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Reviewed by:
  • Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah by John Gary Maxwell
  • John R. Van Atta
Robert Newton Baskin and the Making of Modern Utah. By John Gary Maxwell (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 408pp. Cloth $45.00, isbn 978-0-87062-420-9.)

Here is a volume that makes an interesting follow-up to John Gary Maxwell’s 2010 study, Gettysburg to Great Salt Lake: George R. Maxwell, Civil War Hero and Federal Marshal among the Mormons. The author is a retired professor of surgery at the medical schools of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Utah–Salt Lake City. Those who may uncritically admire Brigham Young and Mormon governance in the Utah Territory during the nineteenth century—or be ideologically opposed to the extension of federal government authority in America—may not much care for Maxwell’s perspective in either of these books. As for the one under review here, Maxwell, as in the earlier work, makes no mystery of his personal leaning. This biography of Ohio-born Robert Newton Baskin, he asserts in the preface, “does deserved honor to its man, naming him to the Valhalla of Utah’s early Gentiles” (15). For Baskin, the Mormon-dominated world of the Utah Territory, contends Maxwell, was “one of tightly controlled state of obedience and conformity, enforced by violence or its threat” (14). In Maxwell’s view, modern historians have “remained mute” as to “any positive effect” of non-Mormon opposition to the obdurate, near-totalitarian Mormon elite in the years prior to Utah statehood in 1896 (348).

Part of what makes this tale engaging is the good-guys-versus-bad-guys tension in the way the author tells it. The arc of the narrative, constructed over the course of twenty-two chapters, features the Harvard-educated attorney, Baskin, a native of Jackson, Ohio, leaving that state under a legal cloud, then arriving in Salt Lake City in 1865. This was only eight years after the Mountain Meadows massacre in southern Utah, in which perhaps as many as 140 men, women, and children of an emigrant wagon train perished by the hands of the Mormon Militia, sent out to enforce Young’s 1857 edict attempting to close the borders of Utah Territory to religious outsiders. Soon after arrival, Baskin learned further what it meant to be part of the despised non-Mormon minority in a society rigidly controlled by the theocratic Young and his contingent of true-believing lieutenants, a group that included Utah territorial delegate to Congress, George Q. Cannon, and LDS Church official John Taylor. Consistently resisting and, at times, openly defying federal law, the Saints maintained that their own “Kingdom of God on Earth,” based on God’s law, revealed uniquely to them, took precedence. That meant not only polygamy and theocracy but also a denial of basic tenets of republicanism, including freedoms of speech and thought, exclusion of common-law principles and U.S. legal precedent, and the conducting of fair trials and honest elections.

Courageously challenging the power of the LDS Church and Mormon leadership of the territory, Baskin went on (among other career highlights) to organize the Liberal Party in Utah; wrote the 1870 Cullom Bill, which, had it been passed in Congress, would have ended the theocratic order sooner rather than [End Page 101] later; and prosecuted high-ranking Mormon leaders for crimes ranging from sexual misdeeds to murder. His involvement as a prosecutor included the eventual trial and conviction of John D. Lee for his role in the Mountain Meadows event. In 1886–87, Baskin pushed for passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which prohibited the practice of polygamy and undercut both the LDS Church and its Perpetual Emigration Fund. In the 1890s, he served as mayor of Salt Lake City, pursuing an infrastructural agenda that included public education (long resisted by Mormon authorities) and completion of the architecturally notable City-County Building in 1894. Finally, Baskin’s post-statehood service on the state Supreme Court, and his advancement to become chief justice of that body in 1903, capped a lengthy life in politics, one that Maxwell considers sufficient to dub him...

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