Building Zions: A Conceptual Framework

Building Zions: A Conceptual Framework

BY ROBERT ALAN GOLDBERG

LEONARD J. ARRINGTON, IN HIS SEMINAL WORK Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900, detailed the course of Mormon colonization in the nineteenth-century West. Through Mormon efforts a wilderness became a functioning society and economy. Arrington determinedly resisted extensive speculation upon the reasons for the success of Mormon colonization. Only briefly did he succumb, discussing the underlying patterns of discipline, careful organization and planning, and the homogeneity of the settlers to explain the spread of Mormon outposts throughout the Great Basin.

This paper seeks to cast Arrington's observations into a wider conceptual scheme to understand the factors that influenced not only Mormon settlement but the process of colonization in a larger context. These factors will be uncovered and probed in a case study of a Jewish colony of the Great Basin. The Jewish settlement of Clarion, Utah, founded in 1911 and dissolved in 1916, was the last of the approximately forty attempts to colonize Jews on the land in the United States. It was the largest in population and land area and had the longest temporal existence of any Jewish colony west of the Appalachian Mountains. What light does its defeat shed upon Mormon victories? Why did Clarion fail when all around it was evidence of Mormon success? Finally, parallels will be drawn between Mormon colonization in the Great Basin and Jewish settlement in the land of Israel, using the insights gleaned from the Clarion experiment. In this way the variables underlying the success and failure of colonization efforts may be ascertained and subject to research in other times and places in world history.

Between 1881 and 1915 Jewish agricultural colonies were planted in New Jersey, North and South Dakota, Kansas, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado, and Utah. This American effort was ideologically, ethnically, and temporally part of an international Back to the Soil Movement that saw Jewish farming settlements established in Argentina, Canada, and Israel. In America advocates seeking to end urban congestion and to restructure Jewish economic life encouraged immigrants to take up the plow. They listed a number of intriguing benefits. Farming would decrease the oversupply of labor in the cities, create a proper environment for child rearing, and accelerate Americanization. Further, the farm would inhibit anti-Semitism by smothering the stereotype of the Jew as a commercial parasite. A return to agriculture would, moreover, bring Jewish spiritual and physical revival, restore a sense of dignity, free Jews from the economic uncertainties of the sweatshop, and demonstrate to Christians the Jews' stake in their new homeland.

The seeds sown by the advocates of a Jewish return to the soil grew in the mind of Benjamin Brown, a Russian immigrant to America. In 1909 he began agitating in New York City and Philadelphia for the creation of a farming colony whose success would generate a wave of Jewish agricultural settlements throughout the United States. His message was always multifaceted, extolling the good life on the farm while reminding his listeners of the impelling need to ameliorate the Jewish condition in the eastern cities. Brown's words touched a wide range of people. Socialists, anarchists, Zionists, the religious Orthodox, and those seeking a more comfortable life for themselves and their families joined. Each would conceive the colony in his own image. In such diversity the weed of dissension was well fertilized.

By 1911 Brown had attracted 200 men, most with families, and had accumulated $60,000 in investment capital for land, equipment, livestock, and building supplies. (While a substantial outlay for the time and the people involved, it would prove insufficient to support the colony during reverses.) Brown suggested a western site for the colony, for land was cheaper there than in the East; the temptation to return to the cities less; and the likelihood of the settlement becoming a boarder-resort, as had occurred to Jewish farms in upstate New York, remote.

On a trip to the West to view land for the proposed colony. Brown visited Utah. State officials greeted him eagerly, offering to sell a prime tract of land that would be irrigated with water from a canal under construction. The more than 8,000 acres offered for sale were located in south-central Utah, three miles from the small town of Gunnison. The canal, state officials boasted, would provide abundant water and eliminate the caprice of weather. Impressed by the state's claims and assurances. Brown purchased 6,000 acres of land for his colony.

The canal was crucial to the colony's future. Yet, at the time of purchase, canal construction had reached only the southern one-third of the eight-mile-long tract of Jewish colony land. The canal would not serve all of the land until two years after the colony's demise. The newly built canal had sides and bottom of dirt and lacked the necessary gates and weirs designed to regulate the water received by each farmer. Moreover, because there were no past data concerning canal capacity, state engineers could only estimate water seepage and quantity available for delivery.

The first twelve colonists, chosen for their mechanical skills, experience with horses, and "seriousness," arrived at the settlement site in September 1911. Only two of the men had any agricultural background, and their knowledge was geared to eastern conditions. None had any practical experience with irrigation or drainage. Although urban dwellers, the men became concerned as they surveyed the tract. The land sloped steeply and was covered by sagebrush, tall grasses, and weeds. Large patches of ground were bare of any vegetation. Closer inspection of the soil revealed a sandy, gravelly consistency underlain by a hardpan subsoil. Although they were unaware at the time, the area had a short growing season with frosts coming late in the spring and early in the fall. Rainfall was minimal.

Despite these difficulties the Jews immediately began to clear the land for cultivation. During the next five years they prepared 2,600 acres for planting. They laid out and dug irrigation channels from the canal to the fields, built homes to house fifty-two families, constructed a school, and experimented with chicken and hog raising. More than 200 people would attempt to realize their dream of going back to the soil. The colonists believed that they had received a call. They perceived themselves as the harbingers of the Jewish economic and social future in America. It was appropriate, then, that they named their colony Clarion.

Between 1911 and 1916 setback after setback, both external and internal, eroded the human and financial resources that the Clarion colonists had mustered. Drought and an unreliable canal combined with marginal soil and farming inexperience to doom the first year's harvest. Already behind in payments to the state for land and water rights, the colonists could not pull themselves out of their financial hole. The support of Salt Lake City's Jewish community and Jews nationally was never sufficient to stem the hemorrhaging of funds. The 1913 harvest brought no respite. Heavy mountain rains in August had sent torrents of water into the dry washes and toward the colony. The water breached the canal and flooded the hay, wheat, and alfalfa fields. In 1914 drought and a water shortage resulting from their neighbors' greed again doomed the harvest. In the colony's last year a late frost was sufficient to break the colonists' spirit, already numbed by the misery of a hard and resisting land.

Adding to this distress was the only crop that grew in abundance in Clarion's soil, dissension. When the colony's future dimmed, Benjamin Brown's judgment and qualifications came under attack, and he was accused of mismanagement and dictatorial practices. Exacerbating tensions was the factionalism inherent in the heterogeneous membership. Anarchists, international socialists, Jewish socialists, and Zionists found no unity as they now had evidence to substantiate their pre-Clarion suspicions. Even the religious Orthodox minority found itself embroiled in the mayhem.

Further, the Mormon community did not present a unifying enemy around which to rally. Mormon welcomed Jew as neighbor and Biblical brother, tendering advice, food, friendship, tools, labor, and moral support. While the colony was an organizational entity. Mormons respected Jewish beliefs and attempted no proselytizing. A sense of common identity, past and present, religious and pioneering, united the two peoples.

In January 1916, with the colony unable to pay the state the monies owed for land and water rights, Utah officials auctioned off the Clarion tract, selling just over one-tenth of the land. Most of the colonists returned to Philadelphia and New York City or went on to Los Angeles. Others took up land in New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and California. Some continued to farm in the Clarion area, with the last Jews leaving in the mid-1920s. The latter left because they feared the loss of their children's religious identities through assimilation rather than as a result of financial hardship.

Five interrelated variables, their influence changing with time, were crucial in determining Clarion's fate: farming experience, environmental conditions, capital availability, colonists' morale, and the existence of alternatives. Clarion's people were urbanites familiar with the sweatshop, store, and the pushcart. Even the few with farming experience were unprepared for the semiarid conditions of Utah. Added to the ordinary toil attendant upon colony ground-breaking, inexperience was a difficult burden to bear. A poor site choice compounded inexperience-generated problems. Water scarcity, an undependable irrigation canal, marginal soil, and capricious weather drained the colony of enthusiasm and its meager supply of funds.

Yet, neither the lack of experience nor the environment is sufficient explanation for Clarion's fall. Each day on the land increased the colonists' store of agricultural knowledge. Hard work, trial and error, and Mormon farmers' aid and advice strengthened the Jews in their physical, emotional, and mental ability to stay on the land. The success of those Jews who remained in the Clarion area for a decade after the colony's demise or who took to the land elsewhere is evidence of their will to adapt to farming. Moreover, those who persisted saw a change in environmental conditions. While life was never easy, the environment had begun to shed its harshness and become more predictable. The most difficult tasks had been accomplished. The land had been cleared and fields created. Fences and outbuildings had been erected. The canal had become increasingly dependable.

Clarion's life could have been extended if it had had the means to sustain it through the difficult years — available capital and high morale. Without either of these vital assets the impact of alternatives became pronounced. Adequate financial resources would have bought the settlers time to survive the early colonization period, gain experience, and control their environment. Still, if the patronage of an outside benefactor with abundant funds would have softened the hard times, it would not alone have ensured the colony's future. To hold the colonists to a resisting land also required a morale that was intense and cohesive. The hardship, denial, and self-doubt that accompany any colonization project can be held at bay, if not dispelled, when men and women are bound mentally and emotionally to a common goal. The colony's avowed purpose was to rebuild the Jewish people through agriculture. The colonists lost sight of this mission as personal animosities, ideological conflicts, and cultural disagreements caused diverse factions to focus their energies against one another, thus dissipating trust, goodwill, and strength. Further eroding morale was the silence of the outside world. When Clarion's call was ignored and financial contributions failed to materialize, the colonists' greatest fears were reified; their mission had no meaning.

Directly related, yet separate, was the existence of alternatives. New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles beckoned Jews as they did Christians, offering rescue and release from farm life. The familiar urban world, even with its drawbacks, promised solutions to economic uncertainty, deteriorating relations with fellow colonists, and idealism gone sour. Without the bulwarks of high morale, financial security, and agricultural achievements, the siren of alternatives could not be silenced. Clarion's obstacles to economic self-reliance and ethnic viability proved too formidable to conquer.

With Clarion as background and the five variables as a framework, let us briefly review the Mormon colonization experience in the Great Basin. In the second half of the nineteenth century Mormon colonists established nearly five hundred settlements in seven states. Professor Arrington conceptualized this colonization movement in a series of stages. In the first stage Mormons initially populated the Salt Lake Valley. Radiating from this nucleus, they built communities in the Utah, Tooele, Sanpete, Box Elder, Pahvant, Juab, Parowan, and Cache valleys. Expansion in the second stage was accomplished beyond Utah's "inner cordon of settlement." Choosing sites for geopolitical and missionary reasons. Mormons colonized San Bernardino, California; Las Vegas and Carson Valley, Nevada; Moab, Utah; Forts Supply and Bridger, Wyoming; and Lemhi, Idaho. By 1857 they had founded ninety-six colonies. During the next forty years, and in a continuing series of stages. Mormons reached central, southern, and northeastern Utah; the Salt and Gila River valleys in Arizona; the Upper Snake River Valley in Idaho; the Big Horn Basin and the Star Valley in Wyoming; the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado; White Pine County in Nevada; and the Grand Ronde Valley in eastern Oregon. Even lands in Canada and Mexico came under the Mormon plow. The success rate of the Mormon colonies is very impressive. Geographer Lynn Rosenvall calculated that only sixty-nine, or less than percent, of the settlements had failed.

We can account for this remarkable achievement with the same variables that determined Clarion's fate. Unlike Clarion's Jews, the Mormon pioneers were steeped in an agrarian tradition. Nineteenth-century America was a nation of farmers, and there were few who were not raised on the land or did not earn their bread from the soil. Rather than stepping into an alien world. Mormon colonists could farm from habit, having learned the skills inculcated through experience, generation to generation. They knew how to fence, cultivate, and care for livestock. Harnesses, hitches, and tools were not mysterious or foreboding. Still, the Great Basin was not New England or the Midwest. Wilford Woodruff reminds us, "of course, we had no experience with irrigation. " Yet, using their abundant store of agricultural resources, the Mormons adapted with trial and error techniques to the new environment. This can be illustrated in Woodruffs account of the first attempt to plant in the Salt Lake Valley. Finding the ground resistant to their plows, the pioneers turned water on the land only to watch their teams sink to their bellies in the mud. When the soil had dried, wrote Woodruff, "We then plowed our land." Such incidents would be repeated many times over until the settlers had mastered farming in the Great Basin. Similarly, in this testing period the Mormons were confronted with environmental disasters. Marginal soil, inadequate water supply, insects, drought, bitter winters, and floods plagued the colonists. Man-made dangers appeared in the form of Indians, federal officials, and soldiers. Setbacks in diversifying the economy compounded harvest failures and at times brought famine and food rationing. Yet the Mormons persevered, stubbornly holding onto the land and gradually subduing it.

The surmounting of these obstacles describes Mormon success. It does not, however, yield a sufficient explanation for their achievements in colonization. In the faces of adversity Mormon morale was sustained by the belief that God had invested them with a mission to prepare the earth for the second coming of Christ. In light of this, all Mormon activities, social, economic, and cultural, were infused with an intensity that could only come from active participation in the building up of the kingdom of God. "High on the mountain top a banner is unfurled," they sang in the ward houses, "Ye nations, now look up; It waves to all the world. . . . " What had occurred, wrote Leonard Arrington, was a "spiritualization of temporal activity."

Mormon history and the geography of the Great Basin bolstered theological doctrine to assure the pioneers of their destiny as the chosen of God. In the 1830s and 1840s the Mormons had suffered violence as they fled before mobs in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. After the murder of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young led the Saints in an exodus across the Mississippi River and into the wilderness. The selfproclaimed "Camp of Israel" found its promised land in Utah. It was hardly coincidental, they believed, that the climate and topography of the region resembled the land of Israel.

Colonization, then, became the means to fulfilling a divine will that seemed partially revealed. This interpretation was made even more convincing when church leaders in conference called pioneers to missions to manufacture iron, raise silk, or till land. Under the direction of the church, colony sites were chosen, settlers selected, and tools and equipment assigned. The church also allocated property rights according to the principles of stewardship. The colonists were, as Charles Peterson suggested, like "children of God thrust from Eden into the hard, cruel world and charged to rebuild the garden in each desert outpost by the sweat of their brow.'' Practical tasks of community building, maintenance, and defense when added to the concept of mission intensified this solidarity.

The result was a nation of highly communal, homogeneous, and close-knit villages composed of individuals prepared to sacrifice their self-interest for the common good. They had taken Joseph Smith's admonition seriously: "I say unto you, be one; if ye are not one ye are not mine." With hardships seen as tests of faith, the future of history on their shoulders, and identities as God's missionaries secure, the Mormons found that colonization efforts gave meaning to life, strength to the community, and success to the communal endeavor.

In addition to farming experience, overcoming the environment, and high morale, capital was necessary to sustain the Mormon experiment. Church leaders were able to pool their followers' savings and invest it for the collective good through the tithing office. Resources gathered through tithing, or as Arrington phrased it, the "socialization of surplus incomes," were partially spent furnishing settlers with food, livestock, equipment, tools, and seed. With the land financially free, settlement costs would not drain Mormon coffers. The church's financial sponsorship of colonization would last into the early twentieth century. The church also created the Perpetual Emigration Fund to bring needy Saints from Europe to Utah for religious reasons. This fund served economic functions as well. It efficiently worked to increase the region's labor supply and to create an effective means whereby payments in cash and kind were transferred and distributed according to need. Gold rushers and western travelers contributed as well to the building of the Great Basin kingdom. Bringing scarce currency, they opened an internal market for Mormon goods. With these resources the Mormons had the means to pass through the ground-breaking period of colonization and achieve economic stability and growth.

Finally, the Mormons had few alternatives to the Great Basin. Recently chased by mobs, few cared to return to the American "Babylon." Church leaders actively pursued a policy of economic, cultural, and political self-sufficiency. Yet, distance did not eliminate harassment. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century Congress rejected rapprochement and vigorously acted to abolish polygamy and the church's influence in economic and political affairs. Mormon hymns such as "Zion Stands with Hills Surrounded," "For the Strength of the Hills," and "Come, Come, Ye Saints" reflect a sense of siege and necessary isolation from the "proud boasting nation." In "Up, Awake, Ye Defenders of Zion" congregations pledged to "Remember the wrongs of Missouri; Forget not the fate of Nauvoo. When the God-hating foe is before you. Stand firm and be faithful and true. . . ." Not until the beginning of the twentieth century, after Utah had achieved statehood, would a ceasefire exist and alternatives to the Great Basin become more visible. By then departure could not destroy the experiment because the long period of community building had created a foundation difficult to unearth.

The men and women who colonized Israel were as prepared for the fields as their Clarion coreligionists. The environment they encountered was equally hostile with poor soil, a shortage of water, swamps, and insufficient rainfall. Over the centuries, since the Jews had farmed the land of Israel, soils had eroded, the forests had been cut down, and the streams filled with silt. Despite these restraints, a quarter of a million Jews inhabit the land today, and hundreds of moshavot ("settlements"), kibbutzim ("collectives"), and moshavimovdim ("workers' cooperatives") dot the Israeli landscape.

The Jewish return to the soil began in the 1830s when 20,000 to 30,000 Jews left pogrom-ravaged eastern Europe for Palestine. By 1898 these men and women had launched twenty-five moshavot. The settlements had not rooted easily. Inexperience, a lack of funds. malaria, and Arab harassment had combined in the first years to choke growth. Only the timely financial intervention of philanthropist Baron Edmund de Rothschild averted the colonies' collapse. The settlements would require a quarter-century of financial weaning before they had stabilized and could stand by themselves.

The moshavot had initiated modern Jewish agriculture in Palestine. They would not, however, serve as ideological or practical precursors for the major thrust of Jewish agrarianism. Zionist leaders disparaged these villages because they did not offer a sufficient foundation to erect a national homeland for Jews. The twenty-five moshavot had lost their idealistic drive, becoming divorced from national goals. To carry forth efforts to accelerate immigration, expand territorial possessions, and reform Jewish society, the Zionist searched for a different solution.

The pragmatic needs of Zionist organizers fused with the ideological dreams of the members of an immigration wave that touched Palestine's shores between 1904 and 1914. Many of these immigrants came to Palestine to build a new Jewish nation upon socialist principles. They hoped to establish settlements that would draw strength from their ideals: from each according to ability and sharing according to need. In such communities property would be owned collectively while decisions were made democratically. Firing hopes and actions was a perception that they stood at a crossroad of history and by their efforts would decide the Jewish future. Bolstering this self-conception was the enormous interest that world Jewry paid to this handful of men and women. This hothouse atmosphere of intense attention and idealism helped push these Jewish pioneers to conquer themselves and their environment.

In 1909 Degania, the first kibbutz or collective farm, was organized. It proved successful and became the model for hundreds of Jewish colonies. The kibbutz fulfilled settlers' needs for independence and self-management, a decent standard of living, and the pursuit of national aims. Often built in a circular pattern for defense, it cultivated a sense of mutuality and self-reliance. Yet it did not stifle colonists' idealism or shield them from larger goals. The kibbutz became a crucial Zionist channel for dispersing immigrants, providing farm experience, building an agricultural sector for a Jewish state, and gathering lands to the end of nation-building. In the 1920s those who sought a cooperative agricultural life but were unable to accommodate to the kibbutz regimen formed moshavim-ovdim or workers' cooperatives. In these communities the central role of the family was recognized, land was privately owned, and members engaged in cooperative buying and selling.

The kibbutz and moshav concepts were conducive to Zionism's limited budget. The pioneers arrived with no resources to begin an agricultural life. Their inexperience amid severe conditions, plus the strategic and geopolitical nature of site selection, meant that the settlements would suffer heavy financial losses in a prolonged period of dependency. Settlement of families on dispersed farms was not only defensively unwise but beyond Zionist capabilities. A variety of organizations existed to provide the subsidization the colonies could not survive without. The Jewish National Fund acquired land which the settlers cultivated. The JNF also extended credits to aid the work of settlement and the purchase of livestock, equipment, and building materials. The Keren Hayesod ("Palestine Foundation Fund") granted loans to facilitate the colonization effort. Additional assistance was provided by the Jewish Agency, the Anglo-Palestine Bank, the Histadrut or General Federation of Jewish Labor, kibbutzim and moshavim federations, and the Israeli government.

The Jewish colonies in Palestine and later Israel had found the means to ethnic and economic viability. The capital resources of the Zionist organizations gave settlers the opportunity gradually to loosen the shackles of inexperience and poor site selection. Their sense of purpose, and even destiny, sustained them when life was difficult and primitive. Self-selection in the migration process, which led to a Palestine destination rather than to the United States, guaranteed a core of men and women hardened in their idealism. Persecution and Arab attack at home combined with aid and attention from abroad to increase their determination. In addition, the kibbutz and moshav support group, its ideology and aims consistent, stiffened resolve and heightened the level of pain and despair that could be endured. At the same time, few alternatives were sufficiently attractive to tempt colonists from what had become their raison d'etre.

The defeat of the Clarion colonists and the victories of the Mormons in the Great Basin and the Jews in Israel differ in degree rather than in kind and thus represent different ends of the same continuum. Rather than a regional, ethnic, or cultural interpretation, the histories of these colonization efforts were written in the interplay of five factors— experience, environment, capital, morale, and alternatives. In the negative or positive interaction of the variables may be discerned the course of colonization. Hopefully, continuing research on the colonial mosaic will be as favorable to these concepts as it has been in substantiating the work of Professor Arrington.

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