Reviews

Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West

By David Walker

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 343 pp. Paper, $29.95

Nineteenth-century Mormonism, located in the heart of the Intermountain West directly in the path of “manifest destiny,” was a problem. The issue with Mormonism was at least two-fold: polygamy and theocracy. Both stood in opposition to American notions of progress and modernity, and Mormonism also seemed to physically stand in the way of the progression of westward expansion. But the solution to the Mormon problem was contested, as David Walker shows in Railroading Religion: Mormons, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West.

Railroading Religion is theoretically rich with an engaging and often ironic storyline. Walker demonstrates how the study of religion can shed light on a vast array of themes, such as capitalism, tourism, and modernity. Walker takes two nineteenth-century topics—railroads and Mormonism—which have both been written about extensively, and uses them to tell a new story in a new way. Focusing on the town of Corrine, Utah, which became the center of “Gentile” opposition to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Walker tells the story of the completion of the transcontinental railroad in Utah, along with the hopes, expectations, impacts, and realities surrounding this railroad. Corinnethians (citizens of Corrine) had many expectations for this railroad, including what Walker calls the death knell thesis. This theory was that Mormonism, with all its backwards ideas, could not survive the influence of modernity brought through the physical presence of the railroad. Corinnethian boosters not only believed this was true but also went to great lengths to convince outsiders of this and, perhaps most importantly, tried to capitalize on this expectation and monopolize control of the railroad. They failed spectacularly.

Every effort that Corinnethians and other non-Mormons in Utah took was fully countered by the Mormons. As Brigham Young essentially managed to take control of construction of the railroad in Utah, and ensure its location in Ogden, Utah, rather than the gentile Corrine, the town struggled to grow and obtain outside support. Walker demonstrates the dedication that Young and other Latter-day Saints had to “[bending] and [building] the railroads to their benefit” (48). After the completion of the railroad, Corinnethians tried to monopolize Mormon “atrocity tourism,” using steamboats and other methods to capitalize on the sensationalism of such a strange religion. These steamers failed to prove economically viable. Mormons opened their own tourist attractions, from resorts to museums, to both control and capitalize on outsiders’ desires to view their religion. Through these actions, Mormons debunked the death knell thesis, arguing that the railroads only strengthened Mormonism’s place in the Intermountain West rather than destroyed it. They seemed repeatedly successfully to “flip [the] secular script entirely” (247). As Walker shows, by the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Mormon rhetoric held much less weight in national discourse than it had previously.

For understanding the history of Utah, Railroading Religion explores, in important and novel ways, the cultural tension between Mormon and non-Mormon residents, a theme that will undoubtedly continue to be critical in understanding Utah history. This book is not only important for anyone seeking to understand the relationship of Utah Mormonism with its non-Mormon neighbors, the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the historical connections between religion and capitalism in Utah, but also the way that concepts such as progress, modernity, and religious freedom functioned in the American West. This work complicates concepts of Protestant modernity and the “secularization thesis.” Walker explains, “Religion, in this reading, did not retreat from the public sphere, so much as it became reinvented and reinvested therein” (245).

Along with a thorough engagement of theory, Walker utilizes an extensive array of primary sources. These include “newspaper accounts, novels, ethnographies, guidebooks, advertisements, ledger books, paystubs, stock statements, probate records, photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters, sermons, excommunication reports,” and many more (6). In using these, and in emphasizing the connection between capitalistic ventures and religious discourse, Walker reminds scholars that understanding the functions of religion, especially in the nineteenth-century American West, requires an examination of more than what has been traditionally assumed to be the content of religious studies. Railroading Religion is an excellent source for both historians and religious studies scholars and challenges both groups to think more carefully about the role of religion in American history.

Brooke R. LeFevre —Baylor University

Frontier Religion: Mormons and America, 1857–1907

By Konden Smith Hansen

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019. xii + 351 pp. Cloth, $45.00

In Frontier Religion, Konden Hansen Smith sets out to explain how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changed from a radical separatist sect in the nineteenth century to a paragon of patriotism and respectability in the twentieth. The answer, he suggests, has more to do with cultural changes in the United States than with changes in the church (237). Specifically, it’s rooted in the emergence of a new, more secularized “myth of the frontier” in the late 1800s than had prevailed for most of that century.

In the mid-nineteenth century, white Mormons and white Protestants shared a view of the frontier as a place of savagery, irreligion, and threat—a place to be civilized through redemptive violence in preparation for the millennial reign of Christ. This white and Christian supremacist myth caused violent conflict between Mormons and Protestants because Protestants drew the boundaries of whiteness and Christianity so as to exclude the Saints.

Viewing polygamist Mormons as part of the savagery of the frontier, President James Buchanan dispatched the US Army to subdue or exterminate them. Mormon resistance and diplomacy brought this “Utah Expedition” to naught, but antipolygamy crusaders kept after the Saints through legislation and the courts. In 1889, the US Supreme Court ruled that Mormonism did not qualify as a religion entitled to First Amendment Rights. Hansen notes that the “civil religion” of this period was not the twentieth century’s superficial public deism, but rather a “united front” of Protestant ministers, reformers, judges, and politicians entrenched at “all levels of U.S. power” (123).

Although the LDS church issued a “Manifesto” declaring an end to polygamy in 1890, the Protestant organizers of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World’s Fair excluded the Saints from the parliament, citing polygamy as the cause. The parliament’s organizers saw it as an opportunity for Protestant Christianity to demonstrate its superiority in conversation with Catholic and non-Christian religions. Mormonism, a sect rather than a religion, they considered unworthy of note.

The Parliament, however, demonstrated not Protestant strength, but Protestant weakness. Nascent modernists and fundamentalists fought bitterly about whether Protestants should consort with “pagans” at such an event, revealing cracks in the united front. The pagans themselves put in a more intelligent and respectable showing than the Protestant supremacists supposed. Sabbatarians lobbied hard to prevent the World’s Fair from opening on Sunday, but they failed after seven appearances in court. Sentiment in the nation was swinging toward a separation of religion and politics, a privatization of religious life.

Although excluded from the Parliament of Religions, Utah received pride of place at the World’s Fair. The Utah exhibitors, including top Mormon leaders, mostly ignored religion and emphasized the secular economic accomplishments of hardy Mormon pioneers. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir wowed audiences with renditions of patriotic songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Audiences came away feeling Mormons might be good Americans after all.

Mormons had protested their Americanness for decades, but as long as “American” had meant “white Protestant,” no one took them seriously. Now things were changing, partly because of the closure of the frontier in 1890, which inaugurated a new era in which the frontier no longer seemed threatening and could be romanticized instead. One presenter at the World’s Fair, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, presented his “frontier thesis,” which held that the difficult conquest of the frontier had forged a unique American character that made America exceptional. With Americanness increasingly understood in terms of a secular myth of “progress” and manly pioneer character, the Mormons had for the first time a path to assimilation by performing their pioneer prowess. Perform it they did, and the US government awarded Utah statehood in 1896.

The Mormons completed their assimilation amidst the US Senate hearings to unseat Reed Smoot, a Mormon apostle elected to represent Utah. Smoot triumphed against Protestant opposition with the support of Theodore Roosevelt, who admired the hardy spirit of historical Mormon pioneers. Essential to Smoot’s victory was his insistence that his religion was private and that he placed loyalty to nation before loyalty to church.

Hansen artfully connects Mormon assimilation to the frontier, and he is undoubtedly correct that Mormons performed a manly frontier archetype. The argument that the frontier’s closure made Mormons seem less threatening feels persuasive. However, the myth of the frontier as a forge for manly American character long predated Turner, so the privatization of religion seems the more immediate and salient catalyst for Mormon assimilation. Equally salient are developments on the Mormon side which Hansen underplays. The nation accepted Mormons in no small part because Mormons deradicalized, a development Hansen leaves mostly unexplained.

Christopher Carroll Smith —Albuquerque, New Mexico

Wonders of Sand and Stone: A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments

By Frederick H. Swanson

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xiii + 370pp. Paper, $34.95

Frederick H. Swanson chronicles the establishment and development of Utah’s eight national monuments and five national parks in a new and much needed synthesis. His work is ambitious for taking a regional view of the southern Utah canyon lands, which he calls one of the “key battlegrounds” of landscape preservation (103). Swanson, an environmental historian, is open about his purpose in writing this book. He closes his introduction saying, “What follows is an argument for treating Utah’s national parks and monuments as integral parts of one of our planet’s most extraordinary natural and cultural regions” (6). His book is a call to action to support forward-thinking landscape-level preservation.

A “mini-empire” of national monuments and parks popped up across Utah’s landscape in the twentieth century (24). The Antiquities Act of 1906, which predated the creation of the National Park Service (NPS) by a decade, allowed the US President to set aside areas of scientific and cultural interest by executive action. Utah’s first national monuments, such as Natural Bridges and Rainbow Bridge National Monuments, were purposefully small, concentrating on unique geologic features and omitting any potential mineral development. Much of the southern Utah canyon lands were remote and difficult to access. When the National Park Service was created, its administrators were able to build an alliance with local and state interests by developing roads to bring visitors to these locations. They had backing from the Union Pacific Railroad, which was also interested in bringing visitors to experience these places. This support made creation of other national monuments and national parks like Bryce Canyon possible. By the middle of the twentieth century, the NPS had helped develop southern Utah into a national vacation destination.

As early as the 1930s, NPS officials became interested in larger, landscape-level preservation of the Colorado Plateau. They developed a national monument proposal for a seven-million-mile area called Escalante, which was quickly quashed by local and state representatives who correctly feared grazing and mineral restrictions. Despite the failure of the larger proposal, Swanson shows that the vision for Escalante National Monument gave way to Canyonlands National Park, an expansion of Capitol Reef National Park, and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Canyonlands National Park was supported by emerging environmental organizations concerned with setting aside wilderness. The Escalante proposal also laid the groundwork for the establishment of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996 under the Clinton administration and Bears Ears National Monument in the final days of the Obama administration in 2016. Conservative politicians saw this as federal overreach and an abuse of the Antiquities Act. When President Donald J. Trump took office in 2017, he reduced the size of these two monuments to allow for grazing and mineral development. The consensus about the role of the federal government in creating parks for economic development had fully unraveled, while threats to the natural and cultural resources of the Colorado Plateau continue to abound.

The author does an excellent job introducing the various officials, business interests, communities, and organizations involved in making Utah’s national parks and monuments. Indigenous groups, however, remain on the periphery of these narratives and do not really take center stage until the creation of Bears Ears National Monument in 2016, which makes one wonder how they felt about the creation of many of the thirteen units described in the book that they undoubtedly had long ties to.

Swanson’s work falls squarely in the realm of national park “administrative histories.” Administrative histories are often bureaucratic products written at the behest of park managers, but skilled historians can use national parks as a lens to examine larger movements or moments in American history. Park managers are often the primary audience, but enthusiastic visitors and historians may also find them useful and interesting. Swanson’s work reaches those audiences, but it is essential reading for anyone looking to understand Utah’s development and environmental politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Angela Sirna —National Park Service

John Hance: The Life, Lies, and Legend of Grand Canyon’s Greatest Storyteller

By Shane Murphy

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. 230 pp. Paper, $24.95.

A tourist bound for Arizona Territory during the late nineteenth century might be as keen to meet an authentic frontier “character” as to obtain a view of the Grand Canyon. John Hance, the canyon’s first resident outfitter and guide, satisfied both needs. From 1881 to 1895 Hance welcomed guests to his rude tent camp located at the eastern edge of the South Rim, a long day’s ride by horse and wagon from Flagstaff. If they were game, he would conduct them deep into the canyon on a rough trail he had constructed down to the Colorado River, regaling them with tall tales all the way.

So entertaining was Hance that more than one writer observed that a visit to the Grand Canyon was not complete without some time spent in the old guide’s company. And so outrageous were his yarns that it proved difficult to discern the man from the stories he spun. Untangling fact from the considerable fiction surrounding this Grand Canyon pioneer is the task Shane Murphy, a former Colorado River river guide, set himself in this well-crafted and elegantly written book.

With little primary source material available on Hance’s life and activities—he kept no personal journal, wrote few letters, and was seldom interviewed—Murphy instead consulted a wide variety of incidental sources, reaching deep into such arcana as hotel guest records, property deeds, mining claim notices, and even the logbooks of the sutler’s store in Camp Verde, Arizona, where John Hance lived with his younger half-brother George before resettling at the South Rim. “Much can be learned about a man by studying his grocery store list,” Murphy observes, noting that Hance found need of “pain pills and quinine” as well as having a taste for whiskey. His shopping included such necessities as corn meal and pairs of overalls, ammunition and axle grease. The latter was needed for Hance’s primary employment as a freighter for the US Cavalry at Fort Verde, which skirmished with Apache and Yavapai Indians who were resisting the incursion of European-American settlers and miners into their ancestral homelands.

Murphy has reconstructed as much as can reasonably be known of Hance’s ancestors and early life in Tennessee and Missouri, including his service in the Confederate Tenth Missouri Infantry, in which the young Hance fought in several battles before being taken prisoner. After spending nearly two years in the hellholes of several Union prisons, Hance was delivered back to Missouri and a new career hauling government freight for L. B. Hickok, brother to “Wild Bill” Hickok, whom he would meet again decades later during one of the entertainer’s visits to the Grand Canyon.

Both John and George Hance took part in the return of the Navajo people from Bosque Redondo in 1868, then settled near Prescott in Arizona’s Verde Valley, where George would remain for the rest of his life. John showed up at the South Rim around 1881, herding sheep for a time and working various mineral prospects along with other Grand Canyon pioneers such as Ralph Cameron and William Ashurst. Hance, though, found his calling in the tourism business. By all accounts he was a genial, considerate, and attentive guide who led tourists down the torturous route he had scratched out through the cliffs of the upper canyon to the Tonto Platform, and thence down a creek bed that in places necessitated rope descents through waterfalls. Hance also used the trail to reach his mining claims, which like most in the canyon were too inaccessible to turn a profit.

Hance’s considerable stash of stories presumably helped to distract his guests during the travails of a Grand Canyon descent. These tales “began innocently enough,” Murphy writes, “then trended due south to end in utter absurdity.” Most of his stories involved a long jump across a chasm of credulity, much like Hance’s oft-repeated account of how he once tried to vault the Grand Canyon on his horse, Darby, only to wheel around midway when he realized he couldn’t make it across. Fortunately for us, Murphy’s painstaking research stands in complete contrast to Hance’s amusing confabulations. He gives us a sympathetic look at an important pioneer of Grand Canyon tourism, observing that the tall tales Hance told “paled in comparison to the real life he lived.” His reconstruction is especially valuable for showing Hance’s interactions with other players at the South Rim, including James Thurber, Pete Berry, Martin Buggeln, and William Bass, each of whom brought more ambition to the tourist trade and built hotels which supplanted Hance’s primitive camp.

We know from records of visitors that Hance was deeply appreciative of the scenes that lay at his doorstep. Josephine Hollenback, who with her sister Amelia spent two weeks exploring the canyon with Hance in the early summer of 1897, described their guide being “as excited as we were” to discover an Indian ruin near Sockdolager Rapid, the terminus of Hance’s original trail. Hance seemed more interested in sharing the canyon with his guests than in growing his tourism business, and in this his career paralleled other pioneers of the Grand Canyon’s tourist trade such as Dee Woolley and Dave Rust at the North Rim. Hance would end his career living in a tent cabin near the Bright Angel Hotel, employed by the Santa Fe Railway to provide local color to its guests.

In filling in the many gaps in the life of John Hance, Shane Murphy has performed an important service for Grand Canyon historians and aficionados alike. But his book also has much to say about life in the Arizona Territory of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, a time when European-American settlers moved from confrontations with Native peoples to capitalize on one of the nation’s greatest natural wonders. At Grand Canyon, John Hance fashioned his own legend through hard work and dedication. By the time of his death in 1919, he had carved himself a place in the canyon’s history, the true outlines of which are now discernable.

Frederick H. Swanson Freelance writer and historian

—Salt Lake City

Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right

By Matthew L. Harris

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xi + 288 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $34.95

Matthew Harris contextualizes the religious and political thoughts of Ezra Taft Benson, ninth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in Watchman on the Tower: Ezra Taft Benson and the Making of the Mormon Right. Harris’s book is the first monograph to examine how and why Benson’s political views developed from his early employment as an agricultural cooperative chairperson, to his call to the Latter-day Saint apostleship, through his service as president of the LDS church. Written for scholars and interested Latter-day Saint readers, Harris’s book is essential to understand how Benson, Utahns, and Latter-day Saints became ardent Republicans in the United States.

Neatly split into five sections, Watchman on the Tower is very much a biography. In the first section, Harris presents Benson’s upbringing in rural Idaho, including his quick ascension in agricultural leadership in Utah and throughout the United States. In the second chapter, Benson’s mission to Europe’s ruins in the wake of World War II and his tension-filled tenure as Secretary of Agriculture takes center stage. In the third chapter, Harris explains how Benson adopted the John Birch Society’s far-right principles and fostered a “conspiracy culture” in Mormon and Utah political circles. The fourth chapter illuminates how Latter-day Saint leaders worked to temper Benson’s politicking, which they believed soured non-Mormons to their faith. Fascinatingly, Harris uses letters written by average Latter-day Saints to First Presidency member Hugh B. Brown to show how many church members disagreed with his politics. The fifth chapter considers Benson’s years as LDS church president.

Harris traces Benson’s later politics to both his early career in agricultural cooperatives and his mission to deliver supplies to war-torn Europe following the Second World War. Benson’s early career in agriculture and his time as Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower cabinet reflect a belief in the free market’s necessity for solving economic problems, rather than government influence. For instance, he supported farmers coming together to receive higher prices for their crops, but disdained government intervention or the creation of artificial price floors and ceilings. To Benson, government should stay out of its citizens’ pocketbooks, even if their Keynesian actions saved many small farmers during the Great Depression and supported them after World War II.

Benson’s European mission left a lasting impact on the Latter-day Saint apostle. He saw bombed-out cities, starving families, and Nazi concentration camps. His mistrust of centralized government power deepened from this experience, causing him to distrust all forms of collective government power.

Watchman on the Tower makes a valuable contribution to the historiography on several fronts. First, Harris systematically explains the origins and evolution of Benson’s religio-political thought over time, pointing to events in the Great Depression and shortly after World War II, rather than the Cold War’s “paranoid” political culture alone. Second, Harris obtained letters written between Benson and the John Birch Society that reveal just how much Benson viewed the organization as compatible with Latter-day Saint teachings. Historians like Gary Bergera and Greg Prince have demonstrated Benson’s preoccupation with “Birchers.” Still, no historians highlighted the degree to which the John Birch Society and Benson worked in tandem at both the regional and national political level. Indeed, Harris highlights Benson’s role in influencing the John Birth Society’s power in Utah and the “Mormon Belt.”

The book is written for an academic audience, but also interested Latter-day Saints without an overarching interest in historiography. This writing style is useful for two reasons; the text is highly readable and eschews sensationalism. Given Ezra Taft Benson’s presence in modern American thought, through Glen Beck’s radio show, popular YouTube videos, and other influential arenas, Harris could have constructed an intellectual strawman to be torn down by liberal readers. Indeed, Harris asks his audience to understand Benson as a thinker, not only as an authority figure, and to grapple with his rationale, not only his legacies. While they may disagree with his views, those who engage with Watchman on the Tower can explain how he arrived at them.

However, readers may read the book without recognizing how Benson’s ultraconservatism and the making of the “Mormon Right” were rooted in the white backlash politics in response to New Deal politics and the Black civil rights movement. Harris makes clear that Benson’s politics represented the fringe of conservative American politics but fails to highlight that the racial stakes were the same as the Republican Party’s after 1964. Considering that Utah has not voted for a Democrat since 1964, the presidential election before the Voting Rights Act, this information is crucial for readers to understand how Benson’s influence reflected changing racial dynamics among America’s two largest political parties. Unfortunately, placing Benson’s thoughts and actions within this context, and within this legacy, also leaves the book out of the broader historiography of the Religious Right’s ascension to electoral power from the 1950s through the 1980s.

Harris’s book should be the first of many to examine Ezra Taft Benson, Mormonism, and Utahns in America’s shifting political landscapes from the New Deal through the 1990s. Future scholars owe Harris a great debt for his research and arguments; Watchman on the Tower is an important contribution to Mormon and Utah history.

Joseph R. Stuart —University of Utah