The late folk singer and labor activist Utah Phillips liked to quote his crony Idaho Blackie, who claimed that voting couldn’t change anything, as evidence for which he claimed that if it could, it would be illegal. What neither man could have anticipated was the extensive contrary evidence on display in the Pilar Pobil Gallery of the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, until May 30 (after which it will move to Moab, Vernal, and Ogden, ending up a year from now in Cedar City). Voices and Votes, variously subtitled “Democracy in America and Utah” and “The Push and Pull of American Democracy,” is a traveling Smithsonian exhibition sponsored by Utah Humanities, with local sponsorship by organizations in each of the venues where it will be seen. At UCCC, that would be the West Valley City Division of Arts & Culture.

The often surprising fact about the Smithsonian is that because it is fundamentally a museum, often called America’s attic, much of the data it houses and historical material it displays are original objects that bring the truth palpably to life. Who could ever forget coming upon the lowly lunch counter, sitting neither on a pedestal nor behind glass, but on the museum’s floor just as it had in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store where on February 1, 1960, four young Black men who were refused service declined to leave? Standing by their actual seats, you realize how vulnerable Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil were during this first ever sit-in. Their courage was matched by their creativity, and throughout the gallery at UCCC are dozens of examples of similarly creative efforts to find out what worked in the struggle to advance the civil rights that were denied so many Americans for so long.

While the struggle over voting in the South had to do with race, in Utah it was all about enfranchising women, an issue where Utah played a leading national role. On February 14, 1870, Seraph Young and 25 or so other women voted in Salt Lake City’s municipal election, becoming the first women to vote in the United States under an equal suffrage law. In 1911, Mayor Mary Woolley Chamberlain and four other women in Kanab were elected to become only the second all-women town council in America. In 1950, Reva Beck Bosone and Ivy Baker Priest were the only two women running for the same congressional seat in the nation. These and other stories about Utah women taking advantage of the vote are told, complete with documentary evidence, in Voices and Votes.

No one should assume that this was some sort of cakewalk to full citizenship. Mormon women were also the only voters to be formally disenfranchised by the federal government. This happened when members of Congress who had hoped Utah women would upend the patriarchy and support their efforts to weaken the Mormon Church, as it was then universally called, realized it wasn’t going to happen. As so often happens when an excluded voter bloc gets to vote, Utah women favored their own issues, like free speech, free religious exercise, and other civil rights that did not extend to attacking the Church.

Anyone following the struggle over who gets to run for office and who gets to vote for them will know that right now, as ever, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Even the interference in Utah affairs by elements of national political power has not changed. There are forces at play that are very concerned with who we vote for, but only so far as it influences events far from Utah.

And here’s the thing. No one I know is happy with the way things are going. The snow is disappearing, the Lake is drying up, the wrong people are getting rich and powerful. The problem is, further, that too many are waiting for a savior to come along and put things right. That’s not going to happen. The only way to save a democracy is by voting. Voices and Votes contains the proof that the ballot not only can change things, but is the only way certain to get back to where we need to be. Sitting this one out is not an option.

Voices and Votes: Democracy in America, Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, through May 30.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.