Samuel Brannan: the Mormon leader in California matched wits with Brigham Young

Samuel Brannan is unique among Mormon historical figures because his role goes beyond his contribution to Mormonism. Brannan (1818-1889) was trusted enough to lead a Mormon colony on a very long sail from the east coast to what is now San Francisco. The ship, The Brooklyn, stopped in Hawaii. While in California, gold was discovered, and Sam Brannan made a public announcement of the find.

It was gold which led to Brannan’s disassociation from the Mormon Church, and being officially severed from the church in 1851. Once gold was discovered, Brannan became very eager to collect tithes. (Until then, Brannan had overseen the colony of Mormons in a less than pious manner, without organizing a branch, causing one of his party to complain to church leaders that the colony was “acting in the same manner as their neighbors … speculating in land, drinking, gambling, and giving their daughters in marriage to non-Mormons.”

(I take a short break to note that the source of this post is from the April 1959 edition of the Utah Historical Quarterly, “The Apostasy of Samuel Brannan,” written by Eugene E. Campbell.)

Indeed, Brannan made sure the Mormon aspect of his colonization was underplayed. The move was successful to the extent that it made him a leading public figure in the early days of San Francisco. Brannan also became a big booster of the Latter-day Saints moving from Utah to California, telling members that would happen soon. Brannan’s deliberate policy of downplaying Mormonism — he published in the newspaper he started, “The California Star,” that the paper would “eschew with the greatest caution, everything that stands to the propagation of sectarian dogma” — put him at odds with Brigham Young and the Utah church leadership, which desired a propagation of Mormonism.

As a result, Brannan found himself in conflict with more traditional church members who sent messages to Salt Lake City unfavorable to the church’s San Francisco leader. Brannan, on the other hand, attempted to maintain a non-traditional manner of control over his branch of the  church while at the same time sending Brigham Young slavish, sycophantic notes professing his allegiance and desiring counsel on various matters from Young.

Anyone who has read John Turner’s definitive biography of “Brigham Young” can only imagine how the sardonic Young would react to Brannan’s attempts to mollify him. It all came to a head after Young learned of Brannan’s energetic attempts to gather “tithing” from gold being prospected in northern California. Using a very polite manner of snark, Young sent Brannan a letter that put his faith in Mormonism to an economic test.

In the letter, Young wrote, “The man who is always doing right has no occasion to fear any complaints that can be made against him, and I hope that you have no cause to fear. I am glad to hear you say that I may rely on your ‘pushing every nerve to assist me and sustain me to the last,’ for I do not doubt that you have been blessed abundantly and now shall have it in your power to render most essential service.” At this point, Young got to specifics, instructing Brannan to send $10,000 tithing to Apostle Amasa Lyman, as well as $20,000 to assist him, Brigham Young, and another $20,000 to assist “Brothers Kimball and Richards.”

At the end of his letter, Young wrote, “Now, Brother Brannan, if you will deal justly with your fellows, and deal out with a liberal heart and open hands, making a righteous use of your money, the Lord is willing that you should accumulate the treasures of the earth and good things in times of abundance, but should you withhold when the Lord says give, your hope and pleasing prospects will be blasted in an hour you think not, and no arm to save. But I am pursuaded (sic) better things of Brother Brannan. I expect all that I have asked when Brother Lyman returns and may God bless you to this end is the prayer of your brother in the new covenant.”

I doubt very seriously that Brigham Young expected to get $10,000, or $50,000 from Samuel Brannan when the apostle Lyman arrived. But the Mormon prophet did know how to get rid of a leader he wanted out. Faced with the prospect of remaining a leader in the California LDS Church or parting with tens of thousands of dollars, Brannan found it an easy decision to leave Mormonism. When Lyman arrived, he and his companion were given $500 by Brannan as well as some books. Lyman’s companion, Charles C. Rich, wrote “We paid Mr. Samuel Brannan a visit and learned from him that he stood alone and knew no one only himself and his family. …”

Thus ended the tenure of Samuel Brannan as a Mormon leader. He stayed busy, becoming California’s first millionaire and a leading citizen of early San Francisco. There he became a leader of the crime-fighting group, The Vigilantes. It was that association which finally led to his excommunication from the Mormon Church. The church branch disciplined him via unanimous vote for “a general course of unchristianlike conduct, neglect of duty, and for combining with lawless assemblies to commit murder and other crimes.”

That was the official reason. But Brannan’s fate in the Mormon Church was sealed when he chose to ignore Young’s sly, ironic request for a share of the gold that had been discovered in California.

Ironically, although Brannan became a millionaire, he eventually lost his fortune and died in poverty. According to Campbell’s UHQ piece, his body was unclaimed in San Diego for a year before a friend donated a gravesite.

A devout Mormon might cite Young’s words, “but should you withhold when the Lord says give, your hope and pleasing prospects will be blasted in an hour you think not, and no arm to save” as being a fulfilled prophecy. Others just might think that this Mr. Brannan was the victim of bad financial luck in the latter decades of his life.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs

Long before Hatch became a Senate institution, there was Utah’s Sen. Smoot

(This post was first published at StandardNET in 2010.)

There’s a lot of talk about Sen. Orrin Hatch, who has served 34-plus years in the Senate and intends to go for 42 year in 2012, and former Gov. Mitt Romney, who gets the question of who will he serve if elected president? The Mormon Church or the U.S. nation? What’s interesting is, long ago, Utah Sen. Reed Smoot (seen above) faced some of these questions.


Smoot, who was in the Senate for 30 years, was handpicked, or more or less called to the job, by the First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 Apostles of the LDS Church. In fact, the monogamous Smoot was not only a Mormon, he was a member of the 12 Apostles. It’s unthinkable today that an LDS apostle would be elected to that high of an office, let alone sent there by the Brethren. However, there is apostle Ezra Taft Benson becoming President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture in the 1950s.

Smoot had to fight for years to be accepted into the Senate. It wasn’t so much for his “church calling” as it was to general suspicion about the Mormon Church’s commitment to the federal government and of course, the big issue, polygamy. He won that battle, though, and like Hatch, became a respected member of the U.S Senate. His trademark achievement was the Smoot-Hawley tariff act and Smoot eventually became chairman of the committee on finance.

In the October, 1960 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly, Dr. Milton R. Merrill, then vice president of Utah State University, praised Smoot, who died in 1941. Despite Smoot’s status as apostle, Merrill says that he regarded himself as a Republican on a mission for the church. But it was more of a political mission, and Smoot loved his job as much as Hatch loves his today. Some positions of Smoot’s: He opposed prohibition; helped get Warren Harding nominated in a smoke-filled room; worked to get non-Mormons in Utah into the Republican Party; and he opposed the League of Nations.

Smoot would have stepped down if LDS Church Presidents Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant had asked him to, but they didn’t. In fact, according to Merrill, the church leaders never requested Smoot vote a certain way. However, just as Hatch may face closure from a nation tired of economic recessions, Smoot’s tenure was prematurely ended in the 1932 Depression-era election, where he was upset by Democratic challenger Elbert D. Thomas. 

Smoot retired to finish his life as an apostle and died in 1941 at age 79. He is buried in Provo.

-- Doug Gibson

Utah's first serious presidential candidate — Christensen, not Romney

Utah’s first serious presidential candidate was not Mitt Romney, of course, or even Sen. Orrin Hatch, who ran a weak race in 2000 that ended after he received 1 percent in the Iowa caucus. 

I’ll bet most have no idea that 90 years ago, Utah fielded a presidential candidate that many newspapers — incorrectly — thought might have a shot at winning a few states. His name was Parley Packer Christensen. The Salt Lake City resident was a bachelor, a Unitarian, a former Salt Lake County attorney, and former candidate for U.S. Congress. He was also the Farmer-Labor Party’s 1920 nominee for U.S. president.

A fascinating article by Gaylon L. Caldwell from the October 1960 Utah Historical Quarterly provides loads of great historical information on Christensen’s candidacy. The Salt Lake Tribune mostly criticized and ridiculed Christensen as a defender of labor unions. The Deseret News afforded him more respect. However, according to the article, the Tribune predicted Christensen would carry six states.

Of course, history records that Christensen carried no states. In a days when polls were nonexistent, third parties still under-performed. On election day, Christensen tallied 265,411 votes, finishing fourth behind Republican Party winner Warren Harding, 16,152,200 votes, Democratic Party nominee James M. Cox, 9,147,353 votes, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs, who was in prison, with 919,799 votes. Finishing fifth was Prohibition Party candidate Aaron S. Watkins with 189,408 votes.

As Caldwell points out, “the final tally ... reinforced the old axiom of American politics that new parties begin with a burst of enthusiasm only to fade away.” There is a parallel between the Farmer-Labor Party of 1920 and the post-H. Ross Perot Reform Party. Once a dynamic personality or symbol leaves a third party, the bloom is gone.

How Christensen grabbed the Farmer-Labor nod is really interesting. As Caldwell recounts, it was big news in the summer of 1920 in Chicago at the Farmer-Labor convention, which was populated by a smorgasbord of political movements — left and right — looking for an alternative to the two main parties.

Christensen was a convention leader. There was a “committee of 48” that tried unsuccessfully to recruit a consensus candidate. That’s not surprising since two major contenders were ultra-right-wing automobile maker Henry Ford and the Socialist Debs.

Christensen, a persuasive leader, saw his opportunity and arranged alliances with lesser candidates. He finished second on the first ballot, which eliminated all but the two top finishers. On the second ballot, Christensen easily garnered the nomination. 

Christensen ran an energetic campaign and attracted nationwide press. In the Aug. 1, 1920 New York Times, reporter Charles Welles Thompson wrote, “The Republicans are getting a little uneasy over the unlimited activity of Parley Packer Christensen, the candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party. He seems a most virile and extensive person. ...”

Christensen also criticized the imprisonment of Debs, saying, “Mr. Debs may be utterly wrong in his ideas as how best to conduct the affairs of society, and so may I be and so may you, but my conception of liberty includes the right to think wrong.”

After reading Caldwell’s excellent account, I think another reason Christensen under-performed is that he was too moderate for a third party. Although clearly a liberal, he was not socialist enough to take many votes from Debs, but he was too liberal for Ford supporters, who returned to the Republican Party in the general election.

Nevertheless, Parley Parker Christensen is an individual worthy of our respect. I doubt, however, that his name is mentioned in any school rooms below the college level.

-- Doug Gibson

This column was previously published at StandardNet.

Charles Shuster Zane was a fair judge Mormons loved to hate

Ever heard of Utah territorial Chief Justice Charles Shuster Zane? He’s one of those fascinating footnotes in history. Appointed in 1884 to administer justice in Utah, the New Jersey Quaker was a respected Illinois lawyer who rubbed shoulders in the same circles that Abraham Lincoln inhabited. Zane was a circuit judge when appointed to the Utah bench by President Chester A. Arthur. 

His tenure was stormy. The dominant Latter-day Saints disliked Zane because he thoroughly enforced the laws against polygamy. He imprisoned men and polygamous wives that he discovered were living “the Principle.” Zane also was heard to publicly proclaim polygamy an abomination. The judge was enforcing the Edmunds law, which was designed to go after Utah Mormons on the polygamy issue. 

According to an article on Zane in the fall 1966 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, then-BYU professor Thomas G. Alexander cited the following negative assessment of Zane from LDS historians B.H. Roberts and Orson F. Whitney: “Judge Zane ... will stand classed ... in that history as sharing in responsibility for the cruelty and injustice of that regime, which marks the saddest period of Utah’s history. ... Judge Zane never divorced himself from his deepseated prejudice and vindictiveness against ... [the Mormon] offenders and their religious faith, ... his object was the overthrow of Mormonism as a religion.”

Those are harsh words, and they come from Roberts’ “Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and Whitney’s “History of Utah.” But they’re also not true. In his Utah Historical Quarterly article, Alexander takes a long look at Zane’s judicial philosophy while in Utah, and discovers a tough but fair judge who was scrupulously following the law. In other words, Zane was not the judicial activist many Mormons had hoped would look the other way at laws designed to hamper their religious beliefs.

In fact, Zane made many lower-profile decisions that helped the Mormon church, which was constantly facing nuisance lawsuits from the energetic anti-Mormon “gentile” faction of Utah, which had as its mouthpiece “The Salt Lake Tribune.” For example, Zane ruled in favor of local, Mormon public schools receiving tax monies, rejecting lawsuits that they sectarian schools that taught treason. Zane was a big believer in public education, and the rights of local communities to make educational decisions. 

Also, Zane resisted efforts by gentiles in Utah to swing elections through malicious efforts. He sided with the People’s Party, an LDS party, in its accusation that members of the gentile Liberal Party had tried to stuff ballots in an 1890 school election. In fact, Zane even allowed, over gentile objections, voting by Mormon men who had engaged in obviously sham “spiritual divorces” from their polygamous wives. That shows a lot of tolerance for the Mormon religious mores.

In fact, when Zane finally jailed men and polygamous wives, it was only after every effort to prosecute, or resolve, the situation, had been attempted. There’s no doubt that Zane’s judicial decrees ailed many prominent Utah Mormons. Zane had the — perhaps — misfortune of assuming the bench when enforcement of the anti-polygamy laws was at its most intense. And he was determined to obey the letter of the law. Alexander adds that whenever a guilty plea came in, Zane was likely to fine, rather than jail the polygamist.

Another ruling, disliked by the LDS majority, was Zane’s decision to allow lawyers to question Mormons on naturalization, or citizenship, protests. As Alexander notes, this was a big issue as the Mormons were energetic missionaries overseas and the converts migrated to Utah. However, Zane did offer the Mormons an olive branch by requiring that the district attorney question prospective citizens, rather than anti-Mormon lawyers, explains Alexander.

After the 1890 Manifesto against polygamy, Zane’s attitude on the practice became more relaxed. Alexander recounts that he accepted the promise by LDS Church President Wilford W. Woodruff and later published an article in Forum magazine where he stated, according to Alexander, “that the Mormon problem (polygamy) was at an end because the Mormons had resolved to obey the law.”

The tenure of Zane was an example of a judge diligently following the law in a rugged, still frontier-like territory and angering both sides. Because the high-profile cases went against the majority Mormons, he was vilified long after his death in 1915. It would be fascinating to read a more in-depth look at his tenure as Utah territory’s chief justice.

--- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardNET

In Lee v. Skousen tiff, LDS Church sided with the man who liked strippers

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

LDS Church, pols failed to enforce cigarette prohibition in 1920s Utah

One of the more amusing episodes in Utah history is the LDS Church-directed effort to ban cigarette smoking in the state. Passed by a compliant Legislature after a rapid, few-months campaign, the refusal of law enforcement authorities to enforce the law frustrated church leaders. However, once the law was finally enforced — with a high-profile arrest of four prominent Utah businessmen — Utah’s cigarette ban made the state a national laughingstock and the LDS Church, through editorials in its organ The Deseret News, paved the way for lawmakers to repeal the ban. The two-year-comedy is recounted by historian John H.S. Smith in the Fall 1973 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly. As Smith writes, morality-based progressive movements across the USA, after achieving prohibition, reformers set looked toward tobacco.

“Thundered Billy Sunday in his most exuberant mood: ‘Prohibition is won; now for tobacco,’” writes Smith. In Utah, the move toward a law banning cigarettes online was signaled in late 1920 by articles and editorials against tobacco in church media, such as the D-News and The Improvement Era. As early as 1919, the LDS Church hierarchy assigned Apostle Stephen L. Richards to chair an anti-tobacco campaign. The Improvement Era “editorialized, ‘We believe that the abolition of the entire tobacco business would be beneficial to the higher interests of the human race,” writes Smith. Soon after, the Mutual Improvement Association, announced its slogan for 1920-21 “would be ‘We stand for the non-use and non-sale of tobacco.”

The committee chaired by Richards, then issued a newsletter that called for “‘coercive and persuasive’ measures to be carried out by special stake committees which were to work to interest the church membership in a greater awareness of the cigarette evil and the possibilities of prohibitory legislation.” All subtlety was cast aside after a church subcommittee issued recommendations that LDS stake presidents interview legislators to find out their attitudes on laws that would ban tobacco and/or cigarettes. Further measures, recounted by Smith, included a New Years anti-tobacco message from LDS Church President Heber J. Grant, and an article in the Young Women’s Journal “which outlined how each church organization was to cover some aspect of the antitobacco crusade,” writes Smith. While it’s not unusual for religious organizations to combat what it perceives as vice, the 1920-21 efforts assigned by the LDS leadership were specific designed to achieve a political goal — the abolition of cigarettes in Utah. On Jan. 19, 1921 following an anti-tobacco campaign in the D-News, state Sen. Edward Southwick introduced Senate Bill 12, which banned cigarettes and cigarette paper. The bill was muscled through the Legislature and signed by Utah Gov. Charles Mabey.

Its supporters were the LDS Church and other religious-based organizations. Opponents, as Smith recounts, were non-Mormon business interests and libertarian-minded citizens, including a few Mormons. The ban’s limitation to cigarettes reflected the times, when cigarettes were criticized for their cheapness and “unmanly” reputation compared to pipes. In fact, much of the anti-tobacco campaigns focused on the adverse effects of cigarettes on femininity. The National No-Tobacco Journal, in an editorial reprinted in The Improvement Era, had written, “How would you like to have women and girls, not only smoking the poisonous, stinking stuff, but chewing, slubbering and spitting the stuff around while they are baking the pies and the cookies?” (Smith UHQ footnote) So the bill was passed, and nothing changed.

Law enforcement organizations, clearly not thrilled about hunting down cigarette smokers and manufacturers, argued with each other over who should enforce Senate Bill 12. For 18 months the law was ignored. A frustrated Heber J. Grant, responding to increased suggestions that the law be repealed, “demanded that in the upcoming elections of 1922 the Latter-day Saints should vote for no candidate who will not declare his willingness to retain the anti-cigarette law on the statutes,” writes Smith. The comedy entered its climax stage when a bill to amend the law to focus on juveniles was proposed by state Sen. Henry N. Standish. It was quickly rebuffed in committee. Meanwhile, anti-tobacco advocates had found a public servant willing to arrest tobacco users. The new Salt Lake County sheriff, Benjamin R. Harries, orchestrated highly publicized arrest of four leading Utah businessmen for having an after-dinner smoke at a Utah diner.

The arrested were Ernest Bamberger, prominent Republican, Edgar L. Newhouse, director of the American Smelting and Refining Co., John C. Lynch, manager of the Salt Lake Ice Co., and A.N. McKay, the Salt Lake Tribune’s manager. According to Smith’s article, the four “were marched down Main Street to the county jail building on South Second East Street to be booked.” It must have been quite a sight. The clumsy, ham-handed gesture by Harries, no doubt approved by LDS Church leaders, attracted equal parts of media attention and censure. Smith notes, “Newspapers as far afield as Boston and San Francisco had an opportunity to wax indignant …” The Carrie Nation-ish Sheriff Harries did not stop his crusade. His deputies haunted hotels, restaurants and the state capitol arresting cigarette smokers, the more prominent the better. Outrage over Utah’s anti-tobacco law was soon accompanied by scorn and laughter by national critics. Local newspapers such as The Salt Lake Tribune were quick to point out Utah’s new, embarrassing national notoriety.

With a silly law, and a zealot to enforce it, backers of the ban, Smith notes, had gained a type of public indignation. Church leaders, very eager not to resurrect the kind of national animus against the Mormons that had only recently started to ebb, suddenly changed their tune about the recently defeated Standish amendment. On March 2, 1923, the Deseret News editorialized in favor of the Standish amendment as an alternative to the original SB 12 cigarette ban, which the editorial board lamented, would have succeeded had it been "vigorously enforced." (There is no small irony in those words, given that the law's demise was assured after it was "vigorously enforced.")

From that point, it didn't take long to repeal Utah's cigarette ban. By March 8, the Standish repeal bill had been signed into law by Gov. Mabey. 

As Standish points out, the flaw in the LDS Church's anti-tobacco campaign between 1921 to 1923 was its emphasis on prohibition, which clashed with the values of freedom and personal responsibility. 

He's correct in his assessment that had the church focused its efforts on education and propaganda, it would have likely been lauded for its tobacco eradication campaign of that era, which today is consigned to footnote status in Utah history.