How Good things can become Bad within a Generation (25 yrs) The settlement of Salt Lake City is a unique chapter in the westward movement of the United States. The people who founded the city in 1847 were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More commonly known as Mormons, they did not come as individuals acting on their own, but as a well-organized, centrally-directed group, and they came for a religious purpose. Their goal was to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Salt Lake City was to be a religious Utopia in the wilderness. Mormons intended that it be not merely a city of man, but a City of God, a New Jerusalem, the Zion of the New World. In the first camp meeting after the Latter day Saints entered the valley, it was decided that settlers would not scatter their labours but would combine and concentrate their efforts, working cooperatively. A kingdom built in any other way would not be a kingdom of God but a kingdom of the world. The settlers were divided into committees of work. One group staked off, ploughed, planted, and irrigated thirty-five acres of land. Another party located a site for a temple and laid out a city modelled loosely on Joseph Smiths Plat of the City of Zion. Streets were 132 feet wide and oriented in the cardinal directions to cross at right angles. Land south of the city, called the Big Field, was fenced for the planting of crops. Farmers lived in town and drove out to their fields each day. Such an arrangement facilitated cooperation and in general assured a highly organized community life. Clearly, the settlement of Salt Lake City was different. Although other western settlements faced similar problems, the Latter day Saints unity, homogeneity, joint action, group planning, and authoritarianism stamped them as unique. Early Salt Lake City and all of Utah stood in sharp contrast to the other western scattered, specialized, exploitative, wide open mining, cattle, timber and homestead frontiers. For about a generation after its founding, Salt Lake City was very much the kind of society its religious founders intended it to be. It was a religious society, with no overriding secular purpose. As such, they were to gather out of a sinful world to a place called Zion where they would build the Kingdom of God on earth, dwell together in righteousness, and prepare for Christs coming. In other words, the Latter day Saints did not aim just to teach certain doctrines or to get people together regularly to hear Gods word. Its goal was the establishment of a perfect society, a model upon which all human society would ultimately be organized. Early on, Brigham Young announced the land policy for Salt Lake. In order to eliminate land grabbing, speculation, and profiteering, land would belong to the community and would be distributed to the people by lottery and on the basis of need. For example, unmarried men would not be entitled to city lots, but married couples. Singles were allotted perimeter lots. Further, people who were given land could keep it only as long as they needed it and used it. Originally no one bought or sold land. The amount and location of a persons land did not depend on who he was and how much he could afford to pay. He/she was not to decide if and when to sell his land. The community as a whole owned all land, and Latter day Saint church leaders decided who was to get what, and how much, and how long they were to control it. Similar principles applied to all natural resources. According to Brigham Young, There shall be no private ownership of the streams that come out of the canyons, nor the timber that grows on the hills. These belong to the people: all the people. In developing their system of irrigation, Latter day Saints did not rely on private enterprise or individual initiative, but on the united efforts of the entire community. When a group of people needed water, the whole group worked together to build an irrigation system. The local bishop often directed construction, announcing at Sunday meeting what work needed to be done and who was to do it. When the project was finished, each man could use an amount of water proportionate to the work he had put in on the construction. Food Shortages---Among the measures taken to cope with the situation were the appointment of a tax collector for public improvements, with power to take from the rich and give to the poor and the establishment of a community storehouse system. Administered on a ward basis, each person with a surplus was asked to turn it over to the bishop to be divided among the needy. According to Brigham Young, If those that have do not sell to those that have not, we will just take it and distribute it among the Poors, and those that have and will not share willingly may be thankful that their Heads are not found wallowing in the Snow.4 The city was essentially a cooperative theocracy that was relatively self-sufficient, egalitarian, and homogeneous. It was a counter-culture that differed in fundamental ways from contemporary American society. It was a socio/spiritual experiment in socio/spiritual awareness. The needs of one were achieved by the needs of all, both social and spiritual. Gradually at first, however, and then more rapidly, Salt Lake City began to move away from its founders ideals. Two factors were crucial in that evolution: the coming of the railroad in 1869 and the formal decision of the LDS church in 1890 to integrate itself into the mainstream of American society. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the spread of a network of rails throughout the state during the next several decades brought far-reaching changes to Salt Lake City. Utahs geographic isolation ended. The railroad brought an increasing number of non-Mormons into Salt Lake City and in a lesser degree to other parts of the state. It changed the areas economy, allowing the development of large-scale mining and leading the way to the diversified economy that could be integrated into the national picture. Most noticeably, the railroad and related changes transformed the face of the city. In 1867 Salt Lake Citys population was approximately 11,000, of which only about 750 were non-Mormons. By 1891 half of the citys 45,000 inhabitants were non-Mormons.(5) The rapid increase of non-Mormon residents in Salt Lake and continued Latter day Saints efforts to establish the Kingdom of God combined to divide the population into increasingly hostile camps. Local politics, for example, featured neither of the national political parties and few of the national issues. Separate Latter day Saint and Gentile residential neighbourhoods developed. While many Latter day Saint residents engaged in agricultural pursuits, few Gentiles owned farms. Two school systems operated in the city, a Latter day Saint system and a non-Mormon one. Fraternal and commercial organizations did not cross religious lines. Sometimes Latter day Saints and non-Mormons even celebrated national holidays like the Fourth of July separately. The 1890 decision of the Latter day Saints church to abandon efforts to establish the Kingdom of God and accommodate itself to the larger society followed a concerted campaign by the federal government to suppress Mormon polygamy. The Edmunds Act of 1882 outlawed the practice of plural marriage, denied basic political rights to those convicted of polygamy, and placed much of the government of Utah Territory in a five-man presidential commission. The City of Zion and its Stakes in the State of Deseret were denied independence and allocated the name of representation so named from the local Indian Tribes (Utes) or the state of Utah. The state, having never been recognized by the federal government, was formally dissolved on April 5, 1851 The Edmunds- Tucker Act of 1887, under which church property was made liable to confiscation and the LDS church itself was disincorporated, brought further pressure to bear on the church and threatened its very existence. Federal leadership was also denied its spiritual leaders, Territory recognition and Governorship was delegated to Albert Cummings of Atlanta Georgia replacing Brigham Young, self appointed governor. In the face of such pressure, church leaders decided to undertake a process of rapprochement with the United States. In 1890 Mormon president Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto proclaiming an end to the further performance of plural marriages. A year later the church dissolved its Peoples Party and divided the Latter day Saints population between the Democratic and Republican parties. Following that, non-Mormons disbanded their Liberal Party. In the next several years the church abandoned its efforts to establish a self-sufficient communitarian economy. It sold most church-owned businesses to private individuals, many of them to eastern businessmen. The businesses that it did not sell, it operated as income-producing ventures rather than as shared community enterprises. In general, as the LDS Historian Leonard J. Arrington points out, the means and end of church-owned businesses became nearly identical with those of the world of capitalism about them.(6) The formal decision of the Mormon Church simply accelerated developments of the previous twenty years, and the next two or three decades were a watershed in Salt Lake Citys history. It was during the period from the mid-1890s until about 1920 that the balance tipped, and Salt Lake once and for all became Americanized. By 1920 it no longer offered an alternative to Babylon. Individualism, Inequality, diversity, and speculation, all once thought to be characteristics of the outside world, became deeply woven into the fabric of Salt Lake Citys life. The city ceased to be different in the fundamental ways it once had. Originally, the Latter day Saint church authorities distributed all land in the city, including Property along Main Street, as inheritances to individual Latter day Saints. Much of Main Street became the home of prominent community leaders, including Ezra Taft Benson, Daniel H. Wells, Edward Hunter, Jedediah M. Grant, and the Walker brothers. Salt Lake City exemplified this colonial economy. Its wealth regularly channelled off to the coffers of eastern finance capitalism, paradoxically it became an exploiter in the classic pattern. It now adopted the worlds view as the “Mormon” church. Once to the abhorrence of the early pioneers who associated it with the persecutions of Illinois and the defilement of the chosen name of Gods Kingdom on earth as the ‘Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. Salt Lake City, the so called city of Zion rapidly began its demise from its original course to the cities and businesses that flourish under Shareholders, Private Ownership and Profiteering, we see today. Gone are the visions and developments of Consecration as a united effort by a united people, replaced by dividends of the wealthy and elitism. Sharing for the Common Good was an event in a past age of spiritual enlightenment, replaced by, prominence on the “AVENUE S” or being highly esteemed on the hill, to look down on the masses as the dust under ones feet.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 01:18:26 +0000