Over the last half-century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has wholeheartedly embraced free-market capitalism, and not only in ideological terms. The church is decidedly corporate, and owns Utahโs second-biggest newspaper, a book publisher, dozens of radio stations, financial companies, hotels, and restaurants. It spearheaded the $2 billion redevelopment of its land comprising a major portion of downtown Salt Lake City, and is one of the nationโs largest landowners, with about 2 million acres of agricultural, residential, and commercial properties across the United States. Up until McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, however, the church leaned strongly in the opposite direction, favoring a communal, even socialist approach to economics.
When Brigham Young led his followers into present-day Utah in 1847 to build a homeland, he championed industriousness combined with cooperation and central planning over the frontier individualism commonly associated with the western frontier at the time. The Mormons began with a cooperative effort to build an irrigation system that belonged to everyone, and then laid out the towns. โThe towns and villages were not established inadvertently or by individual initiative โฆ they were a result of very definite plans,โ wrote Hamilton Gardner in Cooperation Among the Mormons in 1917.
This relatively loose-knit system worked to build communities, but it wasnโt clear that it could protect them from the Gentiles pouring into the region in search of land and wealth. In the 1860s, as the transcontinental railroad approached Utah from both sides, bringing with it an orgy of capitalism and greed, financed with credit that the banks handed out like lollypops, Young buckled down in an effort to protect his holy land from the invaders.
He formed the School of Prophets, which, writes Leonard J. Arrington, the late LDS church historian, โcountered an energetic and powerful laissez-faire capitalism with a vigorous, well-organized, socially minded and theocratically directed program of economic action.โ
That program included creating an organization to build the section of railroad that came closest to the capital, to keep out the riffraff that might otherwise do the work. It funded the creation of cooperative furniture and wool manufacturing along with other businesses, to reduce reliance on eastern imports. The School created the Zionโs Cooperative Mercantile Institution and instituted uniform pricing controls to minimize competition among Mormon merchants.
The Utah Territory successfully resisted becoming a mineral colony for the eastern industrialists, and the School disbanded in 1872. But Young, whose collectivist leanings grew as he aged, wanted yet more.
A chance for radical change emerged in September of 1873, when the Jay Cooke & Co. bankโone of the big railroad backersโcollapsed. Other banks toppled like dominoes, foreclosures were rampant, and the Panic of 1873 swept the nation and the world, leading to one of the worst depressions in history.
Utahโs mining towns were hit hard. But Brigham City, a settlement of about 1,500 people, actually thrived. It had organized a mercantile cooperative in the pre-railroad days, and, by the time the panic hit, it had expanded into a major manufacturing enterprise mostly owned by the worker/shareholders. It built houses for the poor and widows and provided labor for jobless drifters, and its leaders instituted central economic and land-use planning and zoning, dictating where houses and factories and public transit should be built. Novelist Edward Bellamy, who visited Brigham City after the panic, reportedly drew inspiration for Looking Backward, his 1888 utopian novel set in a socialist Boston in the year 2000, when greed and capitalism are no more.
Young didnโt need to wait another century for utopia to arrive. In the aftermath of the 1873 panic, he set about spreading the Brigham City modelโcombined with an element of Joseph Smithโs Order of Enoch wealth-redistribution planโacross Deseret. He started in St. George and worked his way northward, converting communities to the order as he went.
Each adopted the order in its own way, but the core principals were the same: communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth. That this occurred just after the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, had been published in America bears noting, if nothing else. The language in the St. George United Order Constitution gives a sense of what Young was trying to do, mentioning the struggle between capital and labor, bemoaning the โoppression of monied monopoliesโ and railing against โa growing โฆ spirit for extravagant speculation and over-reaching the legitimate bounds of the credit system; resulting in financial panic and bankruptcies.โ
โIt was clear to all that the United Order,โ writes Arrington, in Great Basin Kingdom, โwas an attempt to retard, and, if possible, to prevent the development of a market-oriented economy dependent on extensive importation and exportation.โ About 200 communities implemented the Order. Some, like Brigham City, took a moderate approach. Others were quite radical.
Orderville fits into the latter category. The community was founded in the spring of 1875 by twenty-five families who had broken off from the Mount Carmel community a few miles down valley. The Orderville citizens pitched in to build houses surrounding a central plaza and common dining hall. All property was turned over to the community corporation, including land, livestock, and machinery. Decision-making was centralized. The population grew to 600, with around 200 acres of communal fields. The citizens built a sawmill, cabinet shop, woolen mill, shoe shop and tannery. Wealth was distributed evenly. Everyone ate together and wore locally made uniforms.
Orderville thrived in its collective state even as other southern Utah communities abandoned all or parts of the United Order. The community gained population and was able to quadruple its communal assets over just several yearsโ time.
Ordervilleโs successes, however, only highlighted the failures of the predominant, free-market system in use everywhere else, drawing resentment from the outside world. The timing wasnโt so great, either: In 1882, in a direct affront to the Utah Territory and the church, Congress passed the Edmunds Act, banning polygamy. A few years later, the feds rounded up and jailed hundreds of suspected polygamists, including in Orderville, leaving many communities leaderless. Church leaders, looking to remove yet another source of negative outside attention, urged Orderville to abandon its communal ways. The townโs leaders eventually compliedโthe central dining hall had been wiped out by a flood a few years earlier anywayโbut kept the industries under communal ownership for another couple of decades.
By the early 1900s, the United Order had died in practice. For its part, the church continued to start its own businesses and to invest in other firmsโsometimes to its own detriment. The aim, for the most part, was not to turn a profit, but to provide resources for its members. Still, the communalist spirit lived on, permeating the politics and the economics of the church for years afterward.
One of the embodiments of this spirit came in the form of a Utah Mormon banker and conservative Republican named Marriner S. Eccles. Eccles had long believed that hard work and thrift were all one needed to be successful. His father, David Eccles, had built up an empire on those principles, most famously owning the Utah Construction Company, one of six firms that built Hoover Dam and the largest company of its kind in the nation. The senior Eccles died in 1912, leaving everything to his children from two wives, one in Logan, one in Ogden. Though Marriner was in the lesser-endowed Logan branch, he ended up in Ogden, rose to the top of the bunch with his business acumen, and became president of Utah Construction Company, First Security Corporation, and several other interests. Then the Depression hit. Though Ecclesโs wealth insulated him and his businesses, he noticed all around him people who had toiled and saved their whole lives, and who were now ruined, unemployed, even homeless.
โIt is a national disgrace that such suffering should be permitted in this, the wealthiest country in the world,โ he said. โThe present condition is not the fault of the unemployed, but that of our business, financial, and political leadership.โ
In 1933, Eccles and forty-five other citizens addressed Congress on ways to stop or slow the downward economic spiral. Most witnesses suggested that extravagance, nature, or God had caused the crash, and that balancing the federal budget was the only solution. Not Eccles. He said the root cause was maldistribution of wealth. There was plenty of money out there, it had just all ended up in the hands of a small group of the ultra-richโthe 1 percent, if you willโleaving the other 99 percent broke. That left the bulk of Americans not only hungry, but also without any of the purchasing power necessary to fuel the economy, and thatโs what led to the crash.
How to fix the problem? The federal government had to raise taxes on the rich, forget balancing the budget, and spend like crazy in order to redistribute the wealth. Ecclesโs five-point plan included allocating $500 million for unemployment and poverty relief, increasing funding to state and local governments for public works and infrastructure projects, and refinancing farm mortgages.
The approach was both compassionate and coldly rational. It would feed the hungry with direct handouts. And it would push a little bit of the wealth back into the hands of the working class, restoring the purchasing power of the masses. That, in turn, would revive consumption and jump-start industry, creating more jobs and more wealth. For as Eccles often said, โLabor is our only source of wealth.โ Meanwhile, it would bolster the infrastructure of the nation, providing a foundation for future economic growth.
Trickle-down economics simply wouldnโt work. โThe orthodox capitalistic system of uncontrolled individualism โฆ will no longer serve our purpose,โ Eccles said, echoing Brigham Young and presaging John Maynard Keynesโs 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Moneyโthe basis for one of the principal schools of modern economic thought. โWe must think in terms of the scientific, technological, interdependent machine age, which can only survive and function under a modified capitalistic system controlled and regulated from the top by government.โ
Eccles, who was not a church leader but whose family remains powerful in Utah, became the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and his theories provided the seeds of the New Deal. In 1936, around the same time that the federal government was launching its wealth redistribution effort, the church created its Welfare Program, which today spans the globe, providing food, shelter, medical help, and emergency aid to those in need.
The church adhered to the collectivist values of Smith, Young, and Youngโs successor, John Taylor (also a strong proponent of wealth redistribution) for the next couple of decades. But when McCarthyism infected the nation in the 1950s, the Churchโs communalist ways once again put them at odds with the nationโs mainstream. Then, maybe fearing more persecution, church leaders started an effortโperhaps concerted, perhaps notโto change their public image from borderline theocratic communists to full-on capitalists.
The ideological leader of this new, free-market, staunchly conservative Mormonism was Ezra Taft Benson, whom the church named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943. He served as President Dwight D. Eisenhowerโs secretary of agriculture from 1953 until 1961, during which he became more and more rabidly anti-communist. In 1961, he told the churchโs general conference: โNo true Latter-day Saint and no true American can be a socialist or a communist or support programs leading in that direction.โ
Benson was a contemporary, friend, and ideological twin of W. Cleon Skousen, the ultra-conservative political theorist whose teachings would influence the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s, the Wise Use and Patriot movements of the 1990s, and the violent right-wing uprisings of the mid-2010s, including the armed occupation led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016. Benson and Skousen both were strong supporters of the John Birch Society, which was considered extreme even by the likes of hardcore conservatives such as Barry Goldwater. The societyโs founder, Robert Welch, derided Eisenhower as a communist and Benson concurred. And in 1963 Benson predicted that within the decade the United States would be ruled by a communist dictatorship, which would include military occupation, concentration camps, and the like.
Many church leaders considered Bensonโs beliefs not only to be too radical, but also blatantly racist, and at times he was chided for being too political and too extremeโthough his status as apostle was never threatened. Still, his beliefs trickled down into more tempered elements of the church. In 1966, Apostle Marion G. Romney, former Sen. Mitt Romneyโs fatherโs cousin, felt compelled to use his entire speech to the annual LDS general conference to outline the differences between socialism and the United Order (distillation: the United Order has God, socialism doesnโt). And in 1999, Phillip J. Bryson, a professor at Brigham Young University, wrote a paper called โIn Defense of Capitalismโ to counter some LDS scholarsโ anti-capitalist leanings.
These efforts served gradually to pull the church rightward politically, and in 1985, Benson was named the churchโs thirteenth president, a position he held until his death in 1994.
Utahโs politics have long been dominated by the churchโnearly 90% of the stateโs legislature identify as practicing Mormons. As a result, the stateโs politics tend to reflect the churchโs. Prior to 1980, for example, the stateโs voters were as likely to elect a Democratic governor or federal or state lawmaker as they were a Republican one. But during the Reagan era and, for that matter, the Ezra Taft Benson era, the state has become bright red, only electing Democrats to represent isolated liberal strongholds such as Salt Lake City.
During the same time-frame, the church shifted economically, as well. In 1960, a Canadian oil company executive named N. Eldon Tanner was appointed by thenโchurch president David O. McKay as an assistant to the twelve; two years later he became an apostle. He introduced corporate financing to the church and pointed it to not only achieve solvency, but to become a full-on business empire within a few decades.
Itโs the latter, capitalist version of Mormon history that the modern media has glommed onto. And itโs not inaccurateโunder Youngโs leadership, the church had its hands in a number of business enterprises, just like todayโbut itโs also not complete. There still is a faint undercurrent of the old United Order beliefs. The churchโs welfare program and Deseret Industries continue to be a significant part of its larger workings, providing humanitarian assistance across the globe as well as food and clothing and jobs to people closer to home. And itโs safe to say that the churchโs current capitalist successes are rooted in, and wouldnโt be possible without, Brigham Youngโs collectivist, quasi-communist experiment from the late 1800s that played out in a tiny town called Orderville.
๐ธ Parting Shot ๐๏ธ
