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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 311 WILLIAM GLASMANN no-nonsense approach and the biting sarcasm he used to stand up to the union. Glasmann’s new-found prestige served him well. In an editorial on February 23, Cannon announced that the newspaper would remain open with nonunion workers but that he hoped the union workers would stay at their jobs at the same wage he promised the nonunion employees.22 While the Standard fought with the union, however, elsewhere in America warnings of trouble loomed on the horizon. On February 23, 1893, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad filed for bankruptcy, sparking a “pyrotechnic contraction” in the stock market. Investors learned that the company had amassed $125 million in debt, upsetting an already fragile market. Ten days later, on March 4, 1893, Grover Cleveland succeeded Benjamin Harrison for his second term as president, but Cleveland’s administration was handicapped from the outset. Just over two months later, America plunged deep into the depression of 1893.23 Before it ran its course, the depression caused the bankruptcies of the Northern Pacific Railway, the Union Pacific Railroad, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; 15,242 businesses and more than five thousand banks failed; and unemployment ran as high as 18.4 percent in 1894. People abandoned their homes and moved west to metropolitan areas, boosting the populations of railway towns such as Ogden, Salt Lake City, Denver, and San Francisco.24 In Utah, several leading men went bankrupt, prompting one prominent Utahn to lament: I have never witnessed a greater stagnation in business enterprises than has manifested itself during the last month. Money is not to be had, confidence seems to have disappeared, and credit is denied by nearly all tradesmen. Public works are stopped, and thousands of men are out of employment.25 Most observers agreed that the depression meant doom for the newspaper, in spite of cutting labor costs and management salaries. The Standard soon found itself on the fringes of the whirlpool that sucked thousands of companies into failure. Glasmann struggled to find a way to keep the newspaper open, but it looked hopeless. On November 26, 1893, Cannon resigned as editor. In a letter to the subscribers of the Standard, Cannon explained “The reasons for this action are many, but none of them implies any lack of hope in THE STANDARD’S future.” Politics prompted the decision. When he left, Cannon parted on cordial terms with Glasmann and threw himself into his 22 “The Standard is Continued,” Ogden Standard, February 21, 1893. See Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998). Rendigs Fels coined the term “pyrotechnical contraction” in American Business Cycles, 1865–1897 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), cited in Steeples and Whitten, Democracy in Desperation, 32. 24 Walker, “Panic of 1893,” 413; Steeples and Whitten, Democracy in Desperation, 88. 25 Walker, “Panic of 1893,” 413–14. 23 311 |
