Book Reviews

Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory

By Brent M. Rogers

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. xiv + 383 pp.Paper, $32.00.

In this excellent study, Brent Rogers examines the conflict between Washington, D.C. and early Utah Territory through the lens of popular sovereignty. While most historians concentrate on the violence in Kansas Territory as an explanation for the ultimate failure of popular sovereignty, Rogers argues that Utah Territory played a key role in dooming the doctrine. He makes a convincing case that the conflict between the Mormons and Washington over polygamy, theocracy, and the administration of Indian affairs exposed popular sovereignty as little more than “a situation-based, ad hoc sham” that left its proponents with little choice but to backpedal when it only created new conflicts, instead of resolving the debate over slavery (19).

Rogers argues that the framers of the doctrine of popular sovereignty were so eager to remove slavery from congressional debates that they seemingly forgot that the territories were not states. The territories came under a federal supervision that sought to guide their development, in order to assure that their governments were consistent with the principles of republicanism and loyalty to the Union. Not surprisingly, residents of the territories often resented the exclusive power of the federal government to choose their territorial officers and the ability of Congress to veto the enactments of their territorial assemblies. Rogers argues that in Utah Territory, resistance to federal authority was particularly strong and grew only more intense in light of the expectations of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. This soon came to light thanks to Mormonism’s “peculiar institution.”

The practice of polygamy in Utah Territory grew to become one of the primary challenges to the viability of popular sovereignty. When Democratic leaders first proposed a policy of allowing territorial residents the autonomy to arrange their domestic relationships, they were thinking of slavery—not the practice of polygamy. Unfortunately, the Republicans were all too quick to tie them together as the “twin relics of barbarism.” While Mormons saw the slogan as an affront to their religion, the real target of the Republicans was the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Democratic leaders soon found themselves in an awkward position when they discovered they could not logically ban polygamy while still allowing territorial residents the freedom to choose or reject slavery.

Rogers also notes that the Mormon philosophy of government posed a threat to the doctrine of popular sovereignty. In the first place, a theocracy could hardly pass muster as republicanism in Washington. Meanwhile, the anger of the Mormons over past religious persecution in the United States made the federal government suspicious of their loyalty to the Union. These suspicions only grew when non-Mormon federal officials encountered Mormon resistance and anger in 1851. Fearing for their lives, they left the Great Basin and returned to Washington with tales of Mormon disloyalty to the Union. While Mormon leaders managed to avoid serious consequences after this first exodus of federal officials, repeated occurrences only reinforced the belief that the Latter-day Saints could not be trusted to govern themselves the way the proponents of popular sovereignty had envisioned.

Rogers’s greatest contribution to our knowledge of this conflict comes from his discussion of Indian policy. He makes the case that Mormon practices in managing Indian affairs were often in direct competition with federal policy. Accordingly, the Mormons had arguably violated the Trade and Intercourse Act. While this conflict is rarely discussed in depth in scholarly treatments of the period, Rogers declares that Mormon actions constituted the “gross dismissal of federal sovereignty” (97). For example, the Mormons sought to control regional Native Americans through a policy of making them economically dependent on the Latterday Saints rather than Washington. Mormons also proselytized to the Indians and earned their loyalty at the expense of Washington. This competition added urgency to the federal government’s decision to send troops to Utah Territory in 1857, where it proceeded to dismantle popular sovereignty among the Mormons. It was perhaps a more dramatic expansion of federal power in the West than Washington’s actions in regard to bleeding Kansas.

Unpopular Sovereignty increases our understanding of the West during the antebellum period. While readers of other scholarly studies of Utah Territory may find Rogers’s coverage of polygamy and the Mormon conflicts with federal officials familiar, his attention to Mormon Indian policy makes a unique contribution to the study of the expansion of federal power in the territories. This is an important and long overdue addition to the knowledge of this period and emphasizes the importance of the study of Utah Territory’s role in the history of the American West.

— Bruce W. Worthen Salt Lake City, Utah

Utah and the Great War: The Beehive State and the World War I Experience

Edited by Allan Kent Powell

Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and University of Utah Press, 2016. x + 421 pp. Paper, $24.95.

Allan Kent Powell’s Utah and the Great War— although timed with the centennial of World War I—features essays whose publication dates stretch from 1973 to the present. All but one of these articles were published in the Utah Historical Quarterly; the exception appeared in Brigham Young University Studies. The crisply edited collection demonstrates the transformative effect of WWI on American society. The essays testify against a longstanding but erroneous belief that the war’s outbreak in 1914 mattered little to Americans. They demonstrate that the seemingly local concerns of Utah communities were anything but narrowly construed. The war resonated deeply in a state in which the population maintained strong ties to European homelands and overseas missions sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Whereas Utah is often unfairly characterized as a racial and religious monoculture, these essays show its cosmopolitan demography.

Utahns reacted instantly to the war. German immigrants raised money for the German Red Cross to aid wounded soldiers fighting for the fatherland. Two hundred Serbian immigrants from Carbon County heeded the call to colors that beckoned tens of thousands of immigrants from across the United States to fight for their homelands. Richard C. Roberts’s two essays establish that Utahns were privy to a dress rehearsal for war in 1916, through the National Guard’s deployment to the Mexican border. The mobilization challenges confronted by the Utah Guard—including physically unfit soldiers, soldiers whose service would constitute a terrible financial burden to their families, and the necessity to flesh out understaffed units— were problems the U.S. Army would also experience in 1917–1918.

Utah and the Great War describes the experiences of war in extraordinary detail. Soldiers from the Beehive State, for instance, separately witnessed a military balloonist burned to death while attempting to escape by parachute and American troops slaughtering German soldiers who were attempting to surrender. We learn of the acreage of war gardens in Salt Lake City, restrictions on gasoline purchases, the armed prosecution of Navajo draft resisters, and the militant responses of southern Utah cattlemen to warnings that German saboteurs might target their livestock. The establishment of prisoner of war camps in Utah for German soldiers ensured that local communities were privy to a grand saga of imprisonment that ensnared nearly ten million troops and civilians worldwide.

State and church leaders encouraged universal subscription to war bonds drives and myriad relief initiatives, hoping to dispel the suspicions of disloyalty about a state born in rebellion. Their ambitions were achieved. The war catalyzed “the Americanization of Utah,” (3) which established Utah as an essential part of the national tapestry. Reports of Utah’s soldiers in training camps located across the United States and during overseas deployments confirmed the identity of Utahns and validated their citizenship; observers praised Utah’s Doughboys for superlative discipline, martial virtues, and moral qualities. Unlike many of their fellow servicemen, troops from Utah actually upheld the moral standards for soldiers expected by American society. Perhaps for the first time, Utahns became paragons of Americanness as the nation took on the charge to transform the world into an American ideal that celebrated individual rights and political freedoms.

Certainly, not all Utahns embraced the Great War as a constructive endeavor. Some Utahns resisted the coercive pressures to conform to local, state, and national war imperatives. The essays in Utah and the Great War featuring an Episcopalian bishop named Paul Jones, German-Americans who ardently supported Berlin’s war policies, and draft-resisting Goshute Indians are some of the finest contributions to the volume for their presentation of America’s multifaceted responses to war.

This collection of essays demonstrates that the questions elicited by the war did not simply end with the armistice in 1918. Utahns earnestly debated the postwar problems of crafting a durable peace through such solutions as the League of Nations. Even as Utahns generally welcomed the war’s end and the illusory return to “normalcy,” one Utah veteran so haunted by the echo of battle killed himself in 1925. The trauma of war endured.

The war, its contested meaning, and its commemoration are all explored in Powell’s compilation. Drawing as it does on obscure local newspapers, oral histories, interviews, and unpublished papers in private collections, this volume illuminates otherwise hidden contours of the war. Few local histories more richly detail the global concerns and interactions of American society in the First World War than Utah in the Great War.

— Branden Little Weber State University

Water, Agriculture and Urban Growth: A History of the Central Utah Project, the CUP: The First Fifty Years

By Craig W. Fuller, Robert E. Parson, and F. Ross Peterson

Salt Lake City and Orem: Utah State Historical Society and Central Utah Water Conservancy District, 2016. xiii + 475 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

With Water, Agriculture and Urban Growth, Craig Fuller, Robert Parson, and F. Ross Peterson have provided a carefully researched study of the Central Utah Project (CUP), the most far-reaching reclamation project in Utah. The book is based on research in secondary sources, in documents, and in interviews with those responsible for the project.

A predecessor to the CUP occurred in 1879 with the diversion of water by Heber Valley farmers from the Strawberry River into Daniels Canyon. In the 1880s, Heber Valley farmers converted small lakes on the west slope of the Uinta Mountains into reservoirs. Early in the twentieth century, Uinta Basin farmers converted lakes into reservoirs on the south slope of the Uinta Mountains, and the Bureau of Reclamation constructed the Strawberry Valley Reclamation Project (SVRP).

The Bureau of Reclamation planned the SVRP as the first major diversion of water from the Colorado River drainage into the Great Basin. It supplemented water for farmers in southern Utah Valley. Completed in 1915, the SVRP contracted in 1921 with the Strawberry Water Users Association.

An addition to the CUP was a Bureau of Reclamation Depression-era project on the Provo River to provide water from the Deer Creek Dam to the Salt Lake Metropolitan Water District. Much of the story of that project appeared in Water for Urban Reclamation: The Provo River Project (Logan, 1966), by Leonard J. Arrington and this reviewer. The authors of Water, Agriculture and Urban Growth seem to have overlooked it. The Provo River Project was unusual since it supplied water for urban use rather than irrigation.

Utah could not achieve its goal of utilizing a share of Colorado River water until the states the river drained reached an agreement on how much each state could legally divert. Such an agreement became an absolute necessity after the Supreme Court ruled in Wyoming v. Colorado (1922) that prior appropriation allowed water diversion in one state to prevent the diversion of the same river in another state. This meant that one state within the Colorado’s drainage could effectively preempt a large portion of the river water and block diversions in other states. Senator Hyrum Johnson and Congressman Phil Swing threatened to give California this benefit by constructing a reservoir on the Colorado.

A provision of the Constitution that authorized states to negotiate interstate agreements led to a conference on the Colorado River in Santa Fe in 1922. After solving several problems, the states agreed to divide the river at Lee’s Ferry, with the upper and lower basin states each receiving 7.5 million acre-feet of water annually. The upper basin states—Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and part of Arizona—negotiated an agreement on the division of upper basin water. Although 3.4 million acre-feet originated in Utah, Utah received 1.71 million acre-feet in the division.

Utah intended to use its allocation by diverting Colorado River water into the Great Basin, constructing features in the Uinta Basin, allocating water to the Uintah Reservation, diverting water from the Weber River to the Provo River, and constructing several other features. Originally the CUP would have furnished water for the Uinta Basin, the Wasatch Front, Juab, Millard, and Sevier counties and possibly Piute and Garfield counties on the upper Sevier River. Eventually, however, the Sevier River counties withdrew from the CUP.

The Bureau of Reclamation faced a number of problems because of the need to satisfy various demands. Water users in the Uinta Basin resented the priority given to expanded diversion to the Wasatch Front. The Utes rightly resented the decisions to place projects for their water use on the bottom of the list. Under the Supreme Court decision in Winters v. United States (1908) their 1861 water right predated many of the competing demands.

Congress authorized the CUP as part of the Colorado River Storage Project in 1956. Construction moved ahead at a slow pace under congressional appropriations. A hit-list by President Jimmy Carter threatened to kill the CUP, and opposition by environmental groups endangered its completion as well. Congressman Wayne Owens and others stepped in in 1992 to secure passage of the Central Utah Completion Act (CUCA). The CUCA authorized the project to continue but required the CUP to protect environmental values such as stream flows and wildlife. The CUCA required the Central Utah Water Conservancy District to assume the responsibility to complete the CUP, a provision that caused considerable consternation to the Bureau of Reclamation.

As the authors show, parts of the project still remain uncompleted, but the CUP is nevertheless functioning to supply water to multiple users while protecting environmental values.

— Thomas G. Alexander Brigham Young University

Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image

By Mary Campbell

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 192 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

Mormon and erotic are words that are not typically paired. Together they might seem contradictory—especially in light of the LDS church’s entrenched position against pornography—yet tantalizing. In her new book, art historian Mary Campbell brings these disparate elements together in an exploration of the work of Charles Ellis Johnson, a lesser-known Salt Lake City photographer who proudly boasted “you see Johnson all over the world” (3). The creation of pornographic photographs dates to the earliest uses of the camera, and, in truth, Johnson’s extant images of scantily clad and bare-breasted young women are tame in comparison to what his contemporaries were producing. The presence of these so-called spicy pictures, however, provides a sharp contrast to Johnson’s other subjects, including his better-known photographs of Wilford Woodruff and other church leaders. It is the contradictions of this photographic chameleon that make Campbell’s book intriguing.

In many ways, however, the lure of the erotic Mormon image is merely a tease (pun intended), and is not the true subject of Campbell’s text. Her larger objective is the investigation of that complicated and thorny period in Mormon history when the LDS church struggled to move beyond its polygamous past. Johnson’s photographs, therefore, provide entrée into an important period, a moment of compromises that eventually transformed Mormons from “peculiar” pariahs into mainstream Americans. According to the author, “it’s a book about the complicated ways this process and its aftershocks played themselves out” in Johnson’s work (14).

In investigating Johnson and his context, it is inevitable that there will be what Campbell calls a “slide” or “point of instability” (106). There simply are a lot of unknowns “in the back corners of Johnson’s archive” (56). Campbell overcomes this challenge through intensive research and penetrating analysis of the photographs. This is particularly true of Johnson’s bluer images, which invite speculation on who made up Johnson’s audience, the identity of the women in these photographs, and how these images could coexist alongside photographs of pious prophets and polygamous wives. The highlight of the text might be the discussion of Johnson’s stereographs of young women posed like eastern odalisques (chapter four). While not unique to Johnson, odalisque poses provide an opportunity to investigate the supposed parallels between polygamous Utah and Middle Eastern harems, which were frequently noted at the time. In chapter five Campbell utilizes Johnson’s portraits of Emmeline B. Wells and Martha Hughes Cannon to examine how these “Lady Saints” pushed gender boundaries in Utah and actively engaged in national movements (115).

In general, this book gets weaker as it becomes unmoored from Johnson and his work. This becomes especially apparent in the final chapter, which seems disjointed and lacks the cogency of the previous chapters. In it, Campbell presents an intriguing premise: that Joseph Smith’s use of the Urim and Thummim is comparable to stereoscopy in its ability to transport and decorporalize its viewer. This idea, however is weighed down by a discussion that winds through images of Joseph F. Smith (by an unknown photographer), the Book of Mormon, and the transcendentalists, which are all thinly tied to a final, enigmatic stereograph by Johnson. By and large, Campbell also ignores local connections in lieu of national interests. There is no discussion, for example, of how Johnson’s work compares to that of his photographer peers and competitors, or how his work relates to the nude sketches brought home by the Utah painters trained in the academies of Paris. Johnson was also not the only one to create nudes in his studio; see, for instance, C. W. Carter’s Beauty Unadorned, Paiute.

At its finer moments, however, Charles Ellis Johnson is very well done. Campbell’s writing is informative, witty, and intelligent. It is well researched and engaging and, when read with texts such as those from Thomas Alexander and W. Paul Reeve, it helps piece together this crucial period in LDS history, as Mormons struggled to find their footings in the arenas of politics, culture, race, gender, and sex.

— James R. SwensenBrigham Young University