Stop the Press

by James W. Ure

  It astonished Mormon and non-Mormon alike. Thereafter it would be called simply, the “Manifesto.” It was sustained by the church membership at the next semiannual LDS Conference.21

  If statehood came, would Mormons control the political system? This and other worries jammed the political process. Finally, an agreement was reached; the Mormon People's Party and the non-Mormon Liberal Party were no more. Instead, there were Republicans and Democrats. It may be apocryphal, but the enduring story is that ward bishops divided their membership in half: those sitting on one side of the chapel would become Democrats. The other side would become Republicans. Utah was declared a state on Saturday, January 4, 1896.22

  Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.

  —Franklin D. Roosevelt

  The presidential election of 1900 found the Tribune supporting the Republicans. In January the Utah Legislature convened to select a man to become a full-term senator, and after much contention between Mormons and non-Mormons, the compromise appointee to emerge was Thomas H. Kearns, a Catholic mining magnate. Reed Smoot, a Mormon apostle, had withdrawn from the race, and church president Lorenzo Snow essentially “allowed” Kearns to go to the Senate.1

  “Kearns was the greatest surprise that has ever occurred in Utah politics,” penned an editorialist for the Bingham Bulletin.2 Utah was at the time 70 percent Mormon.

  Tom Kearns was second generation Irish Catholic born in Ontario, Canada. He arrived in Park City in 1883 with a grammar school education and much ambition. He was tough, both physically and mentally.3

  Kearns had worked in mining camps around the West before making his way to Park City, thirty miles east of Salt Lake City. He and a partner acquired a lease on an undeveloped mining property called the Mayflower. They struck ore, which was 30 percent lead and contained about one hundred ounces of silver per ton. The first ore shipment put $20,000 in Kearns's pocket. The Mayflower led to the discovery of the main vein of the Silver King Mine.4

  On the day Kearns was due to leave to take his Senate post in Washington, the Silver King announced it was increasing its monthly dividend from $75,000 to $100,000.5

  Kearns married Jennie Judge, winner of Father Galligan's contest as the most popular girl in Park City.6 They would move to South Temple Street in Salt Lake City, and the home they built is now Utah's Governor's Mansion.

  When Senator Kearns purchased the Tribune secretly in 1901 (for an estimated $200,000),7 he wanted to reach out to Mormon and gentile alike. Kearns, who began in the mines as a mucker (ore shoveler), had an egalitarian streak.

  Stories circulated about his lack of education and his hardscrabble beginnings. His gaffes included referring to Alaska as an island; he mispronounced the Philippines as “Filliponies” and referred to indigents as “indignants.”8

  He founded an orphanage, championed miners, and refused to cut their wages when metal prices dropped. Kearns had a down-to-earth appraisal of himself. Meanwhile, in Washington, Senator Kearns was erasing the image given him by his political foes—that he was graceless, a hard-rock miner.9

  Kearns and his descendants would own the Tribune for the next hundred years. Kearns would build it, an adopted son would manage it, and his children and grandchildren would enjoy the prestige and profits of what would become a respected, Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper. All would be lost to the family through the manipulations of the Mormon Church.

  Senator Kearns returned to Salt Lake City in the fall of 1902 to find the political scene chaotic. He was accused of supporting Mormon apostle Reed Smoot for Senate. He was also accused of not supporting Smoot. Political alignments were fractured.10

  Kearns chose no side, but he did have doubts that Smoot would be seated by the Senate if elected. He was right.

  Smoot's election sparked a bitter four-year battle in the Senate. Was he eligible to serve? Did his position as a Mormon apostle disqualify him from the Senate?

  Meanwhile, Thomas Kearns had to decide whether to seek another term as senator, or to retire. In the 1900 election Kearns had essentially bought his Senate seat.

  At the time, the LDS Church was destitute. In an agreement with President Lorenzo Snow, Kearns agreed to buy from the church an option on Saltair (a resort on Great Salt Lake) for $50,000 and also agreed never to exercise the option.11 In return, President Snow “allowed” Kearns to go to the Senate. Kearns wanted badly to return for a second term, but by then, Snow was dead and Joseph F. Smith was LDS president. Smith hated Kearns for, among other things, railing against polygamy on the floor of the Senate and accusing the Mormons of continuing the practice in secret even after the Manifesto and statehood.

  Kearns was well regarded, and his chances appeared favorable for reelection. It was an unwritten maxim of the time that of the two senators from Utah, one would be Mormon and one would be non-Mormon. His seat should be filled by a non-Mormon.12

  When the Republican Legislature met in early 1905, the Mormons refused to reelect Kearns and instead chose George Sutherland for a full six-year Senate term. (Sutherland had been elected to Congress in 1900; he was raised as a non-Mormon by a father who had left the Mormon Church. In 1922 Sutherland would be appointed to the US Supreme Court and would become one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's disdained “nine old men.”)13

  Kearns's parting speech upon leaving the Senate dripped with anti-Mormon vitriol. The Deseret News called the speech “his dying wail.”14

  By 1903 Kearns's ownership in the Tribune had become public knowledge. The anti-Mormon watchdog barked out big headlines during local elections, and frequently Kearns was on the winning side.

  Mormons and non-Mormons were mingling more, crossing the religion barrier to vote for candidates on principle and softening their stance on ecclesiastical matters. In the 1912 election, candidates from all three parties—Democratic, Republican, and Bull Moose—were treated by the Tribune with an impartiality that puzzled long-time readers. All in all, the Tribune had achieved a kind of maturity under Kearns and pursued a course of reconciliation.15

  John F. Fitzpatrick, who would serve as publisher from 1924 to 1960, joined the Tribune in 1913 as secretary to Kearns. Born in 1887 in Pennsylvania, he was an enigma—tough, autocratic, and shy.16

  He was disciplined and determined to learn, delving into every aspect of the newspaper business—mechanical production, circulation, distribution, advertising, business management, news gathering, and the editorial departments.17

  The Tribune, under Fitzpatrick, was building its circulation and getting advertising from Mormon firms, as well as non-Mormon. Its fight with the Deseret News was quiescent. The quelling of the old political war was paying off on the bottom line.

  Only occasionally were barbs exchanged with the Mormons, although the Tribune was ever ready to harpoon Senator Reed Smoot. Any politician supporting Smoot could be on the receiving end of a Tribune editorial punch.18

  The year 1918 proved eventful. The Spanish flu closed down Salt Lake City. Long lists of dead and missing from the trench war in France appeared in the Tribune. For Thomas Kearns, the year ended early. On October 18 he died eight days after he was struck down by an automobile near the base of a monument to Brigham Young on Main and South Temple Streets.19

  The responsibility for running the paper shifted to Fitzpatrick, and he consigned to the past some of the old animosities that had festered for years. The paper grew in circulation and profits, and the editorials grew blander. In 1924, Fitzpatrick reluctantly agreed to be given the official title of publisher.20

  In 1930, the morning Tribune reacquired another local newspaper, the evening Salt Lake Telegram (sold in 1914 by Kearns), which competed for afternoon readership with the News. The Tribune didn't want it. Nor did the church's News. However, neither paper wanted outsiders to take it over.21 The Salt Lake Telegram would be among the cast of characters when the joint operating agreement made its appearance on the stage in 1952, and it would di
sappear shortly thereafter.

  In spite of the Great Depression and the diminution of advertising, the Tribune survived with Fitzpatrick guiding the paper through tough times.

  The New Deal came to Utah in 1932–33, with voters turning against both the church and the Tribune by casting ballots for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smoot, whose demise as senator had been loudly predicted by the Tribune in three prior elections, lost in the Democratic landslide.22 Smoot's name lives in a kind of infamy as a sponsor of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, considered a factor causing the Great Depression.

  The Tribune and the News would editorialize for Wendell Willkie in 1940, but when war broke out, both papers stood behind President Roosevelt.23

  Shortly after the election of 1936 a young Notre Dame graduate came to the Tribune. John W. “Jack” Gallivan was the only son of a half sister of Jennie Judge Kearns, the senator's widow. Jack's mother died when he was five, and Jennie assumed responsibility for him and his two sisters. He attended private schools in California, and while attending Notre Dame University he was campus correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.24

  He started at the Salt Lake paper on August 1, 1937, as a full-time employee. He was hard working and popular, soon dispelling any mutterings of nepotism. For a brief time he fed the homing pigeons kept by the Tribune on its roof. Only the adoption of a two-way radio system by the paper saved him from the dovecote.25

  Gallivan was clearly marked for higher calling. Soon he moved into Fitzpatrick's office as assistant to the publisher.26

  Post–World War II brought prosperity but also rising costs. The three newspapers of the Mormon's capital city (the morning Tribune, the Trib-owned afternoon Telegram, and the afternoon Deseret News) were vying for advertising and circulation. Editorially there was more tolerance between the two papers, primarily because of the détente established by John F. Fitzpatrick during his years as publisher. It was a time when radio was popular and television was on the horizon.

  In 1947 the Tribune's circulation in the primary Retail Trading Area (basically Salt Lake County) was 84,895, more than twice the circulation of the News, which stood at 40,147.27 Any circulation outside that area would be money-losing, since about 95 percent of the profits of a newspaper come from retail and classified advertising. The folks in Pocatello, Idaho, might get a Salt Lake newspaper, but that didn't do the Salt Lake advertisers much good.

  The facts didn't deter the Deseret News, which made a gambit to increase its circulation, primarily to reach its Mormon audience in Idaho. It was a bruising war, fought with turtles, bicycles, toy race cars, and yo-yos, all given to children as incentives to sign up family and neighbors as subscribers.28

  For a time the Deseret News was able to outspend the Tribune in promotion. Both papers expanded their circulation areas. At one time the Tribune was reported by Editor and Publisher, the industry's trade journal, to cover the largest geographical area of any daily in America—Utah, eastern Nevada, southern Idaho, eastern Oregon and Wyoming.29

  At the same time, Tribune staffers heard rumors of other newspapers being interested in buying the Tribune. One rumor that shook the paper in 1950 was that it had been sold to the Mormon Church.30

  The Deseret News leaned on its Mormon business owners, and the pressure resulted in increased advertising lineage. They spent heavily promoting themselves in trade magazines. The News gave church-approved books to LDS wards selling the most subscriptions. For thirteen weeks one of the Tribune's major Mormon advertisers, ZCMI department store, withdrew its ads from the morning paper.31

  Business fell at ZCMI, to the loud cheers of the Tribune's ad salesmen, who quickly restored ZCMI's advertising to the pages of the Tribune. The paper gave away live turtles with subscriptions, until crying children called the city desk reporting the death of a turtle.32

  David O. McKay, president and leader of the Mormon Church (1951–1970), was a tall man, marked by his full mane of silver-white hair even at age seventy-nine. He strode through the halls of Holy Cross Hospital in 1951, a Catholic institution, his figure turning the heads of nurses and nuns.33

  John F. Fitzpatrick, Tribune publisher, now sixty-five and recovering from a heart attack, looked up from his bed and saw the silvery mane of the prophet leaning over him. In that hospital room McKay suggested that they work out a joint operating agreement (JOA) for printing, advertising, and circulation that would cover both the Tribune and the News. The Tribune would become the sanctuary for the survival of the News.34

  A JOA deal went into place on October 1, 1952.35 It would become known as the “Great Accommodation.” Many saw it as a symbol of a healing of the breach between the active LDS community and on the other side, the dissidents and non-Mormons. It was a cultural melding of sorts.

  However, the JOA deal was “[h]ated by Mormons for its long fight against various church policies; and scorned, immediately after the accommodation, by the more hard-nosed gentiles who considered it cowardly for giving up the fight,” wrote Tribune biographer O. N. Malmquist.36

  The new JOA entity was named the Newspaper Agency Corporation, known locally by its initials, NAC. In the original agreement the JOA would have three representatives from the Tribune and two from the Deseret News. Since it had the greater circulation, the Tribune selected the president of the JOA. Profits were allocated according to each paper's percentage of the total JOA circulation. Fifty-eight percent went to the Tribune, 42 percent to the News, even though the stock was split fifty-fifty. The Deseret News was given a benchmark by which it could split the profits fifty-fifty, if the News could increase its circulation to the level of the Tribune. Historically the Tribune had always enjoyed about twice the circulation of the News, and the numbers were based on the figures provided by the newspaper industry's credible third party, the Audit Bureau of Circulation.37

  The power held by the Tribune in NAC essentially was the power to control the business policies of the newspapers. The level of revenue the Tribune received from NAC dictated how many reporters it could hire, how many investigative stories it could pursue, and how many editorial writers it could employ.38 The JOA of 1952 was further affirmed in 1970 by the congressional passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act, in which Gallivan played a major role (Fitzpatrick died in 1960).39 The Newspaper Preservation Act, in essence, waived monopoly restrictions for cities in which competing newspapers needed the economies of joint operation. It was again affirmed in a JOA in 1980.

  In the founding agreement of the JOA was a clause thought relatively innocuous: both parties to the contract must approve any transfer of stock to any other party. Lawyers might have called it “mere boilerplate.”

  The JOA, and the veto power inherent in the transfer of stock clause, would be the Achilles heel that the News would spike in 2013 in its attempt to drive the Tribune into its death spiral. Yet “[w]ithout the 1952 agreement,” said Jack Gallivan, at the time assistant publisher of the Tribune, “[t]he Deseret News would have gone down the drain.” It had lost an estimated $9 million in the circulation war of the postwar years.40

  By early 2016, it would be the Tribune circling the drain, and while the Tribune was still the larger and more profitable of the two newspapers, the maneuverings of the Mormon Church had managed to turn Salt Lake City's newspaper profit structure topsy-turvy.

  With the death of John F. Fitzpatrick, Jack Gallivan became publisher of the Tribune. Gallivan was a community builder, a man with a puckish sense of humor, who, like Fitzpatrick before him, was a Catholic who counted LDS Church leaders among his friends.41

  The Tribune was no longer in relentless pursuit of Mormonism. Gallivan aimed his editorializing at making tourism Utah's largest industry, rebuilding the aging heart of downtown Salt Lake City, and to bringing the Winter Olympics to Utah. He was also instrumental in reviving a largely abandoned and dying mining town—Park City. His Kearns roots were there, and he envisioned it becoming a winter sports destination resort. He established the first condominium in Park City in 1963, t
he Treasure Mountain Inn, and it sparked life in a moribund mountain town where just two or three years before a Main Street property could have been purchased for back taxes of $500.42

  Gallivan also encouraged Utah's bid for the 1976 Winter Olympics and built a consortium of interests to support it. This group would grow until finally, in 2002, Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Olympics.43

  With an eye to the future, Gallivan began expanding the holdings of Kearns-Tribune Corporation (K-T), owner of the Tribune. As assistant to the publisher and on behalf of K-T, he purchased the Elko, Nevada, city cable TV franchise in 1956. He saw cable TV as the wave of the future. He continued to build microwave and cable companies across northern Nevada through the fifties and sixties, eventually merging these systems to another group of western cable companies owned by Bob Magness, naming the combined companies TeleCommunications, Inc. (TCI). Shortly thereafter, John Malone was brought on as TCI president.44

  While Gallivan grew the Kearns-Tribune's cable business, he also shrank the size of the geographical circulation of the Tribune, resulting in greater profitability. Although these years were relatively harmonious and profitable, the Tribune and News opposed one another in several major clashes. There was a face-off over a law to close all businesses on Sunday, supported by the Mormon Church. The church lost. Most heated was a 1968 plebiscite over serving liquor by the drink (in Utah you could take a full bottle of whisky into a restaurant and pour yourself a dozen drinks from it, but a restaurant was not allowed to serve liquor by the drink).45 The church prevailed in the liquor vote, but this contentious issue drew battle lines between the active LDS members and the dissidents, inactives, and non-Mormons. It would reverberate in one of the church's salvos to kill the Tribune many years later.

  If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.