So then that's a yes? You do claim that the evil anti-Mormon forces in the United States have denied the LDS church its rightful pre-eminent spot in history?
No, I'm saying that this is one of the issues that people aren't comfortable talking about.
I mean, it took how long for the nation to admit it fucked up when it came to the Japanese internment camps during WWII? How long for an apology to come over the Tuskegee Experiment?
For most Americans, it's still unfathomable to think that once upon a time the entire weight of the nation tried to come down on a religious group that - today - is regarded as being in the mainstream and an example of "Americana."
1,000+ soldiers setting upon their fellow Americans because of a false report issued by a corrupt judge? Too horrible to comprehend; let's pretend the whole thing never happened.
Women being legally stripped of their right to vote simply because they belonged to X religion or lived in Y territory? "I know nothing."
A 10-year-old boy being executed in front of his mother by a state militiaman who was wanting to make an example? Look! A blimp!
Did you know that the Extermination Order wasn't officially rescinded until the
1970s? Or that it took decades for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to apologize for and retract the claims he made in "A Study In Scarlet"? Ever hear of the Smoot Hearings?
It's a hell of a lot easier to white-wash bits and pieces of history that confuse, shock, or even offend rather than actually take a stand and admit that there are (often terrifying) questions that need to be addressed in regards to America and how we got from A to B.
For example, about 80% of the non-LDS US history works I've read simply don't mention the Utah War. The rest either say "there was a brief tiff where the government sent peacekeepers in after a false report" or "the government needed to show the church who was running the show" and leave it at that. Furniss' work is the only one I've seen written by a non-member that actually asks the questions people don't want to answer.
Likewise, the only time Reed Smoot ever comes up is in regards to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act; no one ever talks about the three-year battle he had to wage just to even claim his seat in the Senate.
And the sections on womens' suffrage is generally silent about the fact that Utah women had the vote during the 1870s but lost it as a side effect of the anti-polygamy laws.
In fact, the entire period of time between Young first arriving in the territory and the year 1890 is almost completely ignored by your average US history textbook outside of nods towards the Trans-Continental Railroad and the Mormon Trail.
Maybe in about 50 years people will finally be comfortable with talking about these matters. We'll just have to wait and see, eh?
Furniss is the only person I've seen outside of the church to directly tackle the Utah War in a neutral fashion.
Beyond that, however, every so often you'll see a work about the American West that delves into matters.
There's a vast difference between what actually is reality and what the popular notions of the day happen to be.
For example, here in the US the "popular notion" in regards to WWII is that the French were pussies and that we had to come and save everyone from Hitler & co. People might know General Montgomery from his portrayal in "Patton" (which portrayed him as a vainglorious prima donna whose actions did not match his words) but that's about it.
The French Resistance is usually only ever given a passing nod, British efforts are often downplayed beyond the Battle of Britain and the sinking of the Bismarck, and the efforts by resistance movements in the occupied nations is almost completely ignored; Russia's efforts are generally the only ones that get their full due.
I would think that you of all posters would be more aware of how things worked, right?
I'm referring to the
textbooks, the stuff that students get in primary & secondary school as well as the lower levels of college.
Few people outside of history buffs or specialists go for anything much beyond that.
It did, though, kick off a wave of people stopping to re-evaluate American history and did serve to get more people asking questions.
So in that sense, at least, it does deserve at least some credit.
Each one of the items in the book (I've got it sitting on the book shelf right next to me) are points in which there is either a reasonable degree of historical debate or points wherein the common historical presentation is flawed.
As an example of the former, #6 deals with whether or not the "Wild West" was actually tamer than what the media depicted. Woods notes a number of authors over the past 30 years who have argued that some of the items that people take as signs that the region was lawless - such as an extensive common law and wide-spread personal firearm ownership - actually worked to
prevent lawlessness in the sense that people were compelled to honor-based behavior.
As an example of the latter, #32 is about
Samuel B. Fuller. Fuller was an African-American businessman who made a fortune during the 1930s and 1940s by selling toiletries and cosmetics; over the course of the 1950s, his company logged $18 million in sales. However, during the 1960s Fuller made it clear that he felt a lack of business acumen among his fellow African-Americans was doing almost as much to hold them back as actual discrimination; he believed that if more African-Americans would follow his lead and develop an entrepreneurial spirit then they could use their very success in the business world to overcome racism by showing that blacks could compete equally with whites. The very notion that racism wasn't 100% to blame for the plight of African-Americans so offended many leaders during the Civil Rights era that Fuller found himself blacklisted; his reputation and his company never recovered, and he ended up slipping away into history.
Everything I posted is the truth. (URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War#Consequences]link[/URL])
For that one brief year, the entire nation looked away from the South and towards Utah. The invasion and the political backlash that followed so distracted Buchanan that he lost track of what the South was up to, and as such he failed to realize what was going on until it was too late. Making matters worse was the fact that the political backlash over the invasion resulted in a house-cleaning in Congress; the Republicans swept in, and in retaliation for the loss of power the remaining Democrats - led by the politicians from the South - stalemated the government for the remainder of Buchanan's term.
Furthermore, the invasion of Utah pulled over a thousand soldiers away from their garrisons, and the occupation thereof pinned even more in place, leaving them unable to respond to the conflicts that were flaring up as a precursor. The invasion, and the losses they sustained therein, also very nearly drove one of the Army's biggest supply contractors to bankruptcy; the Pony Express was actually created by said contractors just so they could make back what they lost.
Likewise, the Utah War also resulted in Albert Sydney Johnston, who ended up in command of the invasion force after the original commander took ill, receiving a brevet to General. This promotion resulted in Johnston being given a top command position after the invasion ended, a position which he used to round up a group of pro-Confederate soldiers and escape to Texas at the outbreak of the Civil War. Jefferson Davis placed in in command of the Confederate's western forces in honor of his command position for the government, and so Davis oversaw the Confederacy's operations in the western US; he took personal command at the battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, where he fell of blood loss after failing to realize how serious one of his wounds was.
So yes - if Buchanan had taken just five minutes to think things through in regards to Utah, the Civil War might have been delayed or even averted
and the South would have lost one of their key commanders.