Lee, J(oseph) Bracken (“Brack”)

(b. 7 January 1899 in Price, Utah; d. 20 October 1996 in Salt Lake City, Utah), mayor of Price, Utah (1936–1947), governor of Utah (1949–1957), and mayor of Salt Lake City (1960–1972), best known for his conservative politics, tax protests, and ambivalent attitudes toward education.

The son of Arthur James Lee, an insurance and real estate salesman, and Ida May Leiter, a homemaker, Bracken attended school in Price, Utah, and in Fruita, Colorado. Lee attended Carbon County High School in Price, but left school two months before graduation to enlist in the army after the U.S. entry into World War I in April 1917. He was stationed in California during the war and served until March 1919, leaving as a sergeant. He then joined his father in an insurance and real estate business, managing and eventually owning the firm.

On 20 September 1920 Lee married Nellie Amelia Pace, a Latter-day Saint (Mormon). They had one child. Nellie died in 1926. On 23 February 1928 Lee married Margaret Ethel Draper. They had three children. Although Lee’s wife and children belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Lee belonged to no church. He was an active Mason.

In the early 1930s, Lee entered politics. A Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic stronghold, Lee ran in 1931 for mayor of Price, an eastern Utah coal-mining city with a population of five thousand. He was soundly defeated. In 1935 he won by two votes. He served six two-year terms (1936–1947) and along the way eliminated the city’s property tax. The city paid for services from 1943 to 1946 through the sale of electricity and water systems owned prior to Lee’s incumbency. He concentrated on constructing a civic auditorium and city hall, in part with assistance from the federal Works Progress Administration and additions to the water and street systems. Lee also carried on a running battle with the state liquor control commission agents and other state agencies.

Lee failed in an attempt to obtain the Republican nomination for governor in 1940. He won the Republican nomination for U.S. representative in 1942 and for governor in 1944, but lost both general elections. In 1948, however, Lee won the governorship of Utah in a hotly contested election, becoming the first Republican to serve as the state’s governor since 1925. He was reelected in 1952.

Although taking office in a state free of debt, Lee moved rapidly to cut the state’s budget. In continuing battles with educators and with the legislature, he saved money by reorganizing the liquor commission and cutting expenditures for education and public works, in part through the line-item veto. Lee reduced property and income taxes and the levy for school equalization. Although all people received some tax reductions, the principal benefits went to corporations like the Kennecott Copper Company and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad.

Perhaps Lee’s most persistent controversies resulted from his efforts to reduce school expenditures. He carried on a running dispute with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction E. Allen Bateman. In 1948, just before Lee became governor, the national expenditure per school child was $179.43, while Utah spent $179.40. In 1957, at the end of Lee’s two terms, the national expenditure had increased to $300 while Utah’s stood at $258, or 86 percent of the national level. In addition, the salaries of Utah’s teachers had dropped behind the national and regional averages. Despite a provision in the state’s constitution requiring uniform school funding throughout Utah, Lee tried unsuccessfully to end both state aid for school construction and state acceptance of federal aid.

Lee carried on a number of other campaigns. He tried to remove commission members appointed by his predecessor, although their statutory terms allowed them to continue serving. He fought battles against lawyers, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, the United Nations, Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice James H. Wolfe, and Utah senator Elbert D. Thomas, a Democrat. On the other hand, he supported the Republican Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his anticommunist campaign. Lee conducted a persistent struggle to end the income tax and to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, which permitted the federal government to levy such a tax. In 1955 and 1956 he refused to pay a portion of his income tax in protest against foreign aid. The Internal Revenue Service attached his bank account to recover the taxes.

Lee tried generally to maintain good relations with members of the LDS Church’s general authorities, and especially with J. Reuben Clark, a counselor in the church’s First Presidency. As an economy measure, he unsuccessfully proposed the return of Weber, Snow, and Dixie Junior Colleges to the LDS Church, which had donated them to the state in the 1930s. On the other hand, he vetoed a Sunday closing bill that Mormons and other Christian groups supported.

Lee’s alienation from Republican moderates led to the defeat of his third-term bid by George D. Clyde in the 1956 Republican primary. In October, Lee launched a somewhat belated independent reelection bid, but ran third in the race. In 1958 he ran again as an independent in a three-way senatorial race with Republican incumbent Arthur V. Watkins and Democrat Frank E. Moss, who was the winner. Lee challenged incumbent Senator Wallace F. Bennett in the 1962 Republican primary; he dropped out of the race after Bennett defeated him. Lee failed to win sufficient support at a Republican state convention to qualify for the Republican primary for governor in 1964.

Meanwhile, in 1959, following his defeat by Moss, Lee won election as mayor of Salt Lake City. He served three four-year terms. At the time, Salt Lake City operated under a commission system, and the mayor had no more power than the other four commissioners. Lee wanted to supervise the city’s finance department, but the commissioners voted to assign him to the more controversial public safety post.

In 1960, shortly after his inauguration, Lee generated a public storm by removing the police chief, W. Cleon Skousen, an anticommunist crusader. Lee locked horns with Skousen over a reduction in the police department budget that Lee had mandated and the commission approved, department policies, and Skousen’s management style. After Skousen’s removal, the commission agreed to change Lee’s assignment to the finance department. Lee promoted public works but opposed urban renewal and the fluoridation of Salt Lake City’s water. He opposed the construction of a sports arena and convention center in downtown Salt Lake City and battled over vice prosecution and finance with Commissioner James L. Barker.

Lee left public life in 1972 at age seventy-three. He died of old age in a Salt Lake City retirement home at the age of ninety-seven and is buried in Salt Lake City.

Lee was the most controversial governor in Utah’s history and may have well been the state’s most controversial political figure. His battles against E. Allen Bateman, W. Cleon Skousen, James L. Barker, James Wolfe, Elbert Thomas, fluoridation, and the IRS, bestow on him little lasting credit. He gained considerable support for his campaign to cut taxes on the state and city levels. Nevertheless, his tax-cutting campaigns damaged Utah’s public, technical, and higher education. On the other hand, time has demonstrated the wisdom of his battles against urban redevelopment to remove minorities and the poor in favor of upscale businesses.

Lee’s correspondence as governor from 1946 to 1957 is at the Utah State Archives in Salt Lake City, Utah. His mayoral papers from 1948 to 1972 are in the Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. Dennis L. Lythgoe, Let ’Em Holler: A Political Biography of j. Bracken Lee (1982), is an excellent biography for which the author received Lee’s assistance. An obituary is in the Salt Lake Tribune (21 Oct. 1996).

Thomas G. Alexander