'Occupy Wall Street' won't bring solutions

On Feb. 23, 1933, the Salt Lake County sheriff's office held a foreclosure sale on six houses and one farm, and quickly had a riot on its hands.

A mob assembled outside the City-County Building, urged on by a speaker who told them to make a demonstration loud enough for the Legislature to understand that the unemployed in Utah meant business.

As the Deseret News reported at the time, the mob partially broke down a door to the room where the sale was ongoing. When officers tried to use a water hose to subdue them, they wrestled the hose away, beat some of the officers and ended up flooding much of the building's first floor.

Describing the incident as a "riot," the paper said the mob finally subsided in the face of tear gas.

Two days later, during a preliminary hearing for 15 men charged in connection with this riot, about 250 volunteer citizens, armed with nightsticks, joined about 50 officers to stand guard. A large crowd outside listened to a speaker characterize the volunteers as "hired assistants of the interests."

The only reason to review this long-forgotten bit of Utah history is to point out what ought to be obvious. Hard economic times lead to anger and unrest. This can be dangerous, and it may not be necessary to articulate a focused or coherent argument in order to organize a mob.

There was no evidence that the original owners of the property were part of the mob, or that they even supported the demonstration. Whether the volunteers who kept the peace were hired by "the interests" is difficult to know because no one ever articulated what those interests were.

In much the same way, the "Occupy Wall Street" protests in recent days, which now have spread all the way to Utah, have been unable to articulate what participants stand for, other than a general discontent with the economy.

As politics abhors a vacuum, the movement won't stay this way long. No doubt sensing a leftward bent among the mostly young crowd, labor unions have stepped in to lend support. Media reports in recent days note how public employee unions have, in particular, joined the ranks. Some are drawing comparisons to the union protests in Wisconsin last winter.