One of the more entertaining Utah political tiffs
was the battle between Salt Lake City Mayor J. Bracken Lee and Salt Lake City
Police Chief W. Cleon Skousen. The battle ended in 1960 when Lee managed to
convince a majority of city commissioners to fire Skousen.
Skousen was hired in 1956 to re-energize a police
force that suffered from low morale. He had been recommended by FBI chief J.
Edgar Hoover. The then-mayor, Adiel F. Stewart, not surprisingly, lobbied LDS
Church leader David O. McKay for permission to get ex-FBI agent Skousen out of
his BYU job. By most accounts, Skousen did improve the moral of the department.
However, the moralistic, ultra-conservative Skousen was headed for a collision
with the election of Lee as SLC’s mayor in 1959.
The Fall 1974 issue of “The Utah Historical
Quarterly,” has an interesting account of the tension that developed between
Mayor Lee and Chief Skousen. Both were political conservatives, but Lee, who
was not Mormon, enjoyed recreational activities that the straightlaced Skousen
regarded as immoral. According to historian Dennis L. Lythgoe, the pair clashed
over Skousen regularly sending the city’s vice squad to bust striptease shows
“to the private clubs of the city, such as Alta, Ambassador and Elks.” Lee
allegedly ordered to Skousen to let up on the raids. Skousen refused. According
to Lythgoe, “Angry words followed, with Lee suggesting that the police should
stay away from striptease shows and admitting that he enjoyed them himself and
had no desire to be arrested while attending one.”
Lee’s defense of striptease shows in refreshingly
candid. In a footnote to Lythgoe’s article, he says in an interview “… I think
the prettiest thing in the world is a nude woman — a good looking nude woman.”
It’s clear that Lee was offended by what he believed was Skousen’s attempt to
put a heavy police presence on issues that offended his personal morality. The
pair also clashed over Skousen’s attempts to crack down on mild forms of
gambling that went on surreptitiously at area private clubs.
When he became police chief, Skousen initiated a
program where local taverns would self-police themselves. His reasoning was
that if the taverns could self correct any potential violations of the law it
would cut down on needed police presence. The taverns formed an association and
hired a former police officer to advise them.
Lee disliked the program, and asked Skousen to
disband it. He believed that tavern businesses were pressured and intimidated
by both SLC police and the association if they spurned membership. At a public
hearing charged by Mayor Lee on the program, both sides of the association
debate were heard. In an interview with Lythgoe, Lees regards the tavern owners
as thieves who had made a bargain with Skousen to steal less. He told Skousen,
“I think you could make a deal with the underworld to only steal so much at
night and they would be glad to police themselves.”
The rift between Lee and Skousen was moving beyond
competing moral visions and into disputes over the role and size of government.
Despite both men being traditional, anti-communism conservatives, Lee was
realizing that Skousen’s morality tolerated an intrusive form of bigger
government that his competing moral views opposed. Lee was not interested in
vice cops chasing dancing women in panties or bras. Also, he wanted taverns to
be policed by cops.
Not surprisingly, the final straw that led to
Skousen’s firing was over the size of the police department’s budget. Lee
wanted it trimmed far more than Skousen wanted to trim it. Skousen’s salary, at
$10,000 a year, was larger than Lee’s. He also had three highly paid assistant
police chiefs. Lee wanted those to go. The money issues, as Lythgoe recounts,
couldn’t be worked out, and one day, in a Machiavellian move, during a routine
commission meeting, Lee made a surprising motion to fire Skousen. Even more
surprisingly, it passed 3-2 among city commissioners.
The mayor suffered short-term public relations/media
problems but eventually withstood harsh criticism from Skousen supporters and
others. In fact, Lee was re-elected as mayor of Salt Lake City twice after
firing Skousen. In an interesting twist, the Deseret News, which had been an
enthusiastic supporter of Skousen during his tenure, published a lukewarm,
passionless editorial on his firing. What Lythgoe reports is that the Deseret
News had prepared a full-page editorial harshly condemning Lee for firing
Skousen. However, at the last minute, the LDS Church First Presidency spiked
the editorial, and sent Counselor Henry D. Moyle to make sure the editorial did
not run. Moyle’s church duties at the time included overseeing the editorial
content of the Deseret News.
According to the article, Lee says that when he
learned of the upcoming editorial, he called Church President McKay, who told
him not to worry. Skousen is quoted as saying that Moyle was sent to spike the
editorial because Lee was a Mason and the church worried about offending
Masons. In an article footnote, then-Deseret News editorial director William
Smart, who was editor and general manager of the News at the time Lythgoe’s
article was published, Smart said that he had been opposed to Skousen’s firing
but added this: “Well, we’ve never published nor ever will publish a full-page
editorial — that’s ridiculous. And I’d really rather not comment on that.
That’s an internal matter that I’d rather not get into.”
n the history of Utah journalism, it’s no secret
that the Deseret News’ editorials are influenced by the hierarchy of the LDS
Church. (In fact, recently, the newspaper, and the rest of
the church’s media, has been restored to First Presidency control to a level
that equals, if not exceeds, what it was 52 year ago.)
As to what drove the LDS Church leadership to side
with the mayor who liked strippers over the ultra-straightlaced Skousen, I
suspect Skousen is pretty close to the truth when he claimed “that the
president of the church had always been more comfortable with a non-Mormon in
office who was friendly than a Mormon who might feel a need to be independent,”
writes Lythgoe.
As mentioned, it was an entertaining tiff in Utah
history. The winner was Lee, who continued with a successful political career.
Skousen resumed a private life, and enjoyed success with his brands of politics
and religion for about two more decades until changing moods rendered him
obsolete. However, in recent years the popularity of Mormon commentator Glenn
Beck, a Skousen fan, has pushed his books, particularly “The 5,000 Year
Leap,” back into prominence.
-- Doug Gibson
-- Originally published at StandardBlogs
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