Utah Governor Quotes

Alleging that the Mormons had committed a long list of treasonous acts, in May 1857 Buchanan dispatched a contingent of federal officials to restore the rule of law in Utah, including a new territorial governor to replace Brigham Young. More ominously, the new president ordered twenty-five hundred heavily armed soldiers to escort these officials into Salt Lake City and subdue the Saints if necessary. For all intents and purposes, the United States had declared war on the Mormons.

Ten thousand people wrote letters to the governor of Utah, protesting the verdict, but Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad. Before he died he wrote to Bill Haywood, another IWW leader, “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.” Socialism,

The Meeker Massacre, as newspapers across the country labeled it, gave Governor Pitkin an opportunity to make a special announcement to the press about the Ute threat: “My idea is that, unless removed by the government, they must necessarily be exterminated.” He pointed out “The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of twelve million acres of land to miners and settlers. . . .” In August 1881 the U.S. Army force-marched virtually all of the Colorado Utes 350 miles to a reservation on a desolate stretch of land near Roosevelt, Utah.

Mormon-black relations. This work’s central thesis was that two factors drove Brigham Young to implement the Church’s black ban by 1852. Most important was a developing sense of Mormon “whiteness” wherein Latter-day Saints identified themselves as a divinely “chosen” people, while conversely labeling blacks a biblically cursed race, given their skin color and alleged descent from the accursed biblical counter-figures of Cain, Ham, and Canaan. Further motivating Young was his embrace of black slavery, which he considered divinely sanctioned. Thus as Utah Territorial Governor he called for its legalization—this occurring in February 1852, shortly following Mormon migration to the Great Basin. Utah became the only western territory to approve slavery. Young in calling for this statute claimed a divinely sanctioned link between black servitude and black priesthood denial—the latter practice made public for the first time in his 1852 statement calling for black slavery. The dissertation also drew a number of conclusions relative to the perpetuation of the black priesthood and temple ban. The ban was firmly established by the time of Brigham Young’s death in 1877, given that the Mormon leader repeatedly affirmed its divine legitimacy over the previous quarter century. Further assuring perpetuation of the ban was official LDS embrace of the historical myth that Joseph Smith established the restriction. Such mythmaking received scriptural justification through canonization of the Pearl of Great Price in 1880, a work consisting of the Books of Moses and Abraham. All such developments made the subordinate status of Mormon blacks virtually “irreversible by 1880,” enabling the ban to continue unchanged into the mid-1970s.13

ran—at separate times—a boutique investment banking firm and a small mortgage company. He served as the Treasurer for the multinational vitamin manufacturer USANA Health Sciences years before becoming CFO for MonaVie. Devin squeezed in two brief stints in government, including two years working for Jake Garn on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Staff and another year working for an independent state agency called USTAR, where he helped foster technology entrepreneurship during Governor Jon Huntsman’s administration. Devin is proud to be a Ute, having graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alum in 2006. He also earned an MBA at Cornell University where he ran the student newspaper, Cornell Business.