Truth (Salt Lake City, Utah)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
212 issues from 1905 to 1908, published in Salt Lake City, Utah, digitised for Chronicling America.
When the Truth made its 1901 debut in Salt Lake City, it offered Utah’s booming capital an alternative to the newspapers that regularly appeared (and disappeared) in western cities during the turn of the century. With a focus on hard-hitting local reporting and progressive social commentary, the Truth developed an identity as an urban weekly, an early antecedent of the alternative weekly, which would become popular some nine decades later. And much like those future publications, the Truth would struggle to survive against the big city daily papers.
In the first decade of the 1900s, two newspapers dominated Salt Lake, the Deseret Evening News, the official mouthpiece of the Mormon Church, and the Salt Lake Tribune, which almost always placed itself against the News. The Truth carved out a middle ground between the two publications, neither acquiescing to every instance of Mormon influence, nor bashing the church unrelentingly. For instance, on January 4, 1905, during a contentious Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C., over the seating of Utah’s elected senator Frank Smoot, the Truth weighed in on the controversy without endorsing the church’s embrace of polygamy, while eschewing “the miles of slander, slush, and absolute lies that have been printed in [the Tribune].” In the same article, the Truth went on to counter the notion that “good, honest people east and west have been made to believe, that Salt Lake is a Hades where no woman is safe.” Conducting its own…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress