A record crowd turned out for the January 11th Humanists of Utah meeting. The enthusiastic response to Ken Verdoia's presentation regarding the Utah Struggle for Statehood indicated no one was disappointed. The senior director of KUED-TV said the short-hand version of the first 50-years of colonizing the Territory of Deseret ignores the rich diversity of peoples, voices and experiences that shaped the future of this unique geography. Verdoia said the Centennial should be more than just a big birthday party. The award winning journalist touched interesting highlights of the information he accumulated during his three years of researching the events that took place between 1847 and 1896.

The story of Utah is a history of conflicts, the competition of voices, the resolution of injustices. Its more than a one dimensional spiritual story. Rather, the real story of Utah is a choir of voices, Native Americans, miners, railroad workers, publishers, merchants; a chorus of extraordinary diversity and languages, Swedish, Danish, German, French, and various English dialects like Welsh, Irish, and Liverpool. The conflicts were economic, social, political and religious. Those conflicts, said Verdoia, are recorded in historical copies of the various newspapers that competed for readership as they recorded Utah's struggle for statehood.

Reading those journals, Verdoia concludes that contrary to popular myth, polygamy was not the major obstacle to statehood for Utah. The wall that kept the U.S. Congress from accepting the territory's many applications for statehood was the absolute political control of the Mormon church. While the church reluctantly permitted limited social and economic relations with nonmembers, it maintained a tight-fisted political control. When political adversaries attempted to form opposition parties, church members infiltrated organizational meetings and thwarted any effective activity. Polygamy was used as the sloganeering reason for opposing statehood because it was an easy issue to popularize, but the religious domination of Utah politics was the real reason Congress defeated the first six petitions from Utah for statehood. Only when the Mormon church was willing to relax its political control did the United States Congress give serious consideration to its seventh application for statehood. That's why Utah's constitution has one of the nation's strongest clauses separating church and state. Article 4, section 4 "... no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office of public trust or for any vote at any election; nor shall any person be incompetent as a witness or juror on account of religious belief or absence thereof."

Verdoia concluded his presentation saying: "Our history is neither Mormon nor non-Mormon, it cannot be defined with one set of parameters. It cannot be just the spiritual story, or the political story, or the economic story or the social story. 1896 was a coming of age, a slow maturation that took a lot of give and take. If you think in those terms and can say 'I am a Utahn' then you will be celebrating the centennial in a way that will inform and grace succeeding generations."

Ken's five-hour television documentary: Utah, the Struggle for Statehood aired on KUED January 3rd and 4th. It's available, along with a colorful pictorial narrative publication, from Eccles Broadcast Center, University of Utah.

--Wayne Wilson