Beginnings
The People's Party emerged in 1870 in response to the non-Mormon Liberal Party. In fact, the initial slate of candidates for the 1870 Salt Lake City election was approved on February 9 by Latter-day Saints who had swarmed into the first meeting of Liberals in order to hijack and disrupt it. Daniel H. Wells, the incumbent mayor, easily won the first contested Salt Lake election 2301 to 321.
Previously, political candidates ran without party affiliation, and LDS candidates usually found themselves unopposed. With organized opposition to LDS candidates, the LDS leaders found having their own party expedient. Historian Ronald W. Walker states that the party's name was selected to combat the notion that Brigham Young, himself not an elected official since 1857, was a tyrant. The People's Party, as the name intentionally suggested, claimed to speak for the Latter-day Saints, vast majority of citizens, in Utah Territory.
Read more about this topic: People's Party (Utah)
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“[Many artists], even the greatest ones, are not sure of their own existence. So they search for proof, they judge, they condemn. It strengthens them, it is the beginnings of existence. They are alone!”
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“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)