Census. Wanda Steffenson, the census taker, went beyond what she was required to do in documenting the races of residents and recorded the ethnicities of everyone in the neighborhood, giving us a very clear picture of the makeup of this particular locale. Of the 191 households she listed, ten were Greek or Mediterranean, four were Jewish, including several Russian Jewish households, two were Hispanic, and three were Black. So although the neighborhood was dominated by white northern European and English descendants, it included residents of other ethnicities. In his oral history, Brewster remembered that there had always been Black families living in this central city area: “We had a few Negroes in the area, they were nice people. They had been there, one family of Negroes came into the area with the pioneers. It was the servants of the prophet Joseph Smith and they lived in the area and then others came in. Nobody objected to them at all. Got along with them, they with us.”13

Since its founding in 1847, Salt Lake City had always supported a small population of Black residents. Three enslaved Black men had been part of the advance party of Mormon pioneers and descendants of early Black settlers had long farmed southeast of downtown in Mill Creek and Union. Many of these Black Utahns had Mormon heritage, and some of their progeny still retained membership in the LDS church. History shows they were hard-working and more or less integrated into their white Mormon communities.14 In 1886, with the arrival of the US Army’s Twenty-fourth Infantry, the Black population of Utah rose significantly, and for a few decades a small Black community supported its own newspapers as well as political, social, fraternal, and religious organizations.15 Despite the flowering of Black associations and businesses in the early 1900s and the fact that Salt Lake City’s population had nearly doubled between 1900 and 1930, Black residents were still few and far between. By the time the 1930 US Census was enumerated, only 1,108 Black residents were counted in all of Utah, making up only 0.02 percent of the population.16 The older Black families were a known quantity. Many shared a history and religious values with white LDS residents. It is obvious, however, from the number of people who attended the meeting at the Sumner School, the reports printed in the local papers, and especially the strong language used in Petition No. 1133 that white homeowners felt a high level of fear about what they saw as an outside threat entering their neighborhood.

Attendees at the mass meeting on November 1, 1939, who addressed the gathering maintained that an unnamed group of Black people were “circulating a petition to have the area designated by the city zoning commission as a negro residential zone.” They asserted that property values had already suffered because of an “influx of negroes.”17 Brewster believed that soon more would be moving into their neighborhood. The Salt Lake Herald reported him saying that “an influx of members of the race” was imminent and that “certain interests” were “attempting to buy and rent a group of houses for them.”18

The seven-member committee formed on November 1 consisted of Sheldon Brewster

as chair, Mrs. Roy Bowman, Mrs. Ollie J. Sinclair, R. H. Siddoway, Thomas Sawyer, Mrs. A. C. Lund, Colonel Elmer Johnson, and Leon F. McAllister.19 They “pledged to protest against the creation of a negro residential district” in their neighborhood.20 By November 16, Brewster and his committee had drafted Petition No. 1133 with its three main requests and had garnered the signatures of 1,000 property owners and residents. The first demand on the petition was the closing of a social club, the High Marine Club. The High Marine Lodge No. 12 of Free and Accepted Masons, a Black fraternal organization, had been chartered on September 12, 1893, in Salt Lake City. Black soldiers stationed at Fort Douglas were members, as was W. W. Taylor, the editor of the newspaper The Plain Dealer. 21 The Masons of the High Marine Lodge had planned to build a lodge at 523 South 200 East. They purchased the lot in 1922. By July 1929 an architect was drafting a plan for the new two-story structure, expected to cost $35,000 to $40,000.22 The next month, seventy-five local residents signed a petition protesting the construction of the lodge building on the grounds that it would be used as a “dance resort and would be detrimental to the moral and social welfare of the district.”23 The plans for the new building were then scrapped, and beginning in 1930, the lodge began meeting at 176 East 700 South.

Often referred to as the High Marine Hall, the building on Seventh South served as a meeting place for various types of events. In the 1930s the Salt Lake Chapter of the NAACP met there. During National Negro History Week in February 1939, the opening lectures took place there. Seeking support from the Black community, politicians rallied there. Evidently the on-site manager of the hall, John J. Jordan, also hosted more informal social events. Although the Polk Directory until 1940 listed 176 East 700 South as the address of the Masonic Lodge, when white neighbors lodged complaints about the noisy goings-on at that location, they referred to it as the High Marine Social Club. The hall could have served a dual purpose late in the 1930s and into the early 1940s.

Petition No. 1133 complained of the “unpleasant conditions aggravated as a result of . . . the High Marine Club. . White women and girls that

walk past this place after dark are constantly being accosted and insulted by Negroes. . . . [T] he continuous proceedings of this place are a disgrace to our city. If such a place is to be tolerated it certainly should be away from decent citizens.” One important point of friction could have been the hall’s proximity to the Salt Lake Third Ward meetinghouse on the same block, just across 700 South.

This was not the first time the Salt Lake City Commission had received a petition complaining about the High Marine Social Club. On August 17, 1939, Mrs. B. Gallion, who lived on the same block as the hall, submitted a petition signed by more than one hundred people that alleged “boisterous conduct” and car horn honking late into the night. The city commission referred the complaint to the public safety department.24

The second request put forth in Petition No. 1133 asked the city commission to deny the zoning of the central city neighborhood as a “Negro district.” The petitioners laid out their reasoning in terms of the proposed district’s location.

This district, which is in the very heart of Salt Lake City, in the shadow of the City and County Building could be and should be one of the most attractive and valuable parts of the City. . . . We recognize the citizenship and constitutional rights of the Negro. It is not our purpose to persecute or abuse him. But neither do we intend to stand idly by and see less than five hundred Negroes confiscate a district which is inhabited by more than five thousand whites. Do we want the thousands of tourists who come to our city each year to pass through a “Negro District”? And do we want our visitors in 1947 to find that the Negroes have taken over the center of Salt Lake City?”25

R. H. Siddoway, a member of Brewster’s committee, told a Tribune reporter, “We agree that a residential district for colored persons should be established, but we object to the area of the proposed district. It may take some time to iron out difficulties and reach an agreement, but I believe the matter can be worked out to everyone’s satisfaction.”26

As it turned out, many Black Salt Lakers were not satisfied with the concept of a segregated neighborhood, no matter where it might be located. When the NAACP members learned of their neighbors’ intentions, their organization passed a resolution that appeared in the Deseret News on Wednesday, November 8, 1939. It stated that “whereas the people of Salt Lake and vicinity have been informed through the press and otherwise that the negro people favor the segregated district, we the members of the Salt Lake branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People declare that this is not the fact and we wish to go on record that this segregated district is not the wish of the negro people and anyone requesting a segregated district is acting without the authority of the negro people.”27 Two days later, an article in the Salt Lake Tribune listed newly elected officers of the NAACP Salt Lake Branch and published a slightly different version of their resolution with an important distinction; “negro people” was changed to “negro citizens.”28 Among the elected officers of the local NAACP were Harmon O. Cole Jr. and Minnie Williams Cole, who lived a few blocks south of the Brewsters and the protesting Sumner homeowners—Harmon as chair of the executive board, Minnie as president. Harmon was also a former grandmaster of the High Marine Masonic Lodge.

Not all white Salt Lakers agreed with the central city protesters, either. A notice of an open forum scheduled on November 8, appeared just below the article listing new NAACP officers. A group called the Utah Conference for Human Relations proposed a discussion of “civil rights of racial groups.” The subject for the forum was chosen, “a recent proposal for residential zoning of negroes in Salt Lake City.” Two speakers, both white, were slated to present their views on the civil liberties of the “negro group” and other “racial minorities,” followed by D. H. Oliver, one of Utah’s early Black attorneys who planned to talk about the Bill of Rights.29

The NAACP assumed the right to represent the Black community of Salt Lake City, and it is clear from their resolution that their members were not party to any circulating petition for a segregated residential neighborhood. The question remains whether any other groups or individuals were behind the petition, or whether such claims were just unsubstantiated rumors?

The third recommendation made by the Sumner petitioners was that a committee be appointed to study “the Negro problem” and establish a segregated residential district to accommodate them. As they drafted Petition No. 1133, the writers invoked the memory of Salt Lake City’s Latter-day Saint founders as they advised city officials: “The matter of zoning a district for them will eventually have to be met. Why not have some of the wisdom and foresight of our pioneers by facing the issue now.” 30 The petitioners alleged, “We know that additional members of the race are planning to make Salt Lake City their home. We understand that twenty-five . . . families are being urged to move from Ogden to this City.” 31

For Sheldon Brewster, these twenty-five families were only the tip of the iceberg. He believed there was a larger plan in place. Over

thirty years later, he explained some of what he and his neighbors objected to in 1939:

There was a movement on in the South to move a lot of the Southern negroes to the North. . . . The alarming thing . . . was the fact that word had come that they were going to bring a large group of them to Salt Lake and wanted to obtain that area [central city] for settlement in. That was the thing . . . none of us wanted because you didn’t want it to become any particular area just a nice residential area for everybody. So we went up to the city commission . a lot of it was misunderstood. Some of them thought it was a fight against the negro people. It was a fight against them establishing it as a negro area. Which, of course, with integration it’s not supposed to be centralized in one area.

Sheldon Brewster (left), with Chet J. Olsen, director of the state park and recreation commission, and G. E. Untermann, director of Utah fieldhouse in Vernal, in 1958. Brewster, who worked in real estate, spearheaded the 1939 petition encouraging the study for the formation of a “negro district” outside the Sumner neighborhood where he lived. Reproduced from the Vernal Express Collection. Used by permission, Uintah County Library Regional History Center, all rights reserved

We went to the city commission and we said, ‘We don’t have any objection whatever of the negroes wanting an area . . . but no one should come from the outside.’ It wasn’t local negroes, it was an outside movement, you see. It didn’t interfere with the negroes who were there.32

At the time of his oral history in 1974, Brewster seemed anxious to explain away any bigotry that had attached itself to his earlier efforts by stating his appreciation for the Black Mormon families living in downtown Salt Lake City and attempting to distance them from what he characterized as outsiders whose culture clashed with LDS Utah culture. In fact, the language of Petition No. 1133 was inflammatory and derogatory toward members of the Black community. It listed the “evils” caused by an “influx of Negroes.” The petitioners claimed that Blacks “confiscate” the districts they “invade” and that “Colonization” of the neighborhood had resulted in “unpleasant conditions” being “aggravated.” As noted earlier, the number of Black residents in Utah had actually gone down from 1920 to 1939, so there really was no “influx.” It seems much of this language really referred to the High Marine Hall drawing people of color into the neighborhood.

The commission, which received the petition on November 7, agreed to hold a hearing dealing with the complaints and recommendations set forth by the Sumner petitioners the following week at its regularly scheduled meeting. At the same time, two interested parties filed their own petitions to oppose Petition No. 1133: Petition Nos. 1151 and 1152. Neither of these documents is extant. One was apparently filed by Helen Dennis, chair of the executive committee of the Utah Conference for Human Relations, the same organization that hosted the civil rights discussion earlier in the month. According to the Deseret News, this petition asked that the commission take no action to segregate Black residents or distinguish them from their white neighbors.33 The Salt Lake Telegram reported that she and two University of Utah professors appeared before the commission and spoke against segregation, condemning it on ethical and scientific grounds.34 The other petition was filed by Reverend Lilly who represented the Salt Lake Ministerial Association. Both

Dennis and Lilly asked the city commission to notify them if there was to be a hearing.35

On the day of the hearing, November 21, 1939, the city recorder’s official record of the meeting reported, “A group of persons were present in behalf of petition #1133 by Sheldon Brewster, et. al. representing property and residents in the territory between 5th and 9th So. and Main and 6th East St. complaining of the invasion of negroes in this section and asking the City to a [sic] zone or restrict the use of this property. Mayor Wallace announced that the City has not and does not intend to set aside any section of the City for the use of negroes and that the City Commission had not officially or unofficially taken any steps to set aside a negro district.”36 Regardless of this clarification, the petitioners pressed their desire for a segregated black housing district: “Mr. Brewster, Mrs. O. J. Sinclair . . . spoke stating that they were in favor of zoning or setting aside of some district for negroes as they have done in other cities and that they object to their neighborhood being invaded.”37

Salt Lake City Commission minutes do not list everyone in attendance at the hearing for Petition No. 1133, but the Deseret News reported that the commission chambers were “packed with negro residents of the district.”38 The story of their protest and effort to kill the proposed segregated district lives on thanks to Mary Lucile Perkins Bankhead and her retelling of the event. It has become something of a legend in Utah’s Black community.

Bankhead was the direct descendant of Black Utah Mormon pioneers. Her mother was the granddaughter of Green Flake, an enslaved Latter-day Saint who came to Utah with Brigham Young’s advance party and became a property owner and miner after his emancipation. Bankhead’s father was the son of Frank Perkins, another enslaved Mormon brought into Utah, who has many descendants in the state and in the West. Lucile was a devoted Latter-day Saint all her life and became the first Black Relief Society president in the church when Genesis, a church-sponsored support group for Black Mormons, was created in 1971. She lived all her life in Mill Creek, about eight miles southeast of downtown Salt Lake City, where her father and many relatives farmed. In 1939, Bankhead

and members of her sewing club, the Camellia Arts Club, got wind of a plan to create a housing district for all of the Salt Lake Valley’s Black families. Opposed to the idea, they decided to voice their opposition to government officials. As detailed in a 1983 interview, Bankhead, with Alice Weaver Leggroan and three or four other women, “took a horse and wagon and we went up to the legislature and we sit there all day. ‘Course I was the one that did the talking. . . . I said we had no intention of selling our property and it was all clear, no taxes due, so what could you do about it? And we hit . . . so hard ‘til the newspaper got on it.”39 Remembering the event more than forty years later, Bankhead’s memory was, understandably, not entirely accurate. The zoning question was debated in the chambers of the Salt Lake City commission in the City and County Building, not the Utah State Capitol. The fact that Sheldon Brewster was a Utah state legislator likely added to the confusion.

Undoubtedly, Bankhead and the other members of the Camellia Arts Club were among the seventy-five Black protestors who packed the commission chambers on Tuesday, November 21. In retrospect, Bankhead realized the sensation they must have caused because even though most of the women dressed up to protest, “Mrs. Leggroan had on a big white apron . and a white dust cap.” Some of them had young children in tow. “We took our lunch and took the basket for the baby to sleep in after he was nursed and stayed all day long and I guess they was glad to get that crowd out of there when they got through. . . . I have to laugh about it. But we were really kind of mad. . . . [The commissioners] didn’t want us sitting up there all day.”40 Bankhead’s home was on land her family had owned since the nineteenth century, and she had no intention of letting anyone force her off it and make her relocate to a downtown neighborhood. “It’s been a hundred years that we’ve owned this place . and we’re still on it,” she explained.41

Generations of the Mary Lucile Perkins Bankhead family. Mary Lucile Perkins Bankhead lived her entire life in Mill Creek and was the granddaughter of George and Lucinda Vilate Flake Stevens, and the great granddaughter of Green and Martha Crosby Flake. In the image on the left, she is pictured as a child with her mother, Martha Ann J. Stevens Perkins, along with three brothers, Frank S., Huron, and George, circa 1909 or 1910. On the right, she is pictured with her mother, daughter Ruth Jackson, and granddaughter Juanita Spillman. USHS, Peoples of Utah Photograph Collection, MSS C 239

Bankhead’s comment about her desire to retain her familial inheritance begs a question. Her home was in Mill Creek, in Salt Lake County, outside the boundaries of the city and several miles from the neighborhood in question. While the city’s zoning powers did not extend into the county where Bankhead lived, she made assertions in her oral history that bear closer investigation and give hints as to what might have prompted Brewster and his neighbors to create their petition in the first place.

When asked by her interviewer about “that thing that happened in ’39,” Lucile Bankhead made it clear that at the time she believed the proposal was to create a Black residential district near 700 South and 200 East, downtown, and force all Black Salt Lake Valley residents to move there. She did not name the person responsible for the idea, but she told how she learned about it. One of her Mill Creek neighbors, a man she was related to through marriage, acted as an agent for an unknown person to obtain the support of members of the Black community, “We had a Black man helping him out . . . [and] he came to this meeting. The first thing we knew about it was the Black man telling us, did we want to sell our places? Come out to ask if we didn’t want to sell our homes. He had offered him money, if he could get us to sell[,] and then he told this story about him saying it would be best for all Blacks to be on 7th South. . [T]hat’s what they wanted us to do. He tried to get us to move up there. . . . It’s funny what people will do for money.”42

Looking back at this episode, some scholars have concluded that Sheldon Brewster was the unnamed person who wanted to restrict Black housing to the central city location, but by his own admission he and his neighbors petitioned the city commission to ensure that did not happen. It is evident by their petition and local newspaper reports that the Sumner neighborhood residents were in favor of segregating Black residents of Salt Lake City in a dedicated neighborhood, but they were also clear about not wanting it to be in the central city area where they lived. If Bankhead’s retelling is correct, her version agrees with the petitioners’ claim that some other group first suggested that part of the Sumner neighborhood be zoned for a segregated residential area

in which all Black Salt Lake County residents would be forced to reside.

Oddly enough, city commission minutes related that Brewster, Sinclair, and a “Mr. Oliver” spoke in favor of zoning “some district for negroes.”43 There was no “Mr. Oliver” named as part of the Sumner School committee, but D. H. Oliver is listed as an attendee of the city commission hearing. David Herbert Oliver was originally from Oakwood, Texas, and, after graduating from the University of Nebraska law school, practiced law for five years in Omaha. He relocated to Ogden in 1930 and passed the Utah state bar.44 Oliver’s name often appears in Salt Lake City and Ogden newspapers in connection with his legal cases and work as a defender of Black civil liberties.45 In 1939 Oliver was the president of the Utah Council of the National Negro Congress, a more politically radical organization than the NAACP.46 In its coverage of the November 21, 1939, meeting, after naming the Sumner School committee members, the Deseret News reported that “D. H. Oliver, negro attorney, told the commission he had come to represent this group but added that since a committee was appointed to investigate, he would appear before the committee.”47 No other information sheds light on Oliver’s involvement. What “group” Oliver intended to represent is not clear. If it was the group of Black residents assembled to voice opposition to the petition, Oliver must have realized his views ran counter to theirs. It is possible the city recorder mistakenly called one of the Sumner neighborhood petitioners “Mr. Oliver.” Or it is also possible that Oliver and Louis Leggroan, the man Bankhead named, stood in opposition to the wishes of the majority of the Black community as represented by the NAACP.

During the course of the commission hearing, the Sumner petitioners pressed their grievances against the High Marine Club and accused Jordan, the manager of the club, of selling hard liquor on the premises. Jordan responded that he had been the manager for three years and had never sold any on site.48 At the conclusion of the hearing, having listened to the grievances of the white residents and registering the counter-protests of the Black community, Mayor John Wallace decided to send the “question” to the city’s legal department with a request

that they attend to it and give an answer as soon as possible.

This was not the first time Utah residents tried to circumscribe Black housing to specially zoned areas. Earlier in 1939, white property owners in Ogden had attempted to prevent a Black family from renting a home in an allwhite neighborhood. Since the Deseret News reported the attempt on February 3, 1939, some Salt Lake City residents may have been aware of it.49 Minutes of the Ogden Board of Commissioners contain limited records of the tussle between a homeowner and her neighbors, but the Ogden Standard-Examiner reported the story in more detail. In its issue of February 2, 1939, the newspaper described “sharp words” exchanged at a city commissioners meeting over whether Edna G. Heflen could rent a home she owned on Patterson Avenue to a young Black couple and their baby. Eighty residents along Patterson Avenue had signed a petition addressed to the city board alleging that the “presence of the Negroes would depreciate property values.” Heflen argued that she was a widow and needed to rent the property to support her family and pay taxes. She also told the commissioners that the prospective renters were “intelligent . . . respectable, self-supporting American citizens,” and she asked, “Can you deny them equal rights?” Heflen believed the Black family’s presence would not lower property values. She said she resented the publicity over the rental and accused a city commissioner, who lived on Patterson Avenue, of being responsible for the petition. He heatedly denied her allegation but said he intended to go to the defense of his neighbors.50 The commissioners “instructed” the Ogden city attorney, George S. Barker, to “prepare an ordinance prohibiting Negro families from residing in certain sections of the city.”51

The demands for limiting Black housing in Ogden continued into the summer of that year. In July, four hundred residents along Ogden’s east bench asked for a new zoning ordinance to prohibit “the spread of Negro families through the municipal Fourth ward.” Again, the action was based on property values and the fear that the presence of Black residents would so depreciate home values that owners would see “the savings of our lifetime practically wiped

out.” The white homeowners, on this occasion, reacted to a change in railroad practice. Many Black train employees, porters and cooks, had been transferred from Omaha, Nebraska to Ogden. After arriving in Utah, they found it difficult to find “suitable” housing. As reported in the local newspaper, “railroad employees complained their present homes, located in the immediate area of railroad tracks, were unsanitary, crowded, and undesirable.”52

John R. Braggs, a member of a dining car waiters union, wrote a letter to the editor of the Ogden Standard-Examiner that appeared in the issue of July 14, 1939. “On behalf of the Negro citizens of Ogden, and the membership” of his organization, he replied to the July petition to bar Black people from renting or buying homes east of Washington Avenue. He quoted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and asserted that the petitioners must not have ever read the document. He also urged Black families to exercise their constitutional rights and look for homes available due to foreclosures. “The United States government will accept money from black, as well as white Americans,” he advised.53

The reportage on the efforts to zone Ogden neighborhoods based on race, as well as the minutes of the Ogden Board of Commissioners meeting, mention something that bears on the protests over central Salt Lake City, sheds light on Lucile Bankhead’s understanding of the “Black district” proposal, and helps to explain Sheldon Brewster’s fear of outside influence. The Ogden Board of Commissioners meeting minutes of February 2 and the Ogden Standard-Examiner report that “the board accepted an offer of A. B. Paulson of Salt Lake City, member of a housing committee which proposes to provide moderately-priced homes through a federal project, to explain the proposal before a commission meeting next week.” Paulson explained, “‘I am well acquainted with the slum clearance problem in Utah in relation to the U. S. housing project.’ A bill is now before the Utah legislature, proposing to place the state in line to participate in the federal housing program.”54 Paulson served on a housing committee in Salt Lake City. The Deseret News added, “A plan proposed several weeks ago by Negro residents whereby a federal housing project

would be sponsored by the city is being investigated.”55 On February 7, Paulson, an architect, and others appeared before the Ogden Board of Commissioners to explain “in detail the United States Housing Administration” and its programs.56

It seems likely that Brewster, as a member of the Utah House of Representatives, would have known about this proposed legislation. House Bill No. 96 of 1939 outlined creation of a local housing authority to oversee the use of federal money to “clear slums” and build low-income housing in cities with a population over three thousand.57 The discussions and debates regarding the passage of the bill could very well be the source of Brewster’s impression that more Black families would be relocating to Salt Lake City. It is also possible that some Salt Lake City Black residents were in favor of their city, like Ogden, sponsoring a housing project in the heart of downtown. Brewster was not a proponent of later urban renewal programs. In his 1974 oral history, he argued that such renewal programs often called for historic structures to be leveled rather than restored, and as a preservationist he did not approve of that approach.58 Even earlier Brewster had clearly expressed his feeling that federal housing programs clashed with property rights and did not accomplish their stated goals. In an open letter he penned to his fellow democrats in the Utah House of Representatives, likely around 1959, he wrote:

[T]he idea of Public Housing came into existence and spread rapidly . . . because of its high sounding aims.

[In 1949] planners saw that public housing was not eliminating slums, so a new feature was conceived of “slum clearance” which has been given various names such as community redevelopment, urban renewal etc. . . . They [slums] have just been moved and new slums have even been created by the very program which proposed to eliminate them. . . . I was Bishop for 18 years in an area which is in the “plan” to be bulldozed out of existence. What will replace it? That isn’t planned yet, but it won’t be the people who are there now. They are buying and renting homes which fit

their economy. It is one of the most integrated parts of the city and there have been no serious race problems. They feel their property rights are just as sacred as anyone’s.59

Brewster based his objections to the housing programs of the New Deal and later urban renewal plans on the same principles.

The Ogden imbroglio might also shed light on why Brewster maintained that twenty-five Black families would be settled in Salt Lake City. Perhaps he had railroad employees in mind. It is difficult to know with certainty the source of the information that so alarmed the Sumner neighborhood residents and prompted their appeal to the city commission, but it is reasonable to draw a connection between the events in Ogden and what developed there.

The Salt Lake City Law Department gave its ruling on the demands of Petition No. 1133 to Mayor Wallace and the city commission in early 1940. On February 21, Salt Lake City Attorney Fisher Harris told the commission that “the results sought by Petition No. 1133 are beyond your power to accomplish and beyond your jurisdiction to influence.” Harris’s ruling echoed the earlier sentiments of Ogden railroad waiter John Braggs. The attorney cited the Fourteenth Amendment to inform his opinion of what the commission could legally do. Harris quoted, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor deprive any person within its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws.” He asserted that “while the principal original purpose of this amendment was to protect persons of color, it has more frequently been invoked by others, and the broad language used has been uniformly held by the courts, both state and federal, to protect all persons, regardless of race, creed or complexion, against discriminatory legislation and governmental action, of every nature. Such is that sought, or at least suggested, to be induced by this petition.” After denying the petitioners a governmental or legal resolution of the conflict, he suggested another course of action: “If there is any remedy for the conditions complained of, it lies within the field of social cooperation

rather than in that of governmental action.”60 This was a somewhat recent application of the Fourteenth Amendment. The first time it was cited by the Supreme Court to strike down a local racial housing ordinance was in Buchanan vs. Wardley in 1917. The majority opinion stated that legislation to separate the races “must have its limitations, and cannot be sustained where the exercise of authority exceeds the restraints of the Constitution.”61

The 1939 attempts in Ogden and Salt Lake City to form legally zoned racial housing areas failed, but real estate contracts and covenants essentially segregated neighborhoods before and after this time. In two of Utah’s largest cities, real estate developers and agents used extralegal methods to attempt to maintain allwhite enclaves. In the Salt Lake City neighborhood of Highland Park, begun in 1909, Kimball and Richards planned to limit sales in their new subdivision to white residents only. They advertised the Highland Park restrictive covenants as a selling point in the Salt Lake Tribune. On January 19, 1919, the firm stated that this new neighborhood housed “only members of the Caucasian Race.” Ad copy informed prospective buyers that the building regulations included a provision that “the buyer agrees that no estate . . . shall be sold, transferred or

Map of Salt Lake City, 1940.

Created by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the map assigned grades signaling a neighborhood or area’s “mortgage security.” Rated safe were the “A” areas; “D” was the lowest grade and considered “hazardous.” Such “redlining” functioned as a barrier to people of colors from acquiring homes in certain neighborhoods. The notes commenting on D-1—the “old part of the city”—read: “In the southwest corner of this section is found the only concentration of negros in the city.” Home Owners’ Loan Corporation files in National Archives at https://dsl.richmond .edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5 /39.1/-94.58.

conveyed to any person not of the Caucasian race.” Therefore, “you will forever be assured of desirable neighbors.” In 1919, titles were amended to reflect that restriction.62 Several subdivisions in Ogden barred all but “the Caucasian race” from owning or living in homes there with the exception of live-in domestics.63 The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), created by the National Housing Act of 1934, “strongly encouraged” this type of racial restriction in neighborhoods to protect its mortgage investments. The agency feared “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” could upset the stability of a neighborhood. Redlining—the practice of identifying neighborhoods where banks took considerable risks to lend money to home buyers—grew out of this fear.64

In 1944 Salt Lake City realtors were forthright in informing city residents that they planned to do everything in their power to segregate neighborhoods. On May 7 that year, several newspaper articles reported their intentions. Don Carlos Kimball, the man who developed Highland Park, was chair of the “nonwhite housing control committee” of the Salt Lake Real Estate Board. He announced he had succeeded in obtaining pledges from most city real estate dealers to decline to sell homes to nonwhites in white neighborhoods. Kimball

said his committee used the 1940 US Census to establish the locations of nonwhite homes. He based his policy on “the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics which forbids the sale of property to anyone who might ‘lower community standards.’” Kimball referred to “the recent influx of Negroes” and asserted that as they filtered into predominantly white neighborhoods, white residents left. Acknowledging Black residents’ citizenship, Kimball said that “we will tolerate them, but not favor them.” His committee’s stated goal was to “do everything possible to promote the general uplift of every community.”65

What law would not dictate, informal segregationist policy could accomplish. A number of real estate agents, developers, and individual sellers continued to make it difficult for people of color to buy property and live in predominantly white neighborhoods, at least until Congress passed the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was intended to finally end racially restrictive covenants and sales practices.66

After standing for property rights and equal protection for herself and members of the Utah Black community in 1939, Lucile Bankhead remained an outspoken leader and mentor to a younger generation of Black Mormons and Utahns. She lived on her Mill Creek land for the rest of her life, proud of her heritage, her religion, and her family.

Despite the Salt Lake City commission denying the demands of Petition No. 1133, Sheldon Brewster, continued to devote his time to government and church work. He was elected to two more terms in the Utah House of Representatives in 1956 and 1958. He was manager of the Utah State Fair from 1941 to 1949 and is best remembered for his work to protect property owner rights and preserve Saltair Resort. After serving eighteen years as bishop of the Salt Lake Third Ward, he became president of the LDS Liberty Stake. His earlier failure did not deter Brewster from his campaign to close the High Marine Social Club. On August 2, 1940, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Salt Lake City Commissioners refused to issue a beer license to the club. Police Chief Olson recommended it be denied “because of friction the club has caused in the neighborhood between white and colored residents. The license

was also protested by Sheldon R. Brewster . . . chairman of the Central Civic and Beautification league.”67 The Brewster family moved out of the Sumner neighborhood in 1961, and by the end of that decade, a quarter of Utah’s Black population lived in one square mile in the central Salt Lake City area that Sheldon Brewster had called home.68

Notes

1. “Meeting Raps Plan for Negro District,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 2, 1939, 14; The Sumner neighborhood is directly southeast of the downtown business and shopping district of Salt Lake City and is part of what most Salt Lakers think of as “Central City.” It runs from 400 South to 900 South between State Street and 700 East. There is an area designated as the Central City National Historic District that encompasses the strip of land from just north of 100 South to 900 South between 500 East and 700 East, so while the two areas overlap, technically they are different. See Mark Hanner Hafey Jr., “Land Use Change: The Impact of the Traditional Process of Land Use Change on the Sumner Neighborhood in Salt Lake City” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1974).

2. “Ogden Plans Negro Zones,” Deseret News, February 3, 1939, 7.

3. There is no way to tell who attended the Sumner School protest meeting and signed the petition presented to the city commission, but the neighborhood was predominately white and the struggle fell out on racial lines.

4. See Tarienne Mitchell, “Lucille [sic] Bankhead, Defender of African-American Rights,” BetterDays2020 website, https://www.utahwomenshistory.org/bios/ lucille-bankhead/; Helen Papanikolas, ed., The Peoples of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah Historical Society, 1976); Linda Sillitoe, History of Salt Lake County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Salt Lake County Commission, 1996); and Thomas G. Alexander, “The Civil Rights Movement in Utah,” History To Go website, https://historytogo.utah.gov/?s=the+civil+rights +movement+in+utah. These sources recount Black residents marching on the State Capitol to register their opposition to a Black housing district proposed by Sheldon Brewster. Many details of the controversy are missing from these accounts. They confuse the area proposed as a Black district and they make no mention of other demands made by the Sumner residents, namely the closing of the High Marine Hall. The counter protest by the NAACP is often omitted.

5. “City Petitioned to Find Resident Zone for Negroes,” Deseret News, November 17, 1939, 6.

6. “Meeting Raps Plan for Negro District.”

7. “Meeting Raps Plans for Negro District.”

8. Salt Lake City Commission, Petition No. 1133, 1939, transcription, as quoted in Margaret Judy Maag, “Discrimination Against the Negro in Utah and Institutional Efforts to Eliminate It (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1971), 47. The Salt Lake City Recorder’s Office no longer has possession of the original petition. Some records were water damaged and destroyed, and the petition appears to be among them. Maag made a

transcription and included it in her thesis. The J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections also holds an undated partial transcription from an unknown person that includes some wording not in the Maag transcript.

9. Nancy Weatherly Sharp and James Roger Sharp, eds., American Legislative Leaders in the West, 1911–1994 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997), 67–68.

10. Sheldon R. Brewster interview, September 6, 1974, transcript, 2–3, MSS A 3063, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. Some spelling and punctuation has been corrected.

11. Brewster, interview, 2. Sheldon Brewster organized the first neighborhood beautification program in Salt Lake City in 1932, as documented in A Preservation Handbook for Historic Residential Properties and Districts in Salt Lake City, pt. 3, ch. 15, p. 5. The handbook also describes the changes the Central City neighbor underwent with the influx of unskilled laborers who moved into the area.

12. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map for Salt Lake City, 1933–1939, shows this neighborhood to be a red or hazardous area, meaning banks took considerable risks to lend money to home buyers there. “Redlining” is often associated with New Deal efforts to segregate housing stock, since many redlined neighborhoods were minority neighborhoods. These maps are located in Series: Residential Security Maps, 1933–1939, Records of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 1933–1989, Record Group 195, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.

13. Brewster, interview, 2–3. Brewster’s reference is to early Mormon convert, Jane Manning James, her descendants, and her brother, Isaac L. Manning. Manning and her brother had worked for Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, Illinois. James and Manning lived in the LDS Eighth Ward until James’s death. Then Isaac Manning moved in with James’s granddaughter, Josephine Washington, whose address in 1910 was 150 East 700 South. Her boarding house was within the boundaries of the LDS Third Ward. Brewster, while a young boy, may have known of Isaac Manning.

14. Tonya Reiter, “Life on the Hill: The Black Farming Families of Mill Creek,” Journal of Mormon History 44 (October 2018): 68–89.

15. Ronald G. Coleman, “African Americans in Utah,” Utah History Encyclopedia, accessed April 6, 2020, https:// www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/a/African _Americans.shtml.

16. Pamela S. Perlich, “Utah Minorities: The Story Told by 150 Years of Census Data,” Bureau of Economic and Business Research, David S. Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, available at https://gardner.utah.edu /bebr/Documents/studies/Utah_Minorities.pdf. The number of Black Utahns in 1930 was actually lower than the 1910 census figure of 1,144 and the 1920 count of 1,446. In 1940, the number of Blacks had only risen 127 to 1,235. Even with Black railroad employees and families moving in, it was not until after WWII that Utah’s Black population doubled to 2729 in 1950.

17. “Meeting Raps Plan for Negro District.”

18. “Negro Area Plan Draws Protests,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 2, 1939, 7.

19. “City Petitioned to Find Resident Zone for Negroes,” Deseret News, 17 November 17, 1939, 6.

20. “Group Protests Zone Plans,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 6, 1939, 10.

21. “M. B. McGee and the Broad Ax,” Broad Ax (Salt Lake City), September 25, 1897. 4.

22. “Colored Masons To Build Lodge Home,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 18, 1922, 6, “Society Plans New Building,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 29, 1929, 34.

23. “Petition Protests Giving Permit for Lodge Rooms,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 4, 1929, 34,

24. “Zoning Board Defers Action on Complaint,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1939, 13.

25. Petition No. 1133.

26. “Group Protests Zone Plan,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 6, 1939, 10.

27. “Salt Lake Negro Group Opposes Race Segregation,” Deseret News, November 8, 1939, 13.

28. “Colored Group Elects S. L. Leaders, Files Protest Against City Negro District,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 10, 1939, 24.

29. “Forum to Discuss Rights of Group,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 8, 1939, 24.

30. Petition No. 1133

31. “Negro Ghetto” in “Afro-Americans, Utah” Vertical File, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. This document is a partial transcription of Petition No. 1133. These two sentences are not found in the Maag transcript of Petition No. 1133.

32. Brewster, interview, 3.

33. “Committee Named to Study Negro Section,” Deseret News, November 21, 1939, 24.

34. “Racial Barrier Protest Filed,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 21, 1939.

35. Salt Lake City Commission Minutes, November 21, 1939, 834, Salt Lake City Recorder’s Office, Salt Lake City, Utah.

36. Commission Minutes, November 21, 1939, 833.

37. Commission Minutes, November 21, 1939, 833.

38. “Committee Named to Study Negro Section.”

39. Mary Lucile Perkins Bankhead, interview by Leslie G. Kelen, Salt Lake County, Utah, 1983, transcript, 26, box 1, fd. 6, pt. 3, “Interviews with Blacks in Utah, 1982–1988,” MS 0453, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

40. Bankhead, interview, 27.

41. Bankhead, interview, 27.

42. Bankhead, interview, 25–28. Bankhead names Louis Leggroan as the black agent. Ironically, he was the husband of Alice Weaver Leggroan who protested the idea of a segregated district with Lucile Bankhead. Alice had been an officer in the Salt Lake Branch of the NAACP earlier in the 1930s. For biographies of both Louis Leggroan and Alice Weaver Leggroan, see Century of Black Mormon, https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/ century-of-black-mormons/page/welcome.

43. Commission Minutes, November 21, 1939, 833.

44. “Negro Intends to Open Ogden Legal Practice,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 1, 1931, 4.

45. In 1940, the flamboyant D. H. Oliver told Judge Oscar McConkie that he wanted an entire pool of two hundred potential jurors dismissed because of their membership in “an organization prejudiced against the negro race.” When McConkie asked what that was, Oliver said they were all members of the Democratic Party! Evidently Oliver had a change of heart because twelve years later, in 1952, Milt Weilenmann, Utah Democratic state chairman, named Oliver as the Democratic campaign director for Blacks. See “Attor-

ney Charges Negro Prejudice by Jury Panel,” Deseret News, February 3, 1940, 14; and “Democrats Name Campaign Head,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 11, 1952, 29. Oliver is known for a book he wrote after living thirty plus years in Utah, A Negro on Mormonism.

46. The National Negro Congress was a short-lived organization affiliated with the Communist Party and had as its goal the fight for Black liberation. “National Negro Congress,” accessed April 27, 2020, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Negro_Congress.

47. “Committee Named to Study Negro Section.”

48. Commission Minutes, November 21, 1939, 834.

49. “Ogden Plans Negro Zones,” Deseret News, February 3, 1939, 7.

50. “Sharp Remarks Made as Negro Trouble Aired,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, February 2, 1939, 11.

51. “Ogden Plans Negro Zones,” Deseret News, February 3, 1939, 7.

52. “Bench Citizens Resist Negro Family Influx; Protest Made to City,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 11, 1939, 14.

53. “Letters to the Editor,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 14, 1939, 3.

54. “Sharp Remarks Made as Negro Trouble Aired”; Minutes of the Regular Meeting Board of Commissioners of Ogden, Utah, February 2, 1939, 79. See also “Ogden Plans Negro Zones.”

55. “Ogden Plans Negro Zone.”

56. Minutes of the Regular Meeting Board of Commissioners of Ogden, Utah, February 7, 1939, 84.

57. 1939 Session: Bill 96, box 23, fd. 39, Utah Legislature, House of Representatives working bills, Series 432, Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City, Utah.

58. Brewster, interview, 16–17.

59. Sheldon R. Brewster to Utah House of Representatives democrats, n.d. [ca. 1959], Sheldon Riser Brewster Papers, 1919–1975, MSS SC 1980, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. Some spelling and punctuation corrected.

60. “Reports of City Officers, 24,” in Salt Lake City Commission Minutes, February 21, 1940, 139, Salt Lake City Recorder’s Office, Salt Lake City, Utah. By this time the Fourteenth Amendment was often applied to state and local law through the principle of “incorporation.”

61. Buchanan vs. Wardley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917).

62. Polly Hart, “Highland Park Historic District,” accessed July 16, 2021, https://www.livingplaces.com/UT/Salt _Lake_County/Salt_Lake_City/Highland_Park_Historic _District.html; “Utah’s Black History includes legalized housing discrimination,” accessed July 16, 2021, https:// www.fox13now.com/news/uniquely-utah/legalized -housing-discrimination-mars-utah-neighborhoods -past.

63. “Professor Probes Housing Discrimination,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, May 26, 2021, 1.

64. Hart, “Highland Park Historic District”; “Utah’s Black History includes legalized housing discrimination.” Again, Buchanan vs. Wardley had already ruled that legislation to separate the races to keep the peace overstepped the police power held by the individual states. The majority opinion in that case stated that the problems “arising from a feeling of race hostility” cannot be solved by “depriving citizens of their constitutional rights and privileges.”

65. “S.L. Realtors Restrict Housing of Nonwhites in Urban Areas,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 7, 1944, 17.

66. See John Spencer Kirkham, “A Study of Negro Housing in Salt Lake County” (senior thesis, University of Utah, 1968).

67. “City Denies License to Social Club,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 2, 1940, 9.

68. Kirkham, “A Study of Negro Housing in Salt Lake County,” 6. According to Hafey, in “Land Use Change,” 52, by 1974, eighty percent of Black residents in the Sumner neighborhood were on welfare. “Many of these Blacks have migrated to this area from the Southern States and are poorly educated.” In his thesis, Hafey related many of the same problems Brewster talked about in the Sumner neighborhood. Housing units held by absentee landlords far outnumbered owneroccupied homes. Economics and land use changes resulted in owners creating smaller and smaller apartments out of former single-family houses. Uncertainty related to possible changes in land use and zoning gave rise to homeowners and renters neglecting properties, so many structures became sub-standard and were allowed to deteriorate. A cycle developed in which lenders became afraid to risk funds on the neighborhood, so the residents were unable to improve their homes, making them ineligible for loans and so on.

Liberals, Labor, and the Left: Henry Wallace and the 1948 Progressive Party Campaign in Utah

BY JOHN SILLITO

On December 29, 1947, former vice president Henry A. Wallace announced that he would enter the coming presidential race as an independent—the culmination of a series of events that began when Wallace was denied re-nomination in 1944. After that defeat, FDR had appointed him secretary of commerce as a consolation, and after Roosevelt’s death many liberals—but not all—considered him the leader of the New Deal legacy. Over the next three years, Wallace became increasingly critical of the foreign policy of Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman, leading to Wallace’s eventual dismissal from the cabinet. Many then encouraged him to challenge Truman in the Democratic primaries; others suggested that he take advantage of the independent route. Among them, two groups, both nationally and in Utah, played a central role promoting Wallace’s independent candidacy—the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA) and the International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union (IMMSWU).1 PCA was organized in December 1946 with ties to organized labor. It became a counteracting force to the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) founded a month later, and the major organization of anti-communist liberals. While these two groups generally agreed on domestic issues, they were at odds over the Truman Doctrine, Communist influence in politics and unions, and Wallace’s candidacy. The Communist Party was a third group instrumental in promoting Wallace and, ultimately, in creating a new party. In the last effort of their “popular front” approach tracing back to the New Deal, Communists and their allies provided grassroots organizational support for Wallace. Ultimately, the decision proved to be disastrous to the Communists and their labor allies, while also weakening the broad appeal of Wallace and the Progressive campaign.2

Wallace proclaimed that “a new political alignment” was necessary because “everywhere . . . today I find confusion, uncertainty and fear. The people do not ask ‘Will there be another war? – but when will the war

Henry Wallace, appearing here in the years after his 1948 presidential campaign. USDA Agricultural Research Service, ars.usda.gov/oc/images/photos/oct01/k9636–1/.

come? They do not ask ‘Will there be another depression? – but ‘When will the depression start?’”3 He invited those who agreed with him to join with “the forces of peace, progress and prosperity” as part of a “Gideon’s Army, small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action.” Wallace concluded his remarks: “We face the future unfettered by any principle but the general welfare. We owe no allegiance to any group which does not serve that welfare. By God’s grace, the people’s peace will usher in the century of the common man.”4 A month later, Idaho Democratic Senator Glen Taylor agreed to be his vice-presidential nominee. Support for Wallace was at its highest at this point. Thousands of Americans—in union halls, on college campuses, and among critics of Truman’s foreign policy—flocked to his banner, and Democrats, who doubted he could win, were worried about his impact in the election. Wallace campaigned for civil rights, desegregation, social justice, and economic security, all under the cloud of nuclear war.

Much of the scholarly scrutiny over Henry Wallace’s campaign for president has focused on the extent of communist influence in the campaign.5 This article examines the efforts for Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party’s campaign in Utah. The activity of and issues facing the campaign in Utah were the same as they were elsewhere in the country, including communist involvement, even as certain uniquely Utah factors were at play. In that sense, Utah serves as a microcosm of what happened nationally. I also focus on the Utah Progressive Party’s leadership and supporters: what drew them to the Progressive cause, how they fared at the polls, and what happened to the Utah party and its key figures after the 1948 election. I follow Richard Hofstadter’s suggestion that political historians should “try to tell what people thought they were doing in their political activity—that is what they thought they were either conserving or reforming or constructing.”6

The immediate reaction in Utah to Wallace’s decision to run was mixed. As was true nationally, some Utah liberals were unsure how to proceed. Former Utah PCA chair George S. Ballif said that while Wallace was a “great guy,” he would not “follow him into a third party”

and “lessen the liberal movement in the Democratic party.”7 Republicans “professed glee” at Wallace’s decision, and state chair Vernon Romney said the move enhanced an “already assured” Republican victory. At the same time, Democratic chair Clinton Vernon told the press that while the former vice president had “a following in Utah,” he doubted that the Wallace candidacy would gain much support, because “there are quite a few Democrats friendly to Wallace who will not indorse the third party movement.” Still, he admitted that the new party might threaten the Democrats in 1948.8

Indeed, Wallace’s potential to hurt the Democrats was a factor in Utah as it was elsewhere. Utah Representative Walter K. Granger commented that Wallace was “a sincere man living in the clouds,” and that his potential candidacy was being used “by some groups who seek to promote confusion and chaos rather than the public welfare,” Yet Granger admitted that “some fine and sincere people will support him,” especially on issues like the draft and peace. Granger’s views received editorial support from the Salt Lake Tribune, which claimed that many Wallace backers consisted of “misty eyed persons who have a weakness for admiring anyone who proclaims himself a liberal fighting for the masses,” while other more “responsible” liberals were “already beginning to wonder” about the wisdom of such an effort.9

Louise Douglas, Utah Progressive Citizens of America secretary, responded that she was shocked the Tribune would “authorize publication of a statement losing sight of current political . . . life and imputing to Mr. Wallace a political narrative that is alien to his thought and action,” inferring that Wallace had become “a pawn or a dupe of unworthy elements.” Such an argument, Douglas asserted, was a “poisoned arrow borrowed from the propaganda arsenal of the enemies of the people.” She also offered the widely-held view of many liberals on the nature of the Democratic Party at the time, noting that because on several issues, it was just a “carbon copy” of the Republicans, “the third-party movement will bring to the polls the decisive liberal vote and therefore it will help rather than hurt ‘progressive’ candidates regardless of party.” Implicit in this view was a belief that under Truman the Democrats

had abandoned the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt10

The roots of the PCA in Utah stretch back to July 1945, when former Minnesota governor and senator Elmer A. Benson visited Utah on behalf of the National Citizens Political Action Committee. Benson, chair of the NCPAC executive council, was accompanied on the two-day visit by vice chair C. B. “Beanie” Baldwin—a close aide to Wallace—and chief field officer Orville E. Olson. Their focus was building support within Utah labor for the Democratic Party generally, and Truman specifically. After meeting with Utah governor Herbert B. Maw and Utah Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) president Clarence Palmer, the group attended a banquet with a large group of Democratic Party and labor officials, at which Benson lauded Utah’s congressional delegation, telling the press he was seeking to gain an understanding of Utah’s “reconversion problems and postwar plans.” Benson focused on building support within Utah labor for the Democratic Party generally and Truman specifically. A month later, Baldwin suggested to Palmer that they were “very anxious to have a State Citizens PAC formed in Utah as soon as possible” to strengthen labor and progressive forces in the state. Baldwin believed “from a public relations standpoint it will be better to have this committee sponsored by other than the CIO leadership,” while recognizing that labor would “participate actively” in the effort.11

Another important step involved the Utah Independent Citizens Committee (UICC), formed in 1946 and chaired by Salt Lake City lawyer Gordon Hoxsie. The UICC favored national “legislation forbidding discrimination against minority groups, guaranteeing labor’s right to bargain collectively, and developing atomic energy under the direction of the United Nations.” On the state level, it advocated for rent control and repealing Utah’s sales tax. Over the next few months UICC sponsored several public forums and endorsed a number of candidates. Ultimately, they allied with the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and became the nucleus for a Utah PCA chapter, which was organized in April 1947, with M. I. Thompson as temporary chair.12 Utah PCA sought to “fight inflation,

discriminatory labor practices, the impoverishment of the farm, and for a lasting peace throughout the world.” Within a few days, Utah PCA made plans for Wallace to speak in Utah in May under their auspices, but ultimately the speech was cancelled.13 Wallace did visit Utah in May 1947, when he appeared at a brief stopover at the Salt Lake City airport. Wallace told reporters he feared the world was being divided into hostile camps by Truman’s policies. He also addressed his political future, noting he had found “many evidences of growing liberalism” among the large audiences that he had encountered on his speaking tour in California and the Pacific Northwest. When asked if there would be a third party in 1948, he replied though “impossible to answer,” he believed if “the Democratic party clearly becomes a war party” then “a third . liberal party next year” was likely. That same day, the Salt Lake Tribune editorialized that if Wallace became “the nominee of a third party,” it would be supported by “the undemocratic element” in the United States and the Soviets.14

In July George S. Ballif, judge of Utah’s Fourth Judicial District, became chair of the Utah PCA chapter. Other officers were F. E. Shippe, vice chair; M. I. Thompson, treasurer; and, Louise Douglas, secretary. They urged Utahns to join PCA because it was “a force resisting fascist tendencies, [and] the drift toward war and in to depression.” Later, after Ballif stepped down, Dr. James E. P.Toman, assistant professor of physiology at the University of Utah, assumed the post. In January 1948, Utah’s PCA endorsed Wallace and selected Betty Nickerson to attend the national PCA conference in Chicago that month. Nickerson was among some five hundred delegates from twenty-six states to participate and hear from Wallace. At the conclusion PCA voted to join with other “like-minded groups” to support Wallace, which allowed state PCA affiliates to join Wallace for President groups.15

From the beginning Wallace and his new party were widely accused of being influenced—even controlled—by Communists, primarily because the party endorsed him and did not field its own ticket. On December 30, 1947, the Deseret News ran a cartoon titled “The Papers Are Full of What Happens to People Who Pick Up

Hitchhikers.” It pictured a buck-toothed Wallace in a jalopy labeled “Henry’s Third Party” saying, “Sure! Hop in!” to a long-haired figure resembling a wolf, signifying American Communists. Similar images and sentiments would mark the Utah press in subsequent months.16

Despite these caricatures, both Wallace and Taylor were well known in Utah and occasionally visited the state. Utah Democrats had supported Wallace’s winning bid for vice president in 1940 and his losing effort at the 1944 convention.17 While divided between a conservative and a liberal wing, most Utah Democrats fell into the latter. They had been strongly supportive of Roosevelt and remained closely tied to the state’s labor movement. These factors drew them to Wallace, though, increasingly, the charges of Communist influence on him and his candidacy resonated with some.18

Glen Taylor was even better known to Utahns. He had visited the state before his political career as leader of the “Glendora Players,” a traveling theatrical company popular in Ogden and Salt Lake City that included his wife, Dora, and son, Arod (Dora spelled backwards). As the Salt Lake Telegram noted, he was a “colorful Democrat who has successfully roped cows, sung on the radio, and worked sheet metal for a living.”19 After losing Idaho races for US Congress in 1938 and the US Senate in 1940 and 1942, while campaigning in cowboy garb, Taylor, ran a successful Senate run in 1944 that was covered in the Utah press.20 By then he had dropped the western attire for a business suit.

During the 1946 midterm elections, Taylor keynoted the Utah Democratic convention held at Saltair, delivering a “stemwinder” directed against “big business, the ‘reactionary majority’ in congress, the ‘controlled press,’ and demagogues who seek to divide labor, farmers, and small businessmen.’” The Democratic Party, he stated, “must remain true to the liberal ideals” of Roosevelt, because there was a “fundamental difference” in the economic philosophy of the two parties. The Republicans, he said, “pour in at the top on the theory that the crumbs will fall below. The Democratic approach is to support the bottom and this in turn starts the wheels throughout the economic structure.” Taylor concluded with his belief “that the prosperity of the nation is founded on those who work for

wages and the fate of all the little people—laborers, farmers, and business—are tied up in the same bundle.”21

Later that year, Taylor, dubbed “Idaho’s Dynamic Democrat,” appeared at campaign rallies in Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Price. At the Ogden event, broadcast on local radio station KLO, Taylor pushed back on the Republicans’ insistence “that the issue of the day is Americanism vs. Communism” and that everyone who worked for a “square deal” for workers and farmers was a Communist. As he noted, “To hear the Republicans talk everybody in this room tonight is a Communist, and yet we know that we are just good American citizens who insist that the breaks in life should be shared.”22

Some early support existed for Wallace among University of Utah students. Roy E. Tremayne, a liberal political science senior, wrote in the Utah Daily Chronicle that Wallace’s entry into the race was the “most significant political development of 1947.” Tremayne suggested the formation of a Wallace For President club at the school, declaring that Wallace: has “become the great standard bearer of the FDR brand of liberalism. To cast a vote for Wallace is same as casting a vote for Roosevelt.” Wallace, Tremayne predicted, would keep America “on an even keel.”23

A move to organize Students for Wallace began in January, part of similar efforts in other states and colleges.24 The organizers, including the temporary chair of Students for Wallace, Adele Ernstrom, were members of the campus Young PCA (YPCA) chapter. Writing in the Daily Utah Chronicle, Don Wahlquist reported that it had been asserted that the “use of the name PCA would not be associated with the movement to support Wallace,” because PCA had been labeled in some press reports as a “Communist-supported organization.” The next day, Ernstrom refuted the account, noting that “YPCA members . . . did not feel there was a stigma to PCA sponsorship.” While the issue of Communist influence was troubling to some, many on the left saw it as red-baiting. As Ernstrom reflected “the Communists supported the New Deal with which Wallace was of course associated. I think there was an understanding that red-baiting was an attack on what the New Deal had stood for. In other words, the

Wallace candidacy represented a tradition that was coming under attack.”25

Students for Wallace became a formal organization at a February meeting held off campus at the Campus Christian Center. The group encouraged students to affiliate saying, “If you don’t want to be an apple seller with a Ph.D. / If you don’t want to be a veteran of World War III,” you should be for Wallace.26 Led by Tremayne, Ernstrom, Leone Paradise, Bettye Berliner, and Jean Langdorf, the group filed the necessary paperwork with the school’s Committee on Student Organizations. A copy of the organization’s constitution, by-laws, and proposed officers was required, as was a list of affiliated students. The goals of Students for Wallace were twofold: to “promote discussion and encourage participation in political activity among students,” while establishing “a third party in Utah for supporting Henry Wallace,” whose policies “represent the clearest approach to world peace and security.” Of the nineteen students endorsing the document,

eleven were female. Also included were five African Americans and two Asian Americans— from Ogden High School and West High School in Salt Lake City, respectively—reflecting the patterns of ethnicity in northern Utah. While the preponderance of the members were native Utahns, a large number were from outside the state. The proposed faculty adviser was Dr. James E. P. Toman.27

Students for Wallace became a central part of the Utah Wallace effort. Ernstrom, a New Yorker with Utah roots, recalls that the group was a mixture of native Utahns and outsiders, Mormons and non-Mormons. Despite political differences within the university student body, she does not recall “division or hostility from other students.”28 Notwithstanding occasional

Bettye Gillespie, 1968. As a student in 1948, then Bettye Berliner of Ogden was instrumental in organizing Students for Wallace, serving as the group’s treasurer. She and Adele Ernstrom were roommates in Carlson Hall, the university’s women’s dormitory. Courtesy Weber State University, Stewart Library, StandardExaminer Collection

Adele Ernstrom played a key role in organizing both Students for Wallace and Young Progressives, and was an important voice throughout the campaign. Courtesy Adele Ernstrom

condescension from some older party officials, Ernstrom believes that the state party took Students for Wallace seriously.29 Similarly, Martin Tolchin, also a New Yorker, recalled that after arriving at the University of Utah, he “soon discovered a group of left-wing easterners” who all supported Wallace because “President Truman seemed too establishment for us, and Thomas Dewey, the Republican was out of the question.”30 Not surprisingly, students attracted to Wallace were also committed to a wide range of causes, including social welfare, religious freedom, and world understanding, both on campus and in the community.

While this was happening, however, the university administration was focused—with the cloud of communism hanging over their heads and a paternalistic sensibility guiding their actions—on the larger issue of student political activity itself. On January 26, Dean of Students

George A. Pierson wrote to President A. Ray Olpin that in “the past few weeks” members of the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) had been approached about the possibility of organizing campus political clubs. While these had included Republicans and Democrats, he felt sure that the “‘Wallace for President’ club is also planning to apply.” Because of the “many problems” associated with political organizations, Pierson said he would “appreciate receiving from the Dean’s Council clarification of University policy in this regard.”31

Clarification came the next day when Sydney Angleman, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, informed Olpin that he had “moved that it is in the interest of society that its educated citizens actively engage in politics, but that the university student can learn of politics more profitably and influence his government more surely if he associates himself with the regular political organizations.” Because there was a “real opportunity” to do this in Salt Lake City, the Dean’s Council encouraged students to engage in “regular party membership” as the council did not “recognize campus organization of any political party.” In February, the Dean’s Council also recommended that any partisan political activity should proceed under the auspices of the Institute of Government, which, according to its director G. Homer Durham, was modeled “somewhat after

the Oxford Union.” Durham called on Cal Nelson of the Young Democrats, Richard Cottam of the Young Republicans, and Tremayne to serve as a temporary committee, to assist him. The Dean’s Council reasserted their commitment in their March 4 meeting, in part to “relieve some of the criticism now being aimed at the University” over its policy. At the same time, all three groups again unsuccessfully petitioned the SAC “to be recognized as official campus organizations.”32

As might be expected, the leaders of the three groups did not necessarily concur with the views of the Dean’s Council. At an early March presidential open house, Tremayne “engaged [Olpin] in a warm conversation on the advisability of admitting national political figures on campus,” but Olpin said that since the open house was primarily social, “problems as this should be taken up through proper channels.”33 Tremayne and the others took him at his word. In a document to the SAC, they sought “reconsideration of the present policy” through “official recognition as University organizations. The group leaders said it was their “common objective” to promote “discussion of and . . . participation in political activity.” They argued that encouraging students to work through off-campus groups did not take into account the “unique problems” facing students or offer them a real voice in “political machines,” since they would not have the support and guidance of the university community.34 Pierson said the SAC had considered this request but instead voted to reinforce that the three groups work jointly with the Institute of Government and to encourage the Dean’s Council to reaffirm its — earlier decision on student political organizations. Moreover, SAC favored establishing a “joint action political club . designed to foster political unity” campus wide. Ultimately, the administration agreed to allow the three groups to operate on campus under the guidance of the Institute for Politics. The groups operated openly, but there was still the issue of inviting political candidates to campus.

Over the next few weeks, Students for Wallace conducted a campus poll of student attitudes, distributed handbills, arranged joint meetings with other campus political groups, and sponsored regional Wallace supporters like Verda

Barnes of Idaho Falls.35 Eventually, the officers included Tremayne as chair, Leone Paradise as vice chair, Dorothy E. Ellis as secretary, and Bettye Berliner as treasurer.36 Representatives at the University of Utah were especially active, publishing a newsletter, selecting a delegate to attend the national Students for Wallace convention in Chicago, and organizing forums. Paradise said their goal was to support Wallace, while also encouraging “political interest, discussion and activity” at the university.37 In March, for example, they sponsored a debate on universal military training as part of similar rallies throughout the country.38

Later they held a statewide Utah Students for Wallace convention, which featured remarks from IMMSWU’s national president Reed Robinson and a keynote address from Betty Nickerson of Utah PCA.39 Martin Tolchin argued that because of their various outreach activities, the organization was the “backbone” of progressive forces at the university, much like “Henry Wallace is the leader of American progressive forces.” As historian Thomas W. Devine argues, the Wallace campaign “demonstrated a special appeal to young people,” and campuses “provided fertile ground for recruiting supporters and often served as the launching pad for establishing new local Wallace organizations.”40 However, not every college campus—nationally or in Utah—provided “fertile ground” for Wallace. For example, students attempted to organize a “Youth for Wallace and Taylor” group at Weber College, but they had little success.41

At a January 27 public meeting, jointly sponsored by Utah PCA and Students for Wallace, attracting some twenty-five students, plans were made to place Wallace on the Utah ballot.42 About that same time, a Utah Wallace for President Committee emerged, led by Salt Lake City attorney Gordon Hoxsie. From that point forward, Hoxsie was probably the best- known representative for Wallace in the state. The next month, a petition campaign for ballot access, launched at a public meeting featuring Dr. James E. P. Toman43 and Albert Skinner, IMMSWU’s local political action director, had gathered over fifteen hundred signatures within only a few days.44 PCA secretary Louise Douglas stated that the goal was to reach two thousand signatures, and that

the “tremendous” request for petitions from around the state “makes us feel encouraged.” Douglas, said their goal for completing the petition drive was April 15.45 Utah Progressives received further support when the executive board of the regional IUMMSW, based on widespread support among its members, endorsed Wallace’s candidacy. The board said Wallace had inherited the “mantle” of Franklin Roosevelt, noting that they felt a “strong allegiance to this humble champion of America’s common man.”46 Despite this endorsement, organized labor in Utah solidly supported Truman and the Democrats.

On the other side of the political spectrum, some saw the new party as simply a tool of the Soviet Union. An unsigned column in the Milford News suggested that a list of Wallace activists “be preserved . in case at some time in the future, when the citizenry may have forgotten the crowd these folks ran with in 1948, they should be candidates under some other banner.” Because Wallace supporters “tie themselves to . the most prominent of America’s communist minds is . . . all the reason that’s needed to black list them from becoming leeches on the public purse.” The author concluded that Wallace was “making his strongest bid for support from radicals, negroes and the guy who never tries to think for himself.”47

Progressive activity increased in May when Lee Pressman, former general counsel for the IUMMSW, spoke at the University of Utah under the auspices of Students for Wallace.48 That evening he addressed three hundred people at a public meeting, telling his listeners that large corporations and the military, working with Republicans and Democrats, were diverting attention from the real issues of the day by scaring people with the possibility of war with the Soviet Union. The only way to oppose this “War Hysteria,” Pressman argued, was to support Wallace and the new party. Pressman praised Wallace and Taylor for their “forthright support for civil rights for all people.”49 Other speakers included Gordon Hoxsie, while “University of Utah coed members of the Students for Wallace club assisted in gathering contributions.”50

Two weeks later, Utah Progressives felt assured of ballot status for Wallace when petitions

bearing 1688 signatures, some three times the necessary five hundred, were presented to the Secretary of State.51 The majority came from Salt Lake County, and one fourth from the coal mining areas of Carbon County. Gordon Hoxsie led a delegation to the capitol to file them that included Arvilla Greatorex, Reverend O. David Slacum of Salt Lake City’s Trinity AME Church, James E. P. Toman, and June Isenberg representing Utah PCA. Hoxsie noted that “a large percentage of the signers were members of organized labor” representing the railroad brotherhoods and IUMMSW, and indicated that a founding convention would be held in June.52

On May 28, the Wallace effort got a shot in the arm with a two-day visit from Glen Taylor. He was met at the airport by Hoxsie and party officials, attended a hurried press conference, then addressed a group of two hundred University of Utah students at an event organized by Students for Wallace.53 Speaking from the top of a car in front of the Campus Christian Center, because the meeting could not be held on campus, Taylor told the crowd that he opposed the Marshall Plan, believing it constituted a scheme whereby big business was attempting to control Europe.54 Tribune political reporter O. N. Malmquist noted that “the senator’s favorite target . . . was ‘the corporate controlled press,’ which he accused of exaggerating conflicts between this country and Russia and ‘playing down’ areas of agreement.” Taylor told students that the “first aim” of the Wallace–Taylor ticket and the new party was peace. He jokingly congratulated the students on their courage in attending the rally, because he understood that “lists” were “being kept for future use.” The remark was “greeted by a mixture of applause and derisive shouts.” Appropriately, students at the rally circulated a petition calling for the removal of a campus ban on political speeches, which they said denied them “an integral part of our academic development, and are depriving us of one of our most cherished constitutional rights.” The petition, addressed to university president Olpin, had already been signed by “about 1000 students including Republicans, Democrats and third party supporters.”55 Prior to Taylor’s arrival, the Salt Lake City Commission had denied the organizers “permission to publicize the meeting by using a sound truck on downtown streets.”56

Later that same day, Taylor appeared at Ogden’s Lester Park, speaking before a crowd of two hundred, many of whom were Weber College students. Also on hand were Marie Berlin, chair of the Ogden Wallace Committee, and vice chair Bill Dawson. In remarks “both booed and cheered,” Taylor continued his assault upon big business and the military, which he said not only controlled the economy but the media as well, accusing both the Republican and Democratic parties of being corrupt.57 From Ogden, Taylor attended an evening event at Helper, in Utah’s coal country.58 An ad in the Helper Journal urged residents to “hear all sides” in the campaign “before you make up your mind.”59

Taylor capped his visit with a Saturday evening rally at the Utah State Fairgrounds. Over 750 people attended, paying the $1 admission charge, which, along with additional pledges, brought the total raised to some $850. Taylor said he was confident that “an honorable peace can be had with Russia without appeasement,” and after that was accomplished, “we would take some of the billions now being spent on armaments,” and apply the money to domestic needs like highways, housing, reclamation projects, and old age pensions. He also said support for the ticket in Utah came from the same groups as it did nationally—a broad base of college students, rank-and-file unionists, and small business leaders.60

At all of his meetings Taylor denied accusations that the new party was controlled by Communists. The way to combat Communism, he said, was “by improving the economic condition of the people.” In his view, “The pink ones will vote the Wallace ticket, because they believe in democratic procedures and abundance. The real Red Communists will vote Republican, because they want revolution. And they believe the best way to promote revolution is to vote for . . . reaction.”61 Taylor also defended the decision for an independent ticket on the grounds that the Democrats would not win even if “Henry Wallace and I returned to the Democratic fold. We just couldn’t take our following back with us.” He indicated that the party would continue to support liberal Democrats “even though their attitude to the Wallace ticket is cold.” Taylor further stated that he did not expect these Democrat “to eulogize us,” but

“neither do we expect them to denounce us. If they do so, it is at their own risk.”62

A founding convention attended by a hundred “enthusiastic” delegates on July 11 at Syrian Hall,63 officially disbanded the Utah Wallace for President Committee and replaced it with the Utah Progressive Party. Reflecting party positions, the hall was decorated with signs reading: “Peace Not War”; “Schools Not Draft”; “Jim Crow Must Go”; and “Utah Favors 18 Voting Age.” The Convention members drafted a state platform, and chose delegates to the national Progressive convention to be held in Philadelphia.64 The gathering also elected Gordon Hoxsie, chair; Jessie Greenhalgh, vice chair; Louise Douglas, secretary; Reverend O. David Slacum, treasurer; and Frank Porter and Stella Jorgensen, national committeeman and woman, respectively. The delegates sung campaign songs and adopted as the party symbol

a flaming torch representing the liberty of the American people. Above the torch were the words “Peace, Abundance, Security” with a backdrop of mountain peaks, suggesting the geography of northern Utah.65

Keynoting the convention was former Washington representative Hugh DeLacy, labeled in the local press as the “fiery young politician who has abandoned his own political aspirations” to work for the Wallace–Taylor ticket.66 DeLacy told the delegates that the two old parties had become one, with the same stance on all major questions. He further declared that leaders of both parties had jointly betrayed the promise of the “just and lasting peace” existing when Roosevelt was at the helm. In his view, “The giant Wall Street-owned corporations are calling the tune to which both old parties are dancing.” DeLacy said the new party sought “secure housing, adequate pensions

Vice Presidential candidate Sen. Glen Taylor confers at a rally in Ogden. Next to him is Gordon Hoxsie, state chair, and Marie Berlin and Bill Dawson, Weber County Progressive party leaders. Courtesy Weber State University, Stewart Library, Standard-Examiner Collection.

of $100 per month, prepaid medical insurance, a plan for full civil liberties for all of our people . and peace.” He also accused the Truman Administration of seeking to establish “puppet governments solely dependent on the United States.”67

Ten days later, several Utah Progressives, including Hoxsie, Arvilla Greatorex, George Greatorex, D. H. Oliver, Jean Langdorf, and Jesse Greenhalgh, attended the national Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia. At this meeting, the ranks of Gideon’s Army officially nominated the Wallace–Taylor ticket and ratified a platform that was one of the most far-reaching in US political history. Among other things, it called for “peaceful, hopeful negotiation” with the Soviet Union, repeal of the draft, and support for the United Nations. In domestic policy it called for an end to discrimination in all forms against all people, national health insurance, equal pay for equal work, support for the Equal Rights Amendment, making election day a national holiday, and a national pension of $100 per month to anyone over age sixty, based on a right and “not on a pauperizing need basis.”68 Utahns played key roles at the convention, as George Greatorex served on the platform committee and Hoxsie delivered the official “thank you” speech to the Pennsylvania delegation and the people of Philadelphia. Langdorf also attended the founding meeting of Young Progressives of America.69

Once the national convention was over, Utah Progressives turned to building the party throughout the state. In July Wallace–Taylor supporters in Carbon County sponsored a rally in Helper featuring Kenneth Spencer, an African American baritone then appearing in a production of Showboat at the University of Utah, an ardent supporter of the former vice president. The meeting—which attracted over one hundred people—was chaired by national committeeman Frank Porter who said that the “old parties are leading us to war and depression by breaking our unions, taking away our civil rights, and placing military leaders or Wall Street bankers in all places of authority in the government.” Betty Nickerson also spoke, stating that the party “planned to conduct a doorto-door fight to improve the living conditions of the people of the state.”70 In a county with a

miniscule black population and a complicated history on race, it was a bold move.

Progressive activity increased in August, as plans were made for a state nominating convention to be held on August 22. In preparation, thirty women attended the organizing meeting of Utah Women for Wallace. Officers of the group included Arvilla Greatorex, chair; Anna Van Ausdahl, recording secretary; and Edna Squires, treasurer.71 Additionally, several campaign meetings were held in Salt Lake and Tooele counties focused on attracting labor support. Two members of the Progressive Party national staff—Stanley Beyer and Fred Miller—drove a sound truck through both counties advertising meetings in Bingham, Magna, Garfield, Tooele, and Pioneer Park in Salt Lake City. At the latter, the failure of the lights at the outdoor park stage forced organizers to rely on automobile headlights to allow Hoxsie, Jean Langdorf of Students for Wallace, and Arvilla Greatorex to address the crowd of seventy-five.72

Utah Progressives found that it was easier to call a convention than find a place to hold one. Initially they had secured Salt Lake City’s American Legion Hall as a venue. One day prior to the opening of the convention, however, the Legion’s executive committee denied use of the hall for political purposes, stating that the previous agreement had been a misunderstanding.73 The switch angered party chair Gordon Hoxsie, who characterized the last-minute action as a “deliberate and apparently organized attempt to stifle political freedom and free speech.” Hoxsie noted that the Progressive party is “not the kind of movement that can be halted by any one group of people opposed to political freedom.” Verda Barnes, western field director of the party, said the action would only serve to “increase public awareness of the needs for revitalizing American democracy,” which she called “precisely the aim of the Progressive party.” The party had no choice but to postpone the convention for a week.74

Utah Progressives were active that week. On August 21, a group of two dozen supporters, led by Hoxsie, protested in front of the American Legion Hall. Joseph Curtis, a teacher at West High school, carried a sign reading: “Wallace, Taylor and the Progressive Party are as

American as the Legion,” and the protestors chanted, “one, two, three, four, we don’t want another war.” Verda Barnes told reporters, “We are going to hold a convention if we have to do it in the street or in a field.”75 Hoxsie also commented that the party was considering suing the Legion post “for the costs of distributed literature and the expenses of out of town delegates.” He also noted they had been denied the use of Syrian Hall—the location of their founding meeting and other events— “because of a new policy forbidding political gatherings in the building.”76

After witnessing these events, Judge J. Allan Crockett offered his court room in the Salt Lake City and County Building if the Progressives failed to find another location for the convention. Crockett, who said he was not a party member nor “affiliated with it in any way,” explained: “It is the duty of the courts to vouchsafe to all citizens the fights of free speech and assembly as guaranteed by the Constitution. While we might disagree with the objective of the Progressive party, we must freely accord to our political opponents the right to disagree with us.”77 Other options included public parks or meeting rooms in hotels, but according to Hoxsie, the latter were “known to have racial prejudices . . . not compatible with our tenets.” Ultimately, the party accepted Crockett’s offer and held the state nominating convention in his courtroom on August 29, but the delay was clearly a major blow to Progressive momentum.78

The Salt Lake Tribune editorialized on the wisdom of Crockett’s decision. He had not only offered shelter to “a wandering group of citizens who are following an economic will of the wisp,” but had also given “them a practical demonstration of irreconcilable differences between communism and democracy.” Such actions, the Tribune suggested, would not have been accorded in the Soviet Union—a fact that American Communists and their fellow travelers “supporting the Wallace-Taylor ticket” ought to know. The paper also commented that under “ordinary condition it is best to allow all disappointed office seekers or spite mongers to assemble, to orate, and to criticize freely,” but there should be a certain amount of restraint when “international relations are strained and potential enemies are seizing upon every

epithet or accusation to inflame their own followers” and delude others.79

In response, Audrey Thompson called the editorial a “direct attack against free speech in America.” Thompson argued, the delegates that met in Crockett’s court were “not a group of revolutionists.” Indeed, she wrote, the editorial also missed the main point. “The Progressive party is not the Communist party . but a group desiring peace and understanding with the Soviet Union, rather than a senseless, totally unnecessary war which can only end in chaos and the total extinction of life on this earth.”80 Progressive Party vice chair Jessie Greenhalgh also responded, suggesting that what the Tribune editorial did was to “drag out the ‘red bogey man’ hysteria as a cover for your distortion and misrepresentation of the facts.” Rather than trust the people, she asserted, it was clear that the paper “no longer trusts the democratic process, the honest clash of ideas.” The outcome of these “smear tactics,” she concluded, “can lead only to complete thought control and to a police state, if followed to its logical conclusion.”81

The convention deliberations began on Saturday morning in Crockett’s courtroom. The three dozen delegates turned their attention to several Utah issues, including repealing the state’s lien law; imposing a severance tax on “raw materials taken out of the state”; sponsoring a state civil rights bill to promote fair employment standards, ban racial discrimination, and guarantee “equality of opportunity”; repealing the state’s sales tax; and lowering the voting age to eighteen. On national issues Utah Progressives advocated repeal of the draft, expanded old-age pensions, and statehood for Alaska and Hawaii. In addition, the Saturday session focused on party organization on a county-by-county basis and on creating a geographically balanced state central committee.82 Similarly, Hoxsie proclaimed that “the Progressive Party is here to stay in this state, in 1948, 1950, and 1952.”83

Keynoting the convention was Herman Clott, national political action director of IUMMSW, who told the delegates that Wallace was winning a “moral victory” by speaking out on the crucial issues of the day. Furthermore, Clott declared, “despite the autocrats of the press,”

the Progressive Party was beginning to catch on with the American people because it had a “program that will return the country to the heritage given it by FDR.” He stated that he believed the new party was “going to be a ‘real’ political force in America” and that “red-baiting and hysteria” would meet with little success. Clott referred to Utah Democratic Senator Elbert D. Thomas as one of the few members of Congress who could be counted on to “further the cause of our late great president.”84 At the Sunday session, the party chose several members of the central committee to serve alongside those who had been elected in June, along with presidential electors.85 Additionally, a number of state candidates were chosen including T. Earl Foote and George T. Harrison from Utah County and James E. Peterson and Thomas Mannion from Salt Lake County for the House. Three individuals were selected to run for the state senate—Joseph Curtis, George Greatorex, and Rev. O. David Slacum.86

The Young Progressives of Utah was created at a convention held on September 4, 1948, by “53 delegates from throughout the state,” who met to declare their support “for the Progressive party platform in every respect.” Jean Langdorf chaired the meeting, and the group chose officers including Ted Clark, chair; Madge Henrie, vice chair; Natalie Nathanial, secretary; and, Toshi Kanegae, treasurer. They selected Fred Geter and Georgina Krissman, a BYU student from Helper, to serve as liaison to the state Progressive Party campaign committee, and Henrie and Krissman to “act as representatives to the Progressive national board meeting in New York City in late September.” Reflecting their experiences of the previous spring, they called for supporting academic freedom and adding a “youth representative on the University of Utah Board of Regents.” Clark told the press that he was “pleased” with the meeting’s turnout, projected that membership would “expand rapidly,” and expected the organization to “work in close conjunction with the progressive party’s campaign committee.”87 The next month they sponsored an informal debate for and against a Wallace vote, featuring James E. P. Toman in favor and Obert C. Tanner in opposition.88

Between the nominating convention and the election, Utah Progressives waged a vigorous

campaign, but one that was largely ignored. Wallace never appeared in the state.89 The party was hindered by a lack of interest from potential supporters, and from a lack of funds. Gordon Hoxsie recalled that the party was “for all intents and purposes completely broke. We couldn’t count on much help from the national headquarters because they were in bad financial shape themselves. Because of the lack of money, we were unable to wage the kind of campaign a new party must wage if it intends to be a lasting party.”90

Another hindrance was the open hostility of the Utah press, not only to Wallace and Taylor, but to the Progressive Party as well. Utah papers devoted much space to anti-Wallace articles and editorials. Their main thrust was two–fold: paint Wallace as unrealistically idealistic and label his campaign and party as Communist dominated. One particularly effective way was through the use of unflattering and stereotypical cartoons, where he would be caricatured as an unkempt “country bumpkin” with unruly hair, a vacant look on his face, and exaggerated buckteeth. The cartoons gave the impression that Wallace was not intellectually qualified to be president. Even more detrimental were suggestions that he was a tool of the Soviet Union. Such a cartoon by national editorial cartoonist Reg Manning appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune on July 27, showing a befuddled Wallace in front of a party table asking plaintively, “I wonder why they don’t flock to my Party?” Beside him on the floor is a sign advertising the Wallace “1/3 party”—fun and games, noisemakers and rose-colored glasses. Behind Wallace stands a gigantic bear with a hammer and sickle armband, signifying that people stayed away because Wallace and the Progressive were dupes of the Russians. In an unflattering cartoon published in the Deseret News on October 11, Wallace is standing on a soapbox emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, while banners proclaiming “disillusioned Liberals and Progressives, and most everybody else” are in the distance. Wallace comments to a sinister-looking figure beside him: “Nobody Even Throws Eggs and Tomatoes at Me Anymore.” It was an illusion to rowdy crowds in the South who had pelted the Progressive nominee with those items when he spoke at integrated rallies. A little later in the month, the

paper showed a pipe-smoking Stalin, contentedly listening to a “Soviet loud speaker system” blaring, “We Want Wallace.” Surrounding a microphone was the source of the chant, a group waving a hammer and sickle labeled as “Am. Communists and featherheads.”91

Despite these unflattering depictions, Wallace supporters in Utah persisted. Ballot status was gained, and Wallace had a radio spot every Monday night that was picked up by several Utah stations. In September, the party campaign committee met jointly with representatives from the Young Progressives and PCA to map out the fall campaign. It was decided at this gathering that Glen Taylor would return to Utah in late October.92 Wallace for President clubs were established in a number of places, especially where labor was strong. The party continued to hold rallies and sponsor ads in local newspapers.93 Additionally, Students for Wallace continued their campus activities by occasionally working jointly with other student political groups.94 Often they combined music and entertainment with politics, a pattern that replicated the national Progressive approach.95

At the same time, Progressive efforts to distance themselves from the communist label were not helped when Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came to Utah in late September. An ad in the Salt Lake Telegram, sponsored by the local Communist Party, promised that Flynn “Will answer the $64 Question,” though it did not spell out what that question was. Flynn, a well-known member of the Communist Party’s national committee, said she wanted to “clear the maze of hysteria” created by Republicans and Democrats in the campaign. Speaking to some three dozen individuals in Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park, Flynn, the Salt Lake Tribune reported, “lauded Progressive party candidates as representative of the labor movement in America” and discussed the many ways Communists had contributed to American life.96 The speaker, who the Salt Lake Telegram described as a “plump, grandmotherly and graying woman” and as the lone female on the party’s national committee, denied that the Communist Party in the United States was controlled by Moscow.97

As the campaign drew to a close, the few published local polls showed the Wallace–Taylor ticket with around one percent of the

total vote.98 The only areas of any Progressive strength were those with a strong labor constituency, but even in those districts Wallace was not polling a substantial vote.99 Still, the Progressives continued to work for votes, sponsoring a series of five-minute radio spots titled “Henry A. Wallace Answers Your Questions,” which was directed at Utahns “tired of sword-rattling politicians” and promised a program for “peace, abundance and security” amidst “a fresh breeze blowing ‘cross the land.”100 Other spots featuring Wallace, Taylor, and Gordon Hoxsie were broadcast on stations in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Helper.101 Reverend O. David Slacum contributed to the Salt Lake Tribune’s “Battle Corner,” which also included selections for Dewey and Truman by the Republican and Democratic state chairs, respectively. Slacum said Truman had “attempted to hide his true colors behind a liberal smoke screen” and had “defiled the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt by claiming what he has done was done in the Roosevelt tradition.” He lauded Wallace and Taylor for their support of peace, veterans’ benefits, fair and low-cost housing, increased employment, and unalterable opposition to all forms of discrimination, pledging to “fight it in all of its vicious forms,” even if “a man or woman is colored, or is a Jew, a Mormon, or a Catholic.” Slacum called on Utah voters to support the Wallace–Taylor ticket because the Progressive

This campaign button reinforces the view of many Progressives that Wallace was the rightful heir to FDR and the New Deal. Author’s collection.

Party had a “deep and abiding faith in America, its people and its democratic institutions, [and] we are . determined that the people shall have a choice in 1948. The Progressive Party program and candidates furnish for the first time in many years a real choice for Utah voters: The choice of a party built on deeds not words.”102

On October 30 Glen Taylor again visited Utah to bring the campaign to a close. The Ogden Standard Examiner said that the “dapper Senator” claimed Truman was “muttering liberal words these days written by a bunch of good, smart speech makers. Why the President is getting so liberal in his talks I’d vote for him myself, that is if I believed him which I don’t.”103 That evening Taylor delivered a major address to a large and enthusiastic crowd of over six hundred at the South High School auditorium. Described by the Salt Lake Tribune as a “showman from beginning to end,” the vice presidential candidate stated that “with the control of our government in the hands of the bipartisan Wall Street, military group, I can see no basis for an agreement nor any end to the cold war. Although I don’t want to believe it, these men must be planning to engulf us in a war. When orders are placed for war materiel to become effective ‘when war starts.’” He told his audience to assume that the aim was to conquer the world militarily and dominate it economically. Taylor also specifically criticized Kennecott Copper Corporation, telling his listeners that the “unfair conditions” that existed in the company’s operations needed to be corrected. “Some of the rich vast resources of the state of Utah should stay inside the state instead of being syphoned off to Wall Street and the House of Morgan through Kennecott,” he said. In closing, Taylor said that the straw votes and polls did not reflect the true strength of the Progressive cause, since many party supporters were afraid “to speak for fear of the ‘red smear’ they will get.” The Idaho senator promised that the Progressive Party was “definitely here to stay.”104

Taylor also apologized to the crowd for “taking up collections at meetings, saying that “such a method of financing the campaign is inevitable if the party’s honesty is to be maintained.”

Additionally, Al Skinner of IUMMSW introduced several local progressive candidates who

promised to fight the Utah welfare law and support a “fair employment practices act that will make civil rights a permanent part of the Utah way of life.”105

Despite the Progressives’ high hopes and hard work, on Tuesday, November 2, Harry Truman defeated Thomas Dewey by three million popular votes, though he received slightly less than half of the total votes cast. Far behind was Henry Wallace with 2 percent, trailing segregationist Strom Thurmond. The majority of the Utah vote went to Truman—149,151 (54 percent) to Thomas Dewey’s 124,402 (45 percent). Henry Wallace earned 2,679 votes, resulting in approximately the 1 percent that had been predicted, but half of the 2 percent Wallace polled nationally.106 Four Utah counties provided more than 80 percent of the Progressive vote: Salt Lake, where Wallace received 1453 votes, along with Weber, Utah, and Carbon, with 789 between them. All seven Progressive candidates for state Senate and House ran a distant third in their races. Progressive leaders put the best face on the results that they could. They “expressed gratification” at the success of Walter K. Granger and Reva Beck Bosone in their congressional victories, as well as for “the many other progressive candidates for judicial and legislative offices.” State chairman Gordon Hoxsie issued a press release appealing for support and emphasizing that the Progressive Party in Utah would “continue its fight for vital issues. The Progressive party is founded on fundamental issues that will continue to exist regardless of the decisions of the election.”107 Arvilla Greatorex, the Progressive Party state secretary, released a statement noting: “We are firmly convinced that the campaign carried on by the Progressive party around the vital issues of peace, housing, high prices, repeal of the Taft-Hartley law and civil rights had a profound effect on the nation.” Greatorex also indicated that when Truman began to campaign on these issues and “finally realized that the people wanted a return to the Roosevelt ideas and policies . . . the complexion of the campaign changed.”108 At the same time, Dick Layman, a Young Progressive, argued that with Wallace’s defeat “our last chance for peace has disappeared as the Progressive party saw its predicted strength dissipated in a cloud of electoral smoke.”109

Reflective of Layman’s views, many Utah Progressives were disappointed over the election results. At the same time, several continued to stay active over the next year. And while some party leaders, notably Gordon Hoxsie, seem to have not been involved, others took up the cause. Less than a week after the election, University of Utah Young Progressives chose new officers and made plans for future public programing, holding weekly Friday afternoon panel sessions. Despite his pessimism, Layman was one of those officers, serving as publicity director. Other officers were Martin Tolchin, president; Bruce Peterson, vice president, Adele Ernstrom, secretary-treasurer; and Leon Marker, organizational director. In a joint statement, Ernstrom and Marker, said the group would “intensify its efforts to secure for our people the peace, abundance and security which was the Wallace banner.” They also pledged to “work harder than ever before to secure . . . the basic human liberties which some of our people have been denied. We appeal to all students interested in our goal . to aid in this drive. The time definitely is now.” Tolchin argued that the “conditions that necessitated the birth of the Progressive party continue to exist,” and that while “we do not feel today that the Democratic party is a ‘peoples party,’ . we will exert every effort to compel the President to represent the Progressive program . . . that won him acclaim during the campaign.”110

While operating in a hostile climate, the Wallace supporters attempted to keep active. The Young Progressives sponsored a series of events, including debates on Taft-Hartley, whether the Communist party should be outlawed, and “warmongering in the American press.”111 The Progressive Party also reorganized, electing new officers and participating in rallies supporting rent control. The party was particularly committed to supporting academic freedom at the University of Utah where James E. P. Toman was under attack, and in support of local high school teachers, including Joseph Curtis and founding force Roy Tremayne. Adele Ernstrom wrote that faculty members at the University of Utah “may soon find themselves compelled to a choice of two dubious alternatives—that of reassuring . under oath that their political views are thoroughly acceptable . . . or of losing their jobs.” As she said, with

little publicity, House Bill 288 had been introduced, which required that all state employees had to swear they were not members of the Communist Party and would not advocate “the overthrow of the United States government by force of by any illegal or unconstitutional method.” Such a measure would give the state the right to determine whether an employee was a “loyal American.” Ultimately, despite being favorably reported by the Judiciary Committee, the bill’s enacting clause was stricken.112

That fall, Young Progressives chair Fred Geter, sought to become Salt Lake City’s first African American city commissioner. His platform called for a fair rent committee (“not loaded with big real estate and landlord advisors”), a forty-hour workweek for city employees, and “opposition to religious and racial discrimination,” including the enactment of a city ordinance “prohibiting segregation and discrimination in all public places in the city including theaters and restaurants.”113 Geter who came to Utah from Indiana in 1943, had attended West High School and was active in the local NAACP, also favored constructing a civic auditorium in Salt Lake City, reductions in working hours for fire fighters, increases in relief for the aged, and hot lunches in each city school. To pay for these programs, he advocated that if needed “taxes should be increased of the big industrialists and big real estate operators, not the small home owner.”114 When the votes were counted in the October 25 primary, Geter ran twelfth out of thirteen candidates, garnering 284 votes.115 His defeat effectively signaled the end of the Utah Progressive Party, though there was some Young Progressives activity into 1950.116 By then both Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor had left the party they helped create.

It is clearly not possible to determine who voted for Henry Wallace in Utah, or exactly why they did so. But by examining those most closely affiliated with the Progressive Party— officers, candidates, organizers—we get some sense of who they probably were. Utah Progressives were more diverse and cosmopolitan than the state itself. They were male and female; white, Black, and Asian; old and young, with ages ranging from late sixties to some still in their teens. Among their ranks were parents and children, in-laws, and siblings. They were

single, married, and divorced. The campaign contributed to some of those marriages, divorces, and even a few romances. Some were immigrants or first-generation Americans; others had deeper roots both in Utah and the nation. In a state that was over 98 percent white, the party specifically reached out to African Americans and Asian Americans, attracting several who served as officers in the party and in Students for Wallace and Young Progressives. In terms of religion, Mormons, ex-Mormons, Catholics, Jews, several Unitarians, and others not affiliated with any religious tradition supported the campaign. Most Utah Progressives had roots in the Democratic Party, including some who had held party or elected office. Moreover, most had strong working-class roots or were still working class, and they were closely tied to the trade union movement, especially railroad and mining unions. At the same time, many were white collar workers—lawyers, clerks, accountants, social workers, physicians, nurses, ministers, salespeople, writers, professors, and students. There were veterans ranging from service in the Spanish-American War to World War II.

Some brought to the Wallace movement experiences from the radical and liberal movements of the 1930s. Many believed they were supporting the New Deal ideals of Franklin Roosevelt and extending them into the post-war world. For others, the 1948 campaign represented their first political activity. Were some of them Communists or tied closely to the Communist Party? Clearly, some were. But many more were simply motivated by the issues of peace, abundance, ending discrimination against African Americans, and economic security. Some continued their activity, even proudly proclaiming their support for Wallace and the Progressive Party, while for others the 1948 campaign was their last real political involvement. Many were harassed because of their affiliation with Wallace; some left the state—and in a few cases the country—as a result. Still, many who were involved in the Progressive cause looked back with pride and a sense that they had done what needed to be done. In Martin Tolchin’s view, the Progressives were “good people whose heart was in the right place.”117

More than a half century ago, I interviewed several of the Utah Progressive Party leaders,

all now deceased, who reflected on those times and the obstacles facing their efforts. Vice chair Jessie Greenhalgh blamed the Progressive failure on the biased press, which she said “created an inaccurate and unfavorable image of Henry Wallace.”118 For her part, Edna Squires, one of the leaders of Utah Women for Wallace, ascribed the defeat to the charges of Communist influence and concluded that “the party was red-baited out of existence.”119 The indefatigable party chair, Gordon Hoxsie, agreed. Sitting in his office in South Salt Lake, he told me that he believed the most important reason why the Progressive Party lost so decisively was because people “just did not want to waste their vote on a sure-loser. When it came down to the final showdown in the voting booths, many people who really favored Wallace voted for Truman. They were afraid of Thomas Dewey, and they chose Truman as the lesser of two evils.” Hoxsie argued that “during the last few weeks of the campaign, a shift on the part of Truman facilitated many progressive-leaning voters to ultimately support him. There is no question that the Progressive vote in 1948 was nowhere near the actual number of people who preferred Henry Wallace to either of the major party candidates.”120

In many ways, these assessments are accurate. A combination of the media’s ability to paint Henry Wallace as a crackpot, the incessant red-baiting, and the aversion to casting a “wasted” vote were at the heart of the rejection of the Progressive Party by Utah voters. Still, at the midpoint of the twentieth century, nearly three thousand Utahns looked at the most important issues facing the country—war, economic insecurity, and racial justice—and cast their ballot for Wallace, Taylor, and the Progressive Party. In the face of likely disapproval from some around them, by standing up for what they believed, these Utahns demonstrated that they were willing to challenge prevailing political views. Having lived through a world war, they deeply feared the possibility of American fascism. In that regard, their attitudes and actions provide a valuable statement in a difficult and contentious postwar world. And, if Hoxsie is correct, more Utahns agreed with this view than voted for it. Utah Progressives believed, in Hofstadter’s view, that they were constructing a different world in the shadow of nuclear

war—one committed to peace, economic security, and racial justice. As Adele Ernstrom observes: “It was a brave effort at the beginning of what would be a dark time.”121 More research needs to be done on the Utah left after the Wallace campaign and possible connections between them and later Utah radical impulses. Still, the little-known story of this coalition of Utah liberals, labor, and the left is worth remembering as we seek to comprehend the larger narrative of this state’s political history.

Notes

1. Because of their ties to the union, the fledgling Utah Progressives were able to bring several important national and regional IUMMSW leaders to the state. Moreover, local union members were instrumental in various party functions and meetings, and running for office. Eventually, both groups suffered internal splits over Wallace’s candidacy.

2. PCA had its roots in the CIO’s National Citizens Political Action Committee, and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. It was created in December 1946, when some three hundred delegates from twenty-one states voted to disband several liberal organizations and merge into the new group. Henry Wallace addressed the gathering saying: “At the moment our objective is to make the Democratic party out and out progressive. Roosevelt is gone, but in true Roosevelt spirit we are looking ahead to a better organized progressive movement.” See “Wallace Charts Policies for 1948 in Liberal Merger,” New York Times, December 30, 1946, 1. There is no mention of any Utahns attending the meeting. For the role of the Communist Party, see Thomas W. Devine, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of American Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2013).

3. “Wallace Seeking Presidency on 3rd Party Ticket,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 30, 1947, 1.

4. For the complete text, see Henry A. Wallace, “I Shall Run in 1948,” Vital Speeches, January 1, 1948, 173. During the early days the title “New Party” was frequently used. At the same time, many individuals referred to the group as the “Progressive Party.” I have used that term generically, although it did not become the party’s official name until their national convention that summer.

5. Among those are Curtis D. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, 3 vols. (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1965), a sympathetic and encyclopedic account with many facts and details. See also the more recent and less sympathetic above-mentioned book by Devine. On the 1948 campaign and the four-way race for president, see Zachary Karabell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election (New York: Knopf, 2000); and A. J. Baime, Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America’s Soul (Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2020).

6. Richard Hofstadter, “The Great Depression and American History: A Personal Footnote,” in Richard Hofstadter, ed. Sean Wilentz (New York: Library of

America, 2020), 963. I rely primarily on newspapers and personal recollections, since seemingly no formal collection of Utah party records exists.

7. “Utah Politicos Discourage Wallace Race,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 30, 1947, 1.

8. “Utah Republicans Hail Wallace Announcement,” Salt Lake Telegram, December 30, 1947, 2. According to a story in the Logan Herald Journal, Utah Democrats were “worried about the prospect” of a Wallace candidacy, because the party was “torn from within by a bitter fight for the gubernatorial nomination, and it was felt that the third party movement might spell defeat for incumbents.” The report quoted an unidentified Democrat that “every Democrat opposed by a third party candidate will be defeated. The third party man might not win, but neither will the Democrat. Republicans will sweep the state.” “Utah’s Third Party Gains Strength, Says Official,” Herald-Journal (Logan, UT), March 6, 1948, 4.

9. See “Granger Views Wallace as Peril to GOP,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1948, 9; and “Wallace Being Use by Subversives,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 5, 1948, 8.

10. Douglas proved to be a central figure in the Utah Chapter of PAC.

11. The Utah visit was one of several such stops the three men made in the summer of 1945. See Zena L. Potter, “PAC Head Lauds Churchill Defeat,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 28, 1945, 13; and “PAC Officials Leave S. L.,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 29, 1945, 2b. For more detail, see Baldwin to Palmer, August 23, 1945, in box 28, Baldwin Papers, Ms C0343, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa. By 1947, both Benson and Baldwin were actively supporting Wallace’s independent candidacy.

12. See “Utahns Form Political Unit,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 29, 1946, 24; “Citizens Group Meeting,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 16, 1946, 20; and “Weigh Affiliation,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 17, 1946, 8. Ultimately NCPAC merged into Progressive Citizens of America. See Albert A. Blum and J Douglas Smyth, “National Citizens Political Action Committee: An Example of Liberal-Labor Cooperation,” Societas 1, no. 3 (June 1971): 187–206.

13. “Wallace Will Speak in S. L,” Deseret News, April 25, 1947, 1; and “Date of Wallace Speech in S. L. Still Clouded,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 26, 1947, 2. The latter account confirms that Utah PCA “was known formerly” as the Utah Independent Citizens committee.

14. O. N. Malmquist, Wallace Hits Arms Plea in S. L. Visit,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 28, 1947, 1; and Editorial, “Frustration Makes Reds and Reds Plot Revenge, Salt Lake Tribune, May 28, 1947, 10.

15. “Delegate to Chicago,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 18, 1948, B3; and “Wallace Will Speak to 3D Party Today,” Chicago Tribune, January 17, 1948, 2.

16. “Cartoon,” Deseret News, December 30, 1947, 4.

17. See “Utahns Plan to Switch to Wallace on Democratic Showdown Vote,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 21, 1944, 1; and O. N. Malmquist, “Friends Name O’Mahoney and Thomas,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 22, 1944.

18. In a column in the Utah Daily Chronicle, Jean Bickmore (who as Jean Bickmore White became an important Utah historian) wrote when Wallace was selected for Commerce Secretary: “Some of us would have preferred to see Wallace appointed to a different post. But . we can only take a deep breath of relief at seeing

Wallace back in a position of power and lend our moral support to one of the most progressive men in American politics.” See Jean Bickmore, “Wallace Appointment Precipitates Crisis, Utah Daily Chronicle, January 25, 1945, 2.

19. “Taylor, Other Democrats Win All but One Idaho Contest,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 8, 1944, 6.

20. Darrell J. Greenwell, “Senator-elect Once Actor in Ogden Tent Theatre; Glen Taylor Airs Views,” Ogden Standard Examiner, November 22, 1944, 14. Indeed, Taylor’s previous campaigns were covered in Utah as well.

21. James O. McKinney, “3500 Utah Democrats Meet with High Hope of Victory,” Deseret News, June 8, 1946; and “Vernon Heads Democrats; Sen. Taylor Blasts GOP,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 9, 1946, 1.

22. “Senator G. Taylor of Idaho Talks at Democratic Rally,” Helper Journal, October 10, 1946, 1; “GOP Has No Room for Liberals,” Ogden Standard Examiner, October 11, 1946, 12b.

23. Roy E. Tremayne, “’48 Election,” Utah Daily Chronicle, January 8, 1948, 2; and Tremayne, “Why I Am for Wallace,” Utah Daily Chronicle, February 19, 1948, 2.

24. “Students Grouped to Back Wallace,” Deseret News, February 20, 1948, 3. Student groups were created on some sixty college campuses, and they hoped to bring “to the polls the 1,250,000 students eligible to vote in ’48.”

25. Don Wahlquist, “Student Group Backs Wallace, Utah Daily Chronicle, January 20, 1948, 1; and “PCA Advocates Clarify Stand on Wallace Bid,” Utah Daily Chronicle, January 21, 1948, 1. Adele Ernstrom, email to author, July 28, 2021.

26. “Ad,” Utah Daily Chronicle, January 26, 1948, 3; “Students Release Wallace Plank,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 14, 1948, 12; and “Student-for-Wallace Organization Planned,” Deseret News, February 23, 1948, 8.

27. Copies can be found in box 40, fd. 23, of Albert Ray Olpin Presidential records, Acc. 024, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter Olpin Papers).

28. Interestingly, a Utah Daily Chronicle reporter, Jean Gallacher, said that one of the members of the group told her that they didn’t know of anyone in Students for Wallace who didn’t smoke. The assertion was refuted by Nancy Belle Waterman, the group’s publicity manager, who said “I am sure I can prove that at least one Student for Wallace doesn’t smoke.” See Nancy Belle Waterman, “The Smoke Clears,” Utah Daily Chronicle, March 8, 1948, 2.

29. Adele Ernstrom, email message to author, August 4, 2020. After leaving the University of Utah, Ernstrom went on to a distinguished career as a professor of art history.

30. Martin Tolchin, Politics, Journalism and the Way Things Were: My Life at the Times, the Hill and Politico (New York: Routledge, 2020), 29–30. Tolchin said that when Glen Taylor “came to visit us one day and was so patronizing” that he lost “interest in the campaign.” Tolchin recalls that Taylor came into a meeting and seemed “unappreciative and arrogant, and made light” of what we were doing. Martin Tolchin, phone interview with author, October 5, 2020. Tolchin later became an important political journalist.

31. George L. Pierson to Olpin, January 26, 1948, “Student Organizations Files,” Box 24, fd. 13, Olpin Papers.

32. Olpin Papers, box 24, fds. 13, 33, 34. Pierson may have been alluding to a series of events in 1946–1947 involving the campus chapter of Youth for American Democracy (AYD), and a proposed Paul Robeson concert. The group described itself as an “independent, progressive organization,” dedicated to working with “labor and the common people against the forces of reaction, imperialism and fascism in America.” After coming under fire for communist affiliation at the national level, the local group chose to disband. AYD chair Jo Ann Bleak stated that the group had “suffered from false charges of communist agitation,” and hoped their action would protect “liberal expression and democratic action on the campus hereafter.” A few AYD supporters were later active in Students for Wallace. See also “Utah AYD Asks Charter Cancellation,” Utah Daily Chronicle, February 20, 1947, 1; “‘U’ To Permit Political Meets,” Deseret News, March 12, 1948, 26; and “I.G. Sponsors Student Public Affairs Senate,” Utah Daily Chronicle, March 25, 1948, 3.

33. “Olpin Greets 125 Students at Open House,” Utah Daily Chronicle, March 4, 1948, 1. Eventually the issue reached the attention of the school’s Board of Regents. Regents Clarence Bamberger and George S. Ballif noted that articles in the Utah Daily Chronicle seemed to suggest that students felt they were “being denied freedom of thought and expression of political views on campus.” As we have noted, Ballif was an early supporter of PCA, though he had stepped away by this point. Olpin responded that he had discussed the issue at the open house with students, “all of whom were in accord with the adopted policy except one or two law students who were in favor of opening the campus for campaigning and bringing national figures here to speak.” Olpin also suggested that students attend political events in the community instead. Some members of the board, however, suggested “that any group should be permitted to organize on the campus, and be recognized as an organization providing they meet the requirements imposed on all campus organizations,” while also opposing any group’s use of “University facilities . for political or religious purposes.” Ultimately, after much discussion, however, no action was taken. See Board of Regents meeting, minutes, March 8, 1948.

34. While some students felt that the Dean’s Council should “reconsider their original action concerning student political groups,” at the same time, they supported the Institute of Government approach. See SAC meeting, minutes, March 10, 1948. Olpin reported the next day on these actions and noted that “Mr. Miller, a law student, had prepared a resolution to be presented to the legislature,” calling for opening “the campus to political activities for students.” Olpin said he had “discussed the matter with the gentleman,” and explained “some of the implications” it contained. He also indicated that “Mr. Davis said he would kill it when presented.” He likely refers to Rep. Merrill K. Davis R-Salt Lake. Olpin Papers.

35. See “Wallace Group at U Slates Politics Forum,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 23, 1948, 8; “Students to Hold Panel on Politics,” Deseret News, March 11, 1948, 26; “Students for Wallace,” Utah Daily Chronicle, April 27, 1948, 1.

36. “Wallaceites Elect,” Utah Daily Chronicle, February 24, 1948, 3. Later, Bettye Berliner Gillespie was a major figure in Utah civil rights activities.

37. Leone Paradise, “More Political Activity Needed, Wallaceite Says,” Utah Daily Chronicle, April 12, 1948, 2.

Paradise stated the group believed that “students in particular, whose immediate future will be directly determined by the course of political events should play an active role in shaping these events.” Interestingly, SAC turned down a request from Students for Wallace requesting permission to hold a “Square Dance Party,” arguing that at this point they were not a “recognized student group,” and besides Durham “felt he could not sponsor activities of this kind.” Martin Tolchin, a square dance caller and member of the American Square Dance group in New York, believes he may have made the suggestion. Tolchin interview. See also SAC meeting minutes, April 20, 1948, box 24, fd. 33, Olpin Papers.

38. “UMT Proposals Debated in Wallaceite Forum,” Utah Daily Chronicle, March 31, 1948, 1. The participants included Professor Frank H. Jonas and student Richard Cottam in favor on one side, with Dr. James E. P. Toman and student Adele Ernstrom in opposition.

39. “Wallace Students Hold Convention,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 16, 1948, 2b. Nickerson (1922–2021), a committed supporter of progressive causes, became an important voice in the campaign. She came to the University of Utah in 1944 and graduated in 1946. During that time, she was an active debater who also took an interest in campus intellectual life and political matters, and wrote for the Daily Utah Chronicle. After graduating she took a leading role in PCA and the Wallace effort.

40. Martin Tolchin,” Wallace Third Party Moves to Check Reaction,” Utah Daily Chronicle, July 14, 1948, 2; and Devine, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign, 200.

41. “Group Organizes ‘Wallace’ Movement, Signpost, February 27, 1948, 1. In fact, a column in the Weber College student paper complained that a Students for Wallace effort was being “dragged through the [sacrosanct] walls of dear Old Weber. Any other time but the present, an idealist like Wallace would be fine. . . . But his and his running mate’s policy of being polite and trying to appease You Know Who is a bunch of goo.” “Old Broom Sweeps Clean,” Signpost, April 30, 1948, 2.

42. “Students at U Map Drive for Wallace,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 28, 1948, 24. Those attending were encouraged to “contact people in their particular voting districts, wear Wallace buttons, and continually talk up his campaign possibilities.”

43. Toman’s politics were controversial at the university, and he ultimately left the institution in 1949 when he failed to get a contract, thus precluding receiving tenure. See Joseph Lanning, “Hunting for a Witch to Burn: The University of Utah and James E. P. Toman” (M.S. thesis, Utah State University, 2015). Despite support from many of his colleagues in the College of Medicine, President Olpin and many individuals at the school sought to get rid of Toman. Jacob Geerlings, Dean of the Faculty, provided Olpin with a typed copy of an article supposedly from the November 7, 1945, issue of the Salt Lake Telegram, asserting that Toman and several other individuals associated with the school were Utah Communist Party officers. A thorough examination of that issue of the Telegram, however, fails to turn up such an article. The typescript came from Quintus C. Wilson, chair of the department of journalism. Interestingly, Wilson came to the school in the fall of 1948. See Olpin Papers, box 63, fds, 2–3.

44. “Wallace Aids Call Parley,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 20, 1948, 11; and “Wallace Party Planned by Utah

Group, Salt Lake Telegram, February 19, 1948, 2.

45. “Petitions Signed to Get Wallace on the Ballot,” Daily Herald (Provo, UT), February 25, 1948, 2.

46. “Union Supports Wallace, Scores Truman, ERP,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 20, 1948, 1.

47. “Everybody’s Ruminator,” Milford News, February 26, 1948, 1.

48. “Lee Pressman Talks Today,” Utah Daily Chronicle, May 10, 1948, 3.

49. “Major Parties Held Insincere,” Deseret News, May 11, 1948, 12; “CIO Union Head Defends Wallace,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 11, 1948, 6; and “Famed Labor Counsel Sets Wallace Talks,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 10, 1948, 13.

50. “Pressman Hits Labor Cuts, War Hysteria,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 1948, 13.

51. Ultimately, nine hundred signatures were approved. “Wallaceites Set Strategy Meet,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 13, 1948, 18.

52. See “Wallace’s Running Mate in Rally Here Friday Night,” Helper Journal, May 27, 1948, 1; “Wallace Unit Gains Utah Ballot Place,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 26, 1948, 17; and Utah Third Party Slates Founding Convention, Salt Lake Telegram, May 26, 1948, 9.

53. “Taylor to Consider Wallace Platform,” Utah Daily Chronicle, May 28, 1948, 1; James O. McKinney, “Taylor Arrives in S. L. With Victory Forecast,” Deseret News, May 28, 1948, B1; and “Loss Won’t Mean Political Death Taylor Declares,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 28, 1948, 1.

54. O. N. Malmquist, “U. S. Provokes Russ War, Taylor Avers,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 29, 1948, 1. For a copy of the petition, see “Campus Political Groups Petition U to Permit National Speakers,” Utah Daily Chronicle, May 27, 1948, 3.

55. Malmquist, “U.S. Provokes Russ War.”

56. “Taylor to Arrive Today for Utah Campaign Jaunt,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 28, 1948, 1.

57. “Taylor Lands Numerous Verbal Blows,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 29, 1948, 8.

58. “Glen Taylor to Address Helper Rally Tomorrow,” Sun Advocate (Price, UT), May 27, 1948, 1.

59. “National Figure Comes to Helper Next Week,” Helper Journal, May 20, 1948, 1; and “Ad,” Helper Journal, May 20, 1948, 8.

60. “Taylor Party Would Combat Reds with Better Economy,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 30, 1948, 1. While Taylor was making these comments in Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story in the same issue noting that the national committee of the Communist Party “took credit for starting the party led by Henry A. Wallace,” in a published report in the Daily Worker. See “Wallace Party Credit Goes to Red Group,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 30, 1948, 5.

61. The “pink vs red” analogy seems to have been a staple of Taylor’s stump speeches and interviews. See MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, 504.

62. “Taylor Party Would Combat Reds.” On a stopover in Salt Lake a few days before his visit, Taylor had observed that “I hold no suit for communism, but if communism can be outlawed–then you have a dictatorship.” “Taylor Lambasts American Policy,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 24, 1948, 2.

63. Constructed in 1941, and located at 1185 Richards Street, the one-story brick structure was owned by the United Syrian American Society of Utah. It was rented

out for various events including receptions and group meetings. See “Syrian Society Occupies New Building, Salt Lake Tribune, July 21, 1941, 9.

64. “New Party to Draw Up Platform at S.L. Meet,” Deseret News, July 9, 1948, A-12.

65. “DeLacy Laces Democratic, GOP Foes at S. L. Parley,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 11, 1948, B3. Later, the owners of the hall denied the Progressive the right to use the facility for the party’s nominating convention. See “Wallace Party Pickets Legion,” Deseret News, Aug 22, 1948, A13. Jorgensen and Porter would continue to be listed through 1949, but it is unclear if they still functioned in that capacity. Both seem to have gone by 1950. See Baldwin Papers.

66. “Wallace Backer’s Form State’s Third-Party Unit,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 11, 1948, 4.

67. “DeLacy Laces Democratic, GOP Foes at S. L. Parley.”

68. Peace, Freedom & Abundance: The Platform of the Progressive Party as Adopted at the Founding Convention, Philadelphia, July 23–25, 1948 (New York: Progressive Party, 1948).

69. “The National Founding Convention of the New Political Party at Convention Hall, Philadelphia, July 23–25, 1948,” typescript copy, box 28, Progressive Party collection, MS C0160, Special Collections and Archives, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. Utah had eight votes, but it is unclear how many individuals attended. See also D. Jean Langdorf, “Democratic Meeting,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 17, 1948, 8.

70. “Negro Baritone Featured at Progressive Meet,” Helper Journal, July 22, 1948, 1. Two days earlier, Spencer appeared at the Wall Avenue Community center in Ogden. Bettye Berliner and Velma Kinsey were hostesses, and a reception was held at the home of Marie Berlin. See “Kenneth Spencer of ‘Show Boat,’ Coming Tuesday,” Ogden Standard Examiner, July 18, 1948. 2b. He was introduced by Rev. Darrell M. Farnham.

71. “Wallace Group Supports Bill,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1948, 20. A week later, Eleanor R. McNaughton, organizer of a group of 26 “nonpolitical” Salt Lake housewives leading a meat boycott, accused them of trying to infiltrate their group. “It is our understanding that the Wallace organization intends to take the credit for the meat boycott in the coming political campaign— and we don’t want that to happen.” See “Politics Rears Head in Meat Boycott,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 25, 1948, 21.

72. “Third Party Holds Meetings,” Deseret News, August 8, 1948, 13. According to an account in the Salt Lake Tribune, Beyer and Miller were “touring the country in a sound truck.” See “Progressives Slate Rally Sunday,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 8, 1948, 2b; and “Wallace Aids Detail Aims,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 9, 1948, 13. A columnist for the Tooele County Chronicle noted that “a car rolled through town all decorated up with loud speaker blaring and brightly colored banners draped over its sides . . . advertising the Wallace Taylor Progressive Party rally at Tooele Park. The music was gay . and the colors all bright and so cheery but try as they might the men could not disguise the car from what it used to be—a funeral hearse.” W. D. Bush, “In the Bush League,” Tooele County Chronicle, August 20, 1948, 6.

73. “Wallace Party Denied Use of Legion Hall, Salt Lake Tribune, August 21, 1948, 17. The decision by the American Legion was reported by the International News Service wire service in various newspapers. See

“Legion Denies Hall to Wallace Party,” San Francisco Examiner, August 22, 1948, 17. The INS covered other Utah Progressive party events as well.

74. “Wallace Party Denied.”

75. “Progressives Picket S.L. Legion Hall,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 22, 1948, B2.

76. “Mine Union Leader to Talk at PCA Meet,” Deseret News, March 31, 1948, 8; and “Wallace Party Pickets Legion,” Deseret News, August 22, 1948, A13.

77. “Glade Offers to Assist Party Meet,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 23, 1948, 13. “Wallace Men Still Need Site,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 23, 1948, 13.

78. “Party Accepts Judge Offer of Chambers,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 24, 1948, 13.

79. “Editorial-Progressives to Convene in Judicial Quarters,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 25, 1948, 8.

80. Audrey Thompson, “Rally Round,” Public Forum, Salt Lake Tribune, August 30, 1948, 6. See also Salt Lake Tribune, August 4 and 8, 1948, for additional letters.

81. Jessie Greenhalgh, “Editorial Attacked,” Public Forum, Salt Lake Tribune, September 12, 1948, 10A.

82. “Wallace Party Maps Battle Tactics Today,” Salt Lake Tribune, August, 28, 1948, 17; and “Progressives to Choose Nominees Today,” Deseret News, August 29, 1948, 11. .

83. “Progressives Outline 3-Point Plan,” Deseret News, August 28, 1948, 7; and “Party Claims Moral Win for Wallace,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 29, 1948, 13.

84. “Utah Nominees Are Chosen by Progressives,” Deseret News, August 30, 1948, A6; and “Wallace Party for Utah Chooses Slate,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 30, 1948, 13.

85. These included Joseph Curtis and Edna Squires from Salt Lake County; Jack Miller from Utah County; Florence Toson and John Kitsman from Carbon County; and Velma Kinsey and Bill Dawson, Weber County. Four party electors were selected: Aquila A. Nebeker, Provo; and Arvilla Greatorex, G. L. Rist, and Madge Henrie from Salt Lake.

86. No doubt this allayed fears of some Utah Democrats, as well as some Wallace backers still tied to the Democratic Party.

87. “Young Progressives Hold Founding Convention,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 4, 1948, 17; “Young Progressives,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 3, 1948, 22; “Wallace Youth Pledge Aid to Campaign,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 5, 1948, 6b; and “Young Progressives Elect State Officers,” Deseret News, September 5, 1948, B18.

88. “Tanner, Toman Slate Debate on Wallace,” Utah Daily Chronicle, October 21, 1948, 3. As Leon Marker argued, such forums were important because the “hysteria surrounding the Progressive party is immense.”

89. One of Wallace’s aides, Barney Conal, believed that by not campaigning harder in Rocky Mountain states like Utah, the party encountered “less antagonism and counter attack.” Such an assertion would be difficult to substantiate. On the other hand, clearly the Utah press provided considerable “antagonism and attack,” even without Wallace’s presence. See MacDougall, Gideon’s Army, 770.

90. Gordon Hoxsie, interview by John Sillito, Salt Lake City, Utah, February 1970.

91. “Cartoon,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 27, 1948, 6; “Cartoon, “Deseret News, October 11, 1948, 4; and “Cartoon,” Deseret News, October 28, 1948, 4.

92. “Wallaceites Set Strategy Meeting,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 13, 1948, 18; “Progressives To Convene Tonight,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 13, 1948, 4; “Tay-

lor To Speak in Salt Lake,” Herald Journal (Logan, UT), September 14, 1948, 5; and “Glen Taylor to Speak in S.L.,” Daily Herald (Provo, UT), September 14, 1948, 6.

93. For example, see “Ad,” Daily Herald (Provo, UT), September 12, 1948, 7. “Utah Progressive Party,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1948, 22; and “Plan Wallace Club,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 19, 1948, 14. George Greatorex said the objective was “to build Wallace clubs in each of the Magna-Garfield voting districts.” “Progressives Set Mass Meeting, Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 27, 1948, 15a; “Progressives to Hold Rally Here,” Daily Herald (Provo, UT), September 15, 1948, 6.

94. “Younger Party Leaders Set Rallies at U,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 14, 1948, 25. The paper noted that while “large rallies have been ruled out by administration,” the groups expected to “have active party speakers address meetings as the political ‘noise’ grows louder.” Moreover, Tolchin assured Tribune readers that “many prominent speakers” were available for Wallace events.

95. “Progressive Party to Meet at Helper Saturday, (Price) Sun-Advocate, October 7, 1948, 1. An ad in the paper noted that $80 in valuable prizes would be given away and that there was a free dance beginning at 10 featuring music by the Swingsters.

96. “Communists Hear U. S. Party Aid,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 30, 1948, 8; “Ad,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 28, 1948, 15.

97. “Red Committee Woman Here,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 29, 1948, 8. Pressman citation

98. O. N Malmquist, “GOP Holds Slim Edge in State-Wide Survey,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 31, 1948, 1. The Salt Lake Tribune poll suggested that Dewey “had a slight margin” over Truman though they admitted the “statewide sample” was well within the margin of error.

99. Patrick R. Eckman, “Telegram Poll,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 12, 1948, 1; O. N. Malmquist, “County Leans to Truman But Backs Lee,” Salt Lake Tribune, 15 October 1948, 1; James O. McKinney, “Democrats Hold Carbon With Exception of Maw,” Deseret News, October 29, 1948, 17A. The paper noted that “Helper, which is the center of the . . . Wallace support, as well as the location of most of the county’s admitted Communists [and] this liberal element will vote for the Progressive party candidate.”

100.“Ad,” Utah Daily Chronicle, October 26, 1948, 3; Ad, Salt Lake Telegram, October 25, 1948, 30.

101. “Progressive to Campaign on S. L. Radio,” Deseret News, October 26, 1948, B8. They included KDYL, KUTA, KSL, and KALL in Salt Lake, KLO in Ogden, and KOAL in Helper.

102. Rev. O. David Slacum, “Progressives,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 27, 1948, 13.

103. “Taylor in S. L. Scoffs at Liberal Talk,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 30, 1948, 1.

104. “Taylor Speech Flails U. S. High Finance,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 31, 1948, 1.

105. His comments were in response to what he called “a snide editorial from the local press” questioning the source of funding of the campaign. “Taylor Speech Flails US High Finance.” See also “Taylor Speech Set Saturday,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 29, 1948, 34.

106. Thurmond was not on the ballot in Utah. See Utah Secretary of State, Abstract of the Returns of an Election Held in the State of Utah, Tuesday, November 2, 1948, A. D. (Salt Lake City, 1948). As Frank H. Jonas wrote at the time, the Democrats with labor’s support, and by endorsing some of the Progressive’s views on Utah issues, “simply stole the thunder of the radicals.” See Frank H. Jonas, “The 1948 Elections in Utah,” Western Historical Quarterly 2:1 (March 1949): 124–27.

107. “Faces of Demos Light Party Headquarters on Returns,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 3, 1948, 4.

108. “Progressives Hail Liberal Wins,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 4, 1948, 11. In Wasatch County, for example, the Democratic Party ran an ad stating that if voters believed in the Republican platform, they should support it, but “otherwise vote for a Progressive Party, Vote Democratic.” “Ad,” Wasatch Wave, October 29, 1948, 8.

109. Dick Layman, “Wallace Defeat Viewed as End of Peace,” Utah Daily Chronicle, November 5, 1948, 2.

110. “Wallace Fans Map Program,” Utah Daily Chronicle, November 8, 1948, 1; “University Politicos Set Stage for Panel Talks,” Deseret News, November 30, 1948, 18; “Elect Officers,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 10, 1948, 16.

111. “Progressives to Air 3 local issues, Utah Daily Chronicle, December 1, 1948, 3.

112. “Utah Progressives to Meet at Annual Conference, Salt Lake Telegram, June 18, 1949, 5; and George Greatorex to University of Utah Board of Regents, July 3, 1949, Olpin Papers, Box 63, Folder 2. See also Adele Ernstrom, “Give political views or lose teaching job,” Utah Daily Chronicle, March 8, 1949, 2; and “Olpin Hints Teacher at ‘U’ Is Commie,” Deseret News, June 13, 1949, B1.

113. “Negro Leader Enters Race for City Commissioner, Salt Lake Tribune, October 5, 1949, 16.

114. “Statements of City Office Candidates, Deseret News, October 23, 1949, B4.

115. “‘News’ Vote Count Same as City’s, “Deseret News, October 27, 1949, B1.

116. See “University Bulletin,” Utah Daily Chronicle, February 8, 1950, 2.

117. Tolchin, interview.

118. Jessie Greenhalgh, interview by John Sillito, March 1970.

119. Edna Squires, interview by John Sillito, March 1970.

120. Hoxsie, interview.

121. Adele Ernstrom, email to author, October 29, 2020.

Led to the Mountains: The Church of God in Christ Comes to Utah

BY ALAN J. CLARK AND HENRY MCALLISTER

On September 29, 1989, Pastor David Franklin Griffin passed away. Many civic and religious leaders from across the community attended his funeral services. He was a stalwart pillar in Ogden’s community, having pastored the Griffin Temple Church of God in Christ since 1946. A few years earlier in February 1985, the Ogden Christian community awarded Griffin the honor of Pastor of the Year for his service to his church and city. Bishop Nathaniel Jones, Jr., Jurisdictional Bishop for the Church of God in Christ in Utah, gave Pastor Griffin the nickname “Mr. Church of God in Christ” because he “eats, sleeps, wakes up, walks and talks and possibly dreams about the people of this ‘Grand Old Church.’”1

Pastor Griffin’s devotion to preaching proved itself to a miraculous degree on one occasion. Elder Roland E. Hurrington, pastor of the Mount Zion Church of God in Christ, had invited Elder Griffin to give a sermon at his Salt Lake City church. Then in his later years, Elder Griffin suffered from a few ailments but never turned down an opportunity to preach. While in the middle of his sermon, Elder Griffin stopped breathing and collapsed to the floor. Fortunately a nurse was present among the members of the congregation and rushed to his assistance, eventually resuscitating him. Elder Griffin, knowing no limits on the importance of preaching, got up and finished his sermon to the astonishment of the congregation. Not even the specter of death kept him from his calling.2

Despite his lifetime of service, very few Utahns knew about Pastor Griffin or the Church of God in Christ, to which he devoted his life. This article seeks to remedy this oversight by outlining the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) in the state of Utah. Since the 1930s, African Americans began migrating to Utah and establishing COGIC congregations in various cities. Their Pentecostal theology and worship separated them from the tiny group of African American churches already operating in the state and required church members like David and Daisy Griffin to devote years of service organizing churches and developing their own social networks within the African American community that existed in Utah for much of the twentieth century. Their resilience and endurance

in forging a home in the West enriches the history, diversity, and heritage of Utah.

Although a few Black individuals colonized Utah with the Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century, the African American community was very small in the early territorial years; the 1850 territorial census counted twenty-four free and twenty-six enslaved Blacks in Utah.3 The ending of slavery in the United States and the coming of the railroad to the West allowed for increased migration, and the 1900 census listed 672 Blacks residing in Utah. By 1910 the Black community in Utah nearly doubled to 1,144 African Americans in the state, with most residing in Salt Lake City. Around two hundred Blacks lived in Ogden. During the Great Depression and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South, more men and women headed west in search of work, but few picked Utah. The population barely changed by 1940, with 1,235 African Americans in Utah. Yet, as with other minority populations, the massive amount of military and federal industrial growth in Utah during the 1940s and 1950s dramatically increased the size of the community. Known as the Second Great Migration, beginning around 1941 many African Americans left the South to pursue employment opportunities elsewhere. Their population in Utah doubled by 1950 and nearly doubled again by 1960, arriving at 4,148 (about 0.5 percent of the state population).4

The community grew steadily through the second half of the twentieth century, numbering

17,657 people in 2000, followed by another surge in growth to approximately 43,000 by 2014. Growth was not evenly distributed across the state, however. According to a study of the 1990 census, African American households were only found in 40 percent of Utah’s cities.5 Most of the demographic growth occurred in urban areas in and around Salt Lake City and Ogden. Despite rapid growth in the early twenty-first century, the African American population remains one of the smallest demographic minorities at about 1.2 percent of the statewide population—smaller than the Hispanic, Asian, and Native American populations in the state (15.1 percent, 2.5 percent, 1.3 percent respectively).6

The same racial segregation and Jim Crowera discrimination that plagued the rest of the country existed in Utah, but it manifested itself in different ways. Opportunities for work primarily determined where African Americans lived in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and elsewhere in the state. Railroad companies employed large numbers of African Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and correspondingly the segregated areas of Salt Lake City and Ogden included the neighborhoods adjacent to the train stations.7 Although Utah did not have the same kind of state-sponsored segregation as existed in the South, municipalities and residents employed their own methods to keep communities apart. Real estate covenants and private businesses excluded Blacks from living in certain neighborhoods or frequenting certain business establishments. Ogden in particular, because of the large Black community that worked for the railroad, used these mechanisms to segregate the city. Anna Belle Weakley, who owned and operated the Porters and Waiters Club on Ogden’s 25th Street, described the social segregation of Ogden as “unannounced segregation.”8 Because segregation was not mandated by law, African Americans had to intuit the social rules. A few businesses catered to everyone, but most did not. As Eric Stene pointed out in his discussion of the 1940s, “Ogden’s Twenty-fifth Street was segregated; Whites stuck to the north side of the street, and Blacks stayed on the south side, along with Italians, Asians, and Hispanics through the decades.”9 Even after passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the climate

Griffin Temple Church of God in Christ, circa 1952. David and Daisy Griffin are second and third from the left, respectively. Bishop Isaac Finley is seated in the center with a white handkerchief in his pocket, and Pastor Leo Waggoner is on his right. History collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ. Used by permission

of segregation continued, most forcefully in real estate. As late as the 1990s, 60 percent of Utah’s cities still had no Black residents.10 Even after restrictive covenants were removed, a cultural desire to maintain segregation seemed to remain and made it complicated for African Americans to purchase homes outside of traditionally Black neighborhoods.11

Despite these racial barriers, the lure of work and a better life continued to draw people to Utah from the east. For most of the new arrivals, religion guided their day-to-day activities and functioned as the center of community life. This had been the case since the 1880s and 1890s when African Americans began organizing churches in Salt Lake City and Ogden. Reverend James Saunders led the organization of the Trinity African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1890.12 Emma Jackson began holding prayer meetings for Baptists in her home in 1892, and the Reverend A. E. Reynolds became the first permanent leader of the Calvary Baptist Church.13 African American churches proliferated in the early twentieth century with the addition of several more Baptist churches and the Liberty Park Seventh Day Adventist Church.14

With very small congregations and slow population growth, Black churchgoers struggled greatly to develop their own communities in the state, but their struggle resulted in increased diversity and vivacity within the Utah African American community. Churches functioned as worship centers as well as social centers. They provided individuals opportunities for leadership roles and allowed them to make work connections. The churches also provided relief and economic support to their members.

The Church of God in Christ emerged in the late nineteenth century out of the Holiness movement among African American Baptists in the South. The Holiness movement grew out of the established Protestant churches with an emphasis on the doctrine of sanctification. Many Protestants felt that the denominational churches had strayed from the path of Christian devotion and instead pursued social status and acceptability. The Holiness movement forcefully reemphasized the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfectionism. The movement

created contention during the nineteenth century among Protestants, and many individuals left the established denominations in pursuit of a Christian experience centered on a sanctified Christian life.

Originally organized as a holiness church in 1895 by Charles Price Jones and Charles Harrison Mason, the Church of God in Christ split over the importance of William J. Seymour’s Azusa Street Revival and the foundation of Pentecostal worship and theology.15 Upon visiting Seymour’s Los Angeles revival in March 1907, according to Mason’s biographer, Mason “experienced a radical ideological upheaval, ultimately resulting in a doctrinal reformation of the Church of God in Christ.”16 When Mason shared his Pentecostal experience with Jones, Jones rejected the Pentecostal view of speaking in tongues as the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. They parted ways, and in August 1907 C. H. Mason became the first “Chief Apostle” and leader of the Church of God in Christ, newly transformed into one of the most prominent Pentecostal churches in the United States.17 With a strong emphasis on evangelism and an intensely charismatic worship style, COGIC has grown into one of the largest predominantly African American churches in the United States. The denomination estimates there are 6.5 million members, rivaling the membership of the National Baptist Convention, USA Inc.18 It is also arguably the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States.19

Because of its foundation in Pentecostal theology, members of COGIC do not usually worship with other African American churches.20 Their numbers are among the smaller in Utah, with approximately two to three hundred strong.21 With very few members and no initial support from the surrounding churches or general population, individuals like David and Daisy Griffin worked tirelessly establishing COGIC congregations among other Protestant and Pentecostal churches in Salt Lake City and Ogden. COGIC did not often establish strong ties with other African American churches and congregations— though connections were sometimes made, as evidenced by the interfaith meeting between Pastor Griffin’s and Pastor Leo Waggoner’s congregations. More often, when the monthly

fellowship meetings rolled around or churches reached out to one another through interfaith activities, COGIC congregations found themselves without invitations. They shared ethnic and racial struggles with other minoritized groups as non-whites, but their beliefs about Pentecostal worship and theology separated them from their racial and ethnic communities. Living in Utah as double minorities because of their religious views, African American Pentecostals encountered opposition from almost every direction. They faced the opposition with endurance and resolve, laying the foundation for some of the oldest continuously operating Pentecostal churches in Utah. As Pastor Griffin said in his daily prayer, “Lord don’t let me die until I finish my work, for no man can do my work for me.”22

No one deserves more credit in establishing the Church of God in Christ in Utah than Alberta Harris Jennings. Born around 1902 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, her family worshiped with the Baptist church. As an adult living in Beaumont, Texas, Alberta heard the teachings of the Church of God in Christ and felt called to the work of evangelism. Bishop C. H. Mason believed increased national evangelism would not only preserve “the best features of Slave Religion but also a commitment to replicating the nonracist early church and [creating] a just society.”23 COGIC missionaries fanned out across the country. Feeling the call, Harris (not yet Jennings) uprooted in 1938 and sought out a place without any COGIC congregations. Through the inspiration of the Spirit and the

encouragement of her local leader, Bishop D. M. Paige, she decided upon Salt Lake City.24

During the first few years of her Utah ministry, Harris struggled not only to hold services but also to make a living.25 She came to Utah with no contacts and joined a segregated community of about seven hundred African Americans in Salt Lake City. Despite having attended Texas A&M College, Harris could only find domestic work. Her preaching drew few listeners beyond concerned members of the Salt Lake City Council. Although COGIC did not recognize women as preachers, Harris could hold street meetings at Pioneer Park in Salt Lake City and revivals at churches willing to host her. When Harris began holding outdoor services, the Salt Lake City Council investigated the outdoor meetings due to concerns of public disturbance but ultimately allowed them to continue.26 Reportedly her favorite worship song was “God’s got a hold of my hand and He’s leading me.” She felt led to Salt Lake City, despite not knowing anyone or having ever visited. Her evangelizing style, spontaneous and unconventional, contributed to the Pentecostal revivalism in the state.27 A few other Pentecostal churches existed at this time in Utah, including the Assemblies of God and the Church of God, Cleveland, but these denominations evangelized primarily to white audiences. The Assemblies of God in particular, having decided to break away from COGIC in 1914, did not evangelize among the African American community in Utah. In her outdoor services, Harris did not place any limitations on who could participate together.

Women played important roles within COGIC during the early twentieth century. Bishop Mason saw women’s value within the community and as evangelists. He established a women’s department in 1911 and often sent husbands and wives together into the “mission field” to establish congregations.28 Anthea Butler explained how Church of God in Christ women “appropriated the southern revivalist traditions of outdoor preaching and canvassing from door to door for converts, and these techniques bore fruit in the urban locales to which they migrated.”29 Marrying home mission work with home life, “church mothers” performed the important work of community building, caring for both the spiritual and temporal needs of those

Alberta Harris Jennings, who more than any other individual deserves credit for establishing the Church of God in Christ in Utah. History collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ. Used by permission

around them. According to Ithiel Clemmons, “they were unashamed to have street worship services, to approach and talk to gangs of roving, idle youth.”30 The combination of preaching and caregiving helped women confront the difficulties of urban life.

The role of “church mothers” transformed into a formal title for COGIC, reflecting the role of women as “mothers in Zion.” Anthea Butler argued that “COGIC church mothers’ quest for spiritual empowerment by means of ‘the sanctified life’ provided the moral, spiritual, and physical fuel that enabled them to negotiate for and obtain power both within the denomination and outside it.”31 In the early twentieth century, Black women faced many impediments to social mobility and leadership. Harris exemplified the willingness of Black Pentecostal women to engage societies that sought to limit and ignore them by means of her spirituality.

Fueled by her resolve to establish a church, Harris managed to earn enough money to purchase property at 552 West 300 South near the Rio Grande train station in Salt Lake City around 1939.32 She and her husband Jack built a small home and meetinghouse on the property. They named it the Mount Zion Church of God in Christ. Elder W. C. Caldwell became its first pastor.33

With a church secured, Harris provided a platform for other evangelists to launch additional missions around the state. She also prompted the establishment of a new geographical jurisdiction in the western United States for COGIC.

Around this time, an evangelist named Isaac Finley was preaching in Oregon and Washington. He subsequently traveled around the West extensively, considering where to start new churches. He preached in Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada, then made his way to Pocatello, Idaho. Finally feeling the call to preach in Utah, Finley connected with Harris in Salt Lake City and offered his support. This led COGIC to appoint in 1938 Finley to the position of Overseer in 1938 for Utah, Idaho, and Nevada.34

Racism in the mid-twentieth century complicated COGIC growth in Utah. Racial aggression had surged in the 1920s, including the brutal lynching of Robert Marshall in Price, Utah. The Salt Lake Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), organized in 1919, held an “antilynching mass meeting” to protest the acquittal of Marshall’s lynchers.35 The Ku Klux Klan operated briefly in the state, appearing in 1921 and seemingly disappearing by 1926, but according to Larry Gerlach failed to take root due to opposition from high-ranking Latter-day Saint church leaders.36

The racism that African Americans dealt with in Utah was often more subversive and less overt. In other parts of the country, communities faced racism in public disputes, protests, and violent encounters. In Utah, racism typically emanated from systemic stereotypes and infrequent interactions with diverse populations. Henry McAllister moved from Arkansas to Utah in 1973 and worked at Hill Air Force Base. Reflecting on racism in Utah, he said,

Jack Jennings (left) and Alberta Harris Jennings (right), circa the early 1940s during the construction of the Mount Zion Church of God in Christ. The completed church appears on the right, circa 1950. History collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ. Used by permission.

It was more subtle. It was more covert rather than just straight out. Down south you knew where you stood. You knew where you couldn’t go, shouldn’t go. But some of the same issues that we had down south are present here in Utah. . . . In Utah they’d be accommodating, but I tell you, you really want to see how they feel, try to date one of their daughters. And you find out the ugliest and the nastiest things that came out. Their true feelings came out from that.”37

Members of the Church of God in Christ struggled with this kind of racism throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Alberta Harris dealt with opposition to her outdoor services from various municipal and church organizations. Utah members of COGIC recall that even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requested Harris explain to the Quorum of the

Interfaith revival held at Griffin Temple Church of God in Christ, circa 1952. Bishop Isaac Finley preaching. Beginning second from the left, Elders David F. Griffin, R. E. Hurrington, Sylvester V. Miller, and Ralph R. Girley. Pastor Leo Waggoner is to the right of Finley. History collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ. Used by permission

Twelve Apostles the brand of Christianity she preached.38 The Salt Lake Tribune reported on March 25, 1943, that “a revocable permit to conduct religious services in a tent . . . was granted by city commissioners to the Rev. W. C. Caldwell of the Church of God in Christ.” When the same paper reported on the permission granted to the Assemblies of God for a tent revival, they apparently had no need to emphasize the “revocable” nature of the permit.39 But it served as a reminder to Elder Caldwell to preach with caution. Without formal segregation laws, municipal courts could use the acceptance or rejection of city permits as mechanisms of discrimination.

Elder Brealey B. Mike also faced such cultural opposition, but with far less subtlety, in establishing a congregation in Ogden. Mike moved to Utah for work in the late 1930s. Initially, he met with Alberta Harris Jennings at her street meetings in Salt Lake City. When Bishop Isaac

Finley and Mother Jennings encouraged Elder Mike and his wife to begin a church in Ogden, they relocated. Prentiss Jones opened his home for meetings to Elder Mike around 1938. In 1941, Elder Mike purchased a lot at 28th Street and Wall Avenue in Ogden, where he built a small home and held tent meetings with Elder Caldwell of Salt Lake City.40 In the winter, Mike and Caldwell held meetings in the “Little House,” as they called it. They would carry the beds out to make space for the service. Elder Ralph R. Girley and his wife attended meetings with Elder Mike until starting their own church in Ogden. It took several more years to complete the church building on the property because every time they tried to begin work, white neighbors would complain, which led the city to put a temporary stop to the construction. The building was finally dedicated in October 1948 as the 28th & Wall Avenue Church of God in Christ.41

Church growth proceeded more quickly in Ogden than in Salt Lake City, despite the former’s smaller African American population. Elder Mike died in 1956 after pastoring the Wall Avenue church for fifteen years. Elder John Parker succeeded him in the pastorate and continued until 1971. Nearby in Ogden, Elder David Franklin Griffin felt called to the ministry. Griffin’s parents had joined the Church of God in Christ in Arkansas in 1908. In 1936 Griffin believed the Lord had called him to be a preacher, and over the next decade he preached as a deacon and elder in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Oregon. His work in the military kept him moving. But after he married Daisy Green in 1945, Griffin took a job with the Southern Pacific Railroad in Salt Lake City. They initially joined Jack and Alberta Jennings at the Mount Zion congregation before relocating and beginning a church of their own in a community building at Washington Terrace, Ogden. The first few years saw many moves, from homes to trailers to boxcars. In 1949, Griffin mortgaged his car to get a loan to purchase a lot in West Ogden on 26th Street. Finally in May 1952, they finished construction on their own building and dedicated it for worship. Affectionately known as the “Church by the tracks,” the West Ogden Church of God in Christ (later renamed the Griffin Temple Church of God in Christ) would eventually become the jurisdictional headquarters for the state of Utah.42

Several other congregations laid their foundations in the 1940s. Elder Ralph R. Girley and his wife Seretha left Elder Mike’s congregation in Ogden to establish the Lincoln Avenue Church of God in Christ. In 1964, the congregation purchased a former Latter-day Saint ward house on the corner of 30th Street and Wall Avenue; in gratitude of Bishop Isaac Finley’s leadership and work to purchase the building, they renamed the congregation the Finley Temple Church of God in Christ. Members continued meeting there until 2013, when Pastor Henry McAllister and his wife Daisy sold the old building and purchased a new property in Clearfield. Renaming the church the Journey of New Beginnings Church of God in Christ, Pastor McAllister continues to lead the congregation at the present.43

Around the same time that Elder Girley began his congregation, Elder Millard C. Thomas and his wife Janie transferred with the military to Camp Kearns in 1945. They worshipped at Mount Zion under R. E. Hurrington until starting a new Salt Lake City congregation called Ebenezer Church of God in Christ in 1952.44 When the Mount Zion congregation closed its doors, Ebenezer remained as the oldest congregation in the capitol city. Today there are two Salt Lake City area congregations: Kingdom Church of God in Christ pastored by Bishop Bobby Allen, and Full Gospel Deliverance Center Church of God in Christ, located in West Valley City and pastored by Apostle Jervis Lee. While others have come and gone, four congregations continue to hold weekly services in Utah.45

Most African Americans lived in Salt Lake City and Ogden, but a few lived or worked on farms in central Utah or in mining towns, which sometimes boasted sizable Black populations.46 In the multicultural Carbon County, the white population predominating in Price were informally segregated from many of the racial minorities primarily living in Helper. Many immigrants made their way to Utah as strike breakers, and some continued living in Utah through the mid-twentieth century. African Americans in these communities became part of a mixed workforce that included recent immigrants and US citizens.47

The limitations of rural life in a mining community may have provided moments of toleration

and interfaith activity not often seen in Utah’s urban areas. With fewer congregations to attend and fewer physical structures in which to attend, churchgoers sometimes relied on denominational cooperation to create worship services despite theological differences. The Church of God in Christ opened a church among the coal camps sometime around 1946.48 Billed as a church “for all races and denominations,” the local church held services in Helper, Spring Glen, and Sunnyside under the direction of J. R. Green.49 Green hoped to develop a church that interacted with the entire mining community, and he often reached out to others for support. As they constructed a chapel in Helper on the foundation of the old Catholic Church, they held a “chair rally” for donations of “any extra chairs or benches that would give his congregation something to sit on while attending services.”50 The COGIC congregation hosted barbecues to fundraise for the construction of the chapel and permitted an African American Baptist church to use the building as well after its completion.51 Green must have reached out to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; in 1948 Pastor Green received a $100 check from Latter-day Saint president George Albert Smith as a donation. Green and others expressed their appreciation for the “generous gesture of tolerance and good will from the dominant church in Utah.”52

Yet the remote living arrangements of the coal camps and towns also revealed racial tensions. A Black man named Howard Browne remembered an incident at a pool hall in Price, one of the few places in Price where Blacks could go. During a card game an altercation occurred among Browne, a Mexican American man, and a white man:

Something came up in the card game that this Mexican had said something to him and [the white man] said, “do you know who you’re talking to?” He says, “You’re talking to an American White Man.” And so this Mexican fellow just said real low, he says, “I’m just as much of an American as you are.” And so this guy says, “You can’t be as much American as me as Black as you are.” . . . Well, he done made me hot then. I said, “Hell, you can’t be as much American as he nor me.” I said,

“I come from the Cherokee tribe. And your people came over here and took this country away from us. So how in the hell are you going to be as much American as me or him!”53

This incident illustrates the feelings of Utah Latinos and African Americans as they wrestled with racial discrimination and bias. Whites discriminated against Latinos and complicated their place in American society. Howard Browne, who reportedly had African Americans and Native American ancestry, found more accepting allies in non-whites who experienced similar discrimination. But African Americans endured the lion’s share of racism in Utah, despite being the smallest minoritized group. Even work culture in the mines, where European immigrants worked alongside African Americans, reinforced racial hierarchies.54

gh

To unify the fledgling congregations and create more support for a statewide community, Bishop Isaac Finley and bishops who succeeded him strongly supported the annual holy convocations in Utah. These meetings brought together the various small congregations. There they celebrated the achievements of the COGIC community and participated in charismatic worship, which included speaking in tongues, prayer circles, holy dance, and ecstatic worship.55 These meetings also brought in speakers from other locations and encouraged past leaders to return and support the community. Bishop Isaac Finley and Mother Jennings, no longer residents of Utah by the early 1950s, maintained their roles from a distance as state bishop and state mother, respectively. Bishop Finley found the convocations to be important enough that he donated funds to purchase an old Latter-day Saint church building large enough to comfortably accommodate all of the congregations during the annual convocation. When Bishop Finley returned to take over the pastorate of Lincoln Avenue in 1955 upon Elder Girley’s death, the building also served as the home location for what became known as the Finley Temple Church of God in Christ.56

The holy convocations of the Church of God in Christ constituted the majority of times that these congregations found their way into

local newspapers.57 The convocations allowed them the opportunity not only to come together as a religion, but also to remind the cities around them about their existence and importance within the state. Bishop C. H. Mason, the founder and Senior Bishop of COGIC, and other national bishops for the denomination made appearances. New local leaders received assignments. Over time, these convocations even received recognition from local officials for their services to the community. When the Utah jurisdiction held its 75th anniversary in 2013, Utah governor Gary Herbert and the mayors of Salt Lake City and Ogden all expressed their appreciation for “your congregations’ efforts to succor and uplift people from all walks of life, both spiritually and temporally, throughout the past seventy-five years.”58

Members of COGIC also shared strong interfaith relationships with other churches in Utah. Tommy Vigil, pastor for the Apostolic Assembly of the Faith in Christ Jesus, remembered as a child how his father’s church (Harold Vigil pastored the Apostolic Assembly), Griffin Memorial Church of God in Christ, and the United Pentecostal Church occupied three of the four corner lots around his home on Lake Street. Vigil recalled how these Pentecostal churches supported each other, despite differences in race and ethnicity.59 France Davis, who pastored the Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City from 1974 to 2019, recalled the “marvelous interdenominational organizations in Utah” and the associations between them that he considered to be unique to the state.60 Close friends with Elder David Griffin and Bishop Bobby Allen, Davis has worked together for years with COGIC in ways that are almost unheard of in other parts of the country. These relationships prevented feelings of isolation and provided support for these small congregations. Summarizing his thoughts about the interfaith relationships over the years, Bishop Bobby Allen cited a scripture: “how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”61

At times, the Church of God in Christ and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sought to improve relationships between their two communities in Utah. Much of the time the two churches did not have much interaction, but on occasion interfaith activities did occur.

In July 1968, Melvin A. Givens Jr. and his family moved from Idaho Falls, Idaho, to Salt Lake City, where he felt called to start a new church. They managed to purchase land at 300 North 862 West but did not have the funds to build a church. Nevertheless, they began construction and held services for the small congregation in the tool shed on the property.62

Bishop Givens pursued the help of the wider Salt Lake City community to finish the building. In early 1970 he met with Ernest L. Wilkinson, president of Brigham Young University. They organized a benefit concert headlining Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel,” and a BYU choir and philharmonic orchestra.63 John H. Vandenbeg, Presiding Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, attended the concert and met with Bishop Givens. They discussed the possibility of working together to complete the Deliverance Temple church. Naming the fundraising project “Operation Good Samaritan,” they enlisted the help of young men and women from both churches. “Youth from 566 Mormon wards washed cars, raked lawns, sawed fireplace wood, sold baked goods, cleaned garages and did yard work to boost the building fund of the Negro church,” reported the Daily Herald in June 1970.64 They raised over $30,000 to complete the construction. At a banquet celebrating the event, Latter-day Saint leaders sat down with Bishop Givens and other leaders in the Utah Church of God in Christ and expressed appreciation for the spirit of camaraderie displayed in the previous months. “I may disagree with some of your teachings,” Givens explained, “but that doesn’t mean we have to pick up bricks and throw them at each other or that we have to start talking black power.”65 They completed construction and dedicated the Deliverance Temple building on August 23–30, 1970.

Despite the good-will and interfaith focus, “Operation Good Samaritan” felt insincere to some observers, since it came at a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints denied full rights to Black members. The historian Russell Stevenson has argued that “over the generations, racism had metastasized into a major aspect of Mormon society and culture.”66 The fundraising event in 1970 followed closely on the footsteps of several complicated public controversies facing the Church of Jesus Christ.

Stanford University and the University of Wyoming staged boycotts and protests against BYU, and civil rights activists continued to attack the church’s priesthood prohibition against African Americans. In 1969, the LDS First Presidency released an official statement that both promoted civil rights and upheld the priesthood ban. Stevenson wrote that “the success of the civil rights protests had seeped into the Mormon consciousness, compelling Church leaders to walk the awkward border between support for civil rights and the continuing embrace of the priesthood restriction.”67

Because of its timing almost immediately following the 1969 statement, “Operation Good Samaritan” appeared to be reparative work on the public image of the Church of Jesus Christ. Bishop Givens viewed the interfaith project as a way to “join hands and be brothers and sisters in our community,” but the moment was rife with implications.68 Some members of the Church of God in Christ had no desire to be

used as a “public relations ploy.”69 The politics of the national image of the Church of Jesus Christ cast suspicions on the motivations of interfaith engagements with African Americans, despite the good-will of many Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. gh

The 1970s provided new opportunities for the Church of God in Christ to emerge as an important part of the Utah cultural and religious landscape, thanks in large part to the work of Robert Harris. By the time the forty-second Utah state legislature began on January 10, 1977, the city of Ogden already knew well the personality of its recently elected representative, Robert Lee Harris. A pastor for the Church of God in Christ Congregational, owner of the Faith Market grocery store by day, and employee for the Union Pacific Railroad by night, the Reverend Harris became the first African American to win an elected office in Utah.70 His

Bishop M. A. Givins with President Joseph Fielding Smith and Jessie Evans Smith. LDS Church History Library. Used by permission.

passion for politics and religion carried him from a life of poverty in the South to the Utah state legislature. But his personality and savvy evangelization of his faith made him a household name among voters in Weber County.

Robert Harris pursued a life of faith and hard work. Born in Ft. Worth, Texas in 1925, his father died when Harris was two years old, and his mother struggled to raise her eight children alone. She remarried, bore three more children, and became a widow for the second time. Remembering his childhood, Harris recalled that “when I was eight I threw a rock as a ball, because I was too poor to buy one.”71 He learned the value of hard work during the Great Depression and felt called to ministry within the Church of God in Christ, Congregational.72 In 1944 he relocated to Phoenix, Arizona, where he started his family.

In 1956, Harris moved to Ogden in pursuit of employment and found work with the Union Pacific Railroad. There, in Ogden, he met his second wife Evelyn and opened Faith market, becoming the first African American grocery store owner in Utah.73 He also established a congregation of the Church of God in Christ, Congregational. Although small, Harris pastored the congregation over several decades. Robert and Evelyn became fixtures of the African American community in Ogden.

Pastor Harris used his pulpit as a platform to express his political concerns throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. He sought to represent the forgotten communities of Utah, including members of minority groups, people living in poverty, and the elderly. Mixing Christian social gospel with civil rights, Harris protested often in the Salt Lake City and Ogden areas. He demonstrated over sixty times and received jail time on at least a dozen occasions.74 Harris blocked traffic with his vehicle to protest increased gasoline prices, laid down at the doors of the Utah State Capitol Building to protest mistreatment of the poor and elderly, and sang “White Man and Black Man Get Together Today,”—a song he wrote—at the steps of the Salt Lake City courthouse to protest the race riots of the late 1960s.75 He ran for Ogden City Council three times but never managed to win a seat. “The black man has never had anyone in office to speak for his rights,” argued Harris, “and the poor people have never had anyone to speak for their rights.”76

Yet when the Reverend Harris won the election for the Utah legislature’s House of Representatives in 1976, he explained that “I’m not taking a racial approach. You walk through my district and you’ll see there are far more white people in need than there are colored.”77 As the first African American in Utah to hold an elected office, Robert Harris vowed to fight for the beleaguered. And his Pentecostal faith, still unfamiliar to most Utahns, colored every action he made in office; “I will be on my knees in prayer for two minutes every morning immediately after the day’s session begins.”78

Although Harris failed to win reelection, he remained a vocal, active member of his community, attending city council meetings and other events in the Ogden area. Despite working nights for the Union Pacific Railroad and days at his grocery store, Harris still made time for church and community. He volunteered to provide funeral escorts in town and donated free meals from his store. Even after he was no longer able to walk, Harris could regularly be seen around town in his motorized wheelchair, looking to help those in need. Loved by his community for his activism (not to mention his “Best Soul Barbecue Sauce” sold in his grocery store), many grieved for his family when he died on February 22, 2005.79

Pastor Robert L. Harris. History collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ. Used by permission

The Utah Church of God in Christ underwent a variety of changes during the late twentieth century. Many of the original members died or retired during these years, turning the congregations over to new leaders with new directions. These decades also marked important anniversaries for the history of the church in Utah. During the 1990s and early 2000s, a new group of leaders celebrated their history and made preparations for growth in the twenty-first century.

The churches in Ogden had grown the most during the early twentieth century and continued to grow in the 1980s and 1990s. Elder Sylvester V. Miller became the third pastor of Brealey B. Mike’s Wall Avenue church in 1970. Under his direction, he believed the church could modernize, both spiritually and temporally. Because national church leader Bishop C. H. Mason had visited the church and the first convocations had been held there, the church guarded some important historical moments. But Elder Miller decided it was time for change. He renamed the church the Emmanuel Church of God in Christ and began buying additional land around the building.

Elder Sylvester Miller, along with his son Elder John Miller, spent decades raising funds for additional land and a new building. Elder John Miller became pastor after his father and could often be heard preaching “this corner is changing by the power of the Holy Ghost!” After many years of hard work, they broke ground for a new building in 2002 and dedicated it on August 22, 2004. Much more spacious and modern than the previous building, the new building could be utilized for decades to come.

At the fiftieth annual district meeting of the Ogden district in 1998, the church decided to take stock in its history. Henry McAllister, the pastor of Finley Temple Church of God in Christ since 1996, started collecting histories for COGIC in Utah. He compiled photos and memories, spoke with long-time members, and wrote short biographies and church histories. At the annual district meeting on March 2, 1998, leaders presented a brief history of the church for their members to keep.

Not only had Emmanuel Church of God in Christ changed over the years, but all of the

other churches had too. The old Mount Zion building was sold and torn down. Elder Griffin and his congregation purchased a new building in April 1989, just before his death that September. Bishop Nathaniel Jones changed the church name to Griffin Memorial Church of God in Christ, in honor of the more than four decades that Elder Griffin had led the church. Bishop Jones then appointed Elder Bobby R. Allen as pastor.

Bishop Bobby Allen is a long-time fixture in the Utah COGIC community. Bishop Allen was born in 1938 and raised in Texas. He and his wife Martha moved to Ogden in 1960. Finding work was difficult, but Bishop Allen found various jobs as a car washer and a mechanic’s assistant. While working at the Cream O Weber dairy, Bishop Allen was the only Black employee there. Often his children were among the only African Americans in their schools, and his family were among only one or two in their neighborhoods. Despite adversity and racism, Bishop Allen eventually trained as a certified diesel mechanic and worked in that profession for more than fifteen years.

Already a believer in Pentecostalism, in 1961 Bishop Allen and Martha began attending the Griffin Temple Church of God in Christ. He became an elder in 1975 and was appointed pastor of the Idaho Falls Church of God in Christ in 1980.80 For seven years, he commuted to Idaho Falls every week. On occasion, he pastored at more than one congregation in Idaho and Utah at the same time. About eighteen months after Elder Griffin’s death, Bishop Nathaniel Jones appointed Bishop Allen to become pastor at Griffin Memorial Church of God in Christ. Shortly thereafter, Bishop Nathaniel Jones was appointed to a new jurisdiction in southern California and Bobby Allen was appointed bishop of the Utah Jurisdiction in 1993. Having served in that position for over twenty-five years, Bishop Bobby Allen is one of the longest serving bishops in the history of the jurisdiction, second only to Bishop Isaac Finley.81

The Church of God in Christ has not grown larger in Utah through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It remains one of the smallest Pentecostal denominations in Utah, probably in large part because African Americans remain the smallest minority

group in the state. Yet stalwart members including Bishop Bobby Allen continue striving to strengthen and care for the community. In 2013 during the Holy Convocation celebrating the 75th anniversary of COGIC in Utah, Bishop Allen wrote “as I reflect upon the past 52 years, I see God has brought us a mighty long way.” Some steps along the way may have been more painful than others, but Bishop Allen believes that God “is yet taking us higher.”82 COGIC’s continued presence in the state of Utah is a monument to their endurance and faith.

The history of the Church of God in Christ illustrates the complexities of race, ethnicity, and religion in Utah.83 Rarely acknowledged by other Pentecostals and often uninvited by other religious communities in the state, they have struggled to find places of worship and maintain active congregations. The COGIC congregations never rivaled the size of other African American or white churches. And even as the Black population in Utah increased over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their congregations remained small. Without the finances for growth and enmeshed within a majority religious community unsure of how to structure its relationship with a growing racial and ethnic community, they soldiered on, developing their own unique subculture within Utah.

Despite cultural and financial hardships, the Church of God in Christ reveals how Pentecostal churches of all types have managed to establish themselves in even the most unlikely of places. For over eighty years, members of COGIC dedicated much of their lives to creating a community in Utah where they could comfortably worship according to their unique beliefs. Many studies of Utah religion focus on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes to the exclusion of other religious groups. Viewing the struggles of minority churches in Utah illuminates the religious diversity of the American West, even within areas saturated by strong religious majorities. The Church of God in Christ community is small, but they show no indication of going away. On the contrary, they are looking ahead to the next eighty years.

Notes

We extend our great gratitude to the congregations of the Church of God in Christ in Utah for generously sharing their community records. The photos and history have

been collected by church members over the years and kept together primarily through the efforts of Pastor Henry McAllister. But many others in the community also deserve credit for preserving and sharing their history.

1. Henry McAllister, “Soldier’s Story,” originally published in The Whole Truth, November 1985. Reprinted in “Obsequies of Superintendent Emeritus David F. Griffin,” 1989, on the occasion of David F. Griffin’s funeral.

2. Recollection of the event provided by the Reverend France A. Davis, pastor emeritus of the Calvary Baptist Church, Salt Lake City, Utah; interview conducted by the author, February 22, 2020.

3. Ronald G. Coleman, “Blacks in Utah History: An Unknown Legacy,” in The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Z. Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976), 117. Coleman notes that the 1850 territorial census probably came up short on the total number of slaves in Utah, but it is difficult to be certain.

4. The data for population come from census data collected in various publications. See Pamela S. Perlich, Utah Minorities: The Story Told by 150 Years of Census Data (University of Utah, David S. Eccles School of Business, Bureau of Economic and Business Research, October 2002), 10–11; and “Race and Ethnicity in Utah: 2016,” fact sheet produced by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, University of Utah, July 2017, available at gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/Raceand Ethnicity_FactSheet20170825.pdf. See also United States Census Bureau quick facts for the state of Utah, available at census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/UT/RHI 225216#viewtop. For nineteenth century African American history in Utah, see Coleman, “Blacks in Utah,” 115–40. For more recent studies of African American Latter-day Saints, see W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Russell W. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism, 1830–2013 (Draper, UT: Greg Kofford Books, 2014).

5. 1990 Census Brief: Minorities of Utah, prepared by Demographic and Economic Analysis, Office of Planning and Budget, Salt Lake City, April 1991.

6. Utah State Profile created by the United States Census Bureau, accessed August 31, 2021, at census.gov /library/stories/state-by-state/utah-population -change-between-census-decade.html.

7. France A. Davis, “Utah in the ’40s: An African American Perspective,” Beehive History 25 (1999): 26.

8. Anna Belle Weakley, “Interviews with African Americans in Utah, AnnaBelle Mattson, Part 1,” J. Willard Marriott Digital Library, University of Utah, accessed August 29, 2021, at collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id =893667&q=AnnaBelle+Mattson.

9. Stene, “The African-American Community of Ogden, Utah: 1910–1950” (Master’s thesis, Utah State University, 1994), 58.

10. James B. Allen, Still the Right Place: Utah’s Second HalfCentury of Statehood, 1945–1995 (Provo, UT: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University and Utah State Historical Society, 2016), 425, 461.

11. Stene, “African-American Community of Ogden, Utah,” 58–59.

12. “African Americans Built Churches in Utah,” The History Blazer (July 1996), accessed May 5, 2021, at issuu .com/utah10/docs/historyblazers_1996_7_july.

13. France Davis, Light in the Midst of Zion (Salt Lake City: University Publishing, LLC, 1997), 13–15.

14. For a history of the Baptist in Utah, see Davis, “Utah in the ’40s,” 25. For Seventh Day Adventists history, see Maxine Goins, “History of the Central SDA Church,” accessed May 5, 2021, slccentral.adventistfaith.org /central-history.

15. There are many histories of Pentecostalism available. For a focused history of the Azusa Street Revival and William J. Seymour, see Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., Azusa Street Mission and Revival: The Birth of the Global Pentecostal Movement (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2006), and Gastón Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

16. Bishop Ithiel C. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason and the Roots of the Church of God in Christ, Centennial Edition (Bakersfield, CA: Pneuma Life Publishing, 1996), 26.

17. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 61–71.

18. For Church of God in Christ membership statistics, see “Church of God in Christ (COGIC),” Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California, accessed May 6, 2021, crcc.usc.edu/report/nationa l-association-of-real-estate-brokers-nareb-religious -literacy-primer-2019/church-of-god-in-christ-cogic/. See also https://www.cogic.org/about-company/.

19. The Assemblies of God has more members globally, but it only has approximately three million members in the United States. For additional details on Assemblies of God statistics, see ag.org/about/statistics, accessed on May 6, 2021.

20. The African American population in Utah is very small. Although members of the various African American churches hold differing views on religious practice and Christian theology, they celebrate special events together. Historically, Pentecostal churches did not receive support from other Protestant or Evangelical churches. Even though COGIC members did not initially worship with Black members of other denominations, this disposition changed over the years. Especially in remote areas like Utah with small African American populations, COGIC churches learned to adapt and participate in more interfaith social activities.

21. These estimates are for 2021 and come from Pastor Henry McAllister. For context and comparison, a Salt Lake Tribune article estimated membership of the Trinity AME Church to be approximately sixty members in 2018. See Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Utah Pastor at historic black church retires after a grueling but gratifying tenure,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 25, 2018. France Davis estimates that as of March 2020, there were approximately 2,300 weekly attendees among the eight predominantly African American Baptist congregations in Utah. Estimates provided via personal communication with authors, May 4, 2021.

22. “Obsequies of Superintendent Emeritus David F. Griffin,” 1989, on the occasion of David F. Griffin’s funeral.

23. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 99.

24. From “Mother Alberta Harris Jennings Trail Blazer,” local history from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

25. Alberta Harris would marry Elder Jack R. Jennings in October 1942. See “Statistics,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 14, 1942, 21. The article includes an announcement for the wedding of Jack Roy Jennings and Alberta Harris.

26. Within the Utah COGIC community, Mother Harris’ encounter with the Salt Lake City Council is an oftrecited anecdote. We have not yet found historical evidence beyond these cultural memories to elaborate on these encounters, but believe that due to the nature of her outdoor ministry at public parks, it is probable that she had meetings with the city council to authorize her services. Other examples of this type of encounter occurred in Ogden and elsewhere in the state.

27. Biographical details from “Mother Alberta Harris Jennings Trail Blazer,” local history from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

28. In the Church of God in Christ today, women are not called as elders or pastors. They do, however, have the ability to share spiritual messages with the congregations in which they reside.

29. Anthea D. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 59.

30. Clemmons, Bishop C. H. Mason, 100.

31. Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ, 3.

32. Biographical details from “Mother Alberta Harris Jennings Trail Blazer.”

33. Very little is currently known about Elder Caldwell. He is included in the “History of Mount Zion Church of God in Christ,” written by Henry McAllister, and a few newspaper articles mention him in the early 1940s. He seems to have assisted in the early stages of the church and then moved on to another location outside Utah.

34. From “Jurisdictional Prelate Bishop Isaac Finley,” local history from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

35. “Meeting Called to Protest Lynching,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 4, 1925, 3. See also Dean L. May, Utah: A People’s History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 144–45. There is not a great deal of data available on lynchings that occurred in the state of Utah, but it appears to have been quite rare. Larry Gerlach provided some context from his research in 1981: “A study of early Utah executions–legal as well as illegal–reveals that at least twelve lynchings have taken place in the state. Except for the lynching of Robert Marshall in Price on June 18, 1925, mob justice in Utah was confined to the territorial period.” See Larry R. Gerlach, “Ogden’s ‘Horrible Tragedy’: The Lynching of George Segal,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (Spring 1981): 159.

36. Larry R. Gerlach, “The Klan in Salt Lake City,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, edited by Shawn Lay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 146.

37. Henry McAllister, interview conducted by the authors, March 8, 2017.

38. This meeting is recorded in “Mother Alberta Harris Jennings Trail Blazer,” local history from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ. We have not been able to corroborate the reminiscence with records from the Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There may be additional information on this meeting, but records and meeting minutes for the activities of the Quorum of the Twelve are restricted to most researchers.

39. See “Permit Granted,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 1943, 10; and “Assembly of God,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 18, 1940, 11. The tent meetings continued on and off for several months. See “S. L. Church Sets Nightly

Revival Meetings,” Salt Lake Telegram, April 29, 1943, 12.

40. “Board Approves Tent Tabernacle,” Ogden StandardExaminer, April 7, 1943, 18; “Church of God in Christ,” Ogden Standard Examiner, August 7, 1943, 3.

41. “28th & Wall Avenue/Emmanuel Church of God in Christ History,” local history from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

42. “Griffin Temple/Memorial History,” from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

43. Over the years, the congregation had quite a few assistant pastors, including Elders Sylvester V. Miller, Hasie Owens, Lafayette Mosely, Johnathan St. Thomas, James Shaw, and Bishop Richard Paige.

44. Elder R. E. Hurrington served as pastor of Mount Zion from 1953 to 1983. He was followed by Elder James Shaw and Elder Ronald Norman.

45. There are a few other congregations that existed at one time or another before dissolving. Bishop Melvin Givens led the Deliverance Temple Church of God in Christ in Salt Lake City in the 1970s. The Fresh Start COGIC existed under Apostle Dennis Newsome and the New Life COGIC was pastored by Elder H. J. Lilly. Elder Clifton Melvin oversaw the Victory COGIC, Robert Harris pastored the St. Paul COGIC, and Mother Leona Thomas led the Shiloh COGIC.

At the time of this publication, four congregations hold weekly services in Utah: Griffin Memorial COGIC under Bishop Bobby Allen, Emmanuel COGIC under Elder John Miller, Journey of New Beginnings COGIC under Elder Henry McAllister, and Holiness Tabernacle COGIC under Elder George Green. From the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

46. Biographical information on Latter-day Saint African Americans living in Utah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has recently been made available online through the University of Utah. The database is called “Century of Black Mormons” and is available at exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of-black -mormons/page/welcome. The database includes biographical profiles of Latter-day Saints, as well as individuals who at one time associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but later left it. It is a very helpful collection for understanding the life of African Americans in Utah.

47. Various strikes occurred in the early twentieth century, but one of the largest strikes in Carbon County occurred in 1922 and 1923. Quite a few outsiders including African Americans moved in as strike breakers during these years. See Ronald G. Watt, A History of Carbon County, Utah Centennial County History Series (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1997), 171–73. See also Howard Browne, “Interviews with African Americans in Utah, Howard Browne Interview,” in Interviews with Blacks in Utah, 1982–1988, MS 0453, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

48. “Listen To the Gospel Hour,” Helper Journal, March 28, 1946, 5. Although it is not clear exactly when Green began his ministry in Helper, he is listed as a participating pastor in this 1946 ad for the Gospel Hour radio broadcast.

49. “Church of God and Christ Services,” Helper Journal, January 16, 1947, 5. The name of the church was misprinted as the “Church of God and Christ” in the earliest announcements.

50. “Religious Group Slates Chair Rally in Helper,” Helper Journal, October 2, 1947, 8. St. Anthony’s Catholic Church burned down in a fire in 1936. Green received permission to use its foundation in the construction of his church. See “Community Church of God in Christ, Building New Church,” Helper Journal, July 17, 1947, 3.

51. “Community Church Here Plans Barbecue Aug. 26,” Helper Journal, August 18, 1949, 8.

52. “New Schedule Listed For Colored Church; LDS Head Sends Check,” Helper Journal, May 6, 1948, 4. There is very little further information available on the Church of God in Christ in Helper. Advertisements for the church continued in the newspaper through 1951. There is no information concerning J. R. Green or his church within the Utah Church of God in Christ history. Likely Green operated independently from the other churches in the state.

53. Howard Browne, “Interviews with African Americans in Utah, Howard Browne Interview 2,” Interviews with Blacks in Utah.

54. Browne, “Interviews with African Americans in Utah, Howard Browne Interview 2.” Browne recalled a conversation turned argument with an Italian miner who unintentionally targeted Browne with racist language. Although not out of spite, the example once again highlighted the subtle kind of racism rampant in Utah during much of the twentieth century.

55. For additional details, see Robert R. Owens, Never Forget! The Dark Years of COGIC History (Fairfax, VA: Xulon Press, 2002), 32–33.

56. As noted above, Lincoln Avenue changed its name from Lincoln Avenue to Finley Temple. Eventually it would become the Journey of New Beginnings Church of God in Christ. Other pastors of this congregation include Elder R. E. Hurrington (1983–1992), Elder Leon Lewis (1992–1993), Bishop William Whitehead (1993–1994), Bishop Bobby Allen (1994–1996), and Elder Henry McAllister (1996–present).

57. The major exception to this is the social activism of Elder Robert L. Harris, which was mentioned in the beginning of this section.

58. “Utah Jurisdiction Church of God in Christ Holy convocation: Celebrating 75 Years,” from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

59. Recollections from Tommy Vigil, interview conducted by the author, December 21, 2018.

60. Reverend France A. Davis, interview conducted by the author, February 22, 2020.

61. Bishop Bobby Allen, interview conducted by the author, September 30, 2020.

62. “History of Deliverance Temple Church of God in Christ,” from the history collection of the Utah Church of God in Christ.

63. “Y Groups To Join Singer,” Daily Herald, March 1, 1970, 20.

64. “Mormon Teens Raise $33,000 to Aid Salt Lake Negro Church,” Daily Herald, June 11, 1970, 13.

65. “Mormon Teens Raise $33,000 to Aid Salt Lake Negro Church.”

66. Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness, 157.

67. Stevenson, 156.

68. “Mormon Teens Raise $33,000 to Aid Salt Lake Negro Church.”

69. Henry McAllister, interview conducted by the authors, March 8, 2017.

70. The Church of God in Christ Congregational broke away from the main body of the Church of God in Christ after the death of Bishop Charles H. Mason due to various concerns over the leadership structure of the church. Although Robert Harris ministered within the Church of God in Christ Congregational, he also participated in the events and services held by the Utah Church of God in Christ. For more about the schism, see Owens, Never Forget!

71. Robert L. Harris, quoted by Amy Donaldson, “Grocer, Reverend Enjoys Feeding Hungry,” Deseret News, February 3, 1994.

72. The Church of God in Christ, Congregational formed in 1932 when it separated from the Church of God in Christ. Its first bishop was Bishop J. Bowe. Some additional information on the Church of God in Christ, Congregational is available from Sherry Sherrod DuPree, African-American Holiness Pentecostal Movement: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 142.

73. Biographical data on Robert L. Harris comes from “Pastor to Tell History of 19 Peace Marches Without Violence,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, November 21, 1968, 4; Cliff Thompson, “‘No Protests Planned,’ Reverend Harris Says,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, January 5, 1977, 24; and Donaldson, “Grocer, Reverend Enjoys Feeding Hungry.”

74. “Preacher Lodges Protest,” Daily Herald, January 15, 1975, 23.

75. “Protest is Costly For Pastor,” Daily Herald, January 30, 1974, 9; David Briscoe, “Capitol Officials Take Min-

ister’s Lying Down Protest Lying Down,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 6, 1973, 19; and “Church Prepares for Third Peace March,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 31, 1967, 2

76. “Pastor Asks Election to City Council,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, August 12, 1971, 7.

77. Thompson, “‘No Protests Planned,’ Reverend Harris Says,” 24.

78. Thompson.

79. Information received from La’Mae Ervin and Henry McAllister, notes in the authors’ possession, November 2020; and “Rev. Robert Lee Harris” obituary, Ogden Standard Examiner, February 27, 2005, 7B.

80. Recollections from Bishop Bobby Allen, interview conducted by the authors, September 30, 2020. Bishop Isaac Finley served as Jurisdictional Bishop from 1942 to 1970. Bishop Allen will soon be the longest serving Jurisdictional Bishop in Utah’s history.

81. Recollections from Bishop Bobby Allen, interview conducted by the authors, September 30, 2020.

82. Bishop Bobby Allen, opening statement in the pamphlet for the “Utah Jurisdiction Church of God in Christ Holy Convocation,” 2013. The year 2013 celebrated seventy-five years of history for the Church of God in Christ in the state of Utah.

83. Note that although not all members of the congregations of the Church of God in Christ are African Americans, most are. The denomination holds an important place in African American religious history in the United States.

Placing Immigrants in Salt Lake City, 1900

BY BRANDON PLEWE

In 1900, immigration to the United States was at an all-time high and rising. In the midst of the “second wave” of immigration (1883–1914), almost half a million people were arriving at America’s shores each year. That rate of increase doubled in the two decades after 1900. Foreign-born residents made up almost 14 percent of the US population.1 These new Americans spread all over the country, enriching our cultural and economic geography. Many looked to settle on the remaining frontier lands in the Great Plains and upper Midwest, but most concentrated in cities, especially the entry ports of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, as well as the industrial cities of the Great Lakes.2

It is not surprising, therefore, that most studies of the urban geography of immigrants center in the Northeast. The historical narrative has often focused on the tendency of immigrants to segregate and concentrate in ethnic neighborhoods in the major cities of that region.3 But what was distribution of the immigrant population in other places? Did they congregate in ethnic neighborhoods like those in large cities did?

Salt Lake City at the turn of the twentieth century is an interesting case study for several reasons. First, for a relatively small city compared to New York and Boston, it had a large number of foreign-born residents— about a third of its 60,000 residents. This proportion is less than the 40 percent in major eastern cities like New York, but higher than any city in the West, including even San Francisco at 29 percent. Second, the composition of the immigrant population in Utah was unique. A rapidly growing proportion of the immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1900 were from southern and eastern Europe (especially Italy, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Russia), joining those who had arrived in the previous wave twenty years earlier, primarily from the United Kingdom and Germany.4 However, the mix in Salt Lake City, with its continued influx of English immigrants and significant numbers from Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and even Switzerland, was very different from the new trends in the rest of the country.5 (Table 1 and Figure 2)

The history of immigrants in Utah and Salt Lake City has been explored at length. William Mulder and others have documented the lives of

Figure 1. Percentage of the population born outside the United States, 1900. All maps courtesy of Brandon Plewe.

Figure 2. Percentage of foreign-born residents from Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland), 1900.

Table 1. Proportion of the foreign-born population in 1900

to produce and preserve more records than did individuals.

The existing historical literature is largely missing a spatial perspective that can add essential information to little-discussed immigrant communities and individuals. Little is said in the literature about where immigrants lived, other than passing references to neighborhoods that rarely existed at the same time (e.g., Little Denmark in the 1850s, Greek Town in the 1920s). Where did they live and work? Who were their neighbors? Understanding the geography of the city can help gain a broader understanding of the experiences of its residents.

Mormon converts in Scandinavia, including their establishment in Salt Lake City and other settlements.6 Several studies have been done on Germans, including Mormon converts, Jews, and others.7 Another commonly studied group has been the Chinese, which formed a very unique community in Salt Lake City despite their relatively small numbers.8 Other works have placed these and other groups in a broader context; notably, Elliott Barkan’s From All Points compares the immigrant communities in Utah to groups in other areas of the American West, while the landmark volume The Peoples of Utah, published in 1976, highlights the common trends of the various ethnic groups in this state, as well as their unique experiences.9 These and related studies share several broad findings. First, the experiences of immigrants in Utah were heavily influenced (directly and indirectly) by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, both as an institution and as a community of believers; whether an immigrant was “Mormon” or “Gentile” often had more influence on his or her subsequent life than which country or ethnic group he or she came from. Second, some immigrants made Utah their permanent home, while others came only temporarily.

One shortcoming of past scholarship is that it has been based on a very selective sample of the entire immigrant community, as necessitated by the availability of historical documentation. For example, the successful immigrant in Utah society (e.g., church, government, business) tended to leave a larger paper trail than more common individuals did; institutions such as churches, societies, and businesses also tended

This essay presents a different but complementary perspective on the existing historical narrative by leveraging limited historical data retained in public records to gain an understanding of Salt Lake City’s turn-of-the-century immigrant population. Specifically, this study evaluates the geographic distribution of different groups of immigrants. The 1900 US census was the first to record street addresses in the city, enabling a detailed analysis that represented every resident of the city. This task presented several technical challenges, solved using a historical geographic information system (HGIS).10

Mapping Salt Lake City in 1900

This project is not the first to study the historical geography of a city using individual-level census data, and some of the methods used herein are already in experimental but not common usage. Nigel Stephen Walford’s experiments in address-based mapping of neighborhoods in London from the 1901 and 1911 census developed a methodology that is generally similar to ours, if different in the details.11 A similar but broader project is the detailed individual-level and neighborhood-level mapping of several American cities (not including Salt Lake City) over several census years by John Logan; one of the subsequent studies they were able to undertake using these datasets focused on the urban segregation of first-wave immigrants (from England, Ireland, and Germany) in the 1880 census, finding that they were moderately segregated in most cities—significantly less so than those arriving in later decades from different parts of Europe.12 This project is currently expanding to include demographics in

more cities between 1900 and 1930, but still not Salt Lake City.13 Local individual-level historical GIS projects along the same lines are starting to appear in several places.14

To map every resident mentioned in the 1900 census, it is first necessary to have a digital transcription of the complete census records. Using records from FamilySearch, we generated a database of 12,577 households in the municipality of Salt Lake City, with the demographic attributes of the persons in each household, including individual birthplaces, parent birthplaces, and year of immigration.15 Street addresses from the 1900 census had to be entered manually. Enumerators appeared to be much less careful about the addresses than they were about other columns, and the way they were recorded in the form was less standardized than other fields. Omissions, misspellings, and other errors were common, which required significant human interpretation anyway. Fortunately, other sources were available to augment incomplete addresses, including a 1902 Polk

city directory.16 This directory only includes about a third of the households found in the census (its sample appeared to miss most of the immigrants, possibly due to a bias in favor of homeowners), but it was still helpful at times to clear up questions that arose from the census transcription, such as blank house numbers or street names.

To map the households listed in the census, one then needs to geocode the addresses. This is typically done using tools such as Google Maps or GIS software by comparing each address to a street map. In this street dataset, each block of a street is attributed with its range of address numbers, enabling the software to interpolate a location along the matching block and on the correct side of the street (since the even/odd standard, known as the “Philadelphia System” from its source in 1790, is practically universal across the United States).

Most of these tools only work with current street data, which does not always work with

Figure 3. Salt Lake City street map, 1900. Streets with the same name and addressing in 2020 are shown in black; those that have changed are white.

historical applications, due to the fact that street names and address numbering often changes over time.17 This is especially true in our situation: about 90 percent of the streets in turn-of-the-century Salt Lake City had different names and/or addresses than they do now (or worse, no longer exist). (Figure 3) Salt Lake City had significantly changed its street naming system several times before and after 1900. In the 1890s, for example, the names of northsouth streets in the Avenues changed from trees to letters, and East Temple and First East became Main and State Streets. In the 1900 census, the old and new names both appear frequently. Sometime soon after 1900, the numbered east-west streets in the Avenues changed from “Street” to “Avenue.”

Significant alterations to the street naming system have occurred since the 1900 census. In about 1908, the haphazard naming of eastwest streets in the blossoming suburbs in the “Five-Acre Survey” between 9th and 12th (now 2100) South was standardized to the pattern of

consistent names across the city (e.g., Emerson, Harvard, Ramona) in use today. About the same time, the mid-block courts of the central city were renumbered from a street-based system (having 1 and 2 at the beginning of the street) to the city-wide address system numbered from South Temple and Main Street. In 1916, the major east-west streets south of the city were renumbered to match their addressing, with 10th, 11th, and 12th South becoming 13th, 17th, and 21st South, respectively.18

A major change came in the 1940s with the statewide adoption of the Lyman addressing system (developed by Richard R. Lyman, an LDS apostle, civil engineer, and city planner), which renamed grid streets according to their addresses (e.g., 2nd South became 200 South).19

In 1972, Salt Lake City finally complied with the county-wide Lyman system, shifting the starting point of the numbering of the western and northern streets from North Temple to South Temple and from West Temple to Main Street, so that 4th West became 500 West (even

Figure 4. Location of all residents enumerated in the 1900 census that could be located by address.

though it had been 500 in house addresses all along).20

Given these changes, geocoding the addresses of 1900 required building a historic street map of Salt Lake City. Fortunately, we had at our disposal several good primary sources, especially the 1898 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and the 1902 Polk directory.21 With these and other sources, the resultant map provided a nearly complete picture of Salt Lake City in 1900, albeit with some uncertainty in the newer suburbs to the west and south (e.g., Poplar Grove, Glendale, Sugar House) not covered by the Sanborn maps until 1911. The census addresses were then matched to the street data to estimate the locations of most of the households in the city, using a custom database query based on a standard geocoding algorithm. Using this method, about three quarters of the households in the city were successfully located.

The remaining households turned out to have more significant challenges. These challenges included street names that could not be found in the street data (usually new subdivisions on the edges of the city not covered in the Sanborn maps), households for which the census taker neglected to record the house number or street name, and households for which either of those was unreadable. These difficult-to-identify households were researched individually, using sources such as the city directory, houses shown with addresses on the Sanborn maps, and manual estimation of locations described only approximately (e.g., “2nd West between 10th and 11th South”).

After working through each of the 12,577 households using automated geocoding supplemented by individual research, we were able to geocode 12,171 (97 percent), although one hundred or so of these appeared to be questionable. The remaining four hundred either had addresses that could not be located, incomplete addresses, or no address at all. These were most common in the western and southern fringes of the city, such as the nascent Poplar Grove and Glendale neighborhoods. In fact, we did not include the Sugar House precinct in the southeast corner of our map, because no addresses were recorded in the census there (the large cluster in the lower right corner of the map is the state prison).

Because each member of a household may have a different birthplace, we needed to map individuals, not households. A database query was written that duplicated the location information for each person in a household and matched it with their individual demographic attributes, producing a map of all 56,000 individuals in located households. (Figure 4) A second query was created from this first one to aggregate the individuals by enumeration district and to total each birthplace, producing statistical summary data that could be visualized using choropleth maps.

Integrated Immigrants

The resultant maps indicating the birthplace of Salt Lake City residents showed several interesting patterns. First, the largest single source of immigrants was Great Britain (6,900 individuals, 12 percent of the total population). They were evenly distributed across the entire city; in fact, they formed a larger proportion in the suburban outskirts than in the downtown district. (Figure 5) They were living in neighborhoods of all economic levels. On its own, one could easily explain this away by assuming that a common language enabled them to easily assimilate into the larger population. In line with this hypothesis, Canadians and the smaller numbers from British colonies such as Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa (totaling about 650 residents) had the same distribution.

However, Scandinavians (especially Danes), who formed the second largest group, showed a very similar pattern of spread across the city, even though they were not English-speakers. (Figure 6) In the 1850s, a Danish enclave had begun to form in the LDS Second Ward, known as “Little Denmark,” but by the turn of the century that concentration of Danes had diminished.22 The distribution was not quite as widespread as the British, with several small Scandinavian clusters representing small tenement buildings (for example, having three apartments with all Scandinavian tenants) or single-family homes inhabited by large extended families. Thus, these immigrants had a tendency to live in the same building as others speaking the same language. This was a common practice among immigrants everywhere, but the fact that Scandinavian-born residents

did not concentrate in one neighborhood, but were spread around the city, is unusual.

Migrants from several other European sources were also spread across the city, including Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Ireland, although with somewhat larger concentrations of Germans (Figure 7) and Irish (Figure 10) in the central city than the other groups. The German population was growing especially quickly during this period, reflecting nationwide trends.23

Why were the immigrants from these particular countries integrated into the population at large? What did they have in common? The most obvious connection is that these were the countries in which missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been preaching and converting tens of thousands since the late 1830s (in Britain) and 1850s (on the European continent).24 LDS converts were strongly encouraged to “gather to Zion”

up until the 1910s, supported by an immigration machine of port agents, funding through the Perpetual Emigration Fund (PEF), and charter ships and trains.25

As immigrants arrived in Salt Lake City, the LDS church wrestled to balance the value of supporting them in their immediate spiritual, social, and physical needs (which required communicating in their native languages), and the desire to keep the church unified through assimilation of immigrants into the Mormon–American culture.26 Small Danishor German-speaking LDS congregations may have operated in the city, but they were citywide rather than being focused on a particular neighborhood and were generally short-lived. The LDS church also organized a “Scandinavian Meeting” and a “German Organization,” quasi-ecclesiastical associations that provided city-wide native-tongue leadership and social activities without becoming a full-fledged ward or branch.27 To further support them in their

Figure 5. Distribution of residents in 1900 who were born in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales).

native tongue, the church endorsed or published foreign-language periodicals, including the German Salt Lake City Beobachter (1890–1935), the Danish Biküben and Utah Posten (1875–1935), and the Swedish Svenska Härolden and Utah Korrespondenten (1885–1915).

By providing non-localized support to new arrivals, these efforts appear to have successfully reduced the impetus to settle in ethnically concentrated neighborhoods. Much has been made of the negotiation that Mormon immigrants had to make between maintaining their national cultural identity and adopting a new religious cultural identity, but at least in terms of residence location, the latter seems to have held sway.28

Another commonality between these groups was race, at least how it was viewed at the time. The existing white American population almost entirely traced their lineage to English, Germanic, and Scandinavian roots, and their

conception of “white” not only included themselves but also immigrants from their same home countries as well.29 While immigrants as a whole were often looked down upon, these ethnicities were less so than those from elsewhere. It is thus not surprising that immigrants from these countries were significantly less segregated in American cities than those from southern and eastern Europe, let alone Blacks and Asians.30 The fact that they were even more integrated in Salt Lake City than elsewhere played into the dynamic relationship between the Mormons and the rest of the country during the fraught late-polygamy and post-polygamy era. Even as the LDS church and its members strove to be accepted as thoroughly American, in terms of race as well as other characteristics, the rapid assimilation of immigrants into Utah often strengthened external views of Mormons as a distinct and lesser ethnicity. The historian Paul Reeve shows how popular media of the time often treated Mormons as if they were a distinct ethnic group or race, at the same low

Figure 6. Residents in 1900 who were born in Sweden, Denmark, or Norway. The LDS 2nd Ward, the location of an early concentration of Danish members, is shaded.

level of social desirability as immigrants; the public Mormon encouragement and acceptance of immigration strengthened this racial link, and it is appears that Mormons bought into the tendency to grade “whiteness” in an attempt to be accepted as thoroughly American.31

Segregated Immigrants

Mapping immigrants from outside Great Britain and western Europe reveals a very different pattern. Salt Lake City residents born in the Catholic and Orthodox countries of southern and eastern Europe were smaller in number but much more geographically concentrated, living almost exclusively in the downtown area extending a little to the south and west toward the rail yards. (Figure 8)

Like the British, Germans, and Scandinavians, Southern and Eastern Europeans do not appear to have segregated into separate ethnic enclaves by 1900, probably due to their small numbers. Rather, they generally lived among native-born residents and other immigrants.

Over the next two decades, much larger numbers arrived from these countries, joined by immigrants from Japan, Syria, and eventually Mexico, before US anti-immigration laws slowed the tide.32 A few of these groups eventually formed distinct neighborhoods in the early twentieth century, especially in the same west-central part of town, such as Japanese Town and Greek Town located between downtown and the railroad tracks.33

As with the northwestern Europeans, this pattern could also be attributed to religion. Prior to the turn of the century, since Latter-day Saint missionaries had had little to no success in southern and eastern Europe and immigrants from that region probably included very few Latter-day Saints, it is probably not a coincidence that the place they concentrated in was a religiously diverse section of Salt Lake City not dominated by Mormons. The city center had not one but two downtowns, with Mormon-owned businesses and institutions centered around Temple Square, and businesses, hotels,

Figure 7. Residents in 1900 who were born in Germany.

churches, and most government buildings not owned by Latter-day Saints concentrated between First and Fifth South—a division that continues in subtle ways to the present.34 The 1880 census identified the non-Mormon residents to be concentrated in the south-central parts of the city, especially in the 13th (46 percent “gentile” or “lapsed Mormon”) and 14th (50 percent) LDS wards, but to a lesser degree in the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 12th wards.35 (Figure 9) It makes sense that non-Mormon immigrants would feel more comfortable in the southern part of the central city.

One might think that the concentration of non-Mormon immigrants would therefore be reflected in the distribution of churches, but the greatest concentration of houses of worship, just east of downtown, did not have a large concentration of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe but did have a large number of non-Mormons in the 1880 census. (Figure 9) The Sanborn maps show the area just east of downtown to be primarily single-family homes; thus, it was possibly a middle-class

concentration of native-born non-Mormons. Basically, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe had not arrived in large enough numbers by 1900 to warrant their own churches (i.e., non-English speaking Catholic, Orthodox); many were built over the next twenty years as these immigrants multiplied. Not all the houses of worship catered to southern and eastern European-born residents. The three Scandinavian churches largely consisted of Mormon immigrants who had been reconverted by Lutheran, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist missionaries in Salt Lake City in the twenty years prior to 1900.36 The small St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, located near the railroad tracks, appears to have catered to Irish immigrants.

However, religion is not the only explanation for the difference in the distribution of immigrants. As in other US cities, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were among the poorest segments of the population. As evident in the Sanborn maps, the southern part of

Figure 8. Residents in 1900 from southern and eastern Europe, primarily Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Poland.

downtown Salt Lake City was home to most of the multi-story tenement blocks, while many of the buildings near the railroad on the west side were shanties. Regardless of religion, this area was simply the cheapest place to live, and without the support structures that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided to its own immigrants, they may have had few other options. Such was the pattern in cities across the country.

Religion and economics also help to explain the mixed pattern of German and Irish immigrants. (Figures 7 and 10) These populations likely included both Mormon converts (especially from each country’s Protestant population), who were more integrated spatially, and immigrants from other religions, who may have been more concentrated. Among this latter group were immigrants from the Catholic regions of Ireland and Germany where LDS missionaries were less successful, and Jewish immigrants from Germany, some of whom had

become quite successful in Salt Lake City, including the prosperous Bamberger and Auerbach families.37 Two significant clusters of Irish immigrants (the large black squares)—both Roman Catholic institutions—was St. Mary’s Academy just west of downtown, and Holy Cross Hospital on 11th East. (Figure 10) Each was staffed with Irish nuns and had Irish students or patients.

As was the case elsewhere in the American West, Chinese immigrants (238 listed residents) were heavily concentrated in Salt Lake City. The majority lived in a single block, between Main and State Streets and First and Second South—the location of Plum Alley, Salt Lake City’s small Chinatown.38 (Figure 11)

In fact, their distribution was possibly even more concentrated than it appears in the map; comparing the numbers of residents listed on the Plum Alley block (about 350 total) to the number of tenements shown in the Sanborn

Figure 9. Percentage of the population from southern and eastern Europe, by census enumeration districts, compared to the locations of non-LDS churches (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish) and heavily non-LDS areas in the 1880 census.

maps suggests a significant undercount. The entire tenement district appears to be undercounted by the 1900 census takers, suggesting that the other concentrated immigrant populations may have also been larger than the census tabulations. This kind of undercounting in multi-story buildings in poor neighborhoods where many non-English speaking residents lived has been widely documented elsewhere.39 Outside Chinatown, a significant number of Chinese residents scattered in the northwest edge of town. According to the Sanborn maps and the census records, these were almost exclusively tenant farmers raising vegetable gardens.40

To what degree could the distributions of the Chinese and Southern and Eastern Europeans be a product of racial/ethnic discrimination?

Residential segregation was common in American cities at the turn of the century and would become even more so in the first decades of the twentieth century.41 Conflating concepts of race and ethnicity, white Americans commonly

perceived a hierarchy of preference, with the Germanic (German, British, Scandinavian) people from their own homelands at the top, followed by “less white” Europeans, Asians, and African Americans.42

For comparison, a map was made of the distribution of Black residents in Salt Lake City. (Figure 12) This map shows some amount of segregation, with an area of concentration along Franklin Avenue (now Edison Street), a poor street of tenements and the city’s Salvation Army. While the Chinese (238) and Black (271) populations were roughly similar in size, and over half of the city’s Chinese population lived on the block including Plum Alley, only 20 percent of the city’s Black population lived on the block including Franklin Avenue, with the rest scattered across the city, largely in single family homes. Moreover, only a third of the residents on Franklin were Black (another quarter were Scandinavian), while over half of those in Plum Alley were Chinese.

Figure 10. Residents in 1900 from Ireland.

Does this mean that African Americans were doing well in Salt Lake City? By no means: discriminatory businesses were common, Blacks were viewed by most Mormons as spiritually lesser (a common feeling in many churches, even in the northeastern United States), and as the Black population grew in subsequent years, their segregation into a concentration along Franklin Avenue (soon rechristened as Edison Street) increased.43 In the 1910 census, every one of the ninety residents on Edison Street was listed as “Black” or “Mulatto.”44 That said, it could be argued, at least based on these maps, that the Chinese were treated worse in some ways, while the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were far less ostracized than Blacks.

Conclusions

Mapping the individual residents of Salt Lake City provides a deeper understanding of immigration as an aspect of its urban geography than other statistical approaches do, especially

since the 1900 census did not report aggregate statistics at the enumeration district level like those commonly used in demographic studies of other years. This mapping project also adds a new perspective to existing documentary and personal histories of the city’s immigrants. The combination of documents about the personal experiences of an immigrant with knowledge of where he or she lived, in what kind of housing, who their neighbors were, where they worked, and other data from the census has the promise of yielding a more complete narrative of the immigrant experience in Salt Lake City.

One way to get a better picture of the situation would be to widen the scope of time. The year 1900 was a good place to start, as it was a transition between a declining Mormon immigration from a few European countries and an increasing ethnically and religiously diverse immigrant population from different corners of the world. I plan to conduct a similar study of the 1910 census and anticipate finding a pattern of

Figure 11. Residents in 1900 who were born in China.

increased segregation among new arrivals. Doing the same for earlier decades is challenging; one source could be the membership rolls of the LDS wards in the city, and Samuel Smith’s ward-level study of the 1880 census could easily be extended to look at birthplace.

What do we see in 1900? The geographic pattern of immigrant residence in Salt Lake City varied significantly by country of origin, with those from some countries integrated into the population at large, some extremely segregated, and others in between. As we would expect in any city in the United States at this time, language and socio-economic status played a role. Many, if not most, recent immigrants were relatively poor, and tenements and other low-income housing were plentiful. Most of them lived among immediate neighbors who spoke the same language. However, only the Chinese formed a significant ethnic enclave, and even that was relatively small. For the rest, clusters were limited to single buildings, single

institutions, and, at most, groups of ten or fewer neighboring houses.

The discriminatory attitudes of native-born white residents toward immigrants of various ethnicities also probably played a role. Those from the same homelands of Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany were the most integrated, while other Europeans were less so. Chinese immigrants were the most segregated, even more so than African Americans.

Lastly, religion seems to have been a very influential factor, as it was in many other aspects of turn-of-the-century life in Utah. Mormon immigrants were actively encouraged and assisted in integrating (including spatial integration), and eventually assimilating, into the broader Latter-day Saint society. Immigrants of other faiths and sources, largely left to fend for themselves, tended to live in the poorest neighborhoods. This study lends some credence to the notion that people coming to Utah added

Figure 12. Residents in 1900 identifying as Black or colored.

to their original cultural identity a new identity as either part of the dominant Mormon culture or not.

Which of these was the predominant cause of the geographic distribution of immigrants in Salt Lake City? While the evidence presented here is circumstantial at best and a conclusive analysis would require a significantly larger amount of data and documentation, most of which probably does not exist, an initial hypothesis based on the maps and documentary evidence can be made. For British, German, and Scandinavian-born immigrants, religion was the most important factor, followed by race/ethnicity and language. For Salt Lake City residents from southern and eastern Europe, economics was the primary factor, followed by religion and race/ethnicity. Race/ethnicity was the determining factor for Chinese immigrants, followed by language and economics. Most likely, all these factors played a role in the decisions that each person and family made about where they would live in 1900, helping to create an urban geography for Salt Lake City that was typically American in some ways and unique in many others.

Notes

My fall 2019 advanced GIS class was instrumental in the development of this project, transcribing and geocoding the addresses for a large percentage of the city and helping to design the database. Thank you to Gordon Bennett, Corey Bishop, Chris Burchfield, Ryan Howell, Emily Peterson, Caleb Smith, and Eliza Snyder.

1. David A. Gerber, American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2; Philip Martin and Elizabeth Midgley, “Immigration: Shaping and Reshaping America,” Population Bulletin 58, no. 2 (June 2003): 12, at prb.org /wp-content/uploads/2003/06/58.2ImmigrShaping America.pdf; Dennis Wepman, Immigration: From the Founding of Virginia to the Closing of Ellis Island (New York: Facts on File, 2002), 160; U.S. Census Bureau, Table LVI: Percentage of natives and foreign white of total population, in Census Report on Population of the Twelfth Census, 1900, Vol. 1, p. cxvii, at 2.census.gov/library /publications/decennial/1900/volume-1/volume-1-p3 .pdf#page=8.

2. Michael J. White, Robert F. Dymowski, and Shilian Wang, “Ethnic Neighbors and Ethnic Myths: An Examination of Residential Segregation in 1910,” in After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census, ed. Susan Cotts Watkins (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), 175; Silvia Pedraza, “Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American History,” in Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, ed. Silvia Pedraza and Ruben G. Rumbaut (Wedsworth Publishing Company, 1996), 14; Wepman, Immigration, 164.

3. Pedraza, “Origins and Destinies,” 15.

4. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, Vol. 23 (1900), Table 123, p. 398, 2.census.gov /library/publications/1901/compendia/statab/23ed /1900–07.pdf#page=14.

5. U.S. Census Bureau, Census Report on Population of the Twelfth Census, 1900, Vol. 1, Table 33 & 34: Foreign Born Population, p. 732, 2.census.gov/library/publications /decennial/1900/volume-1/volume-1-p13.pdf

6. William Mulder, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), 157, 196; Rachel Gianni Abbott, “The Scandinavian Immigrant Experience in Utah, 1850–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alaska–Fairbanks, 2013).

7. Ronald K. Dewsnup, “German-speaking Immigrants and the State of Utah: A Brief History” (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1983). See also a special issue on German-speaking immigrants of Utah Historical Quarterly, volume 52 (Fall 1984), with articles by Allan Kent Powell, Ronald K. Dewsnup, and Douglas D. Alder, at jstor.org/stable/i40215857.

8. Daniel Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns: The Development and Decline of Extinct Ethnic Enclaves,” Utah Historical Quarterly 64 (Winter 1996): 70–95, at jstor .org/stable/4506227; Michael Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century Salt Lake City,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72 (Summer 2004): 220, at jstor.org/stable/45062869; Don C. Conley, “The Pioneer Chinese of Utah,” in Chinese on the American Frontier, ed. Arif Dirlik (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

9. Elliott R. Barkan, From All Points: America’s Immigrant West, 1870s–1952 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Helen Papanikolas, ed., The Peoples of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976).

10. For those interested in the technical details, the historical GIS database was built on a PostgreSQL database to allow collaborative editing, and the data was entered and visualized using the QGIS open-source GIS software, chosen for its direct accessibility to the database and a particular visualization technique not found in other GIS software.

Samuel A. Smith, in a 2008 master’s thesis, used HGIS methods to visualize the territorial census of 1880, including an analysis of Salt Lake City at the level of LDS wards (street addresses were not recorded in 1880). His focus was not on immigrants, but on the Mormon/non-Mormon distinction, which was recorded by Utah census takers in 1880 despite not being part of the official form. Smith, “The Wasp in the Beehive: Non-Mormon Presence in 1880s Utah” (M.A. thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 2008), at etda.libraries .psu.edu/catalog/8769.

11. Nigel Stephen Walford, “Bringing Historical British Population Census Records into the 21st Century: A Method for Geocoding Households and Individuals at Their Early-20th-century Addresses,” Population, Space and Place 24 (May 2019), at DOI:10.1002/ psp.2227.

12. John R. Logan, Jason Jindrich, Hyoungjin Shin, and Weiwei Zhang, “Mapping America in 1880: The Urban Transition Historical GIS Project,” Historical Methods 44 (January–March 2011): 49–60, at DOI:10.1080/0161 5440.2010.517509; John R. Logan and Weiwei Zhang, “White Ethnic Residential Segregation in Historical Perspective: US Cities in 1880,” Social Science Research

41 (September 2012): 1292–1306, at DOI:10.1016/j.ss research.2012.03.010.

13. Allison Shertzer, Randall P. Walsh, and John R. Logan, “Segregation and Neighborhood Change in Northern Cities: New Historical GIS Data from 1900–1930,” Historical Methods 49, no. 4 (2016): 187–97, at DOI:10.1080 /01615440.2016.1151393.

14. Notable examples include HistoryForge for Ithaca, New York (historyforge.net/), and the Keweenaw Time Traveler for Houghton, Michigan, (keweenawhistory. com/), although these were developed using bespoke methods that are not easily scaled up to broader use.

15. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, FamilySearch Developer Program, FamilySearch, familysearch .org/developers/.

16. The Salt Lake City Blue Book [Householders’ Directory], 1901–1902 (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk & Co., 1902), at archive.org/details/saltlakecityblue00rlpo.

17. Walford, “Historical British Population Census Records,” 9; Logan, “Mapping America in 1880,” 56.

18. “Names of Streets South of City are Officially Changed,” Deseret News, May 11, 1916, 16, at news.google.com /newspapers?nid=Aul-kAQHnToC&dat=19160512.

19. Richard R. Lyman, “New Street-numbering System for Salt Lake City,” American City 57 (1942): 62. Lyman was an LDS apostle, son and grandson of apostles, and a civil engineering professor at the University of Utah, but his most lasting legacy was either the street naming and addressing system that is ubiquitous across Utah (and was adopted in a more subtle way in cities such as Los Angeles and Phoenix), or the fact that he was the last LDS apostle to be excommunicated in office in 1943. Gary James Bergera, “Transgression in the LDS Community, Part 2: Richard R. Lyman,” Journal of Mormon History 27, no. 4 (2011): 173, at jstor.org/stable/23292607

20. “Streets to Turn Uniform,” Deseret News, August 5, 1972, 2B.

21. Salt Lake City, Utah, 1898 Insurance Maps (New York: Sanborn-Perris Map Co.), at collections.lib.utah.edu/search ?facet_date_t=%221898%22&facet_spatial_coverage_t =%22Salt+Lake+City%2C+Utah%22&facet_setname _s=uum_sfim.

22. Mulder, Homeward to Zion, 157, 196; William Mulder, “Scandinavian Saga,” in The Peoples of Utah, 172.

23. Dewsnup, “German-speaking Immigrants,” 35.

24. Sonne, Conway B., Saints on the Seas: A Maritime History of Mormon Migration, 1830–1890 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 28–31.

25. Douglas D. Alder, “Die Auswanderung,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52 (Fall 1984): 373–75.

26. Allan Kent Powell, “The German-speaking Immigrant Experience in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52 (Fall 1984): 340.

27. Mulder, Homeward to Zion, 200, 250; Powell, “German-speaking Immigrant Experience,“ 340.

28. Dewsnup, “German-speaking Immigrants,” 80; Mulder, Homeward to Zion, 248; Abbott, “Scandinavian Immigrant Experience,” 343.

29. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

30. Logan and Zhang, “White Ethnic Residential Segregation.”

31. W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

32. Dewsnup, “German-speaking Immigrants,” 43.

33. Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, CO: Pruett, 1984), 135; Linda Sillito, A History of Salt Lake County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1996), 135; Greek American History, Preservation of American Hellenic History, pahh.com/hca/history.html; Helen Z. Papanikolas, “The Exiled Greeks,” in The Peoples of Utah, 409–36.

34. Gary Topping, “The Gentiles,” Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, 2d ed., ed. Brandon Plewe, S.K. Brown, D. Q. Cannon, and R. H. Jackson (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 2014), 112; Donald W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55, no. 2 (1965): 191–220, at DOI:10.1111/j.1467–8306.1965 .tb00515.x; Sillito, History of Salt Lake County, 134.

35. Smith, “Wasp in the Beehive,” 87.

36. Mulder, “Scandinavian Saga,” 174–76; Salt Lake City Blue Book, 86.

37. Eileen Hallet Stone, A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001), 11; Juanita Brooks, History of the Jews in Utah and Idaho (Western Epics, 1973), 117; Jack Goodman, “Jews in Zion,” in The Peoples of Utah, 187–221. A cursory attempt to map a few Jewish households listed in these sources showed them mostly concentrated in the central and northeastern parts of the city, but not all were immigrants.

38. Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns”; Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life,” 220.

39. Miriam L. King and D. L. Magnuson, “Perspectives on Historical U.S. Census Undercounts,” Social Science History 19, no. 4 (1995): 455–66, at DOI:10.1017 /S0145553200017466.

40. Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life,” 221.

41. Logan and Zhang, “White Ethnic Residential Segregation.”

42. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Shertzer, et al., “Segregation and Neighborhood Change.”

43. Ronald G. Coleman, “Blacks in Utah History: An Unknown Legacy,” in The Peoples of Utah, 115–40

44. United States Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Salt Lake County, Enumeration District 144, sheets 8A-9B, at familysearch.org/ark: /61903/3:1:33SQ-GYBF-9F4.

BYU Slavery Project

BY GRACE SOELBERG

The BYU Slavery Project began as an initiative of assistant professor of history Christopher Jones in 2019. Jones completed a PhD in early American history at the College of William & Mary, where he learned about the school’s Lemon Project. The project, named after an enslaved man once owned by the university, studies William & Mary’s extensive connections to slavery and history of racial discrimination. After becoming a professor at Brigham Young University, Jones discovered that Haden Wells Church, one of his own LDS pioneer ancestors, was a slaveowner with tangential ties to Brigham Young Academy (later Brigham Young University). Church had brought an enslaved African American man named Tom to Utah. At some point following Tom’s baptism in 1854, Church transferred ownership of Tom to his bishop, Abraham Smoot, who would later move to Provo, where he served as mayor and became the chief benefactor of Brigham Young Academy.1 As a historian and Church descendent, this connection struck Jones deeply and sparked a desire to be personally involved in something at BYU similar to the Lemon Project. Together with other colleagues in BYU’s Department of History, Jones approached leaders in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences to see what support there might be for such an initiative. With the support of Dean Ben Ogles, as well as the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, and Department of History, plans were made to launch the BYU Slavery Project in the fall of 2020. The project was lent further weight (and attention) in the summer months leading up to its launch, amidst the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and renewed attention to questions of racism, slavery, and memory in American history. Four BYU history department faculty members formed the first Steering Committee, and professors from both BYU and other universities joined the Advisory Board.2 Working together with students from BYU, project partners aimed to understand, document, and clarify the university’s meagerly researched past surrounding slavery, as well as race relations at the school during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras.

Unlike similar projects at other universities like William & Mary, Harvard, and Georgetown, the BYU Slavery Project is unique in several ways. BYU’s geographical location in the Intermountain West distinguishes the

university and its history from schools in the eastern and southern United States. Brigham Young University was originally founded as Brigham Young Academy in 1875 when Utah was still a territory and when LDS president and former territorial governor Brigham Young still wielded considerable influence. Its founding in 1875 came ten years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which made illegal “slavery [and] involuntary servitude” throughout the nation, and thirteen years after Congress made slavery illegal in US territories, including Utah. Nevertheless, some nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints involved in the founding and early years of the academy had ties to slavery and other forms of servitude in the 1850s and 1860s. Given its western location, individuals involved with Brigham Young Academy and its sponsoring institution, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also had connections to both African American chattel slavery and the various forms of Native American slavery and servitude in territorial Utah. Brigham Young infamously legalized African chattel slavery in Utah Territory and participated in the Native American slave trade, even encouraging church members to “buy up the Lamanite children as fast as they could” from slave traders in order to Christianize them.3

Before students began doing their own personal research in a fall 2020 course co-taught by Jones and Matt Mason, the class read and

discussed a variety of sources regarding slavery in the West and at other academic institutions. Class readings included Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, selections from W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness, and Brian Q. Cannon’s “‘To Buy Up the Lamanite Children as Fast as They Could’: Indentured Servitude and Its Legacy in Mormon Society.” These, among other sources, gave students a foundation for understanding how many eastern universities owe their founding and financial survival to the labor of enslaved individuals, the ways in which slavery in the US West distinctly differed from the African chattel slavery of the South, and the intersections of slavery, indentured servitude, and Mormonism. Students also had the opportunity to meet and discuss course material with esteemed guests, including Reeve and Cannon, and current Georgetown Slavery Project members Adam Rothman and Leslie Harris (Northwestern University). Rothman in particular helped students and faculty members navigate the rocky terrain of studying and uncovering controversial historical truths, especially in a religious setting and community.

After several weeks of discussions and meetings, students began researching a variety of topics meant to foster a greater understanding of the school’s racial history. Research ranged from analyzing the extent of Brigham Young’s connection to the Native American slave trade and his theological and political thoughts regarding African American slavery and Black people, to the ways in which slavery was discussed and taught at the university and how religion teachers taught about race, to the family history of BYU’s first Black student who was only three generations removed from slavery. Each student produced original research papers using documents from the university’s and other local archives.

Overall the project has been well received. Many alumni and current students have praised the project for its research, and university administration has supported it by greenlighting the hiring of paid student researchers as well as

BYU Slavery Project logo. Designed by AÏsha Lehmann

continuing to offer the class during the school year. However, there was a brief flurry of pushback by some members of the LDS church and BYU alumni when the project was first announced in the summer of 2020. The project’s social media profiles on both Twitter and Facebook received several negative comments that claimed the project was unnecessary, too controversial, and politically charged. These beliefs led critics to harass members of BYU’s Black Student Union who had urged university leaders to remove the names of people associated with slavery from all campus buildings. The Black Student Union pointed in particular to the school’s administration building named after Abraham Smoot, one of the university’s greatest benefactors who also owned at least two, likely three, enslaved African Americans. This reaction was in sharp contrast to the reaction of Georgetown students and alumni. Adam Rothman explained that given Georgetown’s Christian roots and values of love, repentance, and reconciliation, Georgetown’s slavery project and the resulting findings were well received and the university community was quick to find ways to offer reparations and improve the school. According to Rothman, Georgetown students eventually voted to pay an annual “activities fee” that would go into a Reconciliation Fund to be given to the descendants of those who were enslaved by the university in the form of financial aid and scholarships.

Given BYU’s shared Christian background and values with Georgetown, one may expect that the broader BYU community would have had a similar response. However, much of the pushback to BYU’s project can be understood considering the nondoctrinal belief many Latter-day Saints hold that prominent church leaders, especially from the pioneer era, were always led by God and therefore infallible in their actions. This belief leads many members to justify Young’s racist teachings regarding African Americans, the church’s past priesthood and temple ban for people of African descent, the church’s connection to slavery, and the exploitation of Native American minors that went through the faith’s Indian/Lamanite Placement Program.

While these critics and the persistence of commonly held nondoctrinal beliefs can be

discouraging, I personally think BYU is in a position to make meaningful and lasting change. Unlike most other universities, BYU, like Georgetown’s student and alumni communities, is knit together by more than just school pride and the connection that comes from attending the same institution. Georgetown’s project was successful in achieving its goals because the university community was able to connect to the newly presented historical truths through the common lens of Christian ideals. BYU is also in a position to apply this approach, and by using both rigorous academic research as well as unifying religious beliefs, the broader BYU community has the opportunity to come to terms with the truth in a way that offers spiritual healing and renewal.

The university has an extensively researched list of potential changes to policy, curriculum, and student life that have been compiled by its own Committee on Race, Equity, and Belonging. The committee, at the request of university President Kevin Worthen, produced a sixty-four-page report on the current state of minority students at BYU that was released in February 2021. Some of the committee findings show that BYU has failed to recruit and maintain both students and faculty of color, that students of color graduate from BYU at significantly lower rates than their white peers, and that white students are disproportionately given full-ride and half-tuition scholarships when compared to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) students. The committee’s report also detailed dozens of solutions to these and other issues, including development of curriculum that educates students on race, unity, and diversity, implementation of a “race-conscious recruitment strategy” to diversify the student body, and consideration of renaming campus buildings named after past church leaders to names that reflect the building’s functional role (e.g., Engineering Building).4

I believe that by utilizing the research from the BYU Slavery Project in conjunction with the findings and recommendations from the Committee on Race, Equity, and Belonging, BYU as an institution as well as its broader student and alumni communities can better understand and empathize with the lived experiences of BIPOC both past and present, and that this new

understanding can lead to compassion, unity, and healing.

Notes

1. In August 2019, Paul Reeve, a professor of history at the University of Utah, announced that he had found Tom’s Latter-day Saint baptismal record.

2. Steering Committee members include Rebecca de Schweinitz, Matthew Mason, Brenden W. Rensink, and Christopher Jones. The advisory board is composed

of Anthony Bates, Ryan Gabriel, Farina King, Louise Wheeler, Maurice Crandall, Janan Graham-Russell, and Cameron McCoy.

3. Brian W. Cannon, “‘To Buy Up the Lamanite Children as Fast as They Could’: Indentured Servitude and Its Legacy in Mormon Society,” Journal of Mormon History 44 (April 2018): 1–35.

4. Brigham Young University, Report and Recommendation of the BYU Committee on Race, Equity, and Belonging, February 2021, accessed September 29, 2021, https:// race.byu.edu/00000177-d543-dfa9-a7ff-d5cfc1dc0000 /race-equity-belonging-report-feb-25–2021.

REVIEWS

Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West

By David Walker

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 343 pp. Paper, $29.95

Nineteenth-century Mormonism, located in the heart of the Intermountain West directly in the path of “manifest destiny,” was a problem. The issue with Mormonism was at least two-fold: polygamy and theocracy. Both stood in opposition to American notions of progress and modernity, and Mormonism also seemed to physically stand in the way of the progression of westward expansion. But the solution to the Mormon problem was contested, as David Walker shows in Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West

Railroading Religion is theoretically rich with an engaging and often ironic storyline. Walker demonstrates how the study of religion can shed light on a vast array of themes, such as capitalism, tourism, and modernity. Walker takes two nineteenth-century topics—railroads and Mormonism—which have both been written about extensively, and uses them to tell a new story in a new way. Focusing on the town of Corrine, Utah, which became the center of “Gentile” opposition to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Walker tells the story of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in Utah, along with the hopes, expectations, impacts, and realities surrounding this railroad. Corinnethians (citizens of Corrine) had many expectations for this railroad, including what Walker calls the death knell thesis. This theory was that Mormonism, with all its backwards ideas, could not survive the influence of modernity brought through the physical presence of the railroad. Corinnethian boosters not only believed this was true but also went to great lengths to convince outsiders of this and, perhaps most importantly, tried to capitalize on this expectation and

monopolize control of the railroad. They failed spectacularly.

Every effort that Corinnethians and other non-Mormons in Utah took was fully countered by the Mormons. As Brigham Young essentially managed to take control of construction of the railroad in Utah, and ensure its location in Ogden, Utah, rather than the gentile Corrine, the town struggled to grow and obtain outside support. Walker demonstrates the dedication that Young and other Latter-day Saints had to “[bending] and [building] the railroads to their benefit” (48). After the completion of the railroad, Corinnethians tried to monopolize Mormon “atrocity tourism,” using steamboats and other methods to capitalize on the sensationalism of such a strange religion. These steamers failed to prove economically viable. Mormons opened their own tourist attractions, from resorts to museums, to both control and capitalize on outsiders’ desires to view their religion. Through these actions, Mormons debunked the death knell thesis, arguing that the railroads only strengthened Mormonism’s place in the Intermountain West rather than destroyed it. They seemed repeatedly successfully to “flip [the] secular script entirely” (247). As Walker shows, by the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Mormon rhetoric held much less weight in national discourse than it had previously.

For understanding the history of Utah, Railroading Religion explores, in important and novel ways, the cultural tension between Mormon and non-Mormon residents, a theme that will undoubtedly continue to be critical in understanding Utah history. This book is not only important for anyone seeking to understand the relationship of Utah Mormonism with its non-Mormon neighbors, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the historical connections between religion and capitalism in Utah, but also the way that concepts such as progress, modernity, and religious freedom functioned in the American West. This work complicates concepts of Protestant modernity and the “secularization thesis.” Walker

explains, “Religion, in this reading, did not retreat from the public sphere, so much as it became reinvented and reinvested therein” (245).

Along with a thorough engagement of theory, Walker utilizes an extensive array of primary sources. These include “newspaper accounts, novels, ethnographies, guidebooks, advertisements, ledger books, paystubs, stock statements, probate records, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters, sermons, excommunication reports,” and many more (6). In using these, and in emphasizing the connection between capitalistic ventures and religious discourse, Walker reminds scholars that understanding the functions of religion, especially in the nineteenth-century American West, requires an examination of more than what has been traditionally assumed to be the content of religious studies. Railroading Religion is an excellent source for both historians and religious studies scholars and challenges both groups to think more carefully about the role of religion in American history.

Brooke R. LeFevre —Baylor University

Frontier Religion: Mormons and America, 1857–1907

By Konden Smith Hansen

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xii + 351 pp. Cloth, $45.00

In Frontier Religion, Konden Hansen Smith sets out to explain how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changed from a radical separatist sect in the nineteenth century to a paragon of patriotism and respectability in the twentieth. The answer, he suggests, has more to do with cultural changes in the United States than with changes in the church (237). Specifically, it’s rooted in the emergence of a new, more secularized “myth of the frontier” in the late 1800s than had prevailed for most of that century.

In the mid-nineteenth century, white Mormons and white Protestants shared a view of the frontier as a place of savagery, irreligion, and threat—a place to be civilized through redemptive violence in preparation for the millennial reign of Christ. This white and Christian

supremacist myth caused violent conflict between Mormons and Protestants because Protestants drew the boundaries of whiteness and Christianity so as to exclude the Saints.

Viewing polygamist Mormons as part of the savagery of the frontier, President James Buchanan dispatched the US Army to subdue or exterminate them. Mormon resistance and diplomacy brought this “Utah Expedition” to naught, but antipolygamy crusaders kept after the Saints through legislation and the courts. In 1889, the US Supreme Court ruled that Mormonism did not qualify as a religion entitled to First Amendment Rights. Hansen notes that the “civil religion” of this period was not the twentieth century’s superficial public deism, but rather a “united front” of Protestant ministers, reformers, judges, and politicians entrenched at “all levels of U.S. power” (123).

Although the LDS church issued a “Manifesto” declaring an end to polygamy in 1890, the Protestant organizers of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Fair excluded the Saints from the parliament, citing polygamy as the cause. The parliament’s organizers saw it as an opportunity for Protestant Christianity to demonstrate its superiority in conversation with Catholic and non-Christian religions. Mormonism, a sect rather than a religion, they considered unworthy of note.

The Parliament, however, demonstrated not Protestant strength, but Protestant weakness. Nascent modernists and fundamentalists fought bitterly about whether Protestants should consort with “pagans” at such an event, revealing cracks in the united front. The pagans themselves put in a more intelligent and respectable showing than the Protestant supremacists supposed. Sabbatarians lobbied hard to prevent the World’s Fair from opening on Sunday, but they failed after seven appearances in court. Sentiment in the nation was swinging toward a separation of religion and politics, a privatization of religious life.

Although excluded from the Parliament of Religions, Utah received pride of place at the World’s Fair. The Utah exhibitors, including top Mormon leaders, mostly ignored religion and emphasized the secular economic accomplishments of hardy Mormon pioneers. The Mormon

Tabernacle Choir wowed audiences with renditions of patriotic songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Audiences came away feeling Mormons might be good Americans after all.

Mormons had protested their Americanness for decades, but as long as “American” had meant “white Protestant,” no one took them seriously. Now things were changing, partly because of the closure of the frontier in 1890, which inaugurated a new era in which the frontier no longer seemed threatening and could be romanticized instead. One presenter at the World’s Fair, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, presented his “frontier thesis,” which held that the difficult conquest of the frontier had forged a unique American character that made America exceptional. With Americanness increasingly understood in terms of a secular myth of “progress” and manly pioneer character, the Mormons had for the first time a path to assimilation by performing their pioneer prowess. Perform it they did, and the US government awarded Utah statehood in 1896.

The Mormons completed their assimilation amidst the US Senate hearings to unseat Reed Smoot, a Mormon apostle elected to represent Utah. Smoot triumphed against Protestant opposition with the support of Theodore Roosevelt, who admired the hardy spirit of historical Mormon pioneers. Essential to Smoot’s victory was his insistence that his religion was private and that he placed loyalty to nation before loyalty to church.

Hansen artfully connects Mormon assimilation to the frontier, and he is undoubtedly correct that Mormons performed a manly frontier archetype. The argument that the frontier’s closure made Mormons seem less threatening feels persuasive. However, the myth of the frontier as a forge for manly American character long predated Turner, so the privatization of religion seems the more immediate and salient catalyst for Mormon assimilation. Equally salient are developments on the Mormon side which Hansen underplays. The nation accepted Mormons in no small part because Mormons deradicalized, a development Hansen leaves mostly unexplained.

Christopher Carroll Smith —Albuquerque, New Mexico

Wonders of Sand and Stone: A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments

By Frederick H. Swanson

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xiii + 370pp. Paper, $34.95

Frederick H. Swanson chronicles the establishment and development of Utah’s eight national monuments and five national parks in a new and much needed synthesis. His work is ambitious for taking a regional view of the southern Utah canyon lands, which he calls one of the “key battlegrounds” of landscape preservation (103). Swanson, an environmental historian, is open about his purpose in writing this book. He closes his introduction saying, “What follows is an argument for treating Utah’s national parks and monuments as integral parts of one of our planet’s most extraordinary natural and cultural regions” (6). His book is a call to action to support forward-thinking landscape-level preservation.

A “mini-empire” of national monuments and parks popped up across Utah’s landscape in the twentieth century (24). The Antiquities Act of 1906, which predated the creation of the National Park Service (NPS) by a decade, allowed the US President to set aside areas of scientific and cultural interest by executive action. Utah’s first national monuments, such as Natural Bridges and Rainbow Bridge National Monuments, were purposefully small, concentrating on unique geologic features and omitting any potential mineral development. Much of the southern Utah canyon lands were remote and difficult to access. When the National Park Service was created, its administrators were able to build an alliance with local and state interests by developing roads to bring visitors to these locations. They had backing from the Union Pacific Railroad, which was also interested in bringing visitors to experience these places. This support made creation of other national monuments and national parks like Bryce Canyon possible. By the middle of the twentieth century, the NPS had helped develop southern Utah into a national vacation destination.

As early as the 1930s, NPS officials became interested in larger, landscape-level preservation of the Colorado Plateau. They developed

a national monument proposal for a seven-million-mile area called Escalante, which was quickly quashed by local and state representatives who correctly feared grazing and mineral restrictions. Despite the failure of the larger proposal, Swanson shows that the vision for Escalante National Monument gave way to Canyonlands National Park, an expansion of Capitol Reef National Park, and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Canyonlands National Park was supported by emerging environmental organizations concerned with setting aside wilderness. The Escalante proposal also laid the groundwork for the establishment of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996 under the Clinton administration and Bears Ears National Monument in the final days of the Obama administration in 2016. Conservative politicians saw this as federal overreach and an abuse of the Antiquities Act. When President Donald J. Trump took office in 2017, he reduced the size of these two monuments to allow for grazing and mineral development. The consensus about the role of the federal government in creating parks for economic development had fully unraveled, while threats to the natural and cultural resources of the Colorado Plateau continue to abound.

The author does an excellent job introducing the various officials, business interests, communities, and organizations involved in making Utah’s national parks and monuments. Indigenous groups, however, remain on the periphery of these narratives and do not really take center stage until the creation of Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, which makes one wonder how they felt about the creation of many of the thirteen units described in the book that they undoubtedly had long ties to.

Swanson’s work falls squarely in the realm of national park “administrative histories.” Administrative histories are often bureaucratic products written at the behest of park managers, but skilled historians can use national parks as a lens to examine larger movements or moments in American history. Park managers are often the primary audience, but enthusiastic visitors and historians may also find them useful and interesting. Swanson’s work reaches those audiences, but it is essential reading for anyone looking to understand Utah’s

development and environmental politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Angela Sirna —National Park Service

John Hance: The Life, Lies, and Legend of Grand Canyon’s Greatest Storyteller

By Shane Murphy

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. 230 pp. Paper, $24.95.

A tourist bound for Arizona Territory during the late nineteenth century might be as keen to meet an authentic frontier “character” as to obtain a view of the Grand Canyon. John Hance, the canyon’s first resident outfitter and guide, satisfied both needs. From 1881 to 1895 Hance welcomed guests to his rude tent camp located at the eastern edge of the South Rim, a long day’s ride by horse and wagon from Flagstaff. If they were game, he would conduct them deep into the canyon on a rough trail he had constructed down to the Colorado River, regaling them with tall tales all the way.

So entertaining was Hance that more than one writer observed that a visit to the Grand Canyon was not complete without some time spent in the old guide’s company. And so outrageous were his yarns that it proved difficult to discern the man from the stories he spun. Untangling fact from the considerable fiction surrounding this Grand Canyon pioneer is the task Shane Murphy, a former Colorado River river guide, set himself in this well-crafted and elegantly written book.

With little primary source material available on Hance’s life and activities—he kept no personal journal, wrote few letters, and was seldom interviewed—Murphy instead consulted a wide variety of incidental sources, reaching deep into such arcana as hotel guest records, property deeds, mining claim notices, and even the logbooks of the sutler’s store in Camp Verde, Arizona, where John Hance lived with his younger half-brother George before resettling at the South Rim. “Much can be learned about a man by studying his grocery store list,” Murphy observes, noting that Hance found need

of “pain pills and quinine” as well as having a taste for whiskey. His shopping included such necessities as corn meal and pairs of overalls, ammunition and axle grease. The latter was needed for Hance’s primary employment as a freighter for the US Cavalry at Fort Verde, which skirmished with Apache and Yavapai Indians who were resisting the incursion of European-American settlers and miners into their ancestral homelands.

Murphy has reconstructed as much as can reasonably be known of Hance’s ancestors and early life in Tennessee and Missouri, including his service in the Confederate Tenth Missouri Infantry, in which the young Hance fought in several battles before being taken prisoner. After spending nearly two years in the hellholes of several Union prisons, Hance was delivered back to Missouri and a new career hauling government freight for L. B. Hickok, brother to “Wild Bill” Hickok, whom he would meet again decades later during one of the entertainer’s visits to the Grand Canyon.

Both John and George Hance took part in the return of the Navajo people from Bosque Redondo in 1868, then settled near Prescott in Arizona’s Verde Valley, where George would remain for the rest of his life. John showed up at the South Rim around 1881, herding sheep for a time and working various mineral prospects along with other Grand Canyon pioneers such as Ralph Cameron and William Ashurst. Hance, though, found his calling in the tourism business. By all accounts he was a genial, considerate, and attentive guide who led tourists down the torturous route he had scratched out through the cliffs of the upper canyon to the Tonto Platform, and thence down a creek bed that in places necessitated rope descents through waterfalls. Hance also used the trail to reach his mining claims, which like most in the canyon were too inaccessible to turn a profit.

Hance’s considerable stash of stories presumably helped to distract his guests during the travails of a Grand Canyon descent. These tales “began innocently enough,” Murphy writes, “then trended due south to end in utter absurdity.” Most of his stories involved a long jump across a chasm of credulity, much like Hance’s oft-repeated account of how he once tried to

vault the Grand Canyon on his horse, Darby, only to wheel around midway when he realized he couldn’t make it across. Fortunately for us, Murphy’s painstaking research stands in complete contrast to Hance’s amusing confabulations. He gives us a sympathetic look at an important pioneer of Grand Canyon tourism, observing that the tall tales Hance told “paled in comparison to the real life he lived.” His reconstruction is especially valuable for showing Hance’s interactions with other players at the South Rim, including James Thurber, Pete Berry, Martin Buggeln, and William Bass, each of whom brought more ambition to the tourist trade and built hotels which supplanted Hance’s primitive camp.

We know from records of visitors that Hance was deeply appreciative of the scenes that lay at his doorstep. Josephine Hollenback, who with her sister Amelia spent two weeks exploring the canyon with Hance in the early summer of 1897, described their guide being “as excited as we were” to discover an Indian ruin near Sockdolager Rapid, the terminus of Hance’s original trail. Hance seemed more interested in sharing the canyon with his guests than in growing his tourism business, and in this his career paralleled other pioneers of the Grand Canyon’s tourist trade such as Dee Woolley and Dave Rust at the North Rim. Hance would end his career living in a tent cabin near the Bright Angel Hotel, employed by the Santa Fe Railway to provide local color to its guests.

In filling in the many gaps in the life of John Hance, Shane Murphy has performed an important service for Grand Canyon historians and aficionados alike. But his book also has much to say about life in the Arizona Territory of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, a time when European-American settlers moved from confrontations with Native peoples to capitalize on one of the nation’s greatest natural wonders. At Grand Canyon, John Hance fashioned his own legend through hard work and dedication. By the time of his death in 1919, he had carved himself a place in the canyon’s history, the true outlines of which are now discernable.

Frederick H. Swanson Freelance writer and historian

—Salt Lake City

Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right

By Matthew L. Harris Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xi + 288 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $34.95

Matthew Harris contextualizes the religious and political thoughts of Ezra Taft Benson, ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right. Harris’s book is the first monograph to examine how and why Benson’s political views developed from his early employment as an agricultural cooperative chairperson, to his call to the Latter-day Saint apostleship, through his service as president of the LDS church. Written for scholars and interested Latter-day Saint readers, Harris’s book is essential to understand how Benson, Utahns, and Latter-day Saints became ardent Republicans in the United States.

Neatly split into five sections, Watchman on the Tower is very much a biography. In the first section, Harris presents Benson’s upbringing in rural Idaho, including his quick ascension in agricultural leadership in Utah and throughout the United States. In the second chapter, Benson’s mission to Europe’s ruins in the wake of World War II and his tension-filled tenure as Secretary of Agriculture takes center stage. In the third chapter, Harris explains how Benson adopted the John Birch Society’s far-right principles and fostered a “conspiracy culture” in Mormon and Utah political circles. The fourth chapter illuminates how Latter-day Saint leaders worked to temper Benson’s politicking, which they believed soured non-Mormons to their faith. Fascinatingly, Harris uses letters written by average Latter-day Saints to First Presidency member Hugh B. Brown to show how many church members disagreed with his politics. The fifth chapter considers Benson’s years as LDS church president.

Harris traces Benson’s later politics to both his early career in agricultural cooperatives and his mission to deliver supplies to war-torn Europe following the Second World War. Benson’s early career in agriculture and his time as Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower cabinet reflect a

belief in the free market’s necessity for solving economic problems, rather than government influence. For instance, he supported farmers coming together to receive higher prices for their crops, but disdained government intervention or the creation of artificial price floors and ceilings. To Benson, government should stay out of its citizens’ pocketbooks, even if their Keynesian actions saved many small farmers during the Great Depression and supported them after World War II.

Benson’s European mission left a lasting impact on the Latter-day Saint apostle. He saw bombed-out cities, starving families, and Nazi concentration camps. His mistrust of centralized government power deepened from this experience, causing him to distrust all forms of collective government power.

Watchman on the Tower makes a valuable contribution to the historiography on several fronts. First, Harris systematically explains the origins and evolution of Benson’s religio-political thought over time, pointing to events in the Great Depression and shortly after World War II, rather than the Cold War’s “paranoid” political culture alone. Second, Harris obtained letters written between Benson and the John Birch Society that reveal just how much Benson viewed the organization as compatible with Latter-day Saint teachings. Historians like Gary Bergera and Greg Prince have demonstrated Benson’s preoccupation with “Birchers.” Still, no historians highlighted the degree to which the John Birch Society and Benson worked in tandem at both the regional and national political level. Indeed, Harris highlights Benson’s role in influencing the John Birth Society’s power in Utah and the “Mormon Belt.”

The book is written for an academic audience, but also interested Latter-day Saints without an overarching interest in historiography. This writing style is useful for two reasons; the text is highly readable and eschews sensationalism. Given Ezra Taft Benson’s presence in modern American thought, through Glen Beck’s radio show, popular YouTube videos, and other influential arenas, Harris could have constructed an intellectual strawman to be torn down by liberal readers. Indeed, Harris asks his audience to understand Benson as a thinker, not only as an authority figure, and to grapple with his

rationale, not only his legacies. While they may disagree with his views, those who engage with Watchman on the Tower can explain how he arrived at them.

However, readers may read the book without recognizing how Benson’s ultraconservatism and the making of the “Mormon Right” were rooted in the white backlash politics in response to New Deal politics and the Black civil rights movement. Harris makes clear that Benson’s politics represented the fringe of conservative American politics but fails to highlight that the racial stakes were the same as the Republican Party’s after 1964. Considering that Utah has not voted for a Democrat since 1964, the presidential election before the Voting Rights Act, this information is crucial for readers to understand how Benson’s influence

reflected changing racial dynamics among America’s two largest political parties. Unfortunately, placing Benson’s thoughts and actions within this context, and within this legacy, also leaves the book out of the broader historiography of the Religious Right’s ascension to electoral power from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Harris’s book should be the first of many to examine Ezra Taft Benson, Mormonism, and Utahns in America’s shifting political landscapes from the New Deal through the 1990s. Future scholars owe Harris a great debt for his research and arguments; Watchman on the Tower is an important contribution to Mormon and Utah history.

Joseph R. Stuart —University of Utah

in memoriam

D. Michael Quinn, 1944–2021

When Dennis Michael Quinn passed from this life alone in his condominium on some indeterminate date in late April 2021, Mormon and Utah history lost one of its greatest historians. Among Mormon historians, he was certainly the one who insisted most doggedly on the discovery and assertion of Truth, particularly in what he called the “silent places,” where the facts most inconvenient and embarrassing to received orthodoxy lurked. For that insistence, he paid the highest penalties, over and over again: it cost him his marriage, it cost him his academic career, and ultimately, it cost him his church membership.

Quinn was born in Pasadena, California on March 27, 1944, and grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Glendale. Childhood and adolescence, for most of us, are difficult times at best, but Quinn had to cope with challenges from which most of us are spared. A broken family, less than effective parenting, excruciating physical problems, ambiguous ethnic, social, and religious identities, and a mysterious same-sex attraction—all of these forced the boy to rely upon the proverbial resiliency of childhood, a resiliency that the cruelties of our adult world and the tribulations of Nature itself all too often compel our children to exercise.

His father, Daniel Pena, was a Mexican immigrant and a Roman Catholic. His mother, Joyce Workman, was a sixth-generation Mormon of Swiss ancestry. Before the boy was born, his father changed his name to Donald Pena Quinn in an attempt to conceal his Mexican heritage and speed assimilation, inspired by a childhood friendship with the future actor, Anthony Quinn. (The future actor was also born in Mexico, but to an Irish father.) Although surrounded during his youth more by Catholics than

Mormons, the boy early decided to embrace his mother’s faith—so enthusiastically, in fact, that as an adult he referred to himself as a “DNA Mormon.” Nevertheless, family life in the Quinn household was a religious battleground in which the boy was often used as a pawn, and when the parents divorced in 1949, religious differences were a factor.

Social and economic ambiguities were also part of his life: although the Quinns lived in a poor neighborhood, they attended a Mormon ward in a more affluent area to try to conceal their humble status. Finally, as early as eight years of age, he became increasingly aware of a samesex attraction, as his uncle cradled his body and lovingly lowered him into the warm water of the baptismal font. It was an attraction he fought all the way into adulthood and marriage.

Physical problems dogged him as well. Born with a cleft palate which was corrected by a military surgeon while his father was in the army, he underwent speech therapy to learn to pronounce “S” correctly. A bout with polio threatened his life, but he emerged unscathed as a result, he claimed, of Mormon priesthood ministrations. Finally, he was plagued with ear infections that caused excruciating pain and repeated eardrum punctures until the eardrum was surgically replaced. Those tribulations seem to have developed within him a stoicism in facing adversity, a resource that would serve him well.

A good student, Quinn planned a pre-med major when he entered Brigham Young University in 1964, but bad grades in chemistry and math caused him to change to English literature and philosophy, in which he graduated, with honors. Between his junior and senior years, he married Janice Darley, a union that eventually produced four children.

Quinn’s graduation in 1968 ended his draft deferment which placed him in peril of being sent to fight in Vietnam, a war he strongly opposed. He considered fleeing to Canada but decided

instead actually to enlist, hoping to parlay his college education into a better duty assignment. The strategy worked; he was assigned to military intelligence, sent through the army’s German language school, and spent the next three years in Germany. It was while in Germany that he made the decision to apply, upon his discharge, for graduate work in history rather than English, though he had been accepted into a Ph.D. program in the latter field at Duke University.

Back in Utah, he began work on a master’s degree at the University of Utah under the direction of Davis Bitton, for whom he also worked as research assistant. He also began at that time a lifelong friendship with LDS Church Historian Leonard Arrington and worked for him briefly at the newly created History Division at the Church Historical Department. It was Arrington who persuaded him, near the end of his master’s program, to apply for doctoral work at Yale to work with the celebrated Howard R. Lamar, who was long famous for training topflight western historians.

Quinn became one of Lamar’s prized students, blasting through the Ph.D. program in an almost unheard of three years and producing a prize-winning dissertation. He arrived back in Utah just in time to win a faculty position at BYU. It seemed the fulfillment of a dream: a high-powered Ph.D., a happy and growing family, and a well-paying job at a university run by the church to which he was devoted.

But things began to turn sour. For one thing, he and Jan decided that, try as they might, his homosexual orientation was making their marriage impossible. They divorced in 1986. It was an amicable separation, and Quinn remained close to her and their children and even to her husband when she remarried.

Even before that, he had been getting into academic hot water. In 1981, Elder Boyd K. Packer of the LDS Church’s Council of Twelve Apostles launched a frontal attack on historical honesty in a talk to the Church Education System, “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect.” Quinn took it upon himself to reply. His response, “On Being a Mormon Historian,” could well be considered the finest thing he ever wrote. In addition to being dishonest,

Quinn pointed out, Elder Packer’s “faith-promoting” history, which glossed over leaders’ failings and unsavory historical events, was actually faith-destroying because people are going to find out the truth eventually and blame the church for lying to them.

From that time on, Quinn became a lightning rod for conservative opposition within the church; while he continued to build a resume of solid historical articles, it seemed he always had something controversial in the works. His 1985 article documenting hundreds of authorized post-Manifesto plural marriages was a frontal assault on the official church position that no such marriages had happened. His Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview, which his former mentor Davis Bitton advised him not to publish, drew howls of protest and savagely hostile reviews from the FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research in Mormon Scriptures) Institute at BYU, a bastion of defensively conservative and orthodox Mormon scholarship. Although Quinn answered the FARMS reviewers in characteristically lengthy and polemical—even sarcastic—footnotes in a second edition, BYU administrators were coming to the realization that Quinn was drawing hostile attention from the Mormon hierarchy and told him that further research on controversial topics would be denied university support. Deeming that an unacceptable attenuation of academic freedom, Quinn resigned his faculty position. Although he continued to produce scholarship at the highest level, Quinn had become a poison product within academia and never held another permanent position.

Quinn’s resignation came at a time of increasing pressure and purging of allegedly dissident Mormon intellectuals, and it is no surprise that his enemies in the hierarchy smelled blood in the water and began to plot his excommunication. Quinn protested that his books and articles had never been anything but an honest quest for truth by a loyal member of the church, and he refused to stand before any ecclesiastical court whose proceedings, he correctly perceived, would be a foregone conclusion. That conclusion came, nevertheless, on September 26, 1993, when he was excommunicated as part of a larger purge known as the September Six. At this writing the question remains: when

Quinn’s ecclesiastical superiors excommunicated him, did they excise a potentially fatal cancer, or did they throw away one of the people the church most needed?

With that excommunication, his exile was complete: his marriage was gone, his faculty position was gone, and his church membership was gone. With nothing of his old life remaining, he left Utah and at the time of his death was living in his late mother’s condominium in Rancho Cucamonga, California.

Assessing Michael Quinn’s personal qualities is not a simple task. On the one hand, he was a delightful colleague, a popular teacher, a loyal friend, and a loving husband, father, and son. He was, truly, a “DNA Mormon” who served his church loyally and tirelessly as a missionary, a temple worker, and in a variety of ward and stake callings. Rare in such a profound intellectual, his faith was innocently childlike and literal, embracing such things as angels, demons, miracles, revelations, and direct messages from God. On the other hand, he had a hair-trigger mercurial temperament and a righteous certitude that made him the bane of editors who would deign to alter the holy writ of his manuscripts.

Assessing his contributions as a historian, by contrast, is remarkable easy, for it is nothing short of monumental. For one thing, there is no “Quinn Thesis,” no overarching general interpretation of Mormon history which would be the basis of a school of thought or something that future scholars would plug their own work into. Instead, his work represents a consistent and intense commitment to discovering the truth in every dark corner of history which attracted his attention. Like his role model,

Juanita Brooks, Quinn thought that only the complete and unvarnished truth was good enough for the church he served. There was, though, an immediately recognizable “Quinn Style,” in which the elaborate bibliographical endnotes competed for space with the text. That style rendered his books at the same time both intimidating and accessible: once the reader realized that fully half of the huge volume was documentation, the relatively brief text became more approachable.

Each of his books drew intense critical fire: the J. Reuben Clark biography for exposing its subject’s negative personal qualities and advocacy of unpopular opinions and positions; the Mormonism and magic book for suggesting that Joseph Smith had practiced disreputable Dark Arts; the trilogy on the Mormon hierarchy for many reasons, including Joseph Smith’s post facto alterations of sacred writings, post-Manifesto polygamy, frontier violence, and the octopus of the church’s financial affairs; and the same-sex dynamics book for suggesting that Mormon icons like Evan Stephens, the beloved composer and Tabernacle Choir director, may have been gay.

In retrospect, though, those proverbial Quinn endnotes and his own defense of his research vindicate his work as the exhaustive labor of an honest historian. While the voices of his critics have faded over time into insignificance, Quinn’s work stands collectively as one of the great monuments of Mormon, Utah, and western history.

Michael, where are thy accusers?

Gary Topping —Cottonwood Heights, Utah

ALAN J. CLARK holds a doctorate degree from the department of religion at Claremont Graduate University, with emphases in North American religious history, global Pentecostalism, and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He received his BA from Arizona State University and his MA from Brigham Young University. His interests include religion in the Intermountain West, Pentecostalism, and Latter-day Saint history in the Progressive Era.

HENRY MCALLISTER JR. is currently retired from Hill Air Force Base, where he had been employed for nearly forty three years. Pastor McAllister accepted his call into the Gospel ministry in 1985. The following year he became a licensed a minister in the Church of God in Christ by the late Superintendent David Griffin, and he was ordained an Elder. In 1996 he was appointed Pastor of the Finley Temple (Journey of New Beginnings) Church of God in Christ. He earned a BS degree in Accounting and Business Administration from the University of Arkansas in 1977 and was selected to the “Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities” that same year.

BRANDON PLEWE is an associate professor of Geography at Brigham Young University, where he teaches geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography, and studies historical GIS, historical cartography, and geographical information theory. He was the senior editor of the award-winning 2012 Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History.

TONYA REITER is an independent historian working in Salt Lake City. Her work has been published in the Journal of Mormon History and previously in Utah Historical Quarterly. She received the Dale L. Morgan Award in 2018. She contributes to the Century of Black Mormons website as a researcher and as a member of the advisory board.

JOHN SILLITO, Emeritus Professor at Weber State University, is the author of B. H. Roberts: A Life in the Public Arena and, with John S. McCormick, A History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic and Decidedly Revolutionary, which received the Utah State Historical Society’s award for Best Book in Utah History in 2011. He is currently researching the Utah Left from the Great Depression to the rise of McCarthyism.

GRACE SOELBERG is a recent graduate from Brigham Young University. She majored in history with an emphasis on twentieth-century US History. She was one of the first students to work with the BYU Slavery Project and through her research discovered the identity of BYU’s first Black graduate, Dr. Norman Wilson.

GARY TOPPING is a retired historian and archivist living in Salt Lake City. He is an Honorary Lifetime Member and Fellow of the Utah State Historical Society. His writings include Glen Canyon and the San Juan Country and Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History.

Like some other images in our collection, this photograph of a happy social scene circa the 1950s came to us with no identifying details. Note the stark contrast between the glamor of the individuals and the garage-like setting where they staged a live concert. The location may be attributed to segregation that forced the Black community to live and socialize at venues apart from those frequented by the white middle class. Society’s imposed limitations did not stop Blacks from developing their own communities and social lives, primarily in Salt Lake City and Ogden where they concentrated. They organized social centers and clubs and held formal dances at Black-owned

establishments, like the Porter’s and Waiter’s Club on the south end of 25th Street in Ogden. In Salt Lake City, the Black community frequented another Porter’s and Waiter’s Club, the Redwood Ranch, Dixie Land, Pink Lady, and Jazz Bo.

For more information on the Black community at midcentury, see Ronald G. Coleman’s history in The Peoples of Utah (1976), France A. Davis’s essay in Beehive History (1999), and Christine Cooper-Rompato’s article on the “Green Book” in Utah Historical Quarterly (winter 2020). If anyone has details about this particular photograph, please reach out to us at uhq@utah.gov.