Oral History Program John Sillito Interviewed by Rob Rule 4 September 1979 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah John Sillito Interviewed by Rob Rule 4 September 1979 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State College Oral History Program was created in the early 1970s to “record and document, through personal reminiscences, the history, growth and development of Weber State College.” Through interviews with administrators, faculty and students, the program’s goal was to expand the documentary holdings on Weber State College and its predecessor entities. From 1970 to 1976, the program conducted some fifteen interviews, under the direction of, and generally conducted by Harold C. Bateman, an emeritus professor of history. In 1979, under the direction of archivist John Sillito, the program was reestablished, and six interviews were conducted between 1979 and 1983, with additional interviews being conducted by members of the Weber State community. In 2013 the campus prepared to celebrate the 125th Anniversary of Weber State University in 2014. In order to document the student experience, interviews were conducted with Weber State College Alumni on an ongoing basis. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Sillito, John, an oral history by Rob Rule, 4 September 1979, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections and University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an interview with John Sillito conducted on September 4, 1979, by Rob Rule as a segment of “Dialogue”. Sillito and Rule discuss the dayto-day operations in Sillito’s job as a historian at Weber State College. They talk about the importance of preserving and understanding Ogden’s history and discuss, in brief, the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s presidency. RR: My guest on this segment of “Dialogue” is John Sillito, whose name I will mispronounce at least once during the course of this interview. Is it fair to say that you are an historian? JS: Yes, I’m an historian. My training in college was in history. I have graduate degrees from the University of Utah in that field, which is typical of most people in the profession of archives. They’re trained, generally speaking, as historians. RR: And you’re an archivist at Weber State? JS: That is correct. RR: What is the day-to-day operation of that? When I think of this sort of thing, it’s old books, and it’s records—birth records and title exchange records and things like that. It’s an occasional old house that’s falling down that they stick a plaque on and fix up. But what is it beyond that? JS: It’s all of that and more. It depends a lot on the organization you work for. As an archivist at Weber State College, my activity concerns the preservation of records generated by the college that document the history, the growth, the development of the college. In that sense, my field is somewhat limited. Some archivists who work in a historical society have a larger area of collecting responsibility, a larger area to draw from. My area of collecting is simply the 1 college itself. It’s hard to say what a day-to-day routine is because, like with many professions, there’s no standard day. RR: How long is the history of Weber State? JS: Well, the college itself traces its origin back to the late 1890s. In fact, I believe that this is the year they’re celebrating their 80th anniversary as a college. Originally, the college was an institution owned by the LDS Church. Part of the Stake Academy system that was prevalent in the Mormon church during that period of time. Ultimately, it became a state institution. One time, there was a move to transfer the college back to the control of the LDS church, but that move was defeated, and a lot of local activity on the part of citizens of this community was instrumental, I guess, in changing that possibility. RR: What would have happened, had it become a church university? JS: Well, it’s hard to speculate. I think that it probably would have diminished in size and stature. It’s hard for me to imagine the Church being able to sponsor a major university in Provo and a university or a college—something akin to what we have now at Weber State, within a hundred miles or so. It’s hard to speculate, but it was clear that the people here in Ogden wanted it to stay as a state institution, and I think that the people in the Church hierarchy wanted it to stay there as well. RR: They’re certainly on friendly terms, though. JS: Oh, yes. It’s certainly a relationship where the traditions of the college, dating back to the time it was a Church school, and overwhelmingly, the faculty and staff and student body at the college have an LDS background, but sometimes 2 it’s not as friendly, perhaps, as it should be. It certainly is a tradition that is hard to escape. RR: When you first assumed your duties, did you run across any interesting old relics that you had no idea there would be, or facts about the school? JS: Not really. I wondered if we would do that when we took over. There had been an archivist that had held the job for about three years prior to the time that I took over. Perhaps she found those relics. You always find things that it’s hard to understand where they come from. Plaques, or somebody’s name plaque from their desk, or shelves. RR: The Ben Lomond gymnasium, and things like that. JS: Yes, that kind of stuff. RR: It took those of us new people here at the radio station months to figure out who, or what, Ben Lomond was, just that everything’s named after it. JS: Yes, I wondered who Ben Lomond was. That’s right, and it was different for me, too, in that same sense. Even though I’m from Utah, I was born and raised in Salt Lake. My perceptions of Ogden were not as sharp as they should have been, so it’s been a learning experience for me. I’ve learned a lot about the community that I didn’t know. I’ve learned a lot about the college that I didn’t know as well. When I was younger, the only thing that Weber meant to me was that every year they had a debate meet there, and that’s where I wanted to go. Well, I’ve learned a considerable amount about the college in the two or three years that I’ve been there. 3 RR: When I was living in California and considering moving to Utah, I sent to the Utah Travel Council or somebody like that for a packet of information on Utah, and I think they kind of summed up the existence of Ogden in one or two sentences, and it was just sort of, “Well, Ogden could have been a big place, but as it turns out, Salt Lake was the big place, so forget about Ogden, it doesn’t matter.” Does Ogden have a history of itself that makes it as interesting a place to research as, say, Salt Lake City? JS: Yes, I think it really does. I think that you’re right, that there’s not as good a perception of Ogden’s history as there should be, even today. There’s a lot of interesting aspects about Ogden. The whole relationship of Ogden to the railroads, which goes back many, many years, is something that has really not been explored historically. Of course, we’re always familiar with the legendary ‘Two-Bit Street’, 25th Street, and the sort of area that was, say 50 or 60 years ago. RR: Why don’t you go into that a little bit? I know when I first heard the stories of 25th Street that I was absolutely amazed. I would just never dream that anything like that could have existed here. I don’t know as much about that as some other people, but evidently, based on what I know, it was a wide-open part of town, perhaps the most wide-open street in Utah. There was, of course, the sorts of things that you associate with a wide-open part of town. I think now, there’s some attempt to look at that in historical perspective and try to understand why that happened and what effect it had on the community. Did the community in essence sort of go along despite that? How much role did it play in terms of the 4 day-to-day activities of the community? The heyday of this was the late ‘20s and early ‘30s? JS: Yes, thereabouts. And I think, once again, it’s tied into the railroad. The fact that the railroad depot was at the head of 25th Street certainly plays a role. I think that there’s beginning to be an interest in the history of Ogden in a variety of different ways. Defense industry, of course, is another subject that people have looked at and continue to look at. Ethnic minorities: another subject that needs to be dealt with, I think, specifically for Ogden. And I think the efforts of some historians, the efforts of the people at the Depot in terms of restoration, the talk about restoring 25th Street around that area, all of these things I think are going to help us better understand the heritage that Ogden has as a city. It’s a rich one. RR: When you look at that heritage of Ogden, and the different changes that have gone on here, where do you see us in our cycle of change now? A lot of people say with the new mall coming in and the building up of downtown and whatnot, that Ogden is about to become—and there are positives and negatives of this—a new, modern American city, and the hustle and bustle and all that other stuff that goes with it. But sometimes that means more kids writing on the sides of buildings and more air pollution. JS: I think that Ogden is in a period of—not of growth, but a period where the future is a little bit uncertain. I don’t think anybody really knows for sure where it’s going. I think the mall and these kinds of things are certainly going to change the nature of the city. Ogden, unfortunately, for too many years has lived under the shadow of Salt Lake. It’s been unable to develop its own identity as much as 5 perhaps it could have been if it hadn’t been in that same situation. I think that it’s going to be a good thing. Of course, my field is not planning or demographics or anything, so I’m not speaking as an authority, but my perception is that it’s going to be a good thing for the community. I think that Ogden is really in a period of great change. I see that at the college. We’re beginning to take a harder look at what we can do to make sure that the college is a more significant part of the community than it has been in the past. That’s not to say that it hasn’t played a major role; it obviously has, but there’s a spirit in the college of wanting to become involved with the community, and a dialogue between the college and the community. Those are the areas, of course, that I’m most familiar with, and I see that happening. RR: As a person who’s a little bit older than the average student that you run into from day-to-day, but not so much older that you’re out of touch with the person, how do you perceive the change in the average Weber State student from the week he or she comes in, to the week he or she goes out? Is it preparing them for anything other than more education? JS: I think it is. In fact, I think a lot of the programs at the college are more oriented toward vocational education, if I can use that term—some people see that as a negative term, but I think that’s one of the strengths of the college, I really do. There’s a lot of diversity among the student body, even though 90% of the people at the college are from Utah—an overwhelming majority of them are also members of the LDS church, so there’s a lot of sameness in that sense. Still, there’s a lot of diversity. I taught a class last fall, a history class, and I had 6 students from Hill Airfield that represented approximately twelve states besides Utah. Some of them were older than the usual age bracket for college students, so there was a lot of diversity in that sense. Different backgrounds—different racial backgrounds, different geographic backgrounds and things like that. I think that the education that students get at Weber State College can be a good education, but like with any other college, it’s dependent on how much they’re willing to put into it. The greatest single factor to me in terms of my own assessment of the college is the difference between the way students perceive things today and the ways students perceived things when I went to school, which was in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The activism of that period is certainly not there today. The interest in political activity; the interest in causes, if you will, is not there. It’s really a different generation of students. RR: Do you think it’s a generation of students who don’t have any good causes like we had in the late ‘60s, like a war to be against, or something like that? Or is it students who are just plain not tuned-in to the world around them? JS: Well, I think it’s a combination of both. Obviously, when I was going to school in the sixties, the overriding issue for most people was the war. Today, there isn’t really an overriding issue in the same sense. But I think that there's also a difference in the kinds of attitudes that these students have about their role, particularly about the role of college. Much of the activism of the ‘60s and ‘70s was directed at challenging the foundations of the college structure itself, and I don’t see as much of that. Maybe what happened a decade ago is that we answered some basic questions, and some progress was made, and therefore 7 we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every ten years. But I think there is a real marked difference between the students that I see as a faculty member and my perceptions of what I, as a student ten years or so ago, felt. It was very interesting; when I taught this class last fall, when I would talk about things that were very contemporary in my own mind—the ‘68 presidential campaign, for example, or the Vietnam War—there was really a lack of recognition on the part of some of those students. When I thought about it, I was really talking about things that had happened when they were in fourth grade or fifth grade. Their perceptions have been shaped by different forces. Every once in a while, we have to realize that. It helps us, I think, in understanding where they’re coming from. RR: You mentioned history, and this just brings a favorite subject of mine to mind: Watergate. Do you think that the average student that you pass in the halls everyday knows anything at all about Watergate—about the reality of Watergate, not just the overall headline value of Watergate, but what went on, why it went on, and why it was bad? I think what I’m basically asking is, are these kids going to vote for another Richard Nixon in another few years and not know any better? JS: Sometimes I wonder. Of course, we can’t blame that totally on the young people. It’d be interesting to me if we took a poll of all eligible voters, just to see where Nixon would fit in terms of—maybe some of the older people have forgotten or forgiven in the last five years. I think, in answer to your question, it’s not as important a factor in their perceptions of life as it was in mine. Really, the person you should have on to discuss Watergate is my wife, who’s kind of a Watergate 8 freak, and she’s read all the books and the transcripts, and she knows it chapter and verse. But for us, at least, because of the activism that we were a part of to a degree, in that period—the resignation of Nixon and Watergate and all of that— took on a special meaning that many of the students of today don’t understand. It’s a nuance that they just miss. They see that as a time when there was a President who perhaps did some things wrong, but also did some very good things, and perhaps has paid his debt to society. I don’t see the kind of criticism of Richard Nixon from my students that I saw from my contemporaries when I was in their seats, as it were. RR: There was another big party for him this past week at San Quimade, bidding a fond farewell to the house we all paid for and he said he was going to donate to the public, but sold on the private market. JS: Yes, I noticed that. Well, I expect to get my share, my check. RR: Oh, yes, we’ll all be getting a dividend from the three or four million dollars’ profit. Right. The thing that comes up over and over again, though, is that with Nixon and even with Wagner, who was just a plain, old-fashioned, on-the-take politician, there’s been hundreds of them, I really worry that we will forget awfully soon. We forgot about Korea, and we got into Vietnam. Now we’re forgetting about Vietnam, and we’re forgetting about Nixon. JS: Yes, I agree with you. I don’t want to get too partisan, but I think Nixon is an indictment of our system. People say, well, the great thing about Watergate is that the system worked. Well, in a way it did; in a way it didn’t. We never really got to test the system, because before the final conclusion, Nixon was pardoned, 9 and it was kind of a moot point. But I think there’s a possibility of that happening again, and I don’t think it’s because, as some people said, “Well, Watergate was just politics as usual.” I really don’t believe that. I’ve been involved with enough political campaigns myself to realize that people are not uniformly dishonest and crooked. I think if you look at Nixon’s career—now I’m speaking as a historian and not a partisan—if you go back and look at his career in Southern California in the ‘40s, with the Voorhees campaign and the Douglas campaign of 1950, you find a lot of similarities in some of the things that happened then and some of the things that happened in ‘72-‘73. So I think that the value of something like Watergate is, to us as citizens, to constantly be on the guard and to assess and reassess and challenge our political leaders, and not take things for granted. Maybe if the generation of today understands that aspect of Watergate, even if the attitudes toward Nixon as a figure are different, maybe they still have learned some lesson from it. But I wonder like you do sometimes. RR: Do you think, as a historian, that maybe 50 or 75 years from now, in the proper perspective, with all the inroads Nixon made into China and world peace negotiations and things like that, normalization, that he will be viewed as overall a pretty good president? JS: I think he’ll be viewed overall as a better-than-average president, but I don’t think he’ll ever be able to be viewed except through the lens of Watergate. I think that when historians write the history of the Nixon administration, it’s going to be first to talk about the fact that he was the first president that resigned his post. Talk about the Watergate scandals, and then I think they’re going to say, in addition to 10 that, there were these things: the China initiative or whatever. If you go back and read Nixon’s speeches in ‘69, right after taking office and right before, if he’d gone ahead and done the things that he said he was going to do, he might have been a better president. He didn’t do them, and what the reasons for that are, of course, are a matter of analysis and differing opinion. The point is, I think future historians are always going to regard Nixon through that vantage point of Watergate and the resignation. RR: Kind of reminds me of, in 1970, when they asked John Mitchell, who was an indicted co-conspirator at the end, about their hard stand on law and order. Mitchell turned to the reporter and said, “Watch what we do, not what we say.” JS: Right, right. RR: We did. JS: Yes. The whole campaign in ‘68—we’re going to put an attorney-general in who’s not going to be soft on criminals like Ramsay Clark. Well, everybody did watch what they did. I think that something George McGovern said is really true. They asked him how he felt about the election, how he felt about losing and everything that had happened since. He said, “Well, I’d rather be here today than walking by myself out on the beach at San Clemente.” I think that’s the greatest indictment for Richard Nixon, is that a man that really wanted to be accepted, a man that wanted to be the greatest president and all this sort of thing, leader of the free world, really became ostracized. Even though I wish that the process would have run its course, and the impeachment process would have been undertaken, and perhaps that he should have gone 11 through that, still in many ways the punishment that he received in terms of being, essentially, a non-entity, I think is fitting. Now he’s trying to become an entity again, and we’ll have to see what happens in that sense. RR: Yes, he’s a big hit in Europe, but then again, so was Hitler. JS: That’s right. RR: Now, don’t call me and complain about that. Well, let’s get back a little bit closer to the subject here, I’ve strayed quite a bit from the field. We’re talking—I’m going to get it right—with John Sillito. John is an archivist at Weber State College. What are you going to do tomorrow there? What is your job? JS: Well, tomorrow I’m going to go to Idaho and do an interview with a woman. I’m on a nine-month contract, so I won’t be back on campus until a couple weeks later in September. For this year, though, primarily what we’re going to be doing is trying to build upon what we’ve done in the past, in the sense that we’ve spent a lot of time laying the groundwork for having, I hope, an efficient archive. We’re going to try to go into the college itself and survey what records are in the offices, hidden in the back drawers and the back closets. Find out what’s there and try to make arrangements to have those things that are no longer needed for the business of the particular office transferred to the archives, where they can be assessed for their historical value. The thing about an archive is, you have to remember that records are created to accomplish a specific purpose. What makes a record that’s been created an archival record is that it is kept for some other reason than the purpose for which it was created. 12 For example, one of the analogies I’ve used deals with Roots, the Alex Haley book: when Kunta Kinte was sent aboard ship across to America, a log was probably kept, and his name or description or something was entered. Well, that record was kept for a specific reason, at the time. The reason that a record like that is preserved now is not for the reason that it was created; that has passed. It’s preserved now for the information that it possesses about the past. What can it tell us? What historical value or other kind of value does it have? That’s what we’re going to be doing primarily this year, is finding what records are in the offices on campus and assessing them in terms of the value they have for historical purposes, or for other reasons as well. RR: I had a problem all through school, up until high school—I graduated from high school in 1968 as the war was raging on—and it wasn’t until I got into my last couple years of high school that I realized the value of history. It was always just boring dates and places and names that didn’t matter, and I never understood why it was important to understand what happened to Napoleon. You know, “It has nothing to do with me. I’m never going to go to France, and I’m never going to attack anybody, so what do I need to know about Napoleon?” Then you begin to realize, if you’re in—as you said, a very politically active time, such as the late ‘60s—that “Gee, the stuff I’m learning about Korea is the same stuff that’s in the headlines today. If everybody had learned that lesson a little better back in 1953 and ‘54, maybe we wouldn’t be in Vietnam today.” Is that why history is important? 13 JS: I think that’s one of the reasons that history is important, yes. Woodrow Wilson once said that a nation which does not know what it was yesterday does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. Vietnam is a good example of that. I think that if we had used our historical hindsight a little better, perhaps we could have avoided some of the problems that we found ourselves in a few years ago. So I think it is important to know where we came from. People always make that criticism of history. “I don’t like history because it’s simply memorization of dates and names.” Well, that’s a part of history. Certainly, it’s important to know, for example, that the Revolutionary War came before the Korean War. That chronological framework is essential, and it helps you put things in perspective. But the importance of history, to me, is not what happened, but why it happened. What were the dynamics, the forces, the personal forces? When people say history is boring, what they’re saying is that life and people are boring, because when you get right down to it, that’s what history is. It’s people and their activities and the forces that move and shake. RR: Do you think that’s the fault of teachers, who have traditionally said, “I want you to know tomorrow on the test what year the War of 1812 was, and if you don’t know, you’re failing the course?” JS: “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” RR: “I don’t care who was the commander, I don’t care who financed the war, I want to know when it was fought.” JS: Yes, I think so. I don’t think that’s an indictment of all history teachers, just the ones we had… No, I think that’s true. I think there’s some exciting things 14 happening in history and have been happening for a number of years in terms of our assessment of the role played by women in history, something that’s been sadly neglected for hundreds of years. The role of minorities, the role of dissonant groups, for example. That happens to be the area that I’m most interested in. My own research interest is radical movements in Utah, socialist movements, left-wing political movements, primarily. RR: There have been left-wing political movements in Utah? JS: Oh, yes. Utah has a rich heritage of left-wing activity, going back, really, to the beginning of statehood. Seventy-five or 80 different individuals were elected to political office in Utah as members of the socialist party in the first two decades of this century. Utah has always had, in the past, a strong left-wing movement. In many ways, the kind of voting patterns that we find in Utah are similar to the voting statistics that we find nationally. I think, once again, that’s something that has not been generally perceived, so I see part of my responsibility as bringing that out. Not to overemphasize it and to say that Utah was necessarily a hotbed of revolution; it really wasn’t, but these people were a part of our history. They had some influence and some effect upon the development of that history. Hopefully, to understand the totality of history as best you can, you have to understand those different groups. The history of Utah, for example, is not just the history of the LDS church, although for too many years, that’s been the feeling on the part of many people. RR; Now, this is something that I’ve been asking people, but nobody’s been able to answer: what was going on in Utah at the time of entry into the Union? I know 15 that I have read that there was a tremendous controversy in Congress over allowing Utah in while the plural marriages were still in existence, because in Washington, D.C. they said, “All these people are a bunch of heathens. We can’t go for this.” What was going on around here politically, as I imagine there would have been political moves by people whose own personal economies would be enriched by statehood to say, regardless of religious belief, “This is what we have to do.” What was going on? JS: Well, once again, I’m not the expert on that period, but generally speaking, it was a period of great change in the state. One of the characteristics of Utah’s preparation for statehood was, as you mentioned, the elimination of polygamy. There were other factors as well, in terms of the Mormon church, that kept the state from gaining statehood, I think. In terms of the political development of the state, I think this was the period when there was a crystallization of political thought behind the two major political parties—the Republican and the Democratic party. Prior to that time, politics in Utah had largely been a local concern. The parties were the Liberal party, which essentially were the nonMormon people of Utah, and the People’s party, which represented, generally speaking, the Mormon community. So the politics began to take on national overtones. Of course, the issue of women’s suffrage was an important issue in the Constitutional Convention in 1895 in the state of Utah, so that’s another issue that was significant. Silver was an important issue in Utah in the early days of its political development, because of the mines in Park City and other places. In 16 fact, Utah cast 80% of its vote in 1896, the first national election it participated in, for William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat, and in the eyes of many people, a radical, simply because of his stand on silver. So there was an important shift. One historian has talked about this period from around the time of statehood up until say, 1920 or 1915, as the time that Utah came of age politically. I think that’s a very good characterization of what was happening. The real development of the political machine on the part of the Reed Smoot forces in Utah. All of these things happened. I think if we want to understand Utah, the most important period of time is that period of 30 years between 1890, when the manifesto was issued, and 1920. I think so much of what we are like as a state, what the Mormon church is like as a church, can be traced to that period of time. It’s a period that’s been given a lot of attention, but I think it needs more. I think the same could be said for Ogden, as well; it was a crucial time for Ogden, too. RR: I know that a couple of months ago my grandmother, who grew up in Idaho and around that area, came here to visit me. As we drove by the railroad station, she said, “I remember that when I was six years old, going on my first train ride to go see Grandma.” It was a very big part of the country. We have just about run out of time here, and we didn’t get to really talk on your subject as much as we should have, but it’s been a very interesting and enjoyable conversation. I’d like to bring your wife down one night and have a panel on Watergate. JS: Okay. 17 RR: I don’t know how we tie that into the community of Ogden other than, “We’ve all got to live in this country and we don’t want it to happen again.” JS: Well, that’s a good way to tie it in. RR: Let’s do it. John Sillito, I got it right the last time. JS: Yes, you did. RR: Thank you for being on Dialogue. JS: A pleasure to be here. RR: Thank you. 18