An Urban Mormon Country by Rebecca
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Between Mountain and Lake: An Urban Mormon Country by Rebecca Andersen A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Approved November 2015 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Susan Gray, Chair Susan Rugh Stephen Pyne ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY December 2015 ABSTRACT In "Between Mountain and Lake: an Urban Mormon Country," I identify a uniquely Mormon urban tradition that transcends simple village agrarianism. This tradition encompasses the distinctive ways in which Mormons have thought about cities, appropriating popular American urban forms to articulate their faith's central beliefs, tenants, and practices, from street layout to home decorating. But if an urban Mormon experience has as much validity as an agrarian one, how have the two traditions articulated themselves over time? What did the city mean for nineteenth-century Mormons? Did these meanings change in the twentieth-century, particularly following World War II when the nation as a whole underwent rapid suburbanization? How did Mormon understandings of the environment effect the placement of their villages and cities? What consequences did these choices have for their children, particularly when these places rapidly suburbanized? Traditionally, Zion has been linked to a particular place. This localized dimension to an otherwise spiritual and utopian ideal introduces environmental negotiation and resource utilization. Mormon urban space is, as French thinker Henri Lefebvre would suggest, culturally constructed, appropriated and consumed. On a fundamental level, Mormon spaces tack between the extremes of theocracy and secularism, communalism and capitalism and have much to reveal about how Mormonism has defined gender roles and established racial hierarchies. Mormon cultural landscapes both manifest a sense of identity and place, as well as establish relationships with the past. i For my parents, Dan and Kaye Andersen ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It takes a village to write a dissertation. I would like to thank the Department of History at Arizona State University for awarding me with a four-year graduate fellowship. I never would have come to ASU without it. A generous fellowship from Brigham Young University’s Charles Redd Center also funded research at the Harold B. Lee Library Special Collections. I could not have written this dissertation without the help of my graduate committee. Jannelle Warren-Findlay’s public history seminars opened my mind to the ways in which memory and landscape intersect. More importantly, her warmth and humor helped me feel welcome and accepted. I am reminded of her passing each time I look at my email contacts. Stephen J. Pyne’s creative non-fiction writing class helped me see my dissertation could be more than just a rehearsal of relevant historiography or an interpretation of historical facts. Susan Sessions Rugh’s grounding in Mormon and U.S. cultural history benefited me tremendously. My graduate committee chair, Susan E. Gray, deserves special recognition. She willingly read all of my drafts, provided extensive comments, and conducted skype conferences with me—all while confronting significant personal challenges. If I can write at all, it is because of her. Weber State University professors Gene Sessions and Rosemary Conover believed I could do this. My dear friends, LeGrande and Shirley Davies, continue to open their home to me. And above all, thanks go to my family…every single one. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER Page 1 INTRODUCTION ................. ................................................................................... 1 2 VISIONS AND REVELATIONS .......................................................................... 16 3 THE COMPASS AND THE SQUARE ................................................................. 58 4 THE NEW MORMON VILLAGE ......................................................................... 99 5 WASATCH FRONT SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENT ...................................... 140 6 GENDER ROLES IN MORMON SUBURBIA .................................................. 172 7 THE VALLEYS OF EPHRAIM ARE FULL ...................................................... 207 8 MEMORIALIZING MORMON URBANISM .................................................... 237 REFERENCES....... ........................................................................................................... 247 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Clearly, the city owes much to the Mormons. But Mormonism is profoundly indebted to the city for what it is today. --Dale Morgan1 I am from northern Utah’s Wasatch Front, a narrow sliver of green encased between mountains and lake. The direction east means the Wasatch Mountains that tower over the valley floor in steep jagged peaks and fault scarps. West is where the sun dips, melting into the Great Salt Lake to the north and Utah Lake, its freshwater twin, to the south. Up means north and down means south. We travel up to Brigham City, but down to Provo. The towns in between sit astride alluvial fans that bridge the canyon mouths. This matrix, lake and mountains, up and down, north and south, is engrained in me. I become disoriented each time I leave the Front and must learn to navigate less predictable landmarks. Ironically, I know the Wasatch Front best through an automobile passenger window, traveling up and down Interstate 15, visiting grandparents, taking piano lessons, going to school. Because there is limited space to put in alternate infrastructure systems, I-15 serves as the lifeline, the jugular vein, for the Wasatch Front’s urban system. The same exits and interchanges pass in predictable sequence while the dotted lines tick by like the second hand on a clock. The mountain skyline and low-lying lakes anchor the moving panorama in geologic time that trivializes the houses and asphalt roadways. 1 Dale L. Morgan, “Salt Lake City: City of the Saints,” in Rocky Mountain Cities, ed. Ray B. West Jr. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1949), 179-180. 1 On trips south to Salt Lake City, my mother often related the somewhat hagiographical story of Brigham Young, who, overlooking the valley for the first time and foreseeing its future greatness proclaimed, “This is the Place. Drive on.” Sometimes she related the story as we climbed Victory Road off Beck Street, Salt Lake City’s northern industrial strip, to the extent that for a time I believed the Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley via the low lying hillsides northeast of town. As I looked out on Beck Street’s oil refineries, gravel pits, and the miles of interstate and houses, I marveled. Brigham Young saw all of this? Nineteenth-century explorer Jedediah Smith called the Salt Lake Valley his “home in the wilderness.”2 I feel that same connection. But for me, the Wasatch Front is an urban homeland molded by the region’s physical geography. My ancestors, most of them Mormon converts from Great Britain and Scandinavia settled along the Front and up the nearby canyon hamlets, Huntsville and Morgan. Apparently none of them were “called” to the southern settlements, or if they were, they chose to remain in the fertile valleys of the Wasatch. Some of them practiced polygamy, but most did not. Many of their descendants, 150 years later, live remarkably close to the original farmsteads in one of the many suburban Mormon villages that line the Front like a string of beads. Yet, a network of suburban villages seems to defy Mormon Country’s traditional agrarian communal image, which itself ignores the very uncomfortable fact that most Mormons who continue to live in what cultural geographer D.W. Meinig termed the Mormon Culture Region, an area that encompasses southeastern Idaho, Utah, and 2 Quoted in Dale Morgan, The Great Salt Lake (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947), 87- 88. 2 northern Arizona, do not dwell in isolated, agricultural villages.3 Many of them most likely never did. Historically, the number of Utahans living along the Wasatch Front has always hovered between 60 and 70 percent. The 2010 census continued this tradition.4 In many respects, then, Mormon Country’s Wasatch Front has always been, if not fully urbanized, remarkably interconnected and, while initially agricultural, never experienced the same degree of remoteness as other Mormon settlements, scattered as they were throughout the Intermountain West. Nor was Mormon settlement along the Wasatch Front necessarily planned or centrally coordinated. 5 This dissertation is largely my response to those who persist in seeing the Mormon village as the only authentic landscape type capable of communicating Mormon cultural identity and religious traditions. Indeed Mormon village studies, like those that focus on New England or any other identifiable cultural region, have become an established genre, replete with expected narrative forms and content. While I certainly do not discount this fairly lengthy literature on Mormon agrarian life, I hope to offer a more nuanced story. But before I tell that story, it helps to understand where and how the Mormon village myth (and reality) developed. Certainly the imagery of Mormon village life originated with Joseph Smith’s 1833 City of Zion plat, in which the prophet laid out his vision for a spiritually sanctified 3 D.W. Meinig, “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847-1964,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55, no. 2 (June, 1965): 191-220. 4 U.S. Census and Utah History Encyclopedia, http://governor.utah.gov/DEA/Historical_Census_Data/CityCountyBrief/Historic/County