Mormon Centenary

(See front cover)

In the State of Utah the rock of ages has assumed strange forms. Geologically, as observed in such scenic reservations as Bryce Canyon National Park, The Cedar Breaks, Zion National Park (see map p. 27), the rock has been sculptured by erosion, forming unearthly peaks and terraces, ornate gorges, petrified and ghostly cities. Utah's religious rock of ages--its dominant church--is equally exotic. It is, as everyone knows, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or, more familiarly, the Mormon Church. Fully half of Utah's half-million souls are Mormons. The history and commercial development of Utah is more closely linked with the Mormon Church than is Roman history with Catholicism.

Last week the thoughts of all the 700,000 Mormons in the world dwelt in Salt Lake City, capital of Mormondom and of Utah, where the centenary of the founding of the Church was to be celebrated, exactly to the day, on April 6, 1930. A week of exercises and formal rejoicing was scheduled to follow.

Holy rites of celebration would be secretly performed in the six-spired Mormon Temple, open only to Mormon church-members in good standing (i.e., approved as moral and right-minded by their local pastors--'"bishops"), and thus long supposed by superstitious Gentiles* to conceal queer ceremonies of polygamous import. But Mormonism is by no means merely a closeted, holy matter. It is also a hard-headed economic system and the communicants are bustling, practical, prosperous. Always have non-Mormons been welcomed to services and organ recitals in the great domed Tabernacle (seating capacity 10,000) just behind the Temple. This auditorium, where the late great Soprano Adelina Patti remarked: "My voice is twice as large here," had undergone last week a vast refurbishing for a public pageant calculated to impress its audiences with the fact that Mormonism is a successful religion if ever there was one. Accompanying the pageant would be music from one of Mormondom's most cherished treasures-- its mighty organ. In 1866 oxen began hauling the logs which formed its 32-foot diapason, its tiny flutinos. Glue was made by boiling strips of cattle and buffalo hides. Recently reconstructed, the instrument, with 5,500 pipes, is among the world's largest, draws comparisons with those in Frieburg, London's Crystal Palace, Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Designed on a monumental, historic scale, the pageant would begin, of course, in Heaven, where the Creator's appointment of Jesus as a Redeemer was to be represented with luminous effects and invisible voices. Next would be shown the creation of the world and its peoples; the ancient prophets; the Nativity, Sermon on the Mount, Resurrection. Then would follow the dark period of apostasy and, finally, the story of Mormonism:

In September, 1823, Joseph Smith, son of a New York farmer, claimed that he had talked with a radiant nocturnal visitor who caused him to be led, by divine guidance, to a lonely hill near the village of Manchester, N. Y., where he discovered numerous engraved and lettered plates of gold in a cachet of stone. Annually for four years he returned to look at the plates; then they were delivered to him by his spectral visitor. In 1830 there was first published The Book of Mormon, purporting to be a translation of the plates accomplished with divinely acquired erudition by humble Joseph Smith, 25. That year the Mormon Church, based upon the revelations of this book, was established in a farmhouse in Fayette, N. Y., and Joseph Smith became its first Prophet. Soon the golden plates were nowhere to be found. Prophet Smith averred that he had returned them to the heavenly messenger. Mormon curiosity still contents itself with a sworn statement by numerous early Mormon dignitaries which declares:". . . We have seen and hefted . . . the plates."

The Book of Mormon (522 pages in a recent edition) contains the history of ancient peoples (among them the Lamanites), who supposedly inhabited the Western Hemisphere, coming variously from the Tower of Babel and Jerusalem. They had apostles and prophets even as the Biblical peoples. One of these was called Mormon. To them Christ appeared. He ordained that, after the age of apostasy, his true church should be reestablished somewhere in the Americas. That re-establishment was what took place in 1830 in the Fayette farmhouse. At that time considerable numbers of the ancient Lamanites were still alive. They were customarily referred to as Indians.

The new Church soon established branches in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri. Prophet Smith decreed that Mormons were properly polygamous and took unto himself several comely wives. This practice, sturdily maintained, was among those which brought general persecution on the Church. In 1842 Prophet Smith became a martyr to his 'faith. He had been arraigned 39 times on various charges without once being convicted. At length he was charged with treason against the State of Illinois, was jailed at Carthage. A mob attacked the prison; both Prophet Smith and his brother Hyrum were shot dead. In 1847, harassed beyond endurance by their enemies in the East, the greater part of the Mormon Church followed its new leader, Prophet Brigham Young, to the empty land of Deseret which has become thriving, bountiful Utah, a Mormon achievement.

Mormon good fortune since the trek to Utah is due in no small measure to a faith which greatly admires and encourages prosperity. Mormons irrigated, planted and built with as much persistence as they prayed. A striking fact is that the Mormons did not dig in the ground 'for metallic wealth but concentrated on husbandry. They made a desert bloom. A good Mormon, and the "good" percentage is extraordinarily large, abstains from tea, coffee, tobacco, liquor. He pays a tithe (one-tenth) of his entire income to the Church. He hearkens to the Mormon proverb "the glory of God is intelligence." Thus does the Church seek health, wealth and wisdom.

Mormon health is proverbial; Utah's birth rate is generally higher, its death rate lower, its infantile sickness less than in any other State in the U. S.

Mormon wisdom is variously apparent. It was manifestly wise, for instance, to abolish polygamy (1890) after the U. S. Government had begun an antipolygamy campaign, imprisoning hundreds of offenders, disincorporating the Mormon Church, confiscating property, refusing to naturalize Mormons. To the Mormons, however, polygamy was a heaven-ordained adjustment. What to do? Prophet Wilford Woodruff, then head of the Church, announced that after due meditation it had been revealed to him that heaven thereafter forbade polygamous practice. Many were the individual violations of this manifesto ; robust, marrying Mormons still professed their old belief that millions of disembodied souls needed to be born, to escape the eternal darkness which would befall the unborn at the millennium. But gradually the wisdom of the Prophet pervaded his followers, and Mormonism individually as well as officially abandoned a custom which had been its chief impediment to material development.

Mormon wealth, though impossible to calculate, is apparent to anyone who studies Salt Lake City commercially. The Church owns The Deseret News, two hotels, two office buildings, the Beneficial Life Insurance Co., and Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution (first U. S. department store, 1868). Through the Utah-Idaho Sugar Co., the Church owns 24,539 acres of farm lands and operates numerous beet sugar factories in Utah, Idaho, Washington, Montana, South Dakota. Board chairman of this company is Heber Jedediah Grant, now President of the Mormon Church. But though net current assets are listed at $3,466,860, worldwide oversupply of sugar following upon Wartime excess production has gravely injured this industry, and President Grant says the Church would gladly quit the business, if possible, at a 50% loss. But if it be true that the Mormon Tabernacle rests, among other things, on sugar beets, it is likewise true that the Church's beet-backing has been primarily for the benefit of the farmer. And the Church is not likely to forsake him in his lean years.

President Grant also heads a company which owns the Hotel Utah, largest in the State. He is head of the Utah State National Bank, the Zion Savings Bank & Trust Co., of both of which the Church apparently holds majority stock. He is president of the Utah Home Fire Insurance Co. The Church is reputed to be a minority stockholder in the Deseret National Bank, the Deseret Savings Bank.

Big Mormon names appear on the boards of practically every important enterprise in Utah, but none more often than that of Heber Jedediah Grant. Born 73 years ago in Salt Lake City, he is the first native of Utah to lead his Church (the senior of the Twelve Apostles, high church council, is always chosen President). In 1918 he succeeded Joseph F. Smith, nephew of Founder-Prophet Joseph. President Grant's father died when his son was nine. The boy played smart baseball, developed a florid script di which he is still proud, worked at journalism until he ran the paper (the late Salt Lake Herald), organized insurance companies, banks. Meanwhile, in 1877, he married Lucy Stringham. Seven years later, on May 26, he espoused Augusta Winters and, on May 27, Emily Wells. The last is the only one of his three wives now alive. In 1882 a startling businessman, aged 25, he was chosen one of the Twelve Apostles. During 1901-03 he lived in Japan as a Mormon missionary, then served two years as head of missionary activity in Europe.

Tall, bewhiskered, graced with patriarchal kindness and authority, he is, as divinely authorized President, Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Latter-day Saints, responsible to no one for his administration of L. D. S. affairs. Two other high priests or Presidents constitute with him the First Presidency or governing triumvirate of the Church: Anthony W. Ivins. Charles Wilson Nibley. Both are potent Salt Lake City financiers, board members. Next are the Twelve Apostles, most famed of whom is U. S. Senator Reed Smoot, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, devout Mormon and second in line for the Mormon Presidency (TIME, April 8, 1929). Next are the Presiding Patriarch (head evangelist), the First Quorum of Seventy (foreign ministry), the Presiding Bishopric (temporal affairs), the Standing Ministry (high priests, seventies, elders, priests, teachers, deacons).

A Mormon diocese, called a stake, includes men of varying degrees of priesthood. All worthy male Mormons belong to the priesthood. And each and every one is a Latter-day Saint. Able Saints not already mentioned: Apostle George Albert Smith, past president of the International Irrigation Congress; Apostle James Edward Talmadge, famed geologist, onetime President of the University of Utah; Apostle John Andreas Widtsoe, irrigation expert, member of the Boulder Dam fact-finding committee of which Herbert Clark Hoover was chairman; U. S. Senator William Henry King of Utah; James Henry Moyle, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Wilson Administration; Edgar Bernard Brossard, U. S. Tariff Commissioner; Heber Manning Wells, treasurer of U. S. Shipping Board Merchant Fleet Corp.; Joshua Reuben Clark, Jr., Undersecretary of State under Calvin Coolidge; Dr. Harvey Fletcher, famed acoustics' expert (Bell Telephone laboratories).

* By Mormons a Jew, or any other non-Mormon, is called a Gentile.

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