172 DIALOGUE: A JOURNAL OF MORMON THOUGHT tices and folklore? I would submit that and sexual liberation of the sixties and answering this question is very much like seventies heightens the grotesqueness and taking a Rorschach test — the truth of the raunchiness of the thoughts and actions of matter lies more in the beholder than in the major characters while at the same what is beheld. time lending to the novel an aura of nos- One aspect of the novel which may talgia. The novel makes its point even perplex some readers is the time frame more emphatically than if it had been within which the narrative is placed. placed in a contemporary setting because Nothing explicit is said to indicate when the author cultivates a relentless realism the events of the novel are supposed to which refuses to gloss over anything. At take place, although revealing that the the same time, the novel comes through going price for goats is $25 (p. 3), that as a loving retrospective because of the English 3 is offered at the University of warmth with which the characters are (p. 22), and that one of the char- drawn and the tolerance and understand- acters is a faculty member at the College ing with which their follies and shortcom- of Southern Utah in Cedar City (p. 49) ings are related. are all clear giveaways that the action is Although in Levi Peterson, the back- not set in the present. In fact, it is not waters of Utah may not yet have found until page 50 when Clara thinks "it was their Shakespeare, they certainly have at disloyal of Harold Stassen to try to push least found their very own John Steinbeck! Vice President Richard Nixon off the Re- In a sense, The Backslider is the first in- publican ticket" that we realize by in- stance of a new genre which combines in ference that the novel is placed exactly broad strokes with subtle touches carica- three decades ago in 1956. Even though ture, humor, theology, folklore, and plain this displacement to an earlier time is not old everyday horse sense in a way which explicitly heralded and comes more as a readers will either admire or detest, but kind of shock of recognition, it has a subtle which must be approached on its own terms. but unmistakable effect on the way in This trail-blazing first novel is a veri- which the reader responds to the narrative. table tour de force which, I predict, will Somehow setting the action in the fifties, create even more admirers for Peterson in a relative "age of innocence" which and which whets the appetite of the true antedates the civil rights movement, the aficionado for more, much more, in the Vietnam War, and the political ferment same vein.

Politicians, , Utah, and Statehood

Political Deliverance: The Mormon has searched out and chronicled the detail, Quest for Utah Statehood by Edward Leo factors, and individuals which make up the Lyman (Urbana and Chicago: University drama in Political Deliverance: The Mor- of Illinois Press, 1986), 327 pp. $22.50. mon Quest for Utah Statehood. As Leonard Arrington notes in his in- Reviewed by Allan Kent Powell, His- troduction to this definitive study, "[Lyman] toric Preservation Coordinator, Utah State provides so much new data from so many Historical Society. previously unmined sources that the popu- lar understanding of how plural marriage FEW STATES IN THE UNION had a longer began to be abandoned and how statehood or more bitterly contested statehood strug- came to Zion will have to be reassessed" gle than did Utah. Edward Leo Lyman (p. ix). Still, Lyman's work is based on REVIEWS 173 the foundation of earlier studies of the pectations of loyal lobbyists like Isaac statehood and polygamy issue including Trumbo. Leonard Arrington's 1958 Great Basin While acknowledging Wolfinger's pio- Kingdom, Howard LaMar's section on Utah neering work in bringing to light the nego- in his 1966 volume, The Far Southwest: tiations and political concessions made by 1846-1912, A Territorial History, Klaus Church leaders to federal government Hansen's 1967 Quest for Empire, Gustive officials before the Manifesto, Lyman chal- O. Larson's 1970 The "Americanization" lenges Hansen's thesis regarding the pre- of Utah for Statehood, and Henry J. eminence of the Council of Fifty in the Wolfinger's 1971 "A Reexamination of the fight for statehood and Gustive O. Larson's Woodruff Manifesto in the Light of Utah view that polygamy was primarily a Constitutional History." weapon used by opponents to destroy the The 1890 Manifesto political power wielded by Church leaders. was not so much a revelation or decisive Lyman finds that the first presidency, not announcement to end polygamy, rather a the Council of Fifty, was the primary Mor- political strategy to gain statehood and pre- mon group concerned with economic and vent the enactment of the Cullom-Struble political affairs in Utah during the 1880s Bill which would have disenfranchised all and 1890s. Lyman observes that critics of persons belonging to a church organization statehood did not mandate "cessation of that taught or practiced polygamy. political activity by the Mormon hierarchy With these points outlined clearly in [but the] regularization of political affairs his introduction, Lyman proceeds to review in Utah" (p. 3). This meant the breakup events and circumstances related to state- of the Mormon People's party and the hood from 1849 to 1896. For some readers, Gentile Liberal party and the amalgama- the detail may be overwhelming and unin- tion of political activities across religious teresting. But those who persist will find lines within the Republican and Demo- a stimulating lesson in nineteenth-century cratic Parties. politics including the role of lobbyists and Acknowledging that plural marriage the debts that they expected to collect for presented the greatest barrier to statehood their services. They will also find that the for Utah, Lyman credits historians with political opponents of Utah's statehood recognizing the importance of the polygamy were not so much anti-Mormon as anti- issue and cites the conclusion of Orson F. polygamy. Whitney in his History of Utah that if While the quest for statehood occupies Mormons had abandoned polygamy in center stage, other interesting sub-themes 1862, the Republican party probably would add richness to Lyman's study. These in- have supported Utah's statehood applica- clude the demise of the People's and tion at that time. Lyman finds that polyg- Liberal parties; the emergence of the amy was not on the wane in the late years Democratic and Republican parties in of the century and concludes that without Utah; nationally the shift of political sup- the anti-polygamy raid plural marriage port for statehood from the Democratic to "would have continued to flourish, at least the Republican party; the manner in which among the Mormon elite . . . for at least Mormons and gentiles came together in another generation" (p. 4). national parties; the ambivalence of Students of Mormon History and Church leaders toward political participa- nineteenth-century political history will tion by their fellows; the ease with which find Political Deliverance indispensable to Mormons were drawn into the practice of an understanding of the statehood process slinging political mud at each other; and for Utah and the compromises and conces- how Church leaders were1 unable to keep sions that Church leaders had to make to promises or at least fill the political ex- attain that long-sought goal.