. . .

The trauma of 1893—with its foundering banks, pinched finances, and heroic loans—was never related publicly. As each new wave of the crisis had threatened, the Salt Lake newspapers had reassuredly pronounced the financial foundations of Zion as unshakable as the granite walls of the Wasatch Range. Officially the Saints were never told otherwise. When President Cannon addressed their October conference, he stated only the obvious. “We have had, since we last met,” he reported, “considerable trouble in financial matters. . . . You have no doubt felt it individually, as we have felt it as a church. Probably at no time in our previous experience have we had to contend with pecuniary embarrassments as we have had of late.” Only a few in the audience understood that Cannon spoke of more than the Church’s unpaid bills. Nor did the Mormon public learn of the Claflin loan. Fearing a reputation as a Shylock, John Claflin had demanded secrecy.

This Mormon story had a sequel. Although Grant’s loans may have saved Zion and its money men from bankruptcy, the panic was ruinous. “A few years ago,” Grant admitted in 1898, “we thought less of spending $100 than we do now of a $5 bill.” Although the pacified national government returned what was left from the Edmunds-Tucker confiscations, Utahns and the Church staggered through the misnamed “Gay Nineties.” When the entire Claflin note fell due in 1895, the Church was able only to make the first payment on the loan’s principal. It eventually canceled its debt largely by transferring to H. B. Claflin Company some of the Church’s shares in the Saltair Beach and the Salt Lake and Los Angeles Railway companies. Final payment on the Claflin note was not made until 1899.

Beyond contributing to the distress of the nineties, the panic left a lasting imprint upon the Church. The Church in the nineteenth century had styled itself a unique religious commonwealth apart from mainstream America. Grant’s own business career itself had reflected Brigham Young’s preaching on Zion’s self-sufficiency and independence. Yet Grant’s New York loans wrapped the cords of American finance tightly around Utah’s Zion. Thereafter, Church leaders would not only feel increasingly at ease with the ways of American capitalists, but they would be beholden—at least in the short run—for their services. Within another decade these in fluences would go so far that muckraking journalists would begin to cast the Church in the role of a Wall Street plutocrat. Along with other economic forces working to nationalize America, the Panic of 1893 changed not only the economics of the Church but also indirectly its public image.

There was a final, personal irony to the episode. The mighty H. B. Claflin interests became overextended and in 1914 fell into receivership. John Claflin spent his last twenty years in retirement—prosperous enough to winter on the palmy Jekyll Island resort in Georgia, but stripped of personal or financial influence. Heber J. Grant, in contrast, became financially stable and the Church’s president. One of the hallmarks of his administration, even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, was fiscal stability. The harrowing summer of 1893, with its lessons for careful finance, clearly had left its mark. Indeed, for its participants, like old comrades-in-arms, the Panic of 1893 became a topic to cherish and celebrate. “Those were the days,” Heber Wells mused to Grant almost thirty years after the event, “when we fought and bled and nearly died together.”