THE TURNER THESIS and MORMON BEGINNINGS in NEW YORK and UTAH BY A L E X A N D E R E V A N O F F
INTRODUCTION
This paper will attempt to apply the Turner thesis to the following two problems, to determine: 1. Whether Mormon faith was of frontier origin, and whether or not it appealed mostly to non-frontier people. This is a twofold problem. 2. Whether the frontier in Utah produced democratic or authoritarian influences. Because it has been assumed that Mormon faith had its gestation, birth, and flowering under varying degrees of frontier conditions, Mormon history and institutions would seem to provide a rather ready-made, if not obvious, test case for the validity of Frederick Jackson Turner's ideas. And yet, it was not until Thomas F. O'Dea's The Mormons in 1957 that anyone attempted, in anything more than a casual way, to relate Turner's theory to Mormon history. However, as a sociologist, one who is unwilling to accept the divine origin of Mormon doctrine, O'Dea is more concerned with showing the cultural and social borrowings which he finds in Mormon life than actually attempting to determine whether or not Mormon democracy or Mormon individualism is a result of frontier conditions. Turner himself refers to the Mormons by name only once, and that in passing, and in connection with the Dunkard, the Icarians, the Fourierists, and similar idealists who sought out the western wilds in search of freedom.1 Mr. Evanoff is professor of English at Indiana State University in Terre Haute and is completing doctoral work at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of articles on Flawthorne, William Dean, Howells, Chaucer, economics, and history. 1 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), 263.
