Utah in the Twentieth Century

15. The Volatile Sagebrush Rebellion

367 15 The Volatile Sagebrush Rebellion Jedediah S. Rogers Utahns’ icy relationship with the federal government in the nineteenth century thawed considerably after the state’s admission to the Union. Federal investment during the New Deal, World War II, and the cold war enhanced Utahns’ income and prosperity, while federal investment in highways, national parks, and water projects facilitated transportation , recreation, agricultural productivity, and verdant landscaping. Responding to their constituents’ expectations, Utah representatives and senators lobbied assiduously for federal dollars. In the minds of some Utahns, though, the benefits of federal subsidies were partly offset by government control and management of more than half of the state’s land. In the following chapter, Jedediah S. Rogers traces Utah’s participation in one of the most significant manifestations of opposition to federal control in the West during the twentieth century: the Sagebrush Rebellion of 1979–81. Drawing upon newspapers pieces, other articles, public-opinion polls, and the manuscript collections of politicians and activists, Rogers argues that the Sagebrush Rebellion reflected serious concerns about the federal/state relationship and galvanized substantial organization and opposition by environmentalists but failed to resolve the underlying concerns. When President Bill Clinton stood on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in September 1996, after informing Utah’s congressional delegation and governor only twenty-four hours earlier, local and state reaction to the announcement nearly reached a breaking point. Certainly aware that some people in the local communities would not be pleased with the designation, the president could not fully have anticipated the maelstrom that followed and the controversy that the establishment of the monument continues to provoke. State officials and local residents of the sleepy communities in southern Utah balked at the move, angry that the 368 Jedediah S. Rogers monument had been created in secret and that it would close off 1.7 million acres of multiple-use federal lands to economic “development” and phase out Old West activities such as grazing, hard-rock mining, and gas and oil extraction within a massive section of southern Utah’s backcountry. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called it “the mother of all land grabs.” Hatch’s words echoed back to a long history of conflict over ownership and management of public lands. During the 1940s, the renowned writer Bernard DeVoto, a Utah native, had used the language “land grab” in response to proposals by western congressmen to give ranchers a “vested right” to the title of the public domain.2 Environmentalists resurrected the language in the 1970s in response to the Sagebrush Rebellion, a western movement that aimed to transfer ownership of public lands to the western states—and, presumably, to private hands. The first salvo in the Sagebrush Rebellion came in 1979, when the Nevada legislature passed Assembly Bill 413 and laid claim to Nevada’s right to own and manage forty-nine million acres of the public lands within its borders. It was a meaningless act since the federal government had no intention of ceding ownership of the land and Nevada had no authority to seize it, but it symbolically represented the anger many westerners felt toward what they saw as an overbearing federal presence in the West. Utah’s own Orrin Hatch termed the rebellion a “second American Revolution” and described environmentalists as “selfish,” “radical,” “dandelion pickers,” and “a cult of toadstool worshippers.”3 In response Utah’s environmental community joined opponents nationwide in dubbing the movement nothing more than a traditional western land grab, attacking the rebels’ “greedy” motives, and attaching pejorative appellations to the rebellion such as the “sagebrush ripoff.”4 Such rhetoric reflects the division, anger, and polarization over public-land issues in Utah. This chapter seeks to make sense of these debates, using the Sagebrush Rebellion as an example of the way public-land issues were serious business, yet addressed in a way that made it impossible to find solutions to enduring problems in Utah and the rest of the West. Although the rebellion is usually viewed from a regional perspective, it was on the local and state levels where most of the politicking and debate took place.5 Another key point is that Utah was (and is) hardly monolithic; rather, the issue of public lands was a heated and multilayered controversy. State officials, rural cattlemen and county commissioners, and environmentalists all participated in the conflict yet understood it from varying angles. The purpose here is to explore the ideologies that shaped the movement...