The Mormons in American History

THE MORMONS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

By William Mulder

I bring you not history so much as an invitation to history, an invitation to take a fresh look at a familiar subject. As historians and keepers of history you know that a history of the world narrowly conceived and poorly written may be very parochial, whereas the history of a town or country written with insight and imagination and a sense of the humanly significant may be universal. All history is inescapably local history in the sense it happened in a particular place at a particular time. Yet a musket fired at Concord bridge may be the shot heard round the world, or a word spoken at Gettysburg find itself addressed to the ages. So I offer no apology for dwelling, especially on this occasion, on an eddy in the mainstream of American history. The eddy is part of the larger current. The waters of history originate in a thousand remote and local springs, but they issue in the same great sea that is the story of mankind.

I

The formal separation of church and state, so dear to the American tradition, has not meant a separation of church and society, religion divorced from our national life. The story of religion in America is in many respects synonymous with the history of our country. From the Bible Commonwealth of colonial New England to the Bible Belt still with us both as a state of mind and as a region, the religious background of American culture deserves equal attention with the political, the social, and the economic. They are, in fact, inseparable. Piety consorted well with commerce in the very founding of our civilization. The connection between religion and American life has remained organic and surprisingly vital, whether we think of Jehovah's Witnesses selling their Watchtowers on our street corners or of the revival of Harvard's Divinity School under Paul Tillich. Lift any of America's respective faiths out of the cocoon in which their limited denominational histories have wrapped them, and they take on new interest in the vivid light of this connection.

Mormonism seen in this perspective assumes an unusual identity with American history, all the more because it is as native to the United States as Indian corn and the buffalo nickel. We have to specify an American Judaism or an American Catholicism, but Mormonism is American by birth, although the United States was long reluctant to accept the honor. In its New England origins, its Utopian experiments and reforms, its westward drive, and its early expansion to Europe resulting in a great program of immigration and settlement, nineteenthcentury Mormonism expressed prominent traits and tendencies that were already shaping American society. It was not simply a colorful reflection of the times; it was a dynamic reworking of the diverse elements of American culture. Mormonism is unique primarily in the way it combined these elements, in what it added or neglected, making it now a perfect epitome of its time and place, and now a puzzling contradiction.

In early Mormon theology, for example, we get a fairly complete cross section of the American mind in the early nineteenth century. In the current argument among scholars over the degree and nature of the nineteenth century's optimism and stress on progress, Mormon eschatology is especially pertinent. It embraced both the belief in progress and the underlying sense of doom and destruction in an era we have too simply thought of as a romantic Age of Jackson.

Other illustrations come easily to mind. The Mormons believed in universal salvation and perfectibility, the theological counterpart, perhaps, of the democratic faith in the common man and his natural goodness; but they also believed in blood atonement, suggesting a sense of man's guilt so deep that only the spilled blood of the wicked smoking up to heaven could save them. Implicit in the hope of millennium were the wrath and judgment which would first be poured out upon a wicked generation. The Utopian communities of the Rappites, the Moravians, the Shakers, the Fourierists, the Owenites, and the Mormons were at one and the same time an expression of optimism and of disillusionment, a radical rebuke of the imperfections of the existing social order.

Mormonism's social experiments are another illustration of the way it captured the spirit of the times. The Word of Wisdom was its version of the widespread temperance movement in a day when even bran had its prophets, water cures had become a fad, and Sylvester Graham, who also did not believe in using meat, tea, or coffee, gave his name to a health bread. The temperance movement gained enough momentum to become a political force, but the Word of Wisdom went in a moral direction: it reads like scripture rather than just another health platform, and it holds out a unique spiritual promise: all who do and keep its sayings shall not only run and not be weary and walk and not faint, but they shall furthermore gain treasures of great knowledge, even hidden treasures.

Again, the Order of Enoch, or the first United Order, tried briefly in Missouri from 1831 to 1833, was Mormonism's version of economic equality. Through its law of consecration and stewardship it hoped to preserve initiative and avoid the pitfalls of common stock that were ruining communal societies living like big families. In principle it tried to bring together the advantages of both private enterprise and cooperation. In the same way the blueprint for the ideal city of Zion tried to combine the advantages of town and country living, an anticipation of the garden cities of our own time. And in the same way Mormonism combined the advantages of lay leadership and central authority in giving the priesthood to every man subject to the direction of revelation from the president and prophet.

Again, polygamy was the Mormon version of the daring attempts by contemporaries to modify the basic structure of the family, attempts which ran from the celibacy of the Shakers at one extreme to the free love of the Oneida Community at the other. The Oneida people under Charles Humphrey Noyes, whose descendants today manufacture the famous Oneida Community Plate, called their system Complex Marriage. It shortly became a eugenics experiment in controlled mating to produce superior offspring. The Mormons argued the same selectivity for polygamy, with women better off with part of one good man than with all of a bad one. Sooner or later an expansive America had to produce its cult of fertility to match its own teeming natural abundance. But polygamy was not a pagan indulgence: a Puritan asceticism disciplined it in practice and an Old Testament sociology exalted it. Only the image of Mormon clerks and farmers seeing themselves as Abrahams and girding themselves for godhood in the eternities to come can fully explain this most imaginative of all doctrines.

In its sociology Mormonism expressed the bold, experimental spirit of the times, on occasion moving far ahead of them. In its theology, however, it reacted strongly against the progressive religious liberalism of the day which made the mind its own church. Mormonism returned to the Puritan tradition which made church covenants as important as civil covenants. Again the Mormons combined elements: they combined dissent with authority; they restored the one true authoritative church, as they supposed, with a divinely ordained prophet to lead it but reserved to the membership at large the right of common consent to the nominations from on high. With Emerson and his Transcendentalists they claimed inspiration for every man, a priesthood of all believers, but they avoided the dangers of antinomianism by channeling revelation and putting approved interpretations on Scripture. Mormonism had no traffic with the wild revivalism of the times; Joseph Smith quickly disposed of the barks and the jerks and maverick revelation by branding them of the devil. In its insistence on the role of intelligence — of "Scripture and right reason" — Mormonism expressed its New England intellectual tradition. Its School of the Prophets at Kirtland, Ohio, was a venture in adult education. "They are by no means men of weak minds," reported an early observer. The Mormons were confident that nothing science would discover would betray the revelations of living prophets or the Word of God in the Scriptures. It remains a sublime belief among devout Mormons today.

Besides these topical connections, the Mormons had dramatic connections with American history in time and space. In their westward movement they were like the fine filament preceding the thread as it seeks the eye of the needle. They were part of the vanguard of settlement that was already making the Oregon and California Trail a dusty highway. The first company of Mormon pioneers, by the way, was not a ragged band of refugees but the best prepared of all western overlanders in terms of purpose, knowledge of the country, organization, and equipment. What made the Mormon participation the more dramatic was their three-fold commitment to the westward-running stream in 1846, the "year of decision": first, the main body of pioneers which evacuated Nauvoo in February and, after wintering over in Iowa and Nebraska, went on to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847; second, a company of Saints which left New York in the same month on the sailship Brooklyn and made its way around the Horn to Yerba Buena, now San Francisco, to become the first American settlers in the San Joaquin Valley and publishers of San Francisco's first newspaper; and finally, the Mormon Battalion, which was mustered in along the pioneer trail to march against Mexico, going by way of Santa Fe and taking the first wagons over the route later followed by the Southern Pacific. Several members of the Battalion, scattering for employment in California, were among the workmen who discovered flakes of gold in the mill race they were building for John Sutter on the American River. Ironically, they helped to start the great rush of Forty-Niners who converted Salt Lake Valley from a hoped-for isolated refuge into the Half-Way House in the Wilderness, a great crossroads of the West.

In national affairs the Mormons were at times like the small cloud on the horizon heralding the gathering storm. Their differences with Missouri, for example, were in part the differences of New Englanders with Southerners over slavery. The Mormons not only considered themselves the meek who should inherit the earth, which made old settlers uneasy, but the Mormons besides favored the "free people of color," a position they later repudiated. But at the time it was a touchy point in Missouri, for such a caste would set slaves a bad example. "Mormonism, emancipation, and abolitionism must be driven from our State," cried one frontiersman. The anti-Mormon outrages in Missouri in 1833 and again in 1838 were the counterpart of the anti-abolitionist violence breaking out all over the country. In 1835 respectable Boston dragged the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison through the streets by a rope, intending to hang him. In 1837 Alton, Illinois, murdered Elijah Lovejoy after twice destroying his emancipationist press. "Is not this a free state?" Lovejoy had asked, echoing the Mormons. "Have I not a right to claim the protection of the laws?" The Mormons were not in fact abolitionists, but gradualists. Joseph Smith in 1844 advanced the progressive idea that the national government should purchase the slaves from their owners with money from the sale of public lands. But the country paid instead the price of civil war.

The Mormons were involved in other touchy issues of the day. Early in their career they encountered the same blind prejudice and mass hatred that greeted the Freemasons. Like Freemasonry, Mormonism bred suspicion because to nativists it seemed secret, undemocratic, and subversive of American institutions. Mormon rights as a religious minority tested the larger issue of states' rights. Mormon appeals to Congress and the President for redress after expulsion from Missouri in 1838 got no satisfaction because the national government felt it had no jurisdiction. "Your cause is just but I can do nothing for you," said Van Buren. Whereupon Joseph Smith, after a visit to Washington, declared, "He is not as fit as my dog for the chair of state," and vowed Van Buren would lose 100,000 Mormon votes throughout the country. The Mormons bewailed what they felt was a betrayal of the Constitution, leaving them at the mercy of arrogant state governments. The Prophet was led to run for President because neither Clay nor Calhoun could give him satisfaction on the Mormon question. Nullification, secession, and finally the Civil War tested the whole issue of the relative jurisdiction of the federal government and the states.

Another "Mormon Question" to vex the nation was Utah's long struggle for statehood: Mormon theocracy, complicated by polygamy and the influx of thousands of supposedly ignorant and subservient immigrants, seemed a bad risk to the Union, and Utah had to be content with carpetbag government for forty years. Reverend John P. Newman in the 1870's called for General Sherman to march through Utah as he had marched through Georgia. It was all too reminiscent of Missouri, a period of conflict so bitter and prolonged that the Mormon-Gentile complex on occasion still divides the state.

II

This rapid review of a few highlights — theological, social, and political — may suggest how Mormonism was at once traditional and different in American experience. As a movement making religion both the center and the circumference of daily life, it released energies that made it a wayward current in the mainstream of our history and earned it a lasting notoriety. In our own day a Mormon girl has been crowned Miss America, a Mormon apostle has been named to the President's cabinet, and the great Tabernacle Choir from Salt Lake City has received the applause of Europe in an unprecedented tour; but the news was at one time more sensational and on occasion the country's chief diversion.

In a letter now preserved in the Coe Collection at Yale, we have an early inkling of the excitement Mormonism was to create. On February 12, 1830, Lucius Fenn of Covert in upstate New York wrote an old neighbor in Connecticut about a curious book being published at Palmyra, some fifty miles away. It was said to be a bible which had been concealed in a stone chest in the earth for fourteen hundred years and which an angel had now revealed to a man named Joseph who could not read at all in English but who could read the book's gold leaves. Along with Freemasonry, the temperance movement (which Fenn called "the cold sober societies"), and the considerable stir religion was making that winter in the lake country, the gold bible was the news of the day. "It is expected that it will come out soon," wrote Fenn, "so that we can see it. It speaks of the Millenniam [sic] day and tells when it is a going to take place. . . . Some people think that it is all a speculation and some think that something is a going to take place different from what has been. For my part," Fenn confided, "I do not know how it will be but it is something singular to me." He could only hope that in a time of "general solemnity upon the people in these parts" there would be "a greater outpouring of the spirit than ever."

In March, 1830, within a few weeks of Fenn's remarkable letter, the Boo{ of Mormon appeared and on April 6 Joseph Smith, the youtiiful Yankee seer whose visionary powers had already won him a local reputation, founded his Church of Christ.

Mormonism proved as singular as Lucius Fenn had speculated. Its earliest years, from the miracle at Cumorah to the martyrdom at Carthage, were the lengthened shadow of Joseph Smith himself as he rose from village seer to American prophet. In his progress from Palmyra to Nauvoo he commanded attention in an age already full of the uncommon doings of common men. His unfolding theology seemed tuned to all the reform fiddles of the times, and he filled the breathless years of his brief but crowded career with expectations of the millennium and the Second Coming, with worldwide evangelism and practical programs of immigration and settlement and town planning, and with political aspirations and social nonconformities which the frontier, despite its vaunted individualism, could not abide. A powerful original mind, but untaught by the lessons of history, the Prophet came at length to regard himself, as Whittier put it, "a miracle and a marvel." He aroused deep loyalties and rankling hatreds. The hatreds finally destroyed him; the loyalties kept alive his movement after him.

Mormonism was a movement in a very real sense. In their efforts to plant Zion the restless Mormons were constantly in motion. In less than a generation they crossed the continent in one tragic uprooting after another, leaving their houses unsold and their crops unharvested in a dozen communities hopefully begun in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, until the final removal to the West. Mormon names still dot the map from Mormon Hill in New York to Mormon Island in California, with historic Mormon roads and trails and ferries in between. In the process the Mormons became a genuine people, a covenant folk like ancient Israel with a shared history and at last a homeland. They moved within a magnificent metaphor, the image of themselves as Latter-day Israel. The parallel sustained them, and events sustained the parallel. Persecution and martyrdom deepened the image. Their exodus under Brigham Young, an American Moses, and their chronicles in early Deseret, the new Land of Promise — with its Dead Sea and River Jordan, and with its patriarchal order of marriage and the ensuing struggle with the Philistines, or Gentiles — completed the Old Testament likeness. Emerson, visiting Brigham Young in 1871, noted this Biblical imagination and called the Mormons "an afterclap of Puritanism."

It is all part of a highly usable past. The mind of even the backsliding Mormon today teems with the scenes and images of his heritage. There is much in Mormonism that is merely curious, quaint, and picturesque, and much in the past that is lurid. But a leopard is more than his spots. There is much in Mormonism that is moving and significant as the history of a people earnestly seeking New Jerusalem on the American frontier and diligently preparing themselves to be its fit inhabitants.

As late as 1920 my father landed in Hoboken, New Jersey, a Dutch printer and his young family bound for Zion in the New World as the Pilgrim Fathers had once set out for New Canaan. Coming to America was still a religious experience. For six years we dwelt among the Gentiles, like Ruth amid the alien corn, earning enough to pay our immigration debt and helping other families to come over. Each year found us more eager to move on to Salt Lake, the saintly city of our dreams. As a ten-year-old, I had read the poem "Out Where the West Begins," and I could hardly wait for the handclasp that was a little stronger and the smile that lasted a little longer. At last, in 1926, the family packed its belongings into a sway-backed, seven-passenger, fourcylinder Willys-Knight and headed west along the newly completed Lincoln Highway. I remember how we shouted when we crossed the Utah line. We felt kin to Columbus kneeling on the blessed shores of the Bahamas and William Bradford praising God for safe arrival at Plymouth. My Uncle Bill, who was with us, I remember blew a long blast on his battered army bugle. It was an act of pure joy. We had at length, six years and six thousand miles after our departure from Rotterdam, come home. We were not unlike early wagon trains of Mormon immigrant-converts who used to pause in the mountains as they approached Zion's borders. After a prayer of thanksgiving, the pioneer men shaved and put on clean shirts, and the women donned their Sunday best for the final descent into the Valley, where they were often met by music and gifts of flowers and fruit and were promptly rebaptized in City Creek to wash away the sins of Babylon with the dust of the journey. They were renewing more than their covenants: they were renewing a characteristic American experience, an experience as old as the discovery of America and as new as the arrival of the latest refugees from Hungary.

America as a land of promise and destiny, where the ancient dream of a more abundant life could be realized, is a major theme in Mormon as in American history. It finds eloquent expression in "the gathering," long the heart of the whole Mormon movement. The gathering, not polygamy, is Mormonism's oldest and most influential doctrine. It looked back to the promises made to ancient Israel and forward to the Second Coming. It was Mormonism's way of channeling what the nineteenth century called the religious affections; it disciplined into action the fervor that in revival faiths was dissipated in an aimless love affair with Christ.

Mormonism, like other adventist faiths, was a millennial proclamation, a warning that a final judgment was at hand. But it was also a program designed to prepare for this eventuality. The gathering involved more than a trip to the sinner's bench. It was to be a roll call of Saints without halos, an assembling of a people not already saved but eager to create conditions under which salvation might be achieved. This determination was the mainspring of Mormon social reform, whether it was a United Order or a Deseret Alphabet. Building the Kingdom meant providing an environment that would regenerate the adult and rear the young so that they would never know themselves otherwise than Saints. Salvation was an on-going process: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may be," so runs the most quoted line in Mormon doctrine. To become like God required an eternity, an endless unfolding of regenerated powers by study, faith, experience, and the intelligence which is the glory of God. The immediate need before the trump sounded was to get out of Babylon and unite with God's people to await greater spiritual endowments.

Inspiration for the gathering sprang from a literal interpretation of Scripture, from a providential reading of history, and from the circumstances of free-land society in early nineteenth-century America. Joseph Smith split the Biblical metaphor of Zion and Jerusalem: he saw Judah returning to Jerusalem, Israel to Zion. And America was Zion. While other millennialists set a time, the Mormons appointed a place. America was the preordained site of this stupendous homecoming of the Lord's scattered hosts. On this continental stage the last great dramas foretold in the Old and New Testaments would be enacted: Daniel's stone would roll forth, St. John's heavenly city come to earth, and Rachel would weep no more for her children. For this, all history had been mere prologue. The discovery of America by Columbus, the Reformation in Europe, the coming of the Pilgrim Fathers, the founding of the Republic, and the raising of "that glorious standard" as the Mormons called the Constitution, were all preliminary to this grand design. "The happiness of America," as George Washington himself believed, was in turn to be but "the first link in a series of universal victories."

The Mormons made this common Protestant view of Providence controlling America's destiny peculiarly their own. In Mormon sermons, the American eagle spread broad wings. In a Fourth of July oration in Salt Lake City in 1853, Parley P. Pratt, Mormon apostle, gave America and the latter-day gathering a central role in leading the world to seek deliverance from oppression, not by local revolutions, but by a "voluntary emerging into freedom." Providence, he said, opened the way whereby "the first and best spirits from all countries might liberate themselves." Though they could not master their tyrants at home, they could leave the Old World to crumble in its own decay and come to America. In time their influence would change the old cultures. It was to be a two-way passage of liberated peoples and liberating ideas in a day of unrestricted immigration and no iron curtains. Pratt echoed an earlier patriot. Thomas Paine in his famous tract The Rights of Man had already observed that America was the country best suited for the beginning of "universal reformation." Mormonism attempted it in miniature. Zion was to be model for America as America was to be model for the world.

Joseph Smith's vision of Zion, a holy commonwealth, was nothing new in his America. Everywhere, as we have seen, communitarian societies, secular and religious — backwoods Utopias as Bestor calls them — were springing up protesting a wicked and competitive world. What was different was the Mormon Prophet's continental imagination, the magnitude of his dream, and its adaptation of Biblical prophecies and events to the American scene. Mormon scriptures like the Book °f Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants assisted in this naturalization. Not only was America the promised land, and not only was Missouri, heart of the continent, to be the site of the New Jerusalem. It had in fact, said the Prophet, been the site of the Garden of Eden itself; not Mesopotamia, but the great valley of the Mississippi had been the cradle of mankind, and the Prophet pointed to the very spot where Adam, Ancient of Days, had once built an altar and where he would come again to preside over his righteous progeny.

Once more Mormon belief reflected a contemporary idea and went beyond it: America as the Garden of the World, an Arcadia of civilizations, was just then pleasing America's poets and painters, whose imaginations were being fired by a bountiful and still virgin land extending from the Hudson to the Columbia. The Book of Mormon was part of that literature, as moral as it was romantic. With its grand refrain of the continent as a favored land providentially preserved for the gathering of a righteous people, it provided the American dream its own scripture and endowed it with sacred legend. Whatever else the Boo\ of Mormon may be, it is America's oldest immigration story, chronicling several folk wanderings. It gave the country the immemorial past it yearned for. Centuries before the Pilgrim Fathers, it said, America had sheltered refugee bands from the Old World. Their survivors were the Lamanites, America's Indians, who were to be won back to a knowledge of their forefathers and become a "white and delightsome people." The moral of the Book was unmistakable: only by serving Jesus Christ, the God of the land, had any civilization flourished in America. America on these terms, taught the Prophet, had been held in special remembrance for the righteous in ages past, was even now fulfilling its characteristic role as a sanctuary, and for the redeemed would provide an inheritance in eternity.

The doctrine of inheritance went hand in glove with the doctrine of the gathering, domesticating for the American freeholder the promises made to Abraham. The prospect of a stake in an agrarian Kingdom, a celestial homestead of forty acres on a renewed and redeemed earth, was long the lodestone of the Mormon convert. Joseph Smith's four-square plat of the City of Zion, an idealized New England town with adjacent farmlands, could have been conceived only in a freeland society. It was to serve as pattern for the communities with which he hoped to fill up the earth, just as his contemporary Charles Fourier, the French socialist whose idea influenced Brook Farm, hoped to fill up the earth with his phalanxes. Only Fourier would make Constantinople on the Golden Horn the archphalanx, his secular New Jerusalem, the natural capital of the world, whereas the Mormons would plant theirs on the American frontier. Fourier would adorn his capital as Joseph Smith would adorn Zion's chief city, with all the material and cultural splendors befitting a world seat.

In this respect the Mormons had extravagant hopes for Nauvoo, the beautiful city which they redeemed from a swamp on a great bend of the Mississippi in Illinois. By 1843 they were calling it "the great emporium of the west," confident it would take the lead in art, science, and literature as well as religion. The Saints emigrating to Zion from afar were urged to "snatch from the ruins of ancient greatness everything . . . interesting, great, valuable, and good" and bring it to Nauvoo to make it the city set upon a hill to which the whole world would look while kingdoms elsewhere were crumbling. "We must send kings and governors to Nauvoo," said Joseph Smith, "and we will do it."

What for other millennial faiths marked the end, for the Mormons was just the beginning. Their expectation of the Second Coming was momentary, but they planned for mansions on earth rather than in the sky. The Advent itself would bring no more than a change in administration, so to speak — the benevolent monarchy of the King of Kings. The Kingdom, already established, would go right on, and its yeomanry would keep their inheritances, tilling their fields and tending their shops as they had done the day before. If in America every man was king, in the Mormon Zion every man was to be king and priest. This breathtaking vision of Zion was Biblical, its ardor and materialism characteristically American. It could have been conceived only in the heady atmosphere of Jacksonian democracy, when, as Lowell put it, every man carried a blueprint for Utopia in his pocket.

III

Zion, with the great heart of the gathering pumping converts and their resources into it, made history in two directions — in the west and in Europe. The Mormons planted approximations of the ideal on the frontier and took Zion's image abroad, where Mormonism became an influential American "ism" leading thousands of northern Europeans to try America's promise on Mormon terms. The ideal was tried briefly in its purest form in Jackson County, Missouri, in the early 1830's; in the city-state of Nauvoo in the 1840's; and in Deseret's theocracy, quickly modified after the arrival of the first federal officials in 1852 but a very lively and visible ghost for years afterward.

America rejected each of these attempts, and for the traditional American reason that the Mormons united the civil and religious order to an uncomfortable degree and posed a political threat. The Mormons interpreted the Biblical Kingdom all too realistically. Americans insisted that God must not dare unite what man and the Constitution had sundered. It was once possible to arouse the nation with the implications of Mormon power for American freedom, just as certain factions attempt today with the implications of Catholic power for American freedom, on the theory that both Mormon and Catholic allegiance is supranational, demanding loyalty to church first and only secondly to country. From Missouri to Utah, Zion's changing fortunes described an arc of conflict growing out of this major issue. The root of the trouble was political, but it sprang from the religious principle of community. Missouri in the 1830's, seeing Jackson County fill up with Mormons, offered to buy them out, but the doctrine of inheritance went so deep the Mormons could not be brought to part with their dedicated lands. "To sell our land would amount to a denial of our faith," they said. The old settlers mistakenly feared the Mormons as another Israel ready under Joseph Smith as Joshua to take Canaan by the sword. Vowing to drive them from Daviess to Caldwell and from Caldwell to hell, Missouri expelled them from one county after another in a series of civil wars. In Illinois in the 1840's, where once more the Mormons congregated in exclusive settlements, both Democrats and Whigs at first curried Mormon favor, for the Mormons held the balance of power in Hancock County. A backwoods lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was one of the state legislators to vote for a liberal charter which made Nauvoo a virtual city-state with a municipal court having wide powers of habeas corpus and with a Mormon arm of the state militia in the form of the Nauvoo Legion. Joseph Smith seemed at last safe from the snares of his enemies.

But Joseph Smith as prophet, mayor, and lieutenant general personified an un-American alliance. The Mormons might believe, as their Articles of Faith said they believed, in "being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law," until Christ came, whose right it was to reign; but meanwhile the country refused to accept Joseph Smith as Deity's vice-gerent. Besides, in the name of religion he outraged one sacred American institution by introducing polygamy, and finally — and fatally for him — he assaulted another American untouchable, the freedom of the press. His arbitrary seizure of the dissenting Expositor press in 1844 sealed his death warrant. But it was a mob that destroyed him rather than due process, and he died a martyr.

The longest trial of Mormon social and political nonconformity growing out of its religious collectivism came in Utah after an exodus from Nauvoo which rivaled the trek of the Boers in South Africa and the flight of Longfellow's Evangeline and her fellow Acadians from Nova Scotia. At the outset Zion in the West was the provisional State of Deseret, a regional empire bounded by the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras, the Oregon country and Mexico, with a corridor opening to San Diego on the Pacific as an eventual port of entry for immigrants expected to come the water route around the Horn. Congress clipped Deseret's wings in the Compromise of 1850 and caged it in as the territory of Utah. But it still challenged the imagination, for it included Nevada, western Colorado, and parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Arizona.

Utah's present greatly altered boundaries, seemingly so arbitrary on the map, actually reflect political, social, and economic realities: as the silver mines opened in and around Carson City in the western and in the Colorado Rockies in the eastern extremes of the territory, attracting Gentile populations, separatist movements developed and Utah lost ribs in the creation of neighboring territories which soon outran her in achieving statehood. The Nevada and Colorado lines drawn down the approximate middles of the no man's lands between the Mormons and the Gentiles east and west of them, preserved the social and political integrity of what geographers call the Salt Lake Oasis, the heartland of the Mormon Kingdom. Even today it is essentially intact, though modified by the inroads of other interests for nearly a century. The unity of daily life within the early Mormon Kingdom and the forces gradually giving Zion the face we know today are of course the whole history of Utah, a colorful patch on the nation's garment.

Utah was a land where the Mormons at last could be the original settlers, keeping the outsider in the decided minority. Brigham Young at once sent out exploring parties to discover every habitable valley and preempt the Kingdom. If arable land was scarce and water the price of blood, the limitation proved an advantage: a federal commission in 1888 noted ruefully that the Mormons "have not only settled but have filled all of tillable Utah," and concluded that "those who hold the valleys and appropriate and own the waters capable of use for irrigation, own and hold Utah, and nature has fortified their position more strongly than it could be done by any Chinese wall or artificial defense."

Colonizing the drought-ridden, scattered valleys of Zion demanded co-operation both far-flung and intimate, with every new settlement part of the larger design and every settler a responsive part of the community in a life at once determined by desert conditions and overcoming them. The Mormon farm-village at the same time expressed an ideal — it was the Kingdom in small, patterned after Joseph Smith's blueprint for the City of Zion. Isolation, Indians, irrigation, and a New England town tradition were merely immediate causes of what already had a final cause in the heavenly model.

As pioneers the Mormons differed little, perhaps, from Americans pioneering other frontiers. But as yeomen developing Zion they were significantly different. Desperate private struggle and life-saving cooperation were common enough on the American frontier, but on the Mormon frontier the idea of the Kingdom encouraged survival when lesser hopes failed, and the conditions of life "under the ditch" promoted co-operation not merely occasional like a house-raising or a harvesting bee but daily and endemic to the society. Their commitment to Zion's larger purposes was all that sustained the Mormon settlers through successive adversities — mat and the unfaltering example of Brigham Young, whose annual visitations magnetized the commonwealth. His voice and his handshake were a living experience as he made his progress through the settlements. He was the President of the High Priesthood and Governor of the Territory, but also always "Brother Brigham," who knew his people intimately and their need of his homely advice.

The artists conception of Salt Lake City in the 1860's. The blueprint for the City of Zion, an idealized New England town with adjacent farmlands, tried to combine the advantages of town and country living, an anticipation of the garden cities of today.

The Mormon village was a state of mind framed by the Old Testament, with daily affairs constantly seen in the light of eternity. It was a snug cosmology for the believers, who worked out their civic and religious problems by common consent — by motion, discussion, and vote — whether it was to put down card-playing, to take an assignment to the "cotton mission," or to expel a member for sending his children to a Gentile school. It was expected, of course, that the outcome would always conform to the ideals of the Kingdom and uphold the hands of "those in authority" in whose inspiration they believed. Whoever was not content to exercise his influence always within the determined pattern, soon found himself numbered among the apostates. A closed society like Zion, where every social and civil difference amounted to a religious difference, could not brook dissenters. There was no room for what the British Parliament calls a loyal opposition. Who was not for the Kingdom was against it. The archetype lay in heaven itself, which had cast out the rebel angels.

The world outside, unaware of Zion's unique workings, saw in all this only an oppressive society made up largely of the ignorant and the superstitious. The cathedral builders of medieval Europe would have understood Zion's unity and devotion, but not a Protestant America, more at home among warring and freespoken sects and splinters. Denominational crusaders bent on Christianizing Utah, and political carpetbaggers bent on wresting control from Mormon hands considered Utah alien and seditious and kept it a vassal territory for nearly half a century. The slanders of quarrelsome federal officials brought an army to Utah in 1857 to quell a supposed rebellion and replace Brigham Young with a new governor. After the Civil War, which the Saints considered God's judgment on the nation for their sufferings in Missouri, the country turned its undivided attention to the "Mormon Question." "We mean to put that business of the Mormons through," a New Englander told a British traveler in 1866. "We have done a bigger job in the South; and we shall now fix things up in Salt Lake City."

Extremists called for cannon of the biggest bore to thunder the seventh commandment into the Mormons; they wanted to dissolve the legislature and govern Utah by commission; they clamored for enforceable legislation that would disfranchise polygamists and prohibit Mormon immigration. On a rising tide of public feeling against the Mormons, one congressional bill after another and one presidential message after another sought the formula that would at last throttle Utah's unorthodoxies. Against a background of bitter enmity between the Mormon People's party and the Gentile Liberal party in Utah, Governor Eli Murray in 1883 warned the country that Utah beset them with "another irrepressible conflict." The Edmunds Act that year sent the cohabs, as polygamists were called, underground; and in 1887 the Edmunds-Tucker Act finally brought the Mormons to their knees: it disincorporated the church itself, disfranchised the women, dissolved the Perpetual Emigrating Fund, and led to the Manifesto of 1890 abandoning polygamy. The next year the United States added polygamists to the excluded classes in the Immigration Act, along with paupers and imbeciles.

But it was anticlimax. The legislation merely hastened what changing social and economic conditions were already accomplishing. By 1896 Utah was considered unspotted enough to be admitted to the Union. The conflict and crusade gave way to an era of good feeling, and the Mormons became in time eminently respected.

Zion, once preached with so much intensity and conviction, and expressed in the great program of gathering into Utopian communities on the frontier, was no longer a closed society. As the price of survival it had to accommodate itself to the times. Mormonism's millennial hope burned out, the great events which had seemed so imminent retreated into a future comfortably remote, and Mormonism settled down to an indefinite postponement of prophecy. It spiritualized its message and no longer frightened the nation as an imperium in imperio. Insisting less on building a literal Kingdom, it joined hands with eastern capital to build instead a greater Intermountain West.

A visitor to Salt Lake City once observed that the angel Moroni on its temple spire seen at nightfall "seems to have very little to do with Mormon his father, or Joseph Smith his prophet, or the Hill Cumorah or the golden plates, but a great deal to do with human aspiration." To Mormons, of course, he has everything to do with all of these. But it is well that out of Mormonism and its history, at once so strange and so familiar in the American tradition, there should come the figure of the angel at sunset with something to say for all men. Among the Mormons, though perhaps not of them, it is today possible to foster a humanity broader tiian any dogma. Salt Lake City is the home, not of any single or singular people, but of every questing spirit who lives, or has lived, here deeply. If it is not yet the prophetic City of God, it is on occasion, as I hope you find it, certainly an hospitable City of Man.

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