Origins
The impetus for the setting up of the Liberal Party came from William S. Godbe, a successful businessman and Latter-day Saint who founded a journal called Utah Magazine in 1868. Godbe and several business associates challenged the economic policies of LDS Church President Brigham Young in the monthly periodical, especially Young's opposition to mining. When increasingly harsh condemnations aimed at LDS leadership appeared, the LDS Church excommunicated key "Godbeites" on October 25, 1869.
Corresponding during the winter, key Godbeites and non-Mormons made an uneasy alliance based on their shared opposition to LDS control over temporal matters in the territory.
The Liberal Party formed after a meeting on February 9, 1870 to select independent candidates for the Salt Lake City municipal election. The organizers billed the occasion as a meeting of the "people". A crowd of Latter-day Saints, encouraged by local bishops and a Deseret Evening News editorial, attended in numbers and nearly hijacked the meeting. After the LDS crowd had selected their own slate of candidates, frustrated Godbeite Eli B. Kelsey asked the Mormons to leave, which they did. The remaining non-Mormons selected an independent municipal ticket, forming the Liberal Party. Liberal leaders intended that their party's name suggest reform and evoke Britain's Liberal Party.
In response, Latter-day Saints formed the People's Party, a title selected to suggest popularity and ironically alluding to the Liberal's disrupted meeting of "the people". Latter-day Saints had previously won elections unchallenged.
Early Liberal Party speakers carefully avoided condemning LDS theology or polygamy, because several Godbeites themselves practised polygamy. Eli B. Kelsey and Henry W. Lawrence, both Godbeites, gained election as the first officers of the new party. Non-Mormons, including R. N. Baskin, George R. Maxwell, and Judge Dennis Toohy of Corinne, played an active role in the party, but stayed in the background initially, hoping that ex-Mormon Godbeites would prove more effective leaders and candidates.
Godbeites believed they should reform Utah and the LDS Church to adopt more politically progressive policies, but the non-Mormon element of the party took a more adversarial line. Non-Mormon partisans, especially miners and railroad workers, would increasingly dominate party leadership. Through the 1870s, the Liberal Party grew less appeasing of Godbeites and more openly anti-Mormon and anti-polygamy. Waning Godbeite influence showed even by 1871 when Liberals Dennis Toohy and George R. Maxwell infuriated Godbeites at a party meeting by calling polygamists "dupes" and criminals of perverse sensuality.
Like many political parties of the time, the Liberal Party ran a newspaper, although unofficially. Godbe's Utah Magazine became the Mormon Weekly Tribune and in 1873 three anti-Mormon newcomers from Kansas bought it and it became The Salt Lake Tribune. Until the Liberal Party disbanded in 1893, the Tribune would operate as the Liberal Party's de facto political organ. Similarly, the Deseret Evening News, owned by the LDS Church, often functioned as a People's Party organ.
Read more about this topic: Liberal Party (Utah)
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