Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• Building to a crescendo, Young upbraided those who were satisfied with the temple’s dedication, a symbol of the Mormons’ spiritual commitment and material progress. “I am not half satisfied,” Young thundered as much as his aging lungs would permit, “and I never Expect to be satisfied untill the devil is whiped and driven from off the face of the Earth.”
  • “No one is safe until the end.”
• He was a man of great warmth who might sing and dance with his people into the early morning, but he was also moody and prone to outbursts of wrath. Smith’s murder and Young’s own experiences in Nauvoo, Illinois, altered Young’s personality and approach to leadership. His response, which included extreme vigilance against dissent, increased the church’s cohesion but also exacted a heavy toll on his followers. Intensely loyal to those he trusted, he was often vindictive for years toward those who crossed him.
  • Dissent among the people was one of the main drivers of Joseph Smiths murder.
• Young’s claims were bold and broad, “Our work, our every-day labor our whole lives are within the scope of our religion.”
• [T]he religion that you and I have embraced,” Young once told his people, “incorporates the life and doing of man, the life of the angels and all the doings of the angels. It incorporates the life of the Gods and doing of the Gods.” Their religion encompassed, he explained, everything from building temples to raising corn and melons to building fortifications against Indian attacks. Forging iron was as much part of the gospel as serving a foreign mission. For Young himself, building temples and building mills and factories were all sacred tasks.
• Brigham quickly began to evidence the industry and drive that characterized his adult life. “A year had not passed,” he later explained, “until I stopped running, jumping, wresting, [and] laying out my strength for anything useless.”
• “Young never eats any meat,” one of Brigham’s roommates told a group of workmen. “I can just throw any man that don’t eat meat,” he bragged. “Mr. Pratt,” responded Brigham, “if will step here into the middle of the floor I will show you how to dirty coats.”
• “Joseph the Seer” was bound by no book, no creed, and-unlike many Protestant reformers filled with a longing for the New Testament church-no particular historical golden age. Instead, Smith and his followers spoke of the “restitution of all things.”
• “I reasoned on revelation,” he explained, emphasizing the role of rational reflection in his conversion.
• For Young himself, these were years of growing self-confidence and purpose, qualities that ironically came through increased submission to the church and perseverance through its challenges. His intense commitment to his new church temporarily superseded his customarily fierce independence, and Young subordinated himself-albeit sometimes grudgingly-to his prophet and to other ecclesiastical superiors.
• Young felt hampered by his inarticulateness and lack of education. “How I have had the headache,” he later shared, “when I had ideas to lay before the people, and not words to express them; but I was so gritty that I always tried my best.” A full measure of zeal compensated for such deficiencies.
• “[M]y traditions were such,” he later reflected, “that when the Vision came first to me, it was so directly contrary and opposed to my former education, I said, wait a little; I did not reject it, but I could not understand it.”
• While tarrying in Kirtland, Smith told Young to “In]ever do another day’s work to build up a Gentile [non-Mormon] city.
• Brigham Young’s confidence in Smith, though, did not depend on the vicissitudes of the church’s fortunes or whether or not Smith made accurate predictions of future events. He had accepted Smith as God’s prophet in 1832, and the recent missteps did not change that reality. “He was called of God,” Young later insisted, “God dictated him, and if He had a mind to leave him to himself and let him commit an error, that was no business of mine.”
• “Much of Joseph’s policy in temporal things,” he preached in 1860, “was different from my ideas of the way to manage them.” Young concluded that Smith practiced far too much forbearance toward his wayward Saints. When Young assumed leadership of the church in the mid-1840s, he did not repeat that perceived error. Leadership could depend on confidence, but confidence often proved ephemeral. Young concluded that stronger leadership required a firmer foundation.
  • #leadership
• Smith taught that “it is not necessary for tongues to be taught To the church particularly, for any man that has the Holy Ghost, can speak of the things of God in his own tongue.”
• That Young arose in the middle of the night to beseech God to forgive his sins offers a rare glimpse into his private faith. In addition to embracing the familial and communal aspects of Mormonism, Young remained a man who communed with God in solitude. Moreover, he believed that God heard and responded to his fervent prayer.
• In the late 1830s, Joseph Smith had again discouraged speaking in unknown tongues, and, en route to England, the apostle Parley Pratt had corrected the false notion that “the churches have no gifts unless they have tongues which is the least of all the church, or gifts of the church.”
• In its early years, the church oscillated between strict enforcement and latitude, and the council left the choice up to Young, concluding that “a forced abstainance was not making us free but we should be under bondage with a yoak upon our necks.” Only toward the end of his life did Young encourage strict obedience to the Word of Wisdom.
• In England, Young faced the difficult task of maintaining good relations both among the apostles and with Joseph Smith. Of the apostles, Young was not the most active practitioner of divine healing, the most erudite or eloquent editor, or the most successful evangelist, but he possessed several strengths as the mission’s leader. Young illustrated a talent for practical organization.
• Joseph Smith’s introduction of proxy baptism and the endowment ceremony brought followers like Brigham Young closer to the center of his theological and ecclesiastical vision. In the early 1830s, Smith had already moved sharply away from Protestant doctrines, talking about eternal matter and intelligences (as opposed to creation ex nihilo, out of nothing), distancing himself from the Protestant (and Catholic) understanding of the Trinity, and describing three tiers of heavenly glory. In Nauvoo, Smith sented his new teachings much more boldly, teaching church members about a corporeal God with “flesh and bones” who sent embodied spirits carth and then gave them priesthood ordinances and keys to enable them to secure their celestial glory.”
• While never a man of erudition, Young studied the Bible, theological guides, and Latter-day Saint texts in an effort to improve himself. Although his spelling never improved d he largely stopped writing his own correspondence after the mid 1840s, he which grew increasingly comfortable citing both biblical and Book of Mormon passages in his preaching. Young actively sought answers to theological questions that occurred to him. He recorded in his diary a list of “Question[s] to ask Br. J. Smith.” Probably reflecting his grief over his daughter Mary Ann’s death, concern about “children who die in infinci” topped Young’s list. Young also stored up the following diverse queries: “was David a man after gods own hart”; “[What is] the order of ordaining a partriach for the church”; “did you see one of the 3 Nephits in 1840”?
• “You have got to learn how to be a God yourself,” Smith instructed, “and be a King and Priest to God.”
• “[L]et us alone and we will evangelize the world and not make much fuss about it,” he said defiantly. “Mob us & we will do it sooner.”
• Wisely, though, Young made no attempt to baldly imitate Joseph. “I never pretended to be Joseph Smith,” he commented a few years later. “I’m not the man that brought [forth] the Book of Mormon.” Smith had translated ancient scriptures and dictated revelations; Young never produced a work of scripture and generally eschewed written revelation.
• Losing much of his autonomy and privacy, Young complained of exhaustion, fatigue, and sickness. “I want rest,” he said in July 1845 when ‘explaining his refusal to address a meeting. “I am Teaching exhorting Preaching Praying and laying on hands and counseling the whole church all the day long.” He rarely shared his most difficult interior struggles, though. “I keep my trials, my troubles and my own feelings to myself,” he commented a few years later. “[I] go away, I just go alone, I fight myself and let no one know.” Young had several close associates with whom he discussed matters of church business, but many of his own difficulties he unburdened to no one.
• The people, not Governor Ford, ruled western Illinois. Thus, Ford’s public promises were merely a governmental bluff, though he was at least kind enough to offer the church fair warning. The Mormons were on their own.
  • #[[voice of the people]]
• One portion of Young’s response to the charter’s revocation involved the resuscitation of the Council of Fifty, which its members sometimes called the “living constitution.” The latter term suggested the governance of the church by ongoing revelation rather than by any written set of scriptures or laws.
• Young always remained torn about the Saints’ ability and desire to combine holy zeal with merriment. His Methodist background left him uneasy with dancing and fiddling, and he believed that such pleasures, if not strictly regulated by the church, would promote sinfulness and inevitably distract the people from more important pursuits. Joseph Smith, by contrast, had shown Young that a prophet could enjoy everything from wrestling to dancing. Against his evangelical instincts, Young insisted that “the wicked have no right to dance, that dancing and music belonged to the Saints.” They deserved and needed mirth. “We need a little recreation” be stated. “My mind is continually upon the stretch.”47 Young was maddeningly unpredictable, sometimes affirming such activities one week and proscribing them the next. On balance, though, Young and the Nauvoo Mormons preferred to sacralize and control recreational pleasures rather than forbid them. A people uncertain of their future, beset by poverty and mobs, surely enjoyed these aspects of Young’s personality and leadership. Young stood above the people as their ecclesiastical hierarch, but he also danced with them late into the night and slept on sofas and pallets amid other church leaders and temple workers.
• Along the trail, Young showed himself to be a very different leader than he had been when he sailed to England in 1840. Then, he used patience and humor to build consensus, and he avoided actions that would have left his fellow apostles feeling slighted. In the intervening five years, however, Young had witnessed dissent leading to the murder of his beloved Joseph, and he had spent eighteen months living in fear of arrest or assassination. Shaken and traumatized by these events, he left the crucible of Nauvoo with a steely determination to make sure that factionalism and disobedience would never lead to a second Carthage Jail. Even though he remained unsure of himself as a prophetic leader, and perhaps in part because of that insecurity, Young brooked no challenges to his authority. Sensitive to criticism, he sometimes lashed out at those who questioned his judgment or complained about their circumstances. At other times, he succored his beleaguered followers with words of comfort, the administration of healing rites, and seasons of recreation. Most decisively, though, Young consolidated his leadership by organizing the successful relocation of thousands of religious refugees to a sanctuary “far away in the West.”
• Correspondingly, these American Israelites viewed Brigham Young as their Moses, a comparison Young encouraged. “I feel all the time like Moses,” he told them. Unlike the original Moses, though, Young would reach what Clayton termed “the place which God for us prepared.”
• The result was the creation of the Mormon Battalion, the only military unit in American history recruited on the basis of religion!
• Young misjudged Polk, who harbored no ill will toward the church. In hoping the battalion would secure Mormon loyalty to the United States, however, the president misjudged the depth of the Mormons’ resentment of their treatment in Missouri and Illinois.
• Young stubbornly clung to the objectives he articulated for the church, but as circumstances dictated he pursued them with considerable flexibility.
• Joseph Smith regularly preached about the need for unity and righteousness, Brigham Young demanded it.”
• Upper-class, Victorian Protestants of Young’s day, recognizing the disproportionate number of women in the pews, considered women naturally more religious and righteous than men. Young, perhaps reflecting his hardAcrabble, backcountry Protestant upbringing, dissented in derogatory fashion, “A woman is the distirst (dirtiest) creature,” he stated, “dirtier than a man,” He asserted that “men are honest,” but “if a woman wont lie, she is a miracle,” With some regularity, he made it clear that he would not take orders feom wonmen within his family and that men should act as the leaders of their families and expect obedience from their wives, “The influence of my women over me,” he insisted, “is no more than the buzzing of a fly’s wing in winter.” Men should not kowtow to their wives. “Do there Heavy lugging,” he advised, identifying an acceptable form of chivalry, “but don’t wash there dishes as some men do.”
• Young’s comments during his first few weeks in the Salt Lake Valley set the tone for the future direction of the society he would lead: a theocratic kingdom resisting encroachments on its autonomy, a society that at best tolerated but could not fully welcome non-Mormons. “You don’t know,” he said of the Gentiles, “how I detest & despise them.” Partly because several nonmembers remained with the camp, Young explained that a nonMormon “may live here with us & worship what God he pleases or none at all. They would tolerate nonbelief but punish any immoral behavior or anti-Mormon animosity. A Gentile, Young warned, “must not blaspheme the God or Israel nor dam old Joe Smith or his religion for we will Salt him down in the Lake!” While expressed crudely, Young’s understanding of the rights and responsibilities of religious minorities was mainstream American opinion. In 1821, New York State’s chief justice, Ambrose Spencer, stated that non-Christians would be “tolerated” if they did not criticize Christianity, violate standards of morality, or demand equal treatment. Courts in a number of states upheld convictions for blasphemy through mid-century. In rough terms, Young warned non-Mormons that they could not expect better treatment than some religious minorities received in the United States.
  • Racial discomfort, ideological discrimination, social cohesion, and elitism - all negative realities of modern Mormonism seem to stem directly from Brigham Young.
• Where dissension had undermined Joseph Smith, Young had taken quick and decisive action to instill loyalty and obedience in those followers who dared question him. “[Y]ou cant tell how this harness feels on you till you feel it,” he warned the apostles one year later. “[The apostles] are in the harness and must keep in the line or they will be cuffed.” Young and his closest followers shared bonds of affection forged through their years of missionary work, persecutions, and pioneering, but Young did not simply rely on the affection of his associates. He demanded their obedience.
• It is impossible to exactly recreate the impact of Young’s sermons on the crowds at the Salt Lake Bowery and Tabernacle. Clerks such as Thomas Bullock and George D. Watt recorded many of his discourses, using shorthand and abbreviations. Although their notes take us closest to Young’s unvarnished rhetoric, the rushed nature of such work probably makes Young’s sermons appear more broken and less eloquent than they actually were. At the same time, transcripts edited for publication added erudition and eliminated the coarseness and colloquialisms that made Young’s discourses attractive to many of his listeners. Young’s preaching subtly and persistently shaped Mormon values and religious thought for thirty years, and he often kept his audience entertained and at attention.
  • Threads of those discourses still influence us, however consciously or unconsciously.
• Although Young roughly followed Joseph Smith’s 1833 “City of Zion” plat when allocating properties in Salt Lake City, the Mormons never created another city with the sacred significance of Jackson County or even Nauvoo. Whereas Smith built cities of Zion, Young more literally established God’s kingdom upon the earth. He spoke of the construction of many temples and encouraged the planned dispersal of Mormon emigrants throughout the region.
• The church’s early enterprises, hybrids of public investment, whether by the church or legislature, and private capital, largely failed to meet their objectives. Neither Young nor other Mormon leaders possessed the capital, specified knowledge, or managerial talent necessary to lead large industrial enterprises. Regardless of such setbacks, Young believed the missions inculcated industry, cooperation, and autonomy. Perhaps most obviously, the Iron Mission and a later Cotton Mission led to the formation of the southern settlements of Parowan, Cedar City, and St. George.
• “I am thankful for this hard winter,” Young said in January 1849, “It will freeze out some of the hardhearted curses out of the valley.” The faithful would remain. California might make men rich, even if it more often dashed such hopes. By contrast, as Young explained a few years later, the Great Basin was “a good place to make Saints.”
• The Mormons, though, were cheering their own independence, not that of the United States. Similar to the way that many African Americans commemorated the anniversary of the transatlantic slave trade’s abolition on January 2 but could not wholeheartedly celebrate the Fourth of July, the Mormons privileged their own heritage of liberation and accomplishment. Indeed, while Young venerated the Constitution and Declaration of Independence (the former, he said the following year, “was dictated by the revelation of Jesus Christ”), he minced no words about the politicians and bureaucrats holding sway in Washington, terming them “corrupt as hell.”
• Young’s harsh conclusions about both the earthly and eternal places of black people, and the passion with which he expressed them, were not unusual in the mid-nineteenthcentury United States. The vehemence with which Young expressed his racial views, however, contributed to the long-term exclusion of black men from the Mormon priesthood and black men and women from the church’s most sacred ordinances.
• Despite its broad empowerment of men-and sometimes women-through spiritual gifts and ecclesiastical responsibilities, Brigham Young’s Mormonism remained deeply hierarchical, fostering unequal relationships between leaders and followers, men and women, and white people and members of other races. Young talked of creating a chain of humanity back to Adam, but he by no means envisioned all individuals as equal links in that familial chain. Young saw black Americans at best as servants expected to remain quiescent.
• Given the racial context of the mid-nineteenth-century United States and the attitudes of other Mormon leaders, it makes little sense to lay the entire blame for the church’s discriminatory policies at the feet of Brigham Young. Only a leader with an ardent commitment to racial egalitarianism, which Young did not possess, would have maintained the church’s early relative openness to black Americans. Ecclesiastical discrimination was the norm among white American Protestants, and it is no surprise that the Latter-day Saints followed suit. However, Young’s adamant contention that such discrimination rested upon “eternal principles” fostered a policy of exclusion that his successors saw little choice but to perpetuate.
• Young claimed that the “living oracles” were more valuable “than all that has ever been written from the days of Adam until now.” Smith had left behind an expanded canon, but to Young, God’s ongoing instructions took precedence.
• Moreover, his disregard for prudence turned what should have been a cautious experiment into a poorly organized mass movement with deadly consequences for the members of the Willie and Martin companies. Although Young called for subsequent PEF emigrants to rely exclusively on handcarts, only a few additional companies crossed the plains with handcarts until Young permanently shelved the plan in 1860. That year he finally conceded that it was a “hard task” for emigrants to pull their own provisions.
  • Handcarts were a failed experiment.
• Young had always held out the promise of celestial joy for the faithful. “When you are prepared to see our Father,” Young preached during one of his September 1856 reformation sermons, “you will see a being with whom you have long been acquainted, and He will receive you into His arms, and you will be ready to fall into His embrace and kiss Him, as you would your fathers and friends that have been dead for a score of years.”
• White-on-white massacres, however, are a very rare occurrence in the history of the United States. Even during the Civil War, both sides took pains to avoid killing civilians. The 1838 Haun’s Mill Massacre in Missouri forms one exception, as do the events at Mountain Meadows. A heinous crime executed after careful deliberation and subterfuge rather than in the heat of any battle, the Mountain Meadows Massacre testifies to the extreme levels of anxiety, hatred, and avarice present in 1857 Utah.
• Moreover, many of Young’s close associates experienced both the angel and the goblin. Young excoriated fellow church leaders in public, then salved their wounds with private tenderness. Living with those contradictions, many of his followers craved his approval even as they feared his fury.
• Building upon one of the emphases of Joseph Smith, Young sought to collapse the space between heaven and earth and the distance between eternity and the here-and-now. “Our religion is the foundation of all intelligence,” he stated, touching on the core of his faith. “It is to bring heaven to earth and exalt earth to heaven and to prepare all intelligence that God has placed in [the] heart[s] of [the] children of man to mingle that with that intelligence that dwells in eternity.” Young pointed the Saints toward their future existence on a “celestialized” earth, when they would come into “the immediate presence of the Father and the Son.” The exalted Saints “shall inhabit different mansions,” he foretold, “and worlds will continue to be made, formed, and organized, and messengers from this earth will be sent to others.” At the same time, however, that glorious future always maintained an intimate connection with the Saints’ current work, “We shall make our home here,” he continued, “and go on our missions as we do now, but at greater than railroad speed.” “Every faithful member of the Church of Christ,” he explained several years later, “will always be found in all his earthly occupations and pursuits attending to this business of unifying ourselves.”
• “We are not going to wait for angels, he instructed in 1862, “or for Enoch and his company to come and build up Zion, but we are going to build it.”
• Human existence, Young believed, was a school for life eternal. By dedicating themselves to the tasks before them, church members would prepare themselves to inhabit a millennial city they were building with their own hands.”
• By the time the transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869) greatly eased the financial and logistical burden of gathering, Brigham Young had presided over the organized emigration and settlement of more people than anyone else in American history.’
• When the telegraph line reached Salt Lake City in October 1861, Young wired the president of the Pacific Telegraph Company: “Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country.” Young was careful with his language. He was “firm” for the Constitution, not for the Union or its present government. In short, Young and most of his co-religionists were simply pro-Mormon during the crisis. Mormons did not rush to enlist in the Union Army, and there were no displays of wartime fervor in Salt Lake City. Young offered “to furnish a home guard for the protection of the telegraph and mail lines and overland travel within our boundaries,” but he was opposed to Mormons providing the Union with either money or manpower. “I will see them in Hell before I will raise an army them,” he declared in late 1861.
• The federal government was the gravest, but not the only, challenge to Young’s authority. Since leading the Latter-day Saints to the Great Basin, Toung had faced no serious internal threats to his leadership. Still, he had bot lost his vigilance against the danger of dissent. “Joseph was never nd of anybody but those who professed to be saints and his friends,” Young observed, “and it was those characters that led him to the slaughter.” Because of that perennial fear Young still reacted vindictively toward perceived slights to his authority.
• Young wanted the Latter-day Saints to embrace him as the church’s living oracle, to see him as the font of true doctrine. Ideally, he wanted a submission that flowed from sincere acceptance, not grudging obedience.
• Young was now a much different leader than he had been when he led the Twelve Apostles to England. Then, he had led gingerly, giving his fellow apostles positions of authority and correcting them gently to avoid wounding their pride. Young’s later treatment of high-ranking church members like Orson Hyde and Orson Pratt illustrates a much more heavyhanded approach to leadership. Always cognizant of the events that led to Joseph Smith’s death, Young took no chances with anything resembling disloyalty. He understood how to wield power and exercised it with vigor and sometimes with bravado. Young’s chastisements of his ecclesiastical associates cost him a certain measure of their affection, for the feelings of men like Franklin Richards, John Taylor, Pratt, and Hyde remained bruised.
• While he insisted that the Saints were not “interlopers” because God had brought them to the Great Basin, both peoples possessed the land, and the Saints had to provide for the Indians, whose sustenance they had imperiled. His Springville audience would almost certainly have preferred to listen to a bellicose war sermon. Indeed, few political leaders in the American West would have called for restraint and co-existence under similar circumstances.
• Rather than a place for formal instruction, the revived School of the Prophets served as a forum for the coordination of economic policy, political decision-making, and doctrine.
• While conceding that not all of his decisions had produced financial success, Young countered they might still serve God’s purposes, and he also pointedly remarked that Godbe had grown wealthy under the policies he now criticized. “I do not pretend to be infallible,” Young clarified, “but the priesthood that I have on me is infallible.”
• Several of Young’s wives achieved a high degree of visibility and prominence during these years, rebutting non-Mormon assertions that polygamy enslaved women, In a patriarchal and hierarchical religion, Young ofren reminded women that they were subject to their husbands (the “Lords of Creation”) and an exclusively male priesthood, In other ways, though, he sanctioned the expansion of women’s roles within the church and civil society, “We believe that women are useful,” Young said, “not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies but that they should stand behind the counter, study law or physic, or become good bookkeepers.” He went so far as to endorse the desire of one woman to attend the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. The very nature of Mormon ritual, meanwhile, required women to officiate in temple ordinances performed at the Salt Lake City Endowment House. Without the participation of women, Mormon men could not obtain salvation and celestial glory. Young’s wife Eliza R. Snow was a fixture in the Endowment House, introducing Mormon women to the church’s most sacred teachings while they made their covenants and performed sacred ordinances on behalf of their ancestors. “Aunt Eliza,” wrote Young’s daughter Susa Young Gates, “was the high priestess in the temporary House of the Lord.” Through such ritual work, Snow and several of Young’s other wives gained official positions of high ecclesiastical status and influence.
• Over the thirty years of his church presidency, Young said so many different things about women that with selective quotations from his discourses one could turn him into either a misogynist or a proto-feminist. Neither portrait is accurate. Young did not advocate temple work or Relief Societies as steps toward equality for women, either in the world or church. Instead, he sanctioned wider opportunities for female leadership because he needed the talents of Mormon women for the all-consuming task of building up the Kingdom of God. In the process, though, Young came to appreciate women’s talents in new ways. In 1875, he commented that Eliza Snow and Emmeline Wells “have given as good exhortations as any can give.” Young especially recognized Snow’s intellectual and organizational capabilities. He once gave her a gift of newspapers, and he discussed political matters with her, publicly praised her poems, and regularly gave her a seat next to himself at dinner and during family prayers.
• As Young noted, the New Testament (and the Book of Mormon) recorded that some early Christians had practiced a form of communitarianism, keeping “all things in common.” The sooty misery of working-class England, moreover, had left Young with a lingering belief that capitalism could produce an existence worse than chattel slavery. While Utah was admittedly far removed from such horror, Young retained a skepticism about capitalist development despite his partnerships with railroads and telegraph companies. The Panic of 1873 had proven devastating for the territory’s economy, demonstrating to Young the grave danger of relying upon outside or non-Mormon capital. ZCMI, though, had survived, and a series of cooperatives in the northern settlement of Brigham City had continued to prosper amid the economic storm. After forming a cooperative store back in 1864, the Brigham City settlers under the leadership of apostle Lorenzo Snow had added a tannery, a shoe shop, a woolen factory, and a stock herd. The cooperative’s employees received pay in scrip, redeemable at the enterprise’s various departments. Now, Young wanted other communities to replicate Brigham City’s cooperative spirit and profitability. Young was more aware than ever of his mortality. If the Latter-day Saints were going to achieve a higher level of economic unity under his leadership, it was now or never.63 The United Order movement was thus born, beginning in early 1874 in St. George under Young’s supervision. In March, residents of St. George who joined their community’s United Order approved a founding document, consisting of a preamble and articles of agreement. The preamble referenced “the struggle between capitol [sic] and labor resulting in Strieks of the workman and also the oppression of monied monopolies.” It also blamed speculation and capitalist overreach for the current economic criis and the fact that for many families the necessities of life had become uncertain. The antidote of unfettered capitalism would be “self-sustaining home-manufactures,” including cotton and wool. Utopian elements seeped into the agreement. If they pooled their resources, the Saints would achieve such great economic efficiency that they would have more time to devote to the “cultivation and training of our minds.” In St. George, church members consecrated their labor and property, and foremen under the direction of the order’s leaders took charge of manufacturing and agricultural activities. Private property was not abolished, however, and individuals received dividends and wages based on their contributions and labor.
• The intense spirit of cooperation boosted the prosperity of all for a few years. In the summation of the novelist Wallace Stegner, Orderville achieved “a communism of goods, labor, religion, and recreation such as the world has seen only in a few places and for very short times.”
• Perhaps most emblematic of the struggle to bring the United Order to fruition was Young’s unwillingness to consecrate all of his own property, In June 1874, he announced that he was “going into the Order with all that I have.” Just two months later, though, he conceded that he did not trust anyone else to manage his major enterprises, including a woolen factory in Provo. Back in 1872, he had informed the apostle Wilford Woodruff that he wanted to begin the Order of Enoch by placing one thousand families on his farm, giving them ten acres each. Unfortunately, he told Woodruff, he could think of only “two men that I think would do right & that is you & me.” If Young did not trust others with his property, it is hardly surprising that many church members did not trust him with theirs.
• The process of colonizing the Great Basin, building a theocratic kingdom, and resisting the force of the U.S. government had fashioned a Mormon people. For Brigham Young, individuals did not become Latter-day Saints in the waters of baptism but through trials, tribulations, and “living their religion,” which meant great sacrifice and perfect obedience. “I want hard times,” he once insisted, “so that every person that does not wish to stay, for the sake of his religion, will leave.” In their new mountain home, Young’s followers found those hard times in abundance, suffering from famine, wars and rumors of war, the difficulty of creating harmonious plural families, and a long struggle to build viable communities in a rugged environment. “This is a good place to make Saints,” Young concluded. Even though Young demanded more than some of his followers could stomach, tens of thousands flocked to and abided by his leadership, attracted by his stewardship of Smith’s theological and ritual legacy, his fervent belief in and preaching of the gospel, and the close connections he maintained with his people. The memory of this collective experience still shapes American Mormon identity.
• Brigham Young died with few apparent regrets about his choices and decisions. In his forty-five years as a Latter-day Saint, Young dedicated himself to Joseph Smith, boldly challenged religious, political, and economic conventions, and shaped-as far as was possible, for as long as was possible-the Mormon people in his self-image.