Book Reviews

The Size of the Risk:

Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin

BY LEISL CARR CHILDERS

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. x + 314 pp.Cloth, $34.95We now have many studies of that exotic subject known as rural America, including J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (New York, 2016), George Packer’s The Unwinding (New York, 2014), Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas’s Hollowing out the Middle (Boston, 2009), and Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York, 2004). Each tries to explain Red America, but all are anecdotal and temporally shallow, especially Frank’s, whose title is more a rhetorical device than a discernment of people and place. Such shortcomings are emblematic. Americans have grown comfortable with not knowing each other, at least until presidential elections. Then, as November 8, 2016, illustrated yet again, a country full of strangers wallow in bewildered panic or drink from an ever-more toxic well of schadenfreude. The problem transcends ignorance: we no longer acknowledge the legitimacy of anyone who thinks or lives differently. This is why Leisl Carr Childers’s The Size of the Risk, along with Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment (Chicago, 2016), is necessary reading. The main difference between these books is that while Cramer gives voice to a Wisconsin demographic that matters in state and national elections, Carr Childers zeroes in on a people who almost no one sees. The Great Basin is not simply Flyover Country; for most Americans it is and ought to be terra incognita. Carr Childers explains how this came to be, and why our historical and geographical amnesia is integral to the cultural chasms that plague the West and the nation.

The argument spans seven chapters on the local impact of grazing, military, recreational, and equine policies. The key issue is the rise and uneven consequences of multiple-use policy in federal land management. Carr Childers’s narrative is thinnest in terms of early settlement and grazing history. She foregrounds a set of settler tales to explain how several families arrived in the Great Basin in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The biographies are crucial for contextualizing the impact of later policies, but more could be done to link people to broader currents. Readers need to know how many people came, stayed, and left; why tensions emerged between settlers and distantly controlled railroad, mining, and grazing companies; and what they changed. The historical sweep is key to understanding why Great Basin residents distrusted concentrated power long before the BLM.

The book develops a much sharper focus with the advent of federal regulation of grazing in the 1930s. As Carr Childers notes, rancher opinions divided on the Taylor Grazing Act and the Grazing Bureau. Some rushed to organize grazing districts while others resisted with all their might. District 6, Nevada’s last grazing district, is a poignant tale because ranchers accepted it in 1951 only because they thought it would prevent more intrusive regulation. They were mistaken. Beginning with World War II, the military appropriated great swaths of public and private rangeland to practice bombing and to test nuclear weapons. Carr Childers documents the impact of these takings and the legacy of radiation fallout, ably linking family experiences to the Downwinder scholarship. Local marginalization deepened across the decades as administrations, Congress, and agencies accommodated one recreational or aesthetic demand after another. This is how multiple use became a disruptive force. Reformulation of rancher-dominated grazing boards as advisory boards with recreational standing was another means of diminishing local ranchers’ access to lands they depended upon for their livelihoods.

The most original contributions come in the last chapters on Great Basin National Park and feral horse and burro herds. Preserving basin and range country and protecting free-roaming equine herds were never policy slam dunks, but the concerted efforts of advocates over many decades eventually won the day. Unlike most park and wildlife histories, which tend to flatten social history with partisan views, Carr Childers develops nuanced portraits of local complexity. Residents in and around Ely, Nevada, for example, favored a national park that would attract tourists but not disrupt ranchers and miners. Local debate was less about whether a park would exist than how big it would be and how to compensate losses. The divisions were not over preservation but among rival business interests. Similarly, some ranchers were appalled by the unethical practices of some horse wranglers. Where discussions between these groups broke down was over the role of the range, the legitimacy of wrangling, and the value of horses. Wild horse advocates eventually developed ever more radicalized visions of ranchers and horses. The former were reduced to brutish caricatures, while the latter were reified into racialized containers of European purity. The horses that advocates most cherished, however, were horses of the mind, vestiges of a truly strange kind of wildness with no ecological impact. Horses in the flesh embodied far more muddled genetic and ecological histories. Nevertheless, in the end advocates won the political battle to define horses and burros as privileged species, even though ranchers had the better ecological and economic arguments.

The disparity between political rhetoric and scientific evidence in western contests over the federal domain—between what advocates and policy makers claimed and what good research revealed—is why The Size of the Risk matters for understanding what Richard White two decades ago called “the current weirdness in the West.” Spend any time with this book’s careful dissection of how “each successive variation of multiple use . . . placed the burden of risk on those who relied on public lands the most” (17), and it is impossible to ignore the inequities visited upon people who lived in the Great Basin. Maps drive home this point by illustrating a federal domain increasingly fragmented by proprietary claims that constrained and impoverished residents. The federal domain is indeed a geography of displacement, and one need not be a fire-breathing states’ righter to see here the sometimes dark, dumb, and mean side of environmental advocacy.

These are among the reasons The Size of the Risk won a Western Writers of America’s 2016 Spur Award. It is beautifully written, balancing sensitive portraits of people with scholarly criticism, and it never devolves into tropes and cant. I love the title, borrowed from an Enrico Fermi memo that rationalized in cold, calculating math the radioactive contamination of nearby ranchers, but as a metaphor it stumbles when extended to cover the general devastation of rural lives. For one thing, the phrase takes too long to explain; for another, the costs of parks, horses, and iodine-131 are not equivalent. What they share, though, is a role in the subversion of Great Basin ranching communities. This book would help urban westerners reconsider how they think about the sparsely populated West, but the people who really need it are rural westerners. It’s not that they don’t know their history, but a book like this illustrates why careful, scholarly analysis is far more useful than the delusional and splenetic rants of the current cohort of rural westerners who attract media attention. We all need a smarter discourse about the federal domain, and Leisl Carr Childers’s The Size of the Risk is a very good start.

—JOSEPH E. TAYLOR III

Simon Fraser UniversityThe Mormon Church and Blacks:

A Documentary History

EDITED BY MATTHEW L. HARRIS

AND NEWELL G. BRINGHURSTUrbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 232 pp. Cloth,

$85.00; Paper, $25.00; Ebook, $22.50Racial identity is not only a construct of the imagination; it is a lived construct, experienced in our social relationships, at home, work, and church. Matthew Harris and Newell Bringhurst, in their documentary volume The Mormon Church and Blacks, retrace the making of Mormonism’s racial identity as it existed at the nerve center: the decrees and fiats of its upper eche- lons of governance. As Chimamanda Adichie has observed, “no racism story is ever a ‘simple’ racism story.” 1 While the documents Harris and Bringhurst cull from the archives and the annals might strike the outside observer as yet another pile of corporate documents, they reveal a cavalcade of figures displaying the varieties of Mormon racism over the ages. That Utah might be an interesting laboratory for the study of race seems counterintuitive (as of July 2015, its population identifying as “black” amounted to 1.3 percent of the population), yet in recent years we have seen a flourishing literature addressing the peculiar racial situation in the state.

The Harris and Bringhurst volume enters an existing scholarly conversation, but much of this conversation has been focused on either acknowledging the very existence of the black Mormon experience or analyzing and dismantling the contours of the priesthood and temple restrictions. In a past generation, Lester Bush, Newell Bringhurst, and Armand Mauss performed the sterling work of historicizing the restrictions, demonstrating that Mormon claims to its stasis and predictability did not accord with the documentary record. With W. Paul Reeve’s groundbreaking volume on the racialization of Mormons and Quincy Newell’s scholarship on Jane Manning James, an early black Latter-day Saint woman, and my own volume on comparative black Mormonisms, we come closer than ever to having a critical mass of scholarship on black Latter-day Saints. 2

The story that Harris and Bringhurst tell is not one of the disempowered black Saints but of the evolution of power structures that have restrained Mormonism’s black members. Harris and Bringhurst revisit well-known documents, such as Brigham Young’s speech on slavery be-

1 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About,” New Yorker, December 2, 2016.

2 See Russell Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford, 2014); Stevenson, “‘We Have Prophetesses’: Mormonism in Ghana, 1964–1979,” Journal of Mormon History 41 (Summer 2015): 221–56; W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Quincy Newell, “The Autobiography and Interview of Jane Manning Elizabeth James,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 2 (2013): 251–70; and Max Mueller, “Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2015). fore the territorial legislature in February 1852 and Bruce R. McConkie’s 1958 treatise, Mormon Doctrine. They include Hugh B. Brown’s General Conference comments in support the “full civil equality for all of God’s children” and the correspondence between LDS leadership and African-American convert Jane Manning James detailing her pleadings to receive the highest rituals of Mormon.

The story that emerges from the documents Harris and Bringhurst compiled reveals not only a story of race but how dogmas circulated in speeches, backroom conversations, and folk sayings become hardened pillars of Mormonism’s institutional character. But Mormon leadership could never settle on an explanation; as Harris and Bringhurst show, Mormonism’s racial dogmas were subjected to sustained theologizing, analysis, discussion, and debate among church leaders. Their midrashim ran the gamut: whether Brigham Young maintained that blacks descended from Cain or B. H. Roberts posited that ethnicity was the product of premortal conditions, Harris and Bringhurst show the fractures running through the foundations of Mormon racial structures. They also provide an excellent cache of documents revealing how Mormon leaders have endeavored—with varying degrees of success—to leave behind the legacies of Mormonism’s racial theologizing, including documents detailing an aborted plan to officially apologize for the restriction’s implementation.

Any documentary volume requires selectivity in a hope of approximating representativeness; the selection process demands that certain details not make the final print. In this regard Harris and Bringhurst have done an admirable job, choosing documents that convey the zeitgeist of the times. But on occasion they neglect noteworthy details. While Brigham Young’s February 1852 speech is to the public codification of the race-based priesthood and temple restrictions, this statement represents the evolution of Brigham Young’s thinking. When in the spring and summer 1847, black convert William McCary attempted to have (and, occasionally, succeeded in having) sexual liaisons with several married and unmarried white Mormon women at Winter Quarters, a mob organized to expel him and his white wife, Lucy. The incident gave Parley P. Pratt a pretext for delegitimizing McCary’s ordination to the priesthood based on his Hamitic ancestry. Additionally, Young learned of Enoch Lewis, a black Mormon in Massachusetts, siring an interracial child. In March 1847, Young had allowed for black ordination to the priesthood; by February 1849, Young was dismissing Lorenzo Snow’s concerns about black access to the priesthood by citing their Cainite ancestry. 3

Trained to be an Africanist specializing in religiosity in Igbo Nigeria, I found myself hoping to see a more sustained discussion of Mormon blackness outside the boundaries of the American experience. They include the famous “7th discussion” delivered by missionaries in Brazil to proselytes who were believed to have African ancestry, but the volume contains but a sprinkling of glancing references (101–102). As a sizable body of scholarship demonstrates, the meanings of blackness throughout the Atlantic world changed and shifted, depending on the socioeconomic and religious context; in 1971, Austin Shelton observed that “there is no nicely defined cultural group of the black.” 4

Harris and Bringhurst have produced not only an excellent volume but also an important one—one that enables students of race or religion in America to unpack, dismantle.

—RUSSELL STEVENSON

Michigan State University3 Minutes, March 26, 1847, February 14, 1849, in Selected Collections of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), disc 1.

4 Austin J. Shelton, “The Ideology of Blackness and Beauty in America and Africa,” Presence Africaine 79 (3rd Trimeestre 1971): 134. For a more robust treatment of comparative meanings of how Africans came to assume the identity of “blackness” rather distinctive ethnic identities, see Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

Alma Richards, Olympian

BY LARRY GERLACH

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016. xi + 291 pp. Cloth, $34.95

Alma Richards might be one of the most exceptional athletes of the early twentieth century sports fans do not know about. His greatest feat, without question, was winning the high jump competition at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, and if Richards is remembered at all, it is because of this. But as Larry Gerlach makes clear in his discerning and diligently researched biography, Alma Richards, Olympian, the Utah sportsman achieved much more. Not only did Richards win an Olympic gold medal, he also compiled one of the most noteworthy athletic records during the first third of the twentieth century. All but forgotten today, Richards, Gerlach shows, “is a man well worth knowing” (12).

So what does Gerlach tell us about Richards? Surprisingly, the future Olympic champion had only modest experience with sports as a boy, though the time he surely spent frolicking around (and working in) the hinterlands of southwestern Utah, near his hometown of Parowan, must have helped lay the foundation for his tremendous athletic skill. His staunch Mormon upbringing, which stressed “righteousness, sobriety, and godliness” (21), also aided his athletic development. The self-confidence, honesty, and singularity of purpose instilled by his father, a strong-minded man and revered figure in the Mormon church, almost certainly contributed to making Richards, as one journalist wrote, “one of the greatest natural athletes that ever lived” (88).

And what an athlete he was. Despite being a “big, raw-boned lad” (40), Richards possessed a springiness that allowed him to triumph in not only the high jump, but the long jump as well. With his peculiar technique, he simply bounded—semi-upright—over the high-jump bar. Capitalizing on his brawn, he also claimed championships in the shot put and 56-pound weight toss. The unusual combination of power and nimbleness suited him as a decathlete; in 1915, he won the national title. Starring first for Brigham Young University and then Cornell, Richards would often enter several events in meets. On more than a few occasions, he proved to be the deciding factor. During his career he held records in different events. A husband (three times), military officer, father, lawyer (albeit non-practicing), and beloved teacher, he was such a tenacious competitor that he did not retire from sports until his early forties. As an athlete, Richards was lauded from Parowan to Provo, from Los Angeles to New York.

Given Richards’s renown, why is so little remembered about him today? Gerlach suggests a host of reasons, including: “America’s lack of interest in Olympic history” (2); the “unglamorous, workmanlike field events” Richards participated in (9); the confusing coverage he received in the press (newspapers, for instance, would sometimes misspell his first name); a truncated Olympic and college career caused by WWI (the 1916 Berlin Games were not staged; the 1917 collegiate track season—Richards’s last—was suspended); and “inadequate information about his career” and the fact that “his individual statistics have long since been surpassed by a considerable margin” (182).

How people remember Richards is a central theme of the book, and Gerlach skillfully shoulders the responsibility to set straight arguably the most popular story associated with the Mormon athlete. The story goes that just prior to making his triumphant leap at the Stockholm Games, Richards prayed—openly. Gerlach notes that the tale gained broader currency during the latter decades of the twentieth century, exactly at the moment Salt Lake City was attempting to be a Winter Olympics host city. The story, though, is probably untrue. Like a historical Sherlock Holmes, Gerlach uses logic, intuition, and a deep knowledge of the past to debunk the tale, theorizing that the story’s durability is mostly owing to the Mormon church’s relatively recent efforts to be accepted by a wider religious and secular audience. Historically speaking, the consequences are significant. Gerlach writes: “[T]he uncritical acceptance of a questionable account about an undocumented Olympic prayer has created a distorted if not false representation of Alma Richards and his historic achievement” (202).

With his work, Gerlach has penned the initial book on Richards. That, in itself, is commendable; the historical record on “Utah’s first and greatest Olympian” (218) is frustratingly thin. Gerlach acknowledges this fact, writing about the figure of Richards he presents in the book: “The ‘inner man’ is a shadowy specter, dimly revealed at times, darkly obscured at others” (11). If there is a criticism of the book, it is that some important questions of Richards’ life go unanswered. But Gerlach is too good of a historian to fill in the gaps with contrivance and guesswork. He simply admits that evidence is lacking, and moves on.

It is safe to say that the last thing Gerlach would want is to leave the reader with a false impression of the most extraordinary athlete in the history of the Beehive State. That, certainly, is not how Alma Richards should be remembered. Thankfully we have Gerlach’s biography to remind us just that.

—CHRIS ELZEY