A Re-Evaluation of the "Turner Thesis and Mormon Beginnings...."

Re -Evaluation of the of "Turner Thesis and Mormon Beginnings...."

BY DAVIS BITTON

Alexander Evanoff's recent article in the Utah Historical Quarterly seeks to test the applicability of the Turner thesis — which posited a causal connection between the frontier and democratic individualism — to the Mormon experience. Since the Mormons of the nineteenth century were seldom thought of as being typically American in either democracy or individualism, and since some authorities have even denied that Mormonism was a frontier religion, it is not an easy task to see it as a manifestation of the Turner thesis. Attempting to refute these basic objections, Evanoff has gone on to conclude that "Mormon response to environment would seem to be in accord with Turner's expectations." Since his article proceeds from a basic misreading of Mormon history to draw unwarranted conclusions as to the validity of the frontier thesis, it will not do to let it stand unchallenged.

As a minimal basis for discussion, we need to know whether Mormonism can be described as a frontier religion. There are several possible approaches to the question, the most obvious of which is to determine whether the different geographical regions to which the Mormons gravitated can be accurately described, at the time they were there, as being part of the frontier. These regions, in sequence, are western New York in 1829-30, Ohio and western Missouri in the 1830's, western Illinois from 1839 to 1845, and the Great Basin after 1847. Only one of these, New York, is discussed at any length. Evanoff considers the whole question disposed of if he can show that western New York was on the frontier.

When we discover how he resolves the question with respect to New York, we can understand why he considered it unnecessary to carry the matter further. For it is not really by asserting the availability of unimproved land, the primitive threshing technique, and the low prices of wheat that Evanoff can hope to refute Whitney Cross's data on the existence of urban institutions, the influence of the Erie Canal, and the relatively high population density. One might question how much unimproved land was available, at what prices, and with what chronological variations; or how the threshing technique in New York differed from that used elsewhere; or how the price of wheat varied from year to year and how this differed, if at all, from the prices in other regions of the country. But there would be no point to such queries, for the simple fact is that western New York was frontier or was not frontier according to one's definition. And what Evanoff does, in short, is to call up Turner's most capacious and expandable definitions and then conclude that Turner's "broad and shifting definitions of 'frontier' would [appear to] be inclusive enough to include western New York."

But if the frontier is to be defined so broadly that it includes everything from the outer edge of settlements back through various regions which at one time were on the outer edge, the term becomes useless as an analytical tool. Often in Turner's own writings and throughout most of the present article, the assumption seems to be that there are two kinds of land: one which we can color green on the map and label "Frontier," the other which we can color yellow and label "Non-frontier." The catch is that one is hard pressed to find any region which does not fit under one or another of Turner's "broad and shifting definitions" of the frontier. "As an analytical device," Richard Hofstadter has said, the frontier thesis is "a blunt instrument."

What we want to know about western New York is not whether but how and to what extent it was frontier land in 1830. And these are the questions we need answered about Ohio, about Missouri, about Illinois, and about the Great Basin, with careful attention to geographical differences and chronological development. None of this do we find in Evanoff's article.

Another approach to deciding whether Mormonism was a frontier religion is to determine the geographical origin of its converts. Whitney Cross, basing his conclusions on an analysis of the 1860 U.S. census returns for Utah, had earlier asserted that most Mormons came from the East and from Europe rather than from the American frontier. Now Evanoff has gone over the same returns, concluding that "well over half of the Mormon membership came from non-eastern states or territories." There are several flaws in his presentation — including the assumption that the foreign-born population of Utah represented the total number of foreign converts, and more serious, the failure to distinguish between converts and children born to Mormon parents in Illinois — but it would be pointless to discuss them here. For one thing if it is essential to the Turnerian interpretation to know whether or not Mormon converts came largely from frontier regions, we are well advised to rely on the meticulous dissertation which S. George Ellsworth completed at Berkeley in 1950. Ellsworth found, for example, that during the 1830's and 1840's Mormon converts came chiefly from areas with a population density of 18-90 inhabitants per square mile, areas neither frontier nor urban but generally representative of American population distribution as a whole. Although important questions remain unanswered, largely due to a paucity of data, the indications are that very few Mormon converts had previously been frontiersmen in any meaningful sense.

More to the immediate point, I fail to see how this question relates to the frontier thesis. All frontiers drew their population, to a greater or lesser extent, from the more established regions of the East. It is the influence of the frontier environment that is at issue, according to Turner's formulation, and not the geographical origin of the settlers. Whether western New York was on the frontier in 1830 and whether Mormonism appealed primarily to frontier people are the questions to which Evanoff devotes more than half of his article. Thus stated, these questions — even had they been satisfactorily answered — are irrelevant to the frontier thesis as it is usually understood.

Another possible approach to the question of whether Mormonism was a frontier religion is to examine the ideological and institutional influences which shaped it. These may of course have coincided with the changing location of the Saints, but they may, as David Brion Davis has argued, have come primarily from New England. Although of the highest relevance to his subject, this question is not discussed in Evanoff's article. He does minimize the importance of the New York period in Mormon history: "The Mormon Church cannot be said to have grown or developed in New York State; about all that can be said is that it had its beginnings there." But obviously he is overlooking the enormous importance of the "beginnings" in establishing certain values and objectives which remained central to Mormonism, even with modification and additions, for many decades. It is true that the frontier thesis is concerned with the influence of the environment, but to measure that influence, in the Great Basin for instance, we need to know what the "frontiersman" brought with him.

The latter part of the article turns to the question of "whether the frontier in Utah produced democratic or authoritarian influences." This question, although carelessly worded, is basic to Evanoff's argument. It is not by putting a label on New York State or by proving Mormons to have been born in the West as well as the East that he will prove, disprove, or even touch the frontier thesis as such. But the nature of Mormon institutions and values in the Great Basin is highly relevant. For if the frontier thesis is valid, one would expect to discern a high degree of democracy and individualism. At last we may be in a position to come to grips with an issue of pivotal importance to the Turner thesis.

Before examining Evanoff's methods of proof, it is worthwhile to notice that his statement of the problem disguises the fact that there are two separate questions here: (1) Were Mormon institutions and values in fact democratic, authoritarian, individualistic, or what? (2) Were they "produced" by the frontier? Neither question is satisfactorily handled in the article.

On the first question, what Evanoff offers is a judgment on the years 1847-49, on the assumption, which I consider erroneous, that if the "theocracy" of these years can be reconciled with the frontier thesis, the problem is solved. It is this two-year period, he says, which "seems to offer a more serious stumbling block to the Turner thesis than any other period, before or since." After conceding that during this period the "established church agencies met all governmental requirements," Evanoff mentions the following considerations: (a) the Mormons were looking for more land and room to develop; (b) class distinctions were "relatively non-existent"; (c) the church authority exercised in establishment of settlements was "really quite permissive" and depended on the free and willing cooperation of the people; and (d) the Mormons did not seize the opportunity to establish an independent nation. These assertions, especially if subjected to the serious qualification which they require, scarcely seem to be compelling arguments for Evanoff's rather pale conclusion that "frontier conditions were such as to leave individual initiative and decision not much impaired."

But Evanoff's analysis is puzzling. On the one hand, he is anxious to portray the Mormons as being democratic and individualistic. Hence his effort to explain the theocracy of 1847-49 as an aberration, due to special conditions, which the Mormons were happy to change as quickly as they could. One gathers that Mormon society from 1850 on was individualistic and democratic to a fault, American frontier society in microcosm. Not a word about any peculiar social, economic, or political institutions which even after 1850 were at variance with American norms.

But on the other hand, after portraying Mormonism as being not so authoritarian that initiative was "much impaired," Evanoff turns around and accepts Richard Ely's statement that "individualism was out of the question under these conditions." Turner himself, we discover, had said that the "arid" West would necessitate social institutions entirely different from the "old individual pioneer methods" characteristic of most frontier environments. This is a neat trick: the frontier theory explains everything. Did Mormonism contain elements of democracy and individualism? Such elements were "produced" by the frontier (Definition Number One). Did Mormonism contain elements of authoritarianism and centralization? These are precisely the social forms appropriate to the frontier (Definition Number Two). It is not surprising that Evanoff passes quickly over the highly significant fact that for Turner there were frontiers and frontiers, with quite different methods of social organization resulting from the different conditions.

On the basic question of how democratic or authoritarian Mormon society was, therefore, we are not quite sure, from reading Evanoff's analysis, whether it was "such as to leave individual initiative and decision not much impaired" or whether it was relatively authoritarian, in keeping with the conditions of the arid frontier. The question is complex enough that I plan to devote two articles to the subject at a later date. But at the very least one must point out that Mormon acceptance of American democratic dogma was far from complete long after 1850, even in theory, and that in practice Mormon society was characterized by an absence of political parties, of public education, of trial by jury, and, most "un-American" of all, by a shadow government, the Council of Fifty, the very existence of which Evanoff seems to ignore. The seminal studies of Klaus Hansen and Jan Shipps, unfortunately still unpublished, reduce to absurdity descriptions of Mormon society as being typically American after 1850. As for economic institutions, Leonard Arrington's magisterial work demonstrates the tenacity with which Mormon leaders attempted to establish different kinds of collectivism and cooperation which, to say the least, were contrary to the laissez-faire economic practices most typical of nineteenth-century America. One does not have to accept the caricatures of Mormonism in many articles and pamphlets of the time in order to concede that in certain significant respects Mormon society was by national American standards comparatively undemocratic and nonindividualistic.

The second question, after that of the nature of Mormon society, is whether it was "produced" by the frontier. Were the undemocratic and nonindividualistic tendencies of early Mormonism, then, a consequence of the arid frontier environment? It might be suggested, following David Potter's influential interpretation, that the arid West lacked the economic abundance which is an essential condition of democratic society. There do indeed seem to be significant parallels between Mormon society and that of territorial New Mexico, which, as Howard Lamar has observed, also lacked public education, resisted control from Washington, and in its Santa Fe Ring had a powerful shadow government. Both Utah and New Mexico could thus be seen as manifestations of geographic determinism — not perhaps as Turner's European germs in an American environment but as germs of diverse origin in an arid environment.

There is a grain of truth in such an interpretation. But quite aside from its oversimplification and smoothing over of differences between territorial Utah and New Mexico, it is shattered by one powerful fact: the centralization, the collectivist experimentation, the stress on unity, the hostility toward courts of law, and the contempt for political parties were all brought by the Mormons from the quite different physical environment of western Illinois. Robert K. Flanders' Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi is the most convincing recent demonstration of the extent to which Mormon practices and institutions took shape before the migration to the Great Basin. The main qualification which might be suggested is that some of these practices were inaugurated even before the Mormon migration to Illinois, in Missouri, or in Ohio (see R. Kent Fielding's basic study of the Kirtland era), and some of the basic objectives were stated even before the original handful of Mormons had left New York State. What Mormon history might very well derrionstrate, therefore, is not so much the shaping influence of frontier environment, arid or humid, as the persistence of values and institutions through the thick and thin of changing physical surroundings.

Evanoff's conclusion is interestingly worded: "Mormon response to environment would seem to be in accord with Turner's expectations." He does not say that it was in accord with the Turner frontier "thesis," perhaps because Turner's shifting, now expanding and now contracting, definitions enabled him to include as frontier New York State on the one hand and the arid West on the other and to include as consequences of frontier environment both democratic and authoritarian institutions. But for Evanoff, one gathers, the Turner thesis has in some form been applied to the Mormon experience and found adequate. Perhaps other readers will find his arguments more convincing than I have been able to do.

More important than disagreements over certain details, perhaps, are basic questions of approach. I have already suggested that hypotheses in history need to be formulated with greater precision if they are to serve their purpose. Let the author give us his definition of those highlevel abstractions — frontier, democracy, individualism, etc. — which are central to his study, preferably along Weberian lines in order to avoid simple either/or alternatives and to cope with the complexity and paradox of the human condition. Evanoff has perpetuated the confusion of Turner's basic methodological error. And never have the inevitable consequences of this error been better demonstrated: the hypothesis remains untested because, as stated, it is untestable; the terminology is either inadequate for describing the complexities of the subject or, equally unfortunate, the terms are given definitions so inconstant and vague as to rob them of their meaning; and a true confrontation of opposing views becomes impossible.

If properly formulated, hypotheses such as Turner's can still be highly useful to scholarly study of the Mormon past. My own view, however, is that it makes little sense, now, to utilize the frontier hypothesis in its simple form. Turner described American history as that of "European germs in an American environment"; and since most of the attention had been given to the germs, he sought to redress the balance by concentrating his attention on the environment. We are no longer faced with the same situation. Mormon history is not simply that of a people in a frontier setting; it is the history of people from many different geographical locations, possessing a dynamic set of ideas and values and practices, and living in an environment which changed with the successive migrations. The influence of geography was basic enough in setting limits, but as Carl Degler has said, "it does not determine which of several alternatives available to man's cultural versatility actually will be pursued." With the Mormons the cultural baggage which they brought to the Great Basin included social, economic, and political mores rather divergent from those of most Americans. If we accept Degler's view that "the influence of the frontier lay not in its evocation of democratic ideas, but in providing an opportunity for them to be put into practice regardless of their place or occasion of origin," it must be pointed out that the opportunity was also provided to put into practice ideas which were not so democratic.

Furthermore, the environment of Mormonism was never simply the frontier, however defined. It included psycho-social conditions of vast import, and these must be included in any serious study of the environment. It is hard to overestimate, for example, the impact of two constant facets of Mormon experience in the nineteenth century: the "gathering" and persecution — which, with all they imply, would seem to explain far more of Mormon history than physical geography alone.

Fortunately the past generation has seen the appearance of many excellent studies, some of which I have mentioned already, which contribute to our larger understanding of Mormon history. Thanks to the monographs of Leonard Arrington, Thomas O'Dea, Juanita Brooks, William Mulder, and a dozen or more doctoral dissertations of basic importance, we can appreciate much more adequately than before the interplay of personalities, values, institutions, geography, political and social pressures, economics, and other aspects of Mormon life in the past century. It is to be hoped that such scholarly studies, and others now in progress, will help us to refine our understanding of the effects of a complex and changing environment on Mormon thought and character.

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