As the Great Depression tightened its grip on the United States, millions of dollars in foreign securities went into default, many of them in the hands of private American boldholders. In this richly detailed account of efforts to stem the tide of bond defaults, Gene Sessions chronicles the activities of J. Reuben Clark, Jr., and the federally sanctioned Foreign Bondholders Protective Council that he headed. Clark was a conservative international lawyer who believed himself to be a literal prophet of God and who found acquiescence to the bond defaults unacceptable. As head of the Council, he led a heroic effort through the darkest days of the 1930s to reinvigorate the failing debts and ensure that the world as it then existed would continue to treat responsibility for repaying such obligations as nearly sacred. Surprisingly, Clark won some major victories and retired to his home in Utah convinced that, at the very least, the world had learned a serious lesson from its ill-conceived foreign lending habits. The author suggests that, although events since then may have proven Clark wrong, he still personifies the old order dying hard, its warriors contesting change every step of the way. Sessions's study fills a void in the literature that has come forth, particularly in the last decade, on the international debt crisis. Relying heavily on unpublished archival sources, he presents a careful analysis of the causes and effects of the great 1930s crash in the foreign lending market, investigating not only the foreign lending scene of the time but also the ways in which American politicians, financiers, investors, and their advocates tried to adjust to painful economic and social realities related to the collapse of the foreign bond market. In the book's last chapter, Sessions discusses the diminishing career of the still-extant FBPC since World War II in light of recent developments in the foreign debt situation.

Prophesying upon the Bones: J. Reuben Clark and the Foreign Debt Crisis, 1933-39

Sessions, Gene A.

Business & Money

University of Illinois Press

Camp Floyd and the Mormons traces the history of the sojourn of “Johnston’s Army” in Utah Territory from the beginning of the Utah War in 1857 through the abandonment of Camp Floyd in Cedar Valley west of Utah Lake at the outbreak of the Civil War. The book describes the relationship between the invading army and the local Mormon population, gives an account of Indian affairs in Utah, and describes the activities of federal officials in Utah during that volatile period.
Completed posthumously by Gene Sessions, Moorman’s colleague at Weber State University, Camp Floyd and the Mormons is a comprehensive analysis of the history of frontier Utah as a decade of isolation ended and confrontations with the United States government began. Moorman had unprecedented access to materials in the LDS Church Archives on subjects ranging from the Mountain Meadows Massacre to the Mormon responses to the presence of the army in Utah from 1858 through 1861.
First published by the University of Utah Press in 1992, this reprint edition includes a new introduction by Gene Sessions in which he recounts Moorman’s research adventures during the 1960s "in the bowels of the old Church Administration Building, where Joseph Fielding Smith and A. Will Lund watched over the contents of the archives like wide-eyed mother hens."

Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (UTAH CENTENNIAL SERIES)

History

Moorman, Donald R

Americas

Univ of Utah Pr

The story of how the Utah Construction Company, founded in Ogden, Utah in 1900, became Utah International, a multinational corporation, is known to historians of the American West but perhaps not by the general public. The publication of this book remedies that omission.During its first decades, the company built railroads and dams and was one of the Six Companies Consortium that built Hoover Dam. Utah Construction was also engaged in numerous war-contract activities during World War II. In the postwar period, the company expanded its activities into mining and land development and moved its headquarters to San Francisco. Changing its name to Utah Construction and Mining, and eventually to Utah International, the corporation became one of the most successful multinational mining companies in the world. In 1976, Utah International and General Electric negotiated the largest yet corporate merger in the United States.Based on the Utah International archives housed in the Stewart Library at Weber State University, the story of Utah International describes more than projects: it is also the story of how two remarkable entrepreneurs, Marriner Stoddard Eccles and Edmund Wattis Littlefield, transformed the company incorporated in 1900 by the Wattis brothers into the largest and most profitable mining company in the United States.

A History of Utah International: From Construction to Mining

Sessions, Sterling D

Biography & History

University of Utah Press

Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Utah Centennial Series)

The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism

Religion & Spirituality

Religious Studies

Signature Books

Jedediah Morgan Grant was a man who knew no compromise when it came to principles--and his principles were clearly representative, argues Gene A. Sessions, of Mormonism's first generation. His life is a glimpse of a Mormon world whose disappearance coincided with the death of this "pious yet rambunctiously radical preacher, flogging away at his people, demanding otherworldliness and constant sacrifice." It was "an eschatological, pre-millennial world in which every individual teetered between salvation and damnation and in which unsanitary privies and appropriating a stray cow held the same potential for eternal doom as blasphemy and adultery." Updated and newly illustrated with more photographs, this second edition of the award-winning documentary history (first published in 1982) chronicles Grant's ubiquitous role in the Mormon history of the 1840s and '50s. In addition to serving as counselor to Brigham Young during two tumultuous and influential years at the end of his life, he also portentously befriended Thomas L. Kane, worked to temper his unruly brother-in-law William Smith, captained a company of emigrants into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and journeyed to the East on several missions to bolster the position of the Mormons during the crises surrounding the runaway judges affair and the public revelation of polygamy. Jedediah Morgan Grant's voice rises powerfully in these pages, startling in its urgency in summoning his people to sacrifice and moving in its tenderness as he communicated to his family. From hastily scribbled letters to extemporaneous sermons exhorting obedience, and the notations of still stunned listeners, the sound of "Mormon Thunder" rolls again in "a boisterous amplification of what Mormonism really was, and would never be again."

Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Greg Kofford Books, Incorporated

Jedediah Morgan Grant was a man who knew no compromise when it came to principles--and his principles were clearly representative, argues Gene A. Sessions, of Mormonism's first generation. His life is a glimpse of a Mormon world whose disappearance coincided with the death of this "pious yet rambunctiously radical preacher, flogging away at his people, demanding otherworldliness and constant sacrifice." It was "an eschatological, pre-millennial world in which every individual teetered between salvation and damnation and in which unsanitary privies and appropriating a stray cow held the same potential for eternal doom as blasphemy and adultery." Updated and newly illustrated with more photographs, this second edition of the award-winning documentary history (first published in 1982) chronicles Grant's ubiquitous role in the Mormon history of the 1840s and '50s. In addition to serving as counselor to Brigham Young during two tumultuous and influential years at the end of his life, he also portentously befriended Thomas L. Kane, worked to temper his unruly brother-in-law William Smith, captained a company of emigrants into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and journeyed to the East on several missions to bolster the position of the Mormons during the crises surrounding the runaway judges affair and the public revelation of polygamy. Jedediah Morgan Grant's voice rises powerfully in these pages, startling in its urgency in summoning his people to sacrifice and moving in its tenderness as he communicated to his family. From hastily scribbled letters to extemporaneous sermons exhorting obedience, and the notations of still stunned listeners, the sound of "Mormon Thunder" rolls again in "a boisterous amplification of what Mormonism really was, and would never be again."

Greg Kofford Books, Inc.

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