The Golden Dream (4 page)

But Brigham Young must have seen something, because today, just 130 years later, Salt Lake City, which Young founded, is a gleaming place of steel-and-glass skyscrapers where hundreds of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have prospered and some have become enormously wealthy. A local joke tells of the departed Mormon who arrived at Saint Peter's gate, gave his name, and was asked to state his religion. When the man replied that he was a Mormon, Saint Peter consulted his great book, but could not find the new arrival's name on his list. Finally, after much searching, Saint Peter announced, “Ah, I see
what the trouble is. I have you down under ‘Real Estate.'” Visitors to Salt Lake City are often told that the huge statue of Brigham Young at the center of Temple Square, in the heart of town, depicts Young with his left hand proudly pointing at the new Zion's First National Bank building across the street.

Young designed the irrigation system—based on reservoirs and the river he renamed the River Jordan—which turned the valley green and fruitful, and he laid out the plan for the city's streets, using a unique system of his own devising which was designed to show the traveler exactly where he was at any given moment. The 500 block of South Fifth Street West, for example, would be five blocks west of State Street and five blocks south of Temple Square. As the city has grown, however, Young's numbering system has evolved into one of mind-boggling complexity confusing even to the natives, who would have trouble directing you to an address such as 1185 South 1300th Street East, or 4567 West 5055th Street South. Young insisted that his city have wide streets—wide enough to turn a Conestoga wagon around in—and these streets are a source of great civic pride today. “Have you noticed our beautiful wide streets?” the visitor is always asked. When, not long ago, in order to lure shoppers away from the proliferating suburban malls and back into the downtown shopping area, the city widened the sidewalks on both State and Main streets, and studded them with trees, fountains, benches, and gazebo-like shelters, the result was narrower streets. “We've
always
had wide streets,” complains Mrs. Joseph Mendenhall, whose grandfather came out to Salt Lake with Brigham Young. “We love our wide streets. Why would we need wide sidewalks, for heaven's sake? If you ask me, what they've done with those sidewalks is a
mess
!” (It has also been noted that the wider sidewalks have not appreciably increased pedestrian shopper traffic along State or Main.) Once the city even went so far as to propose moving Brigham Young's statue to another part of town in order to relieve traffic at the intersection of Main and Temple. But this was too much. The citizenry made it quite clear that it would never stand for that.

For all that the city has prospered, expanded, and changed, there is a pervading reluctance to see things change much more. This is a proud and conservative place. And though it was once a desert in the middle of nowhere, it is now a city in the middle of nowhere, and Salt Lake City likes its splendid isolation from other places almost as much as it likes its wide streets. The nearest city of
any size is San Francisco to the west. The closest city to the east is Denver, and to the south there is only Phoenix. “We're not a part of any megalopolis,” says Dr. Duncan McDonald, a prominent ophthalmologist, “and our isolation and distance from other big cities keeps us free from other cities' influences. That's kept us about ten years behind the times. And there are advantages to being ten years behind the times: the problems of other cities haven't caught up with Salt Lake.” But Dr. McDonald also calls Salt Lake City “an island of mediocrity.” He says, “Salt Lake has no pronounced intellectual or social elite, and no pronounced lower class, either. Everyone is on a mediocre level somewhere at the middle.” Salt Lake is also a city that lives entirely in its suburbs, like both Phoenix and Houston, and, as Dr. McDonald puts it, “The Democrats live on the west side of town, and the Republicans live on the east.”

The east side of Salt Lake is by far the most fashionable. There, in the low foothills of the Wasatch Range, sprawling ranch-style houses face the often spectacular sunsets against the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. But there is no real “best address” in Salt Lake City. Federal Heights is an older suburb, near the campus of the University of Utah and not far from the Salt Lake Country Club (the area just below Federal Heights, so another local joke goes, is “Federal Depths”). As the city has grown, it has tended to sprawl eastward and southward, and expensive houses have been built in such newer developments as Olympus Cove and in the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon. Originally, Salt Lake suburbanites took to the hills to escape from the coal dust that hung over the town from the valley's mining operations. Now that the air is cleaner, the attraction of the hills has been the views and the sunsets, and building and development have climbed higher and higher. But when Salt Lake found itself faced with the prospect of having its ruggedly beautiful Wasatch Mountains completely covered with suburban houses and swimming pools, a zoning ordinance was passed requiring that all new houses built at an altitude of 5200 feet or over be placed on lots of at least sixteen acres. Since mountainside acreage is measured on the horizontal, the few people who have ventured higher than 5200 feet have pieces of property that, if laid out flat, would stretch for miles. At least one property owner confesses that he has never really visited the upper reaches of his land.

The Mormon influence in Salt Lake City—and indeed in all of Utah—has created all sorts of interesting anomalies. There is no
clear-cut “Mormon area” of Salt Lake, and Mormons, non-Mormon Christians, and Jews live next door to one another (though wealthy Jewish families, such as the Bambergers, Auerbachs, and Rosenblatts, who made money in everything from railroads to the clothing business, tend to favor Federal Heights). At the same time, there is relatively little social intermingling among the religious groups. In Mormon terminology, any non-Mormon is classified as a Gentile. But to many Mormons the word “Gentile” has a stronger meaning: anti-Mormon. Correspondingly, in the Gentile community, any Gentile who affiliated himself with a predominantly Mormon business or organization was for years branded a “Jack Mormon”—a traitor who collaborated with the Mormon enemy. For years, the Mormon and Gentile communities did not mingle except in some sort of conflict or confrontation. There was a Mormon economy and a Gentile economy. There was a Mormon (Peoples) political party and a Gentile (Liberal) party. There were Gentile holidays, and Mormon holidays, such as the twenty-fourth of July, marking the anniversary of Brigham Young's entry into the valley. Thus the “irrepressible conflict” and the “Utah problem” divided Salt Lake City into two irreconcilable worlds. Though individual Mormons and Gentiles could, and did, strike up occasional personal friendships, Mormons and Gentiles could not afford the social stigma of publicly being in any way nice to one another.

Those days, they like to say, are gone—but not entirely. The Mormon dietary restrictions present a problem, for one thing. A good Mormon is not supposed to drink coffee, tea, or any other “heated liquid,” including, presumably, hot soup. He cannot smoke, drink alcohol, or partake of any other stimulant, including Coca-Cola. And yet, not long ago, when a prominent Mormon businessman was reported to have installed a Coca-Cola machine in his office building, the scoop was that the Mormon Church had invested in some Coca-Cola stock and, therefore, the machine was working for the Church. Though Mormons are not supposed to touch alcohol, the story goes that it was a Mormon group that started the area's first brewery in the foothills at the entrance to the valley—in order to attract newcomers (and potential converts) to the growing city.

There are no ashtrays in Mormon homes or offices, and visitors who ask if they may smoke are requested not to. “Some of my Mormon clients might smell the smoke in the office,” says another Mormon businessman. And yet, away from the office, he smokes
and, on the sly, drinks coffee and Scotch whisky, and keeps a well-stocked bar in his house. Old Melbourne Romney, a prominent Mormon, was even seen smoking his cigar right on Main Street. Mormons, when they are invited to Gentile dinner parties, traditionally arrive one hour late, in order to avoid the cocktail hour. But at the same time, it is the worst-kept secret in the town that many of these late arrivals both drink and offer liquor in their own homes. Because of situations like these, Gentile Salt Lake citizens have the impression that most Mormons are not as serious about their religion as they pretend to be—an attitude that only widens the social abyss between Mormons and Gentiles.

The Mormon taboo against alcohol has accounted for Utah's quaint liquor laws. Utah has many state-run stores (where liquor is heavily taxed), but liquor cannot be sold at bars. It must be “brown-bagged” in, and this has led to a thriving business—in bottle-bag manufacturing. Salt Lake stores offer all sorts of canvas and leather bottle carriers in a variety of designs and sizes. At the larger hotels, the state liquor store is usually right next door to the bar, for the convenience of drinkers. The person desiring a drink buys his bottle at the store, then carries it into the bar, where the bartender will sell setups but, if he is a Mormon, will not mix the drink. As a result, it is futile to order a Margarita or a frozen Daiquiri in Utah. Perhaps, as another result, Utah has one of the highest alcohol-consumption rates—and one of the highest alcoholism rates—of any state in the country. “I'm sure it's because when you have the bottle right there on the table, you tend to pour stronger drinks, and pour them oftener, than when you're ordering an ounce-and-a-half drink from a waiter,” says one man. “At least, I know I drink more under this silly system.”

The fact that many Mormons drink is shrugged off by other Mormons, who do not see it as apostasy or hypocrisy—necessarily. As one Mormon bishop puts it with a wink, “You got to sin to know what sinnin' is.” Mormons also belong to the various private drinking clubs that have proliferated all over Salt Lake City, such as D. B. Cooper's, named after the successful skyjacker who bailed out of his hijacked plane and disappeared. At clubs like Cooper's, members either keep their own bottles at the bar or buy one outright from the bartender. To offset Utah's high tax on liquor, Salt Lake City has Wyoming—with cheap liquor as well as cigarettes—just across the border.

Salt Lake's Mormons are equally ambivalent on the controversial
subject of polygamy. It is estimated that in Salt Lake City and surrounding Davis County as many as twenty-thousand families may be practicing polygamy, or “multiple marriage,” as the Saints prefer to call it, and of course, all of them are doing so illegally. The Mormon Church officially abolished polygamy in 1896—it was a condition of Utah's admission into the Union. Today, polygamy is grounds for excommunication and, in addition, legal arrest. But both the Church and Utah law-enforcement officials have tended to take a soft line on the issue, and to look the other way. The polygamists, meanwhile, consider themselves part of a reform, or fundamentalist, brand of Mormonism, and, as such, candidates for the first circle of Glory when they are gathered to their ancestors—of whom most Mormons keep elaborate track. (Mrs. Mendenhall, for example, can trace her ancestry to the thirteenth century, and has a thick sheaf of documents to back her up.)

If the Mormons of Salt Lake City have one common enemy, it is that amorphous body in Washington known as “the Government,” or in the twangy Western vernacular, “the Gummint.” Whenever the subject of the Gummint comes up, there are angry snorts of general disapproval, because the Gummint is forever threatening to “come in here” and change things around. “The Gummint isn't going to tell
us
what to do,” is a phrase frequently heard in Salt Lake City. The fact that the Gummint opposes polygamy is probably why Salt Lake City Mormons continue to tolerate it, and if the Gummint were not behind the welfare program, the Mormons would be more willing to accept it. It is the Mormons' contention that “We take care of our own,” and they often boast that there are no members of the faith on welfare. Meanwhile, a number of Mormon families in Salt Lake
are
on welfare—particularly the polygamous ones. Some polygamous families are rich, having made money in mining, banking, and real estate, and at least one family lives in an enormous ranch-style house near Cottonwood Canyon. But many of the multiple-marriage families, with numerous wives and even more numerous children, are poor, and the wives and children are said to put an enormous strain on the welfare rolls and, in turn, on the non-Mormon taxpayer. This is another cause of friction between Mormon and Gentile. Several years ago, a number of Mormon merchants banded together to build an elegant downtown shopping complex called the ZCMI Center, the initials standing for Zion Cooperative Mercantile Institution. Non-Mormons jeeringly say that the letters actually stand for “Zion's Children Must Increase.”

Still another sore point between Gentiles and Mormons involves public education. The public schools of Salt Lake City offer an hour of religious education—in the Mormon faith—every day, which strikes many people as a violation of the church and state separation provisions of the American Constitution. To be sure, the Mormon children arrive an hour early for their religious instruction, which is not part of the regular curriculum for non-Mormons. But—in some outlying areas, at least—youngsters receive full scholastic credit for the religious courses, which prompts at least one Gentile cynic to say, “There is
no
separation of church and state in Utah.”

As a group, the Mormons are proud, thrifty, hard-working, and clannish. The late Howard Hughes chose Mormons for his closest business associates because of their acumen and probity. “A man who never drinks never forgets,” he once said. And the manner in which members of the Mormon faith elect to raise their children is perhaps the greatest force dividing the Mormon and the Gentile worlds, and keeps the two in “irrepressible conflict.” Though Mormon and Gentile children may go to school together, their lives outside the classroom are totally different. On the theory that the devil finds work for idle hands, Mormon families keep their children so busy with planned activities that there is no time for them to get into mischief. Immediately after school, youngsters report to various Mutual Improvement Societies, church-sponsored groups designed, as the name implies, to improve the members. The Mutual Improvement Societies offer activities ranging from religious and language study to arts, crafts, sports, and calisthenics. In a proper Mormon household, dinner is on the table promptly at six o'clock. Afterward, there is an evening regimen of study groups, seminars, lectures, and cultural events. On weekends there are church-organized sports and, in the evenings, young people's dances. Dancing is one of the few frivolities of which the Mormon Church approves, and dances—particularly square dances—are an important part of Mormon social life. By the time a Mormon teenager collapses into bed at night he is, so the theory goes, too exhausted to masturbate.