Thriving as a Soloist

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During the 1920s and 1930s, Primary General Board member Florence Summerhays was a soloist in a number of choirs. Which one choir was Florence Summerhays not a soloist in?

a.                  New York’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church

b.                  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir

c.                   Salt Lake City Christian Church

d.                  Salt Lake City Unitarian Church

Yesterday’s answer:

D   Thomas Kane

Referring to the September 1851 “runaway” of four government territorial officers assigned to Utah Territory:   By the mid-summer 1852, the Saints looked upon the previous half year with some satisfaction. The government had not sent troops, the departed officials had been successfully labeled as “runaways,” Young was still governor, and the officers’ report was being officially ignored. For a people who had experienced so much difficulty in their short history, they had found men in high places who helped them in small but significant ways: Joshua Giddings, Horace Greeley, John Gunnison, Joseph Kennedy, Howard Stansbury, and Alexander Stevens.

[President] Fillmore had been especially significant. [John] Bernhisel believed that the president, who had wavered before the “pitiless storm” when the controversy began, had since “honestly and sincerely” tried to do right. Moreover, Fillmore was generous privately and confidentially. When he learned that a very indigent” Mormon woman needed help, he reportedly gave her cash and promised more if she needed it. By summer, Fillmore was a lame duck, having lost to Winfield Scott in the Whig national convention on the fifty-third ballot after both he and [Daniel] Webster, though much closer ideologically and politically to each other than to Scott, had refused to capitulate or help the other.

[Thomas] Kane was the Mormons’ most consistent supporter, despite the strain that his belated awareness of polygamy put upon his feelings. As always, he worked behind the scenes, his story known only partly even to his Mormon friends. But [Jedediah] Grant knew enough to thank him before returning west: “We can never in this world cancel the Debt we owe you. But when the Saints judge the world, some may be forgotten, but the poor Mormons, will never forget Col. Kane.” By this point, the strain between Kane and Fillmore apparently had been patched up, and with the rapprochement came a new offer for political office. “You have decided against the Governorship of Utah, haven’t you,” wrote Kane’s fiancée, Elizabeth Wood, to him in May 1852. Fillmore apparently had asked Kane a second time to take the Utah governorship. If the Mormons knew about it, they never mentioned it.

Ronald W. Walker and Matthew J. Grow, The People Are “Hogafeed or Humbugged”: The 1851-52 National Reaction to Utah’s “Runaway” Officers, Journal of Mormon History, Fall 2014, 48-49.