Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada

A Biography

Michael Vernetti

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780874177473
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

Howard Cannon (1912 - 2002) represented Nevada in the U.S. Senate from 1958 until 1982 and acquired a reputation as one of its most productive and influential members. Because he was a modest man more comfortable with hard work than self-aggrandizement, he was also one of its most under-appreciated. Nonetheless, Cannon influenced many major changes in American politics and policies during his time in office.Born to a devout Mormon family in a small farming community in southwest Utah, Cannon served in the Army Air Force during World War II and emerged from the war as a hero. Soon he was part of the postwar migration of ambitious, adventurous Americans to the booming desert city of Las Vegas, where he practiced law and entered local politics. In 1958 he was elected to the U.S. Senate and joined a group of influential young Democratic senators who were to play a major role in shaping the country's future. His service on the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee and the Armed Services Committee led to major changes in the air travel industry, including deregulation, and to increased support for national military preparedness.

CHAPTER 1

Blood Matters

Descendants of the original Mayflower colonists take great pride in their lineage. The same is true of those who trace their roots back to the Huguenot founders of South Carolina, or to the early planters in Virginia, to George Washington’s officers, to one or more of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—the list goes on. In Utah and other parts of the West settled by the first Mormon pioneers, descendants of church founder Joseph Smith and of his successor Brigham Young and their close associates make up the Mormon aristocracy. Like most aristocracies, it is more a matter of blood and breeding than of wealth.

Howard Cannon was a Mormon aristocrat. His great-grandfather George, known in the family as “the Immigrant,” was prospering as a woodworker in the British port of Liverpool and raising a family with his wife, Ann Quayle, when he encountered the missionary John Taylor, one of the young church’s most important leaders. Taylor spoke compellingly of a new Zion that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was establishing in America. In 1839, when Taylor had embarked on the second Mormon mission to the British Isles, the church was barely nine years old and known only to a relative few, but by the time Taylor and his group returned home in 1841, they had made four thousand new converts, George and his wife among them.

On September 18, 1842, the Cannons, along with Ann’s family and other converts, set sail on the long and perilous voyage to New Orleans. Ann was carrying another child. She became seasick at the beginning of the journey, her condition worsened, and she died twenty days later, leaving a young husband and four children. It is said that her four-year-old son, David Henry, the senator’s grandfather, had to be physically restrained from following his mother’s coffin into the sea. For the Cannons, it was a terrible voyage, and the journey was not over.

From New Orleans, they continued up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where they spent the winter of 1842. The following April they traveled overland to the Mormon colony in Nauvoo, Illinois, Taylor’s “new Zion” and the seat of the prophet Joseph Smith, whose series of visions from the time he was a boy of fourteen formed the basis of the church.

Nauvoo was then the second-most-populous city in Illinois and prospering under the Mormons. The state granted Joseph Smith the right to form an independent militia, which he then commanded. He was also mayor of Nauvoo, justice of the peace, and university chancellor, in addition to being prophet and president of the church. The doctrines of the new church did not set well with their neighbors of other more established faiths. Smith preached—and practiced—the union of spiritual, economic, and political matters under the priesthood, as well as a new scripture that had been revealed to him called the Book of Mormon. Other unorthodox doctrines, including the practice of polygamy, contributed to the heightening of political and economic tensions within Nauvoo and the neighboring communities. Non-Mormons and a few Mormon defectors rebelled against Smith’s rule. He declared martial law in Nauvoo, and as a result he and his brother Hyrum were arrested for treason and jailed in Carthage, the county seat. There, a mob attacked and shot them on June 27, 1844. John Taylor, one of the church’s twelve governing apostles and the missionary who had converted the Cannons, barely escaped with his life.

The Immigrant, the woodworker of Liverpool, was chosen to build the coffins and mold the death masks for Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum. Not long afterward, and shortly after taking a new wife, he himself died of sunstroke. The following spring his wife, Mary, gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth.

Smith’s death caused a rift among the Mormon settlers, but most—including the surviving Cannons—decided to throw in their lot with Smith’s successor, Brigham Young. More violent incidents the following year convinced Young that the Saints, as church members called themselves, should leave Nauvoo and look for new headquarters in the West. After much planning, the exodus began in February 1846. Mary, the infant Elizabeth, and the Immigrant’s four older children joined the pilgrimage. By late spring, 16,000 Saints with their animals and wagons were making the arduous trek across the Great Prairie. It did not end until July 1847, when Young beheld the valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, deemed it the site for the new city, and marked the spot for the temple. It stands on that same spot today.

For a time, the Cannons were settled in Salt Lake City and the family grew in importance within the church. Howard’s great-uncle, George Quayle Cannon, served as Brigham Young’s private secretary and, after Young’s death in 1877, as chief executor of his estate. The Immigrant’s family was among the first group of settlers directed by Young to colonize the sparsely populated desert region of southern Utah, some four hundred miles away. They left Salt Lake City in 1861 on a thirty-seven-day trek through wilderness and hostile Indian territory to the New Dixie, so-called because Young and other church leaders were convinced the area could grow cotton, an important consideration should the traditional supply from the South be cut off by the Civil War. By November more than two hundred wagons were drawn up on the site of St. George.

In April 1862, the Immigrant’s son Angus was elected mayor. Howard Cannon’s grandfather, David, who had so mourned the loss of his mother on the voyage from Liverpool, became the third president of the St. George Temple. George Quayle Cannon was the only child who remained behind. In 1862, at the age of thirty-five, he went to Washington as a delegate from the Territory of Utah to the U.S. House of Representatives, and his son, Frank J. Cannon, was elected as one of Utah’s first U.S. senators in 1897.

David had spent years helping build the temple while managing his own farm and fathering a large family with two wives, Wilhelmina and Josephine, ten children from the former and eleven from the latter. At the 1877 dedication ceremony for the temple, which is still in use, David met the woman who would become his third wife and Howard’s grandmother, Rhoda Ann Knell. Of the eleven children David fathered with Rhoda, the sixth was Howard’s father, Walter, born on July 5, 1888. Like his brothers and sisters, Walter was reared as much by his father’s earlier wives, affectionately called Aunt Willie and Aunt Jo, as by his own mother, and he turned to whoever was closest to hand for comfort. For companionship, he had his thirty-one brothers and sisters and even more numerous cousins. It is easy to see why the town grew rapidly.

Until Walter’s generation, all the Cannons practiced polygamy, and, after federal law abolished it in 1882, all suffered for it. Angus was married six times and served six months in jail in 1890 rather than abandon any of his wives. His brother George fathered thirty-four children with five wives and served 175 days in prison in 1888, using the time to write a book on the life of Joseph Smith.

In 1909, less than a month away from his twenty-first birthday, Walter married Leah Sullivan, a local girl of the same age. Their son Howard, the future senator, was born three years later, on January 26, 1912. Walter and Leah’s life together was less daunting than their forebears’. There were no more directives from Salt Lake City to conquer unexplored new lands for the church, and much of the wilderness of St. George had been transformed by the hard work of their parents’ generation. Instead, they faced the day-to-day challenges and joys of rearing and sustaining a family in a rural farming community formed by the deeply held values of the Mormon Church. In 1914 Walter began his two-year commitment as a missionary in the city of Liverpool that he had last seen in 1842, when he was four years old. The family home was rented out, and Leah and two-year-old Howard moved in with her parents while she earned $2.50 a week working as a clerk in A. R. Whitehead and Sons’ department store.

When Walter returned from his mission abroad, Leah suggested he complete his studies at Dixie College, the local junior college that was housed in the same building as the high school, which Howard later attended. Walter graduated from Dixie and began teaching there. In 1921 he became postmaster of St. George, a patronage position that he held until 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt’s election cost Republican Walter his job. In those years he began investing in local real estate ventures. He owned a farm south of town that was worked by tenants, and later he built a motel that his children invested in to the tune of $2,000 each. It was a good investment. The children sold the motel in 1953 for $60,000. Walter joined the board of directors of the Bank of St. George, and in time he assumed his role as patriarch with the industriousness and stolidity that had made the Cannons respected and admired since the early days of St. George.

For Howard, the firstborn, life in Walter and Leah’s home was safe, predictable, rigorous but not harsh, and filled with love. The home that he and his two younger sisters, Evelyn and Ramona (a third sister, Ellen, lived only three weeks), shared and where each of them had been born was a small white adobe structure facing north on a deep lot just northeast of the temple Howard’s grandfather had helped build. In keeping with the Mormon tradition of laying out cities in relation to the Tabernacle, the Cannons’ address was 167 East 300 South. That meant it was one block east and three blocks south of the Tabernacle block. They bought it for $200. It had electricity but, as in most parts of rural America, no running water. The toilet, Howard’s sister Evelyn recalled, was a “three-holer” in the backyard. The Cannons did not have an indoor bathroom until 1936, when Walter built a new home of red brick on the same lot as the old adobe structure.

There was order and regularity to life in St. George. Saturday was bath day, with everyone getting cleaned up for Sunday church services. Water was heated on the cookstove, and baths were taken in an aluminum tub in the kitchen. On Sunday children were given religious instruction in the morning, followed by worship services. Monday was wash day. The laundry was done in a big tub of water sitting on hot coals in the backyard. Two more tubs were used for rinsing. Bluing was the bleach of the day.

Early in the morning, Howard milked the cows before walking the short distance to Woodward School, which he attended through eighth grade and is still in use today. He, and later his sisters, came home for lunch. After school Howard tended to the second milking and groomed and trained his horses, which were kept in a large corral that surrounded the barn. His mother loved music, and insisted that her son practice the clarinet daily. Howard described her as “a stern but loving woman with an Irish temper that one didn’t want to challenge.”

In 1936, when Howard was twenty-four and studying law at the University of Arizona, resourceful Leah rented a basement room to teachers in the new house that Walter had just built. A spirit of uncomplaining hard work extended throughout the Cannon household: They looked for opportunities and seized them as they found them. Howard’s favorite hymn exhorted, “Put your shoulder to the wheel, push along, do your duty with a heart full of song.” Among many lessons Howard learned from his father were a willingness to work hard and a respect for real estate as an investment. After he had finished law school and returned to St. George, Howard bought a small house for investment purposes on Main Street right across from Dixie College. Later he invested profitably in numerous properties in Las Vegas and in the Washington, D.C., area.

Howard enjoyed a loving and respectful relationship with his father, signified by a son’s appreciation for a hardworking parent. That this example stuck with him was indicated by a wartime letter to his sister inquiring about their father’s health, with questions about how hard he was working and expressions of hope that he could stop working the farm before too long. The concern was well founded, as Walter lived to be “only” sixty-nine, a relatively young age compared with the ninety years of Howard’s life.

For his part, Walter emphasized the importance of higher education to Howard, as if to impress upon him that the hard work of a farmer wasn’t the only option available to him. Howard learned that lesson early and well, recalling nearly seventy years later in an interview with his daughter, Nancy, “Through his example, I knew I wanted to do something else in life other than farm, which meant hard work, mending fences, and knowing the future would always be more of the same. I was willing to do everything I could to follow higher education away from the farm in St. George.”

Howard’s intelligence and maturity soon registered with the neighbors and family acquaintances, and in the summer before he turned six, the first-grade teacher, Miss McAllister, urged Walter and Leah to send him to school a year early. She said she knew the boy was ready for class despite his young age.

By family accounts, Howard competed successfully with his older classmates. Woodward was not a one-room schoolhouse, as Howard’s classes were taught by separate teachers from the first through eighth grades. One childhood trait, his affection for horses, would remain with Howard throughout his life, whether riding in small-town rodeos, cantering through Washington’s Rock Creek Park as a new senator, or riding his golden palomino, Edgewood Sunrise, in full western regalia at the annual Helldorado Days parades in Las Vegas.

“It was kind of a rough-and-tough town back then,” he recalled of St. George years later. “There were cowboys; I was a cowboy myself during those early days. I used to ride horses to school.” His favorite was Old Queenie, a bay mare who lived in the barn behind the house in town and helped him on his paper route delivering the Deseret News around St. George. Howard recalled a specific hallmark of Queenie’s service. “Queenie knew the delivery route so well she would stop in front of every gate or house where I needed to throw a paper,” he remembered. “When I was sick or couldn’t take my route, I had a friend ride her and told him to throw one wherever she stopped, which worked out fine.”

The pattern of work, school, and activities that was fostered in Howard at an early age continued in high school. Dixie High was located within a stone’s throw of Woodward, continuing the close-knit nature of Howard’s upbringing. In addition to playing guard on the football team and fostering a dedication to pole vaulting on the track team, Howard polished the musical skills instilled by the dogged determination of his mother during those daily clarinet lessons. He had added the saxophone to his repertoire somewhere along the way and joined the Dixie High band as a saxophone player.

Although Howard would initially settle on education as a way to take him away from farm life in St. George, his growing prowess as a musician provided another route. In the summers during high school, Howard and two friends from Dixie High—Vella Ruth and LeGene Morris—landed jobs at the North Rim Lodge of the Grand Canyon. “Howard and Gene were employed as bellhops, and I was a waitress,” recalled Vella Ruth. “But we all knew that the real reason for our employment was to entertain the guests. We would work at our regular jobs during the day, then put on a program in the evening for about an hour. Then we would have a dance in the recreation hall,” she added.

The transition from high school to junior college was as easy geographically for Howard as that from elementary to high school, since Dixie Junior College was in the same building as Dixie High. He decided to continue an emphasis on music when he entered Dixie JC. His first two years of college were centered on studying music, debate, and German. According to the 1930 Dixie yearbook, he was also “the only man brave enough to take dramatic art.” He became a member of the college’s advanced band, playing at basketball games and devotional services. One of the purposes of the advanced band was to prepare students for dance orchestra work, and Howard was quick to take advantage of the opportunity. He became a member of the college’s prestigious dance orchestra headed by Earl J. Bleak and later sat in on other dance bands around St. George. He was developing the skills that would provide him both experience and income in his later college and law school days.

Musical studies at Dixie also engendered Howard’s first attempt to use music for wider career goals. He competed in a music contest sponsored by Brigham Young University and was awarded a music scholarship to the well-known school that was considered the epitome of Mormon higher education. The career-minded Howard was at war with the Utah cowboy part of his makeup, however, and he turned down the Brigham Young University scholarship because he thought he might want to play polo at the University of Arizona. If polo was more intriguing to the college sophomore than studying music at BYU, still another opportunity appealed to him at the time: a scholarship to West Point. Howard was eligible to apply to the military academy because he shared top academic ranking at Dixie with classmate Henry Nicholes, whose father was president of the institution and a friend of Howard’s father. Howard first passed the physical part of the West Point entrance requirements, which Henry failed, and then sat for the formal entrance examination.

For perhaps the first time in his life, he met an obstacle he could not overcome and failed to pass the mathematics portion of the exam. This puzzled him because, as he recalled, “I was pretty good in math, too.” He was later informed that an unusually high number of applicants that year also failed the math exam, so West Point allowed all of them to be renominated the following year. For the restless Howard, however, whose mind was mulling everything from music to polo to the military, a year was too far away. “By that time I was ready to go away to school and just skipped it and didn’t take the exam again,” he said.

Still another interest was roiling the college sophomore’s mind, one that would supersede music as an important part of his life: aviation. “I had a yen for flying, for becoming a pilot,” he remembered. “I was probably five or six years old when I first saw an airplane. It landed on Black Hill in St. George. I was about fourteen the first time I got a chance to ride on one. It probably would have been a two-passenger plane. I enjoyed it.”

While passing on some options and seeing others evaporate, Howard eventually focused his career thoughts on two staples of his upbringing: education and music. Specifically, he began to think in terms of becoming a music educator and enrolled in Arizona State Teachers College (ASTC) in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is now Northern Arizona University, majoring in education. Although this was a reasonable compromise between his ambition and his development to that point, he made the decision sound almost accidental in recalling it years later. “I went with two fellows from Santa Clara [outside St. George] down through Flagstaff, where they were going to play basketball,” he said. “When the three of us got there and visited around with the people in the athletic program, they offered all three of us scholarships and work, so we stopped off there and I went to school at Flagstaff rather than going on down to Tucson [the University of Arizona and its polo team].”

Howard recalled that he “did very well in school,” receiving his education degree and graduating from ASTC. An article in a local newspaper gave more details, including Howard’s receipt of a gold key for being named the college’s honor student in music. He had also been president of the Delta Phi Alpha music fraternity in his junior year and president of Sigma Eta Alpha, a local honor society, in his senior year.

The article also mentioned his stewardship of the Lumberjack Collegians, “a dance orchestra which has won a very good reputation in Arizona for its ability to entertain.” It noted that Howard planned to remain in Arizona for the summer, booking his band in resorts such as the dance hall at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon (harking back to his summers at the North Rim), Lake Marie’s Summer Resort near Flagstaff, and the Big Indian Pow-Wow in Flagstaff. Although acknowledging that he “could have been a schoolteacher” at this time in his career, that choice was not enticing enough to the college graduate, who was making a name for himself as a musician and mulling over other possibilities. “For some reason I wasn’t interested in teaching right then,” he recalled, so he turned to his father for counsel. Then a teacher at Dixie College, Walter enlisted a friend, Dixie president Joseph K. Nicholes, to discuss the idea of a law career with Howard. Those two, along with mother Leah, prevailed upon Howard to apply for law school, and he was accepted at the University of Arizona. The ever-practical Walter impressed his son with the argument that even if he did not practice law, it was a good background for business.

Repeating the pattern of Dixie and Flagstaff, Howard combined stewardship of the University of Arizona Concert Band—an impressive group with up to seventy members—with private bookings of musicians he knew. He soon bec...