Reviews

In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953– 1954

By James R. Swensen

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, in cooperation with the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 2018. 432 pp. Paper, $34.95

With In a Rugged Land, James Swensen offers the big backstory for the work of Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams as they pursued the “Three Mormon Towns” project for Life magazine in 1953 and 1954. He does so via a set of concentric contexts, including subject biographies; national, regional and local history; art history and criticism; and literary, aesthetic, and intellectual history. Although Lange and Adams were longtime friends, these two famous photographers approached their work very differently. Dorothea Lange focused on human-centered, very personal images, blending documentary photography with Life magazine–like photojournalism; while Ansel Adams offered breathtaking, human-less landscapes that he prepared with the highest of technical artistry in his darkroom. As Swensen details, both artists fought against these labels, and each pushed the other to work differently. The relationship between Lange and Adams—warm in the long term but sometimes strained—is carefully described in this book.

The two photographers—Lange mostly, but also Adams—were committed to documenting everyday life, with a good deal of focus on women, children, senior citizens, and couples; pioneer homes, outbuildings, community celebrations, religious services, and street scenes; and gender-based divisions of labor; and too the towns’ or church’s leading men. Finally, their focus on human topography, via close-up portraiture— hands, shoes, and everyday clothing—created all together a body of photographic documentation of life in mid-twentieth-century rural Utah that is unsurpassed. Swensen adds to this deep personal engagement by tracking down and interviewing Lange and Adams’s surviving subjects.

Swensen explains the ideological frameworks that informed Lange and Adams work, including the interest of Paul Taylor (the University of California Berkeley economist married to Lange) in studying and encouraging the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent farmer, amid a self-sustaining village. The photographers wanted to document what they saw as the closing vestiges of the Mormon village—which had survived amid scarcity, was committed to community cooperation, and whose people were bound in their common beliefs. This anthropological impulse, as Swensen describes, was informed by the early proponents of studying Utah more scientifically, particularly the practitioners of Mormon village studies from the 1920s to 1950s. Those who advised the photographers included Lowry Nelson, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and Edward C. Banfield, all of whom saw this unique institutional pattern as worthy of study. Swensen’s explanation of these ideological contexts are some of the most contributing aspects of his book.

At the same time, Swensen contextualizes the world of the people who lived in those three Utah villages. He describes, for instance, the advice given to Lange and Adams, which they carefully followed, to secure approval at the offices of the LDS church First Presidency before committing to the project. Concurrently, the small-town Mormon bishops confirmed these arrangements with the same church leaders, demonstrating just how powerful, even in regards to private actions, the LDS church was in midcentury, rural Utah.

Although a social science framework undergirded “Three Mormon Towns,” Lange and Adams were inescapably driven by nostalgia and a romantic ideal—a sense of loss felt in the mid-twentieth century, just after the majority of Utah’s population began to trend urban and after scores of small Utah towns began a depopulation slide. This was only a decade after Utah’s extended Great Depression years had ended, and just after wartime military investments and industries had surpassed Utah’s agricultural industry. The mechanization of farms, the car culture explosion, the soon-tobe-built Interstate Highway System, the influence of television, and the nuclear fallout from Nevada (which Swensen explains well in this story): all of these developments speak to the slipping away of small-town, agrarian life.

If there is anything lacking in Swensen’s book, it is a more thorough examination, perhaps a cautionary discussion, regarding the impact of nostalgia on these photographers. In some respects, the work of Lange and Adam at midcentury was not unlike the work of the photographer Edward Curtis, during the first decades of the century, wherein he sought to capture completely the nation’s Indigenous people or “vanishing race.” The preloaded themes requested by financial underwriters, as well as Lange and Adams’s own preloaded themes, and their effects on the product, could have been studied more. Also the photographers’ composing and even staging of photographs for optimum authentic effect, to comply with rural stereotypes, might have been explored more fully. This, however, is minor in comparison to the vast contribution In a Rugged Land has had and will continue to have, on the history of twentieth-century Utah in general, along with social and cultural history, and the book’s primary art and photographic history.

In a Rugged Land walks a careful line between audiences. Swensen is inescapably a Utahn who understands the social and intellectual world of Utah, and regional readers will appreciate his book, but it is also a work of national importance, equally attuned to broader audiences. This monograph also bests the Utah photographic histories that were written in the 1970s and 1980s, when the works of Utah’s nineteenth-century photographers first garnered attention. Other photographic history books have come out since then but none make the national and regional contribution In A Rugged Land has accomplished. Archives and museums across the interior West are brimming with works of nineteenth and twentieth-century photographers, much of which justifies scholarly attention. It is my hope that Swensen will inspire other to study and analyze these “deep in the archives” caches of predigital visual artifacts. Finally, this book—with its large format, balanced layout of image to text, and generous margins—is a pleasure to read and to consume visually. And the history Swensen writes holds up wonderfully next to iconic photographic work he analyzes.

—Brad Westwood Utah Department of Cultural and Community Engagement

The Commissioners of Indian Affairs: The United States Indian Service and the Making of Federal Indian Policy, 1824 to 2017

By David H. DeJong

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xvii + 305 pp. Cloth, $75.00; Paper, $40.00

In July 2020, the US Supreme Court, in a five to four decision (McGirt v. Oklahoma), removed from eastern Oklahoma state criminal jurisdiction over offenses committed within what has now been determined to be Muscogee Creek reservation land. Few people saw this coming. That same month, the Washington Redskins officially changed its name to the Washington Football Team. And the Bears Ears National Monument continues to be the focus of five Indian tribes—Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and Northern and Ute Mountain Utes—who are petitioning the restoration of the Obama-era 1.35 million acres, following the Trump-era decrease to 15 percent of its original size. What these three seemingly unrelated issues in today’s newspapers have in common springs from the historical context provided in The Commissioners of Indian Affairs by David H. DeJong.

Between 1824 and 2018, there have been fifty-six commissioners and assistant secretaries of Indian Affairs, charged with overseeing the federal government’s relationship with the tribes within the continental United States and Alaska. DeJong outlines the contributions of each of these men (and two women) in an often brief, occasionally lengthy explanation (John Collier netted ten pages), depending upon their length of service and amount accomplished. For scholars writing and researching Native American topics, this book becomes a handy reference that provides details behind these official policymakers, their general beliefs, practices, and reason for their political appointment. Their success was varied—some being hacks with zero knowledge of Indian people and their needs, while others came to the task with high principle and understanding (or at least good will) for their charges. Twenty-six of them were either Native American or Iñupiat.

DeJong organizes what could be a blizzard of personalities, events, and shifting philosophies into two main “braids” of action. “The first was the social and political integration of American Indians,” which over two-and-a-half centuries manifested itself in “civilization (1776 to 1817), emigration [removal] (1817 to 1848), reservations (1848 to 1870), assimilation (1870 to 1929), acculturation (1929 to 1950), termination (1950 to 1968), and consumerism (1969 to present)” (x–xi). The second braid concerns land policy, the general theme of which has been to take as much land as possible along with resources to feed the economic growth and expansion of a land-hungry United States population. This was accomplished, depending on the period of history, through treaties, agreements, land cessions, the General Allotment Act (1887), fee patents, termination, relocation, and other means that relinquished government responsibilities to protect Indian lands. Every tribe has its story. Missing from the general narrative, however, is the use of the presidential executive order, which actually added territory to tribal holdings between 1855 and 1919. In Utah, for example, executive orders under three different administrations created the vast majority of Navajo reservation lands in southeastern Utah. The same is true in other parts of the West.

The Commissioners is a carefully crafted work based on the annual reports written by those serving in that office, as well as a myriad of other primary sources. Each chapter is heavily documented, with endnotes ranging between seventy-five and 223 entries; the prose is clear and direct. This work is an excellent source for information often buried in government documents; it also provides an abbreviated outline of federal Indian policy and the people who ran it. The author is sympathetic to those people who have had to live through the shifting beliefs and historical winds that have blown so many of the tribes about.

A final word. DeJong has laid out the facts and feelings of those serving in what is now called the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA or Office of Indian Services) over the years. As he points out, even with those who were well-intentioned, there has been no satisfying “solution” to many of the questions raised over the centuries. Just as there are differing points of views concerning the recent decision in eastern Oklahoma or in the Bears Ears discussion, strong polarization arises as to what should be done. When Chief Justice John Marshall introduced the term “domestic dependent nation” in his 1831 Supreme Court decision, he paved the way for two-and-a-half-centuries of dispute over interpretation. In spite of all the legislation that has been passed, there is no clear path forward. Native American tribes (573 as of 2018) insist on sovereign nation status, with more applying for federal recognition each year. Yet economically, educationally, and legally they often lack the wherewithal to be truly independent. Termination in the 1950s was a failed experiment. Regardless of which side of the fence one sits when discussing the government’s role, there will be just as many on the other side calling for a different approach. The Commissioners provides a good starting point, so that at least the mistakes of the past can be considered.

—Robert S. McPherson Utah State University, Emeritus

Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics

By David Prior

Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. ix + 258 pp. Cloth, $45.00

Over the past decade, historians have worked to put the Civil War era in broader continental, transnational, and even global contexts. Much of this work centers on the antebellum and Civil War periods. However, we know less about Reconstruction in these contexts. This is where books like David Prior’s Between Freedom and Progress provide a genuine contribution to this ever-growing field of study. Prior’s book covers the period of Reconstruction, just after the Civil War, and aims to recover the “lost world” of Reconstruction-era political discourse that bridges domestic politics with that of the outside world and the American West. He examines the many ways that northern Republicans and Democrats interpreted events across the world and in parts of the United States. Prior uses a series of different instances in which northern Republicans and Democrats debated concepts such as freedom, progress, republicanism, and civilization alongside the two-part question at the heart of Reconstruction: what to do with the South and how to unify the nation? Between Freedom and Progress uncovers “a world part real and part fantasy that Reconstruction’s partisans imagined themselves in as they struggled with each other over the nature of their post-Civil War, postslavery settlement. It was a world made possible by the remarkable technological and commercial transformation centered on Europe and North America during the middle of the nineteenth century” (23).

The book begins with the Cretan Insurrection, when Greeks in Crete rose up against the Ottomans. This uprising halfway around the world provided an early postwar battleground for what Prior refers to as “Reconstructions’ Partisans.” They debated concepts such as progress and barbarism. Northern Republicans connected Greek efforts to throw off Turkish Ottoman rule to what they saw as the global struggle for republicanism over despotism and civilization over barbarism. Democrats, Prior argues, also viewed themselves as more in-line with the Cretan Insurrection against the Turks but used more racialized ideas than northern Republicans. The successive chapters follow somewhat similar dichotomies. Prior follows the Cretan Insurrection by delving into the story of Paul du Chaillu’s expedition to Africa, the figure of the gorilla, and how they both became a part of partisan discourse. Prior discusses other globe trotters whose trips demonstrated that steam technology was knitting the world together under the banner of western progress as well as potentially being changed by the nations that began using steam-powered transportation. He also addresses the Black American press, which debated the global meanings of progress, republicanism, and civilization alongside more domestic issues.

Prior’s final chapter examines how Democrats and northern Republicans used critiques of the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-day Saints and polygamy. Northern Republicans viewed polygamy as one of the “twin barbarisms,” alongside slavery. They also viewed Mormonism as tantamount to a foreign culture, outside the bounds of American culture, and often eschewed or downplayed any successes that the church had in Utah. Democrats, Prior argues, with their more relaxed views on white immigrants, used those views, at times, to lend support to Latter-day Saints. At other times, they rejected Mormonism and polygamy as similar to their racist notions of African American men in the South. Members of both political parties viewed LDS men as not adhering to mid-nineteenth-century gender norms. The anxiety of northern Republicans over the state of Utah society signaled that their overall “postbellum optimism” was coming to an end in an ever-increasing international and national ambiguity.

The book offers a fascinating view of aspects of political discourse and fantasies in the Reconstruction era. At the same time that the Republican Party and a Republican-led Congress was trying to navigate the United States and the South through Reconstruction at home, they were hoping to promote similar principals abroad and link events around the world to their own struggles. The Democratic Party also saw in the events afield further evidence of northern Republicans’ hypocrisies and overstepping. Prior deftly interweaves ideas about race in with others that examine how different groups and nations were judged by these parties. At times it is difficult to see how all of these concepts knit together to form a cohesive whole with the more familiar side of Reconstruction politics and discourse. That said, what Prior has done is truly uncover the different parts of this lost world of politics.

—Angela Diaz Utah State University

Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement

By Jennifer L. Holland

Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. viii + 310 pp. Paper, $29.95

In her thought-provoking study of the United States anti-abortion movement, historian Jennifer L. Holland presents a compelling and, until now, underexplored account of the grassroots campaign against legalized abortion. Anchored by meticulous research, twenty-eight oral histories, and a sharp analysis of the cultural history of postwar social movements, Tiny You unearths how abortion became the singular issue for so many conservative Americans. Her work, like that of other notable scholars, argues that women are the backbone of the anti-abortion movement. But more importantly, Holland broadens the contours of anti-abortion activism, what she terms intimate activism, and provides readers with “a history of the gendered political culture of the anti-feminist movement” (6).

Part 1 overviews the historical foundations of what became the anti-abortion movement. As Holland persuasively asserts, the women’s and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the campaigns against birth control and pornography, developed a set of political tools that anti-abortion activists—most white and Christian—would later hone and invert to suit their movement. As her research demonstrates, the anti-abortion movement’s prevailing political idea was that fetuses were akin to fully formed human beings; therefore, like women and African Americans, they have full political rights. Furthermore, “through this civil rights movement for fetuses, regular white people could be both victims of modernity and potential saviors” (5). As white activists tied their own identities to fetal victimhood, white conservatives too became victims. In this ideology, the political became personal—an inversion of secular feminist ideology, which promoted a woman’s right to choose whether to see to term or terminate a pregnancy.

As Holland documents, by the 1970s, American Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, and evangelical churches became the first important sites of anti-abortion activism, especially in the Four Corners states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. Significantly, in these places of worship, the graphic objects of this ideology—fetal pins, fetal dolls, and other ephemera— galvanized the movement’s moral crusade. Activists integrated pro-life politics in rituals of faith, and for many white Americans, particularly evangelicals, “pro-life belief became central to their religious identities” (101).

Of particular import to Utah history, when the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution was sent to the states for consideration, the LDS church was plunged into a “decade-long acrimonious debate over whether the Mormon tradition sanctioned equality for women or a special, different place for women in families and in society” (97). As Holland tells it, “the church eventually opposed the ERA, helping secure its national defeat,” and reiterated the LDS stance that “motherhood was a woman’s sacred role in society” (97). Furthermore, the US Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade prompted a more explicit opposition to legal abortion among conservatives. Although most twentieth-century Mormons disapproved of abortion in most cases, until the 1970s their opposition had been largely unspoken, except within the confines of the church. However, “in the 1970s . . . opposition to abortion became a regular part of Mormon leaders’ speeches and testimonies. Between 1971 and 1973, leaders of the church discussed abortion 12 times in their public addresses, and between 1973 and 1980, 43 times” (98).

With the church president’s blessing, many pro-lifers, including women active in the LDS Relief Society, the primary LDS women’s group, brought their activism into religious forums. In one oral history, Holland takes up the case of Sandra Allen, a Mormon woman living in Las Vegas who felt exhilarated by her interactions with pro-life non-Mormons but, when she had to enter sexually liberal spaces, often felt physically cold, subsumed by a “spirit of darkness” (99). For Allen, the Divine sanctioned her politics: “shades of darkness and light, sensations of cold and warmth differentiated the upright from the unprincipled” (99).

As Holland argues in Part 2, by the 1980s and 1990s, “activists argued abortion threatened not just fetal lives but also Christianity, womanhood, the haven of childhood, and the ‘traditional family’” (5). In crisis pregnancy centers across the country, the New Right took hold, traditional family values were extolled, and white anti-abortion activists decided that fetuses were not victims enough but rather that the “traditional,” Christian family was endangered, an innocent bystander and victim of secular feminism. Casting children as “survivors” of abortion, the family values movement gained a political and cultural stronghold that continues to permeate reproductive rights and abortion’s ever-evolving and embattled legal standing in the United States.

Holland sheds light on the religious and racialized underpinnings of the pro-life movement, its proselytizing moral politics, and its grassroots mobilization in the Mountain West. This book is a welcome addition to the history of reproductive rights in twentieth and twenty-first century America. A page-turner, it will clearly find a readership in academia and with the general public.

—Kathleen A. Kelly Gray Bevins Editorial