Utah Lore

In the summer of 1945, 19-year-old Joe Badali stepped off a train into the barren expanse of sunburned desolation known as Wendover, Utah. He was an East Coast kid, raised in Connecticut, and most recently stationed with the Army Air Force in Delaware. The terrain before him was like nothing he’d ever seen—a blistering moonscape of low, rocky hills jutting up like icebergs from the vast, lifeless salt flats. Joe turned to Steven Gregg, a fellow soldier transferred from Delaware, and said, “They took us from heaven and sent us to hell.”

Hell, as it turned out, was an ideal place to test the men and machinery that would execute one of the 20th Century’s defining moments: the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan in World War II. During a frenzied 10-month period beginning in late 1944, Utah’s remote West Desert was on the leading edge of the atomic arms race, as crews put the finishing touches on the world’s first nuclear weapon and the plane that would carry it into battle.

Can you keep a secret?

In the fall of 1944, the Army Air Force (AAF) put 29-year-old Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets in command of the newly formed 509th Composite Group. The 509th was a completely self-sufficient unit of nearly 1,800 airmen, machinists, engineers and scientists charged with carrying the atomic bomb to the enemy. Tibbets was already an accomplished pilot, having flown combat missions in Europe and North Africa. He was also a military test pilot for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the plane the AAF chose for the atomic missions.

Army brass offered Tibbets the choice of three bases for the 509th, but he never even made it to the other two; one look at Wendover and he was sold. The air base on Utah’s western border had a large airstrip, barracks, hangars and other support buildings built by conventional bomber groups starting in 1940. It also had easy air access to California’s Salton Sea, where test bombs could be dropped.

But the airfield’s primary asset was its isolation. The base covered 3.5 million desolate acres and the fledgling town of Wendover offered few distractions beyond the tiny cobblestone Stateline Hotel. It was the perfect place to keep a very big secret. 

That secret was even kept from the soldiers themselves. No one was told the full extent of their mission, and they were not to talk about it to anyone, including spouses and other military personnel. 

Like most incoming soldiers, Joe Badali’s first interview at the base was with an FBI agent, who informed Badali that the agency had investigated him so thoroughly as to have paid visits to his schools and neighbors back home. The agent then asked, “Can you keep a secret?”

“I said, ‘I think so,’” recalls Badali, during an interview from his home in Ogden in 2005. That answer, imbued with teenage nonchalance, was not quite what the agent had hoped for. “He stood up,” says Badali, “leaned across the desk, pounded his fist down and said, ‘Damn it, can you or can you not keep a secret? Yes or no?’ I said, ‘Yes sir!’ ”

All told, roughly 400 FBI agents kept an eye on the men stationed in Wendover, camouflaged as workers, military personnel and civilians. “We found out after the war that our latrine orderly was an FBI agent,” laughs Badali. “I’m sure he picked up a lot of gossip there.”

When Morris “Dick” Jeppson arrived at the base in late 1944, he quickly realized that his stay would be anything but ordinary. Jeppson was a 24-year-old electronics wiz from Carson City, Nev. The Army Air Force had sent him through its electronics school, then on to Harvard graduate school, and finally to MIT to study radar engineering. He and six other electronics specialists arrived in Wendover at the behest of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the scientific arm of the atomic program.

“We were met there [in Wendover] not by the Air Force but by Professor Brode from the University of Cal Berkeley,” says Jeppson, who passed away in 1987 at his home in Las Vegas. “He took us around in a carry-all to talk to us about this highly secret but important project. He briefed us a bit, but he didn’t tell us what the project was.”

Only later did Jeppson realize why he’d been sent to Wendover. “One or two of us surmised during our trips to Los Alamos that we were working on a uranium weapon,” he says. “But we never talked about it.”

Neither did Joe Badali, although he knew better than most what was going on. His unit, the 216th Special Base Unit, assembled dummy test bombs of the uranium bomb called Little Boy, and the plutonium version known as Fat Man. During a briefing in the bomb assembly building, Sgt. Joe Cerace stood next to a Fat Man and deftly explained the weapon’s unconventional nature. 

“I can still see this little sergeant there patting the bomb,” says Badali. “And he says, ‘This here is an atom bomb. If this bomb were to explode, there’d be a big hole in the ground where Utah used to be.’ He scared the hell out of us.”

Taking flight

The Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were enormous. Little Boy was 10 feet long, 28 inches in diameter, and weighed 9,700 pounds. Fat Man was slightly longer and 500 pounds heavier, with a bulbous, five-foot diameter housing that gave it its name. The only way to load them into the belly of the B-29s was to tow the planes over specially constructed bomb-loading pits and hydraulically hoist the bombs into place from below ground.

With such a heavy payload on board, the 15 B-29s assigned to the 509th were modified to carry out the atomic missions. To save weight, Tibbets ordered the planes stripped of their guns, turrets, ammunition and fire-control systems. Only the tail gunner’s .50-caliber machine guns were left in place. Improved engines were installed and the forward bomb bays were outfitted to carry either Little Boy or Fat Man.

Under the direction of Col. Tibbets—he’d been promoted to full colonel in January of 1945—the 15 crews took to the skies over Western Utah, designing and testing the means to drop a bomb that was still being developed and had never been detonated.

Even Tibbets did not know fully what to expect. The scientists at Los Alamos conceded that the shockwaves from the blast could destroy the plane that dropped it, even at 30,000 feet. So Tibbets trained the crews to take a sharp, diving 158-degree turn away from the target once the bomb was released, putting maximum distance between the plane and the detonation.

On June 14, 1945, Captain Robert Lewis picked up plane 44-86292 from the Martin Company assembly plant in Omaha, Nebr., and flew it to Wendover. He didn’t know it then, but Lewis was piloting the Enola Gay, the plane that would carry out the world’s first atomic bombing mission. 

The Enola Gay left Wendover for the Pacific island of Tinian on June 27, 1945. Technically, it was still not the Enola Gay. The plane would not get its familiar moniker until August 5, the eve of the first drop on Hiroshima. Tibbets had decided he would pilot the mission himself and chose 44-86292 for the task. The plane was normally piloted by Captain Lewis and his crew. For this mission, Lewis would move to the co-pilot’s seat.

Just hours before takeoff, Tibbets summoned a crew to paint his mother’s name, Enola Gay, on the side of the cockpit. Lewis was reportedly quite upset to walk out onto the airstrip and see his airplane decorated with new nose art.

At 2:45 a.m. the next morning—August 6, 1945—the newly christened Enola Gay took to the South Pacific skies with 12 crew members and one Little Boy uranium bomb. Dick Jeppson, the electronics wiz from Carson City, was positioned in the forward pressurized compartment. Just days before, Navy Captain William “Deak” Parsons, a weapons officer, had voiced his concern that a crash during takeoff might detonate the bomb. So Little Boy had to be armed in the air—a job that fell to Parsons and Jeppson.

“Just after the plane took off,” recalls Jeppson, “he [Parsons] had me join him in the back of the bomb bay to connect some special wiring that had been left disconnected. That was one step of arming.” The second step, Jeppson explains, was to remove three test plugs that were inserted in the skin of the bomb and replace them with “live” plugs that would allow the firing signal to detonate the bomb. Once armed, the Enola Gay climbed above 30,000 feet and set a course for the Japanese mainland.

At 8:15 a.m., Tibbets and crew released Little Boy, 31,600 feet over Hiroshima, and immediately went into the hard right diving turn they’d practiced so many times in Wendover. Dick Jeppson didn’t have a window in the forward compartment, but he didn’t need one. 

“The plane experienced a shockwave from the primary detonation,” Jeppson recalls. “There was a second shockwave a few seconds afterward. From my training, I realized that that was reflected shockwave from the ground, which proved that the bomb had, in fact, detonated at somewhere near the desired elevation above
the ground.”

Three days later, Major Charles Sweeney of the 509th piloted the B-29 Bockscar to Nagasaki, dropping the Fat Man bomb. Not long after the Japanese surrender, Tibbets returned to Wendover, where young Joe Badali and other members of the 216th Base Unit lined up to shake hands with the colonel. Badali remembers it well. 

“He shook our hands and said, ‘Now when you meet someone, you can tell them, shake the hand, that shook the hand, that shook Japan.’ ”

The action in Wendover these days is on the Nevada side of the state line, where sprawling neon casinos and hotels blink seductively at travelers on Interstate 80. On the Utah side, the old airfield control tower stands watch over an assembly of buildings in various states of renovation including the cavernous, arched hangar at the east end of the airstrip—which once housed the gleaming Enola Gay, fresh off the assembly line.

On the other side of the country, the plane itself has been painstakingly restored and is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum near Washington D.C.

The Wendover Airfield is slowly being restored by the Historic Wendover Airfield Society, which
has preserved many of the barracks, hangars and support buildings where the crews lived in secrecy and trained for the atomic mission. The field’s restored service club is the main museum site and inside, on display is a replica of Little Boy—the bomb that changed the course of mankind, and once stirred Utah’s west desert into a frenzy of activity in a massive effort to end the war. 

Utah at War 

Utah developed into an important base for the U.S. Military at the onset of WWII. Its location was ideal for military planners, who after Pearl Harbor were justified in worry about Japanese attacks on the Western Coast. In 1941 Army Air Corps Gen. Henry H. Arnold set about diversifying military resources far into the nation’s interior and away from the reach of the Japanese Navy. Utah with its existing installations and highway and rail access became a prime location.

• Fort Douglas, which was built to house federal troops sent to Utah during the Civil War, was re-purposed as a processing center for U.S. Army recruits.

• The Ogden Arsenal, a weapon storage facility was built in 1921. It would become a manufacturing and shipping center during WWII. 

• Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base was established in 1940 but its beginnings were in 1934 as a mail supply relay. In 1940, the United States was supplying allies with weapons and support and quietly building up its own military power. Hill was a prime location to supply West Coast installations. 

• Wendover was chosen over Hill Field for the B-29 training missions to deploy the world’s first atomic weapons for its remote location to maintain secrecy.

Source: Launius, Roger D., “World War II in Utah,” Utah History Encyclopedia (University of Utah Press, 1994) 

The Darker Side of War in Utah

On Feb. 9, 1941, in the aftermath of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which ordered the incarceration of nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans.

Many of those Japanese-Americans were sent to Topaz, Utah, near the desert Topaz Mountain, where they finished building the barracks they were to live in, set up the barbed wire fence and built out the rest of the camp. More than 11,000 people were processed through Topaz—the population peaked at about 8,300.

In 2007 the Topaz site was listed as a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service. The Topaz Museum opened in 2017 with interpretive exhibits detailing life in Topaz. President Roosevelt announced in 1944 that the camps would close in 1945. The Topaz camp didn’t close until October 31, 1945. Topaz Museum, 55 W. Main St., Delta, topazmuseum.org

Visit a Different Wendover

The Historic Wendover Airfield Museum in Wendover, Utah, just over the border from the casinos and hotels in Wendover, Nev., is one of the most authentically preserved WWII Army Air Force bases in the United States. It is open daily from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Learn more and plan your visit at wendoverairfield.org.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the November 2006 issue of Salt Lake magazine. 

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In 1966, two 18-year-old gas station attendants were kidnapped in Kearns and stabbed to death. The bodies of Steven Shea and Michael Holtz were discovered stripped of their clothing in a remote location. The brutality of the crimes caught Salt Lake residents off guard. “It wasn’t that we didn’t have robberies and murders in Salt Lake City at the time,” says Salt Lake Police historian Steve “Duffy” Diamond, who passed away in 2015. “It was the harsh nature of these killings that got the attention.”

On a wintry night of that year, two men—Myron Lance and Walter Kelbach—were drinking at Lally’s Tavern on the west side of Salt Lake City, on the corner of 400 South and 900 West, now a vacant brownstone. The bartender was chatting with them about the two bodies that had been found.

“The bartender (Lloyd Graven) said something like, ‘I wish I had the guys who killed those kids right here. I’d teach them a lesson,’” says Diamond. “Lance and Kelbach told him he had his chance, brought out their guns, and started blazing away.”

Fred Lillie, 21, James Sisemore, 47, and Beverly Mace, 34, were gunned down that night at the bar. Lance and Kelbach emptied the register and fled. They were captured later that evening at a police roadblock. The investigation uncovered that they had killed Shea and Holtz and that, before the tavern shootings, Lance and Kelbach had shot a cab driver, Grant Strong. The final body count was six. 

“It was like sitting in a foxhole at the battlefront,” Graven told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1966. “He turned on me and shot point-blank. The concussion of the shot knocked me down. He leaned over the bar and shot at me lying on the floor. How he missed, I’ll never know.”

Lance and Kelbach were convicted and sentenced to death in April 1967. (Lance chose the firing squad; Kelbach decided he would hang.) But in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional, and their sentences were reduced to life in prison. After the verdict, the duo gave a startling prison house interview for NBC. 

Lance said, “I haven’t any feelings toward the victims.” Kelbach added, “I don’t mind people getting hurt because I just like to watch it.”

After capital punishment was reinstated, the state again sought the death penalty for the duo, but a Fifth Circuit Court judge rejected the state’s arguments because of the case’s age.

“They were without remorse,” Diamond says. “They were so cold-blooded. It shocked everyone.”  

Extra! Extra! Extra!

In 1968, Lance attacked a prison guard with a sharpened spoon. In that same year, the duo escaped with seven other inmates but were captured in Idaho. During the ’70s, Kelbach attempted to adopt a younger, male parolee. His request was denied. Lance died in prison in 2010 of natural causes. Kelbach passed away in 2018 after serving 51 years.

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Interested in learning more Utah lore? Read about Utah’s “Black Dahlia”

You may arrive at this year’s 24th of July parade at what you assume to be right on time, lawn chairs in tow, ready for the grand marshal’s whistle and the drum majors’ first beat. You are too late. You’ll be relegated to a patch of dirt near Liberty Park, while the primo spots are already filled with enthusiastic daughters and sons of Utah pioneers who have shown up ready to play…12 to 16 hours before go time. 

This parade, after all, is part of the emphatically celebrated anniversary of the Latter-day Saints’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. Few states have such a rich history that it warrants an official day off and a parade of this magnitude.

Snagging key parade spots, and the modest revelry that ensues up and down the town’s main drag, may not be unique to Utah. We all love a parade, after all. But the vibe around 6 p.m.-ish, and on into twilight’s last fading on the 23rd, is essential Utah. 

First, there are the teens, up late with a good excuse for prowling. But “prowling” is too sinister a term. These are the Archie-comic, suburban-parallel-universe versions of the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. You’ll meet a fleet of good-natured Davis County teens, enjoying nothing more intoxicating than Mountain Dew and a pass to be out beyond curfew, thrilling in the “big city.” While mom and dad (and vast extended families) dutifully GUARD THE SPOT with elaborate systems of coolers, lawn chairs and Honda generators, the young crowd is free to roam. Besides, if Mom and Dad are not physically there, the Holy Ghost stays up late tonight (this is Pioneer Day Eve, after all). 

Next, there are the Bible Bangers. Limited most often to the “protest zone” just off Temple Square, this ragtag fleet of Jesus Freaks and End-of-Timers is set free to carry its fire-and-brimstone message to the gathered throngs. Everyone is up all night. What time is it? Half past John 3:16. 

Combine those earnest, mostly LDS-mission-bound teens from the suburbs, all hopped up on sugary sodas, with wild-eyed prophets representing The Lord Savior Jesus Christ “hisself” on one long Rocky Mountain Las Ramblas, and now you’re in Utah, baby.

And by 2 a.m., after the SLCPD has shooed away the antagonists in the debate over the Trinity, it’s proper family time. Bring on the card games, laughter and a shared goal to enjoy the dawn’s early light, to cheer on the marathoners as they enter the city and to anticipate the Grand Marshal’s whistle—which means salt water taffy for all! 

It’s going to be a good morning here in Utah.  

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Every state has mottos and symbols to represent that state’s whole, general vibe. Consider Florida, for instance. Florida’s state reptile is the American Alligator, and, as the state with the fifth highest median age, Florida’s state song is “Old Folks At Home.” Each state also picks two people to represent them in Washington, D.C., and I’m not talking about electing U.S. Senators. Rather, the National Statuary Hall collection contains more permanent representation (although a few forever-senators have tried to give them a run for their money). 

The selection of the statues is an opportunity for each state to put its best foot forward and highlight its favorite sons and daughters. Not every state gets it right the first time. Several Confederate officers have lost their spots in the National Statuary Hall…as well as Philo Farnsworth, a former resident of Beaver, Utah and the inventor of the television. 

Why give Farnsworth the boot? Well, a few years ago, we were approaching the 150th anniversary of women’s suffrage in Utah, which was the first state (well, territory) where women cast their ballots. To commemorate the occasion, the Utah State Legislature, after encouragement from the non-profit group Better Days 2020, passed a resolution to replace poor, old Farnsworth with Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon. 

Cannon was the first-ever woman elected to a State Senate. She was also a medical doctor, suffragist, mother and Mormon Pioneer. Not only did Cannon check all of the “Utah” boxes, but she also reminded people that Utah used to be first for women. Maybe it could be again. At the time of this publication, Utah has once again ranked the worst state for women (according to WalletHub’s analysis, “Best & Worst States for Women’s Equality”), thanks in part to a significant gender-wage gap and political representation gap. 

To address this reputation, the Utah State Legislature “sent Martha to Washington” to stand next to our other statuary representative: Brigham Young, a man who loved women so much that he married 56 of them and once complained of women who didn’t particularly like polygamy, “I do know that there is no cessation to the everlasting whining of many of the women in this Territory.”  

In sending Martha to Washington, D.C., Utah is also addressing the realization that not much of the art in the nation’s capital is of women, and, as many have pointed out before, the few women who are depicted are not real people; they’re fictional like Betsy Ross or embody concepts like Justice, Truth or Victory. Women in the National Statuary Hall include a few more recent additions like famed aviator Amelia Earhart (who replaced a statue of some Kansas senator in 2022) and educator and civil rights leader Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. She’s the first Black woman depicted in the National Statuary Hall collection. Florida chose her to replace a statue of a Confederate general in 2022. That’s become something of a trend as well. Student civil rights leader Barbara Rose Johns will eventually fill a vacancy for Virginia left by a Confederate whose name rhymes with Bobert B. Pee, and Arkansas plans to remove both of its statues of white supremacists and replace them with civil rights activist Daisy Bates and singer-songwriter Johnny Cash. 

All told, currently 11 out of the 100 statues in the National Statuary Hall collection are of women. Once Martha Hughes Cannon joins them, it will be at least 12. She was supposed to head to Washington in 2020, but the pandemic delayed her trip until further notice. At last check, she’s still standing in the Utah State Capitol building, if you’d like to visit her before she leaves. Until then, Mr. Farnsworth stays on his pedestal a little longer. 

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Read More

On the grand stage of national politics, Utah is a bit player. We are one of the least densely populated, most reliably conservative states with middling voter participation rates and are currently embroiled in a gerrymandering lawsuit. However, Utah’s seeming political insignificance is something of a smokescreen, and the monolithic nature of Utah’s long-held political beliefs is an illusion. Utah politicians have amassed power and influence that penetrated state borders and directed the country to where it is today. We are taking a look at the Utah men throughout history who made it into “the room where it happens,” as Hamilton so succinctly put it, and what they did when they got there.  

Political Ideology With Parallels Today

On June 17, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed The Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the wake of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash that marks the impetus of the Great Depression. Utah Senator Reed Smoot lent his name to the Tariff, as the chair of the Senate Finance Committee during the months of odious debates, amendment votes, reversals, in-fighting, backroom-dealing and special interest lobbying that preceded the bill’s passage. (Sound familiar?) At best, the act failed at what its authors initially set out to do—help the struggling agriculture sector. At worst, the Tariff takes the blame for exacerbating the Great Depression. 

 If the act sounds familiar, it might be because Smoot’s namesake was invoked in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) and again in 2017. A Washington Post columnist who declared “The ghost of Smoot-Hawley seems to haunt President Trump” was not the only one who compared President Trump’s tariffs and protectionism to the 1930 bill. 

In 1929, when the tariff negotiations began, Smoot had a reputation as an “exceptionally capable and indefatigable legislator,” according to Douglas A. Irwin of the National Bureau of Economic Research. By 1932, Smoot had lost reelection, but he defended his tariff with the zeal of a religious crusade. “Even if one disagrees with Smoot’s strict protectionist doctrine, one can understand and admire the tenacity with which he pursued his goal,” concludes James B. Allen, former LDS Church historian and BYU professor of history. “He had one great characteristic that some will admire and others scoff at…his overwhelming confidence in his own wisdom and ability.” 

That confidence allowed Smoot to lead “Utah’s march into the national mainstream,” as Utah Historic Quarterly put it, and to be “successful in placing many Utahns in positions of national prominence,” as stated in Smoot’s failed reelection campaign. Outside of the impact of his policies (soon undone after he left the Senate), Smoot’s legacy is forging a path to power for future representatives of the frontier West.  

Elbert D. Thomas, the Utah senator who replaced Smoot, took office during worst economic crisis the country had ever seen. Thomas worked to create a New Deal work-relief program that employed millions of young men in environmental projects and national parks, as chair of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, establishing the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, a minimum wage and a legal working age.

Thomas’s secretary, Elaine F. Hatch, said of her “beloved” senator’s legacy, “This Nation may have totally collapsed and foundered except for the dedicated efforts and activities of men like President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marriner Eccles and Senator Elbert D. Thomas.” 

In today’s political climate, as well as in the 1930s, the mindset of a Utah banker might seem incongruous with the top-down economic policy of the New Deal, but Marriner Eccles was different. Eccles said “frontier economic philosophy”  guided him until the Great Depression, when he changed his mind and chose not to double down on a failed philosophy. In 1933, Eccles testified before the Senate Committee on Finance, saying, “The orthodox capitalistic system of uncontrolled individualism, with its free competition, will no longer serve our purpose. We must think in terms of the scientific, technological, interdependent machine age, which can only survive and function under a modified capitalistic system controlled and regulated from the top by the government.” 

The young banker from Utah proposed a bold five-point plan to fix the economy. F.D.R. gave Eccles a job in the U.S. Treasury Department and then, in 1934, the job as chair of the Federal Reserve. His plan became the inspiration for New Deal programs. While the New Deal did not end the Depression, “It restored a sense of security as it put people back to work. It created the framework for a regulatory state that could protect the interests of all Americans, rich and poor…It rebuilt the infrastructure of the United States, providing a network of schools, hospitals and roads,” said historian Allan Winkler in his own 2009 testimony to the U.S. Senate. 

Eccles pushed to reform the Fed and create the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Housing Act (FHA). While the FHA allowed many Americans to obtain housing, it did not extend those benefits to generations of Black Americans in a process known as “redlining.” Eccles’ legacy includes some insights relevant to post-Great Recession America, as noted by Mark Wayne Nelson in Jumping the Abyss: Marriner S. Eccles and the New Deal, 1933–1940. Eccles advocated for centralized banking regulation and believed it would “prove effective in establishing a sound financial sector…One imagines that were he with us today he might assert that the remarkable financial stability that has distinguished the first three decades following the New Deal, and the turbulence that marked the years 2007 and 2008, has validated this conviction.”

Unmaking the New Deal

While Eccles went back to Utah during the Truman administration, he returned to Washington, D.C., in a fashion, when the building that houses the Fed was named for him. The provision to name it after Eccles came in a 1982 bill co-authored by Utah Senator Jake Garn. Perhaps ironically, given Eccles’ convictions, the Garn-St. Germaine Act deregulated financial institutions, removing some Depression-era restraints on savings and loans and allowing variable-rate mortgages. As with Smoot-Hawley, the legacy of the Garn-St. Germain Act is one of devastating, unintended consequences.

If this sounds familiar, VRMs were at the heart of the 2007 Subprime Mortgage Crisis, which preceded the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. 

As economist Gillian Garcia noted, “The Garn-St. Germain Act allowed lenders to make alternative mortgages, some of which proved to be problematic…unrestrained lenders offered infamous 2/28 adjustable-rate mortgages to entice subprime borrowers,” who then could not afford payments when the rate reset at a higher rate, and millions of people lost their homes. 

Conspiracy Thinking

Eccles’ policies as Fed Chair drew the same sort of shallow criticism that we see in American politics today, when one congresswoman told him, “You just love socialism.” During the Red Scare, such unfounded accusations abounded. Burgeoning McCarthyist fervor ended Sen. Elbert Thomas’s political career. Thomas advocated for accepting more Jewish refugees into the U.S. and against interning Japanese Americans during WWII. His inclinations toward global cooperation saw him labeled a communist sympathizer. 

In 1953, one man with Utah ties came to Washington, D.C. with more zeal for rooting out communism than anyone, perhaps save for Sen. Joe McCarthy himself. When Ezra Taft Benson, a Mormon apostle, became President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, he did not face the same scrutiny that Smoot endured. At the time, separation of church and state was not much of an issue, explains Dr. Gregory Prince, author of multiple books and essays on Mormon history. “The precedent of a high-ranking church official holding a high office in the federal government had been in place for decades,” says Prince. “I think what changed was the nature of the public’s perception of what churches should and should not do.” 

The shift in perception might have come about in part because of Benson’s controversial politics. In his book, Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right, Matthew Harris, professor of history at Colorado State University, details Benson’s political involvement and influence. Benson believed “he had a divine calling to warn Americans about the dangers of communism,” says Harris. As such, he created a secret surveillance system to catch suspected communists within his department. Benson also worked on dismantling the popular New Deal policies of price controls on farm goods and reducing agricultural subsidies, which he called socialism. 

As Benson became entrenched in the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative anti-communist hate group, “Benson emerged as one of the leading anti-communist spokesmen in the United States,” says Harris. For Benson, the concepts of centralized government, socialism, social justice, atheism, etc., were lumped together under a communist conspiracy that he believed had infiltrated all levels of government and corrupted the American way of life. 

Harris is careful to point out that Benson was not unique among his peers for embracing conspiracy theories, with one notable exception. Benson and his friend J. Rueben Clark—whose name is still on BYU’s law school—were “the only apostles who associated the conspiracy with Jews.” They made antisemitic claims that Jewish people established communism and the NAACP to promote racial integration, which Benson opposed. Benson’s political ambitions culminated in two failed presidential bids with two high-profile segregationists: Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.

Influence on Civil Rights

In 1898, Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, the first woman to serve as a State Senator in Utah and the U.S., testified to the success of Utah’s equal suffrage before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. Cannon declared that the women’s suffrage experiment was so successful that it “is no longer an experiment, but is a practical reality, tending to the well-being of the State,” and “Even those who opposed equal suffrage with the greatest ability and vehemence would not now vote for the repeal of the measure.”

The Utah Territory’s women were the first in the nation to cast their ballots. The comparatively early adoption of women’s right to vote and run for public office allowed Utah women to become powerful and vocal advocates for the national suffragist movement, Cannon among them, alongside household names like Susan B. Anthony. While nothing can purge Utah’s legacy as a state that pioneered women’s involvement in politics, Utah’s role as a civil rights leader would later transform into that of one of its most ardent detractors. 

Officials in Washington, D.C. were not the sole actors from Utah influencing national politics. The Utah-based religious organization, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka LDS Church or Mormon Church), has wielded its clout and deployed an obedient membership to sway national politics. Gregory Prince notes that the first time the LDS Church waded into a political issue and made a difference on a national level is with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972 (ERA). 

The ERA would amend the U.S. Constitution to include, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” and needed the approval of three-fourths of state legislatures to ratify. The Utah-based church (then led by Spencer W. Kimball) publicly justified its opposition to the ERA in 1976 when it needed only four more states’ approvals. The church considered the ERA not a political issue but a moral one. The church claimed that the ERA allowed for a “possible train of unnatural consequences” such as “encouragement of those who seek a unisex society, an increase in the practice of homosexual and lesbian activities, and other concepts which could alter the natural, God-given relationship of men and women.” 

LDS Church leadership created a Special Affairs Committee to spearhead anti-ERA efforts in 21 states outside of Utah, where members collected funds for anti-ERA candidates, distributed pamphlets and organized letter-writing campaigns. Historian D. Michael Quinn wrote, “The results were numerically staggering.” Of the anti-ERA mail received by state legislators in Virginia, for instance, 85% of the letters were written by Mormons. They succeeded in swaying ERA “I think the ERA was when they honed their political skills, certainly,” says Prince. “And that same playbook came back in the marriage equality battle.” The Utah-based church once again mobilized to influence votes in other states—this time to oppose the legalization of gay marriage. “That started in Hawaii,” says Prince. The LDS Church “allied with the Catholic Church, very quietly, under a front organization called Hawaii’s Future Today,” says Prince. “It had a significant influence on the debate and the legislation that was going on in Hawaii.” 

The LDS Church followed similar patterns in 2000 with Proposition 22 and again in 2008 with Proposition 8, both in California. “When Proposition 8 came around, they jumped in with both feet,” says Prince. “They took a very public stand and had a considerable boots-on-the-ground initiative within the state.” Mormons’ financial contributions accounted for more than half of the money raised in support of Prop 8. 

The LDS Church likewise declared this a moral issue, not a political one, and published its justification, called The Family: A Proclamation to the World. The document asserts that divine design only allows for a narrow definition of marriage, families and gender roles. The proclamation warns that living outside this definition “will bring upon…the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.” 

The promises of the unraveling of society are not unlike the arguments made against women’s rights. As Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon observed in her prescient testimony on women’s suffrage to Congress in 1898, “None of the unpleasant results, which were predicted, have occurred…[They] have all been found to be but the ghosts of unfounded prejudices.”  

Time Will Tell

Utah’s history of political influence could show that who wielded power was determined by the swing of the ideological pendulum. The same state that produced George Sutherland, who ruled against New Deal legislation as a Supreme Court Justice, elected Abe Murdock, a New Deal supporter; Republican Arthur Watkins replaced him, and Frank Moss, the last Democrat to represent Utah, replaced him. Moss lost reelection to Orrin Hatch. Had the pendulum stopped swinging? 

“Utah began to swing to the right with the full aid of Benson,” says Prince. “And I think it’s kept going in that direction ever since. I think that’s where the genesis of it was, in the early 1960s, to the point now where Utah is one of the most reliably pro-Trump states in the country.” 

That is not the sum of Utah’s political legacy. People—even politicians—are complex, and sometimes they break ideological ranks to great effect. 

As a final example, take Sen. Watkins, who championed a policy that forcibly disconnected indigenous people from their culture and lands. But during his tenure in Congress he also headed a committee to censure Joe McCarthy, a move so unpopular in Utah that he likely lost his seat over it. What was right and what was wrong depends on not just who you ask but when. Legacy is our choices and all of the unintended consequences.  

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