By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As another Presidents’ Day holiday arrived, I was wondering how many leaders of the United States visited my home state of Utah. It’s not the first time such political curiosity has vexed me.
A few years ago, perhaps due to an overactive imagination and too much time on my hands, I wrote a five-part story about a fictional lunch hour tour through the history of downtown Salt Lake City. The ghosts/founders of my two law firms—Joseph Rawlins (Jones Waldo) and William Dickson (Parsons Behle)—guided me.
One article was about the presidents who visited Salt Lake City’s Main Street area, where I have worked for nearly four decades. I identified and described nine of these presidential visits.
It all started in 1875 when President Ulysses S. Grant stayed in the Walker House Hotel, which was right across the street from where my law office sits. Grant met with Brigham Young and Utah Territory government officials.
Five years later, in 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes spoke to a crowd on Main Street from the Walker Hotel balcony. News reports say Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman stole the show that day, however, by telling the crowd to “be at least half as good as they knew how to be.”
William Howard Taft stayed at the Knutsford Hotel a block from my office in 1909. Two presidents—Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and William Harding in 1923—stayed at the old Hotel Utah up at the north end of Main Street.
Both Wilson and Harding were either debilitated or dead within a few months of their Utah visits. I’m pretty sure that’s just an unfortunate coincidence.
Three presidents have travelled up or down Main Street surrounded by large crowds. In 1890, Salt Lakers cheered for President Benjamin Harrison as he rode by in a horse-drawn carriage, surrounded by uniformed guards. In 1903, they waved as President Theodore Roosevelt went by.
A much quieter crowd watched when another Roosevelt—Franklin Delano—drove up Main Street in a rather mournful procession of cars. FDR was on his way to the Tabernacle for the 1936 funeral of his good friend, former Utah Governor and Secretary of War George H. Dern.
On another car ride on a lovely September day in 1963, the first Catholic President John F. Kennedy drove by in an open convertible limousine while going to visit leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The young president died in a Dallas motorcade just two months later.
Although this seemed like a pretty good list of SLC presidential visits at the time, it turns out the list was not complete. A total of almost two dozen presidents have visited Utah—so who did I miss?
Well, every single president during my lifetime, starting with JFK and including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. They have all been here.
I never met any of them in Utah, but I did meet Reagan once before he was elected and Ford after he left office. I also met JFK’s brother Teddy too, but that probably does not really count.
My old law partner Cal Rampton (a three term Utah governor) met several presidents and liked to tell the story about how LBJ once called and yelled at him. LBJ said the defense secretary was stuck in “some God-forsaken place called Alta” and demanded that Cal “get him the hell out of there.”
It’s a great anecdote. But FYI, Cal also used to say, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
President William McKinley was here in Utah 1901, but only for about a half hour. He left abruptly and cancelled his planned visit soon after his wife became ill.
Herbert Hoover came to Utah some 22 times, but only once as president in 1932. Harry Truman stayed overnight in Salt Lake City in 1945 after signing the United Nations charter in San Francisco.
Dwight Eisenhower was in Utah several times too. His only visit as president, however, was to the Four Corners area in 1954.
A total of twenty-one American presidents never made it here. Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge are on that list.
Although two Utah counties are named for them, James Garfield and Millard Fillmore did not come here as presidents either. (Apparently, Garfield was here before he was president.)
The list of no shows includes, of course, everyone from George Washington to Andrew Johnson because Utah really did not exist during many of those years. The Utah Territory started in 1850 and statehood arrived in 1896.
Although he never got the chance, Abraham Lincoln reportedly wanted to see the Pacific Ocean and the old American West. Lincoln once even asked an emissary to tell Brigham Young he’d leave the Lion of the Lord alone if Young reciprocated.
No one from Utah has won a presidential election, but several men have tried.
The first candidate was Parley Packer Christensen, who led the 1920 ticket for the Farmer-Labor party. Christensen twice served as Salt Lake County Attorney, was in the state legislature, and had also run for Congress.
Contemporary Utah Republican politicians like Orrin Hatch, Mitt Romney, and Jon M. Huntsman, Jr., all ran and lost. So did independents like Evan McMullin and former SLC mayor Rocky Anderson.
And Joseph Smith—who at the very least is an honorary Utahn—announced an independent run for president in January 1844. Smith had decided that none of the other candidates would protect the Latter-day Saints or redress their grievances.
A few months later, Illinois officials arrested Smith for alleged treason and then a mob shot/killed him in a Carthage jail. Probably as a direct result, within three years, Utah was born.
Utah produces some radical politicians, but there also are some reasonable, rational, and quite competent people who hold public office here. I don’t expect it during my lifetime, but I do think that someday a presidential visit to Utah will also be someone’s trip home.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
