1. We are now preparing a book tentatively entitled Mormons Move to the Mainstream: The Reshaping of LDS Society in the Twentieth Century.

2. The most comprehensive discussion of the Mormon culture region is by D. W. Meinig, who, in 1965, laid out a three-layered map of the region, which extended north to Boise, Idaho, south to Juarez, Mexico, west to Elko and Las Vegas, Nevada, and east to just inside the borders of Colorado and New Mexico. The settlements in Alberta were highlighted on his map, but not included in the contiguous corridor. D. W. [Donald William] 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 (June 1965): 213–18. See also Wilbur Zelinsky, “An Approach to the Religious Geography of the United States: Patterns of Church Membership in 1952,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 51 (June 1961): 193; Edwin Scott Gaustad, Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), map in pocket, entitled Religion in America: 1950; and A. R. Mangus, Rural Regions of the United States (Washington: Work Projects Administration, 1940), fig. 2. Zelinsky writes that the Mormon culture region was one of the “only two possibly three cases of regions whose religious distinctiveness is immediately apparent to the casual observer and is generally apprehended by their inhabitants.” Zelinsky, “Approach to the Religious Geography,” 165.

3. Doctrine and Covenants 29:8 instructed, “Wherefore the decree hath gone forth from the Father that they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts and be prepared in all things against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked.” See also D&C 42:36; 84:2–4. Although the change in interpretation of gathering began with Joseph F. Smith in the early twentieth century, the following quotes later in the twentieth century capture well the contrast: “The First Presidency and the Twelve see great wisdom in the multiple Zions, many gathering places where the Saints [should gather] within their own culture and nation.” Spencer W. Kimball, The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, ed. Edward L. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1998), 440. “The place of gathering for the Mexican Saints is in Mexico; the place of gathering for the Guatemalan Saints is in Guatemala; the place of gathering for the Brazilian Saints is in Brazil; and so it goes throughout the length and breadth of the whole earth. Japan is for the Japanese; Korea is for the Koreans; Australia is for the Australians; every nation is the gathering place for its own people.” Bruce R. McConkie, Area Conference Report (Mexico City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1972), 45.

4. Dale Beecher, “The Post-Gathering Expansion of Zion: Mormon Settlements of the Twentieth Century,” in Times of Transition, 1890–1920: Proceedings of the 2000 Symposium of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University, ed. Thomas G. Alexander (Provo, Utah: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute, 2003), 103.

5. Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 201.

6. Both Joseph F. Smith references are quoted by Jan Shipps in The Scattering of the Gathered and the Gathering of the Scattered (St. George, Utah: Dixie College, 1991), 5, based on references from a thesis by Douglas D. Alder.

7. Shipps, Scattering of the Gathered, 10. In another essay, Shipps described these differences of activity among Latter-day Saints in the twentieth century. Jan Shipps, “Beyond the Stereotypes: Mormon and Non-Mormon Communities in Twentieth-Century Mormondom,” in New Views of Mormon History: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington, ed. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), 342–55.

8. This construct was later employed by Armand L. Mauss in his book The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 11–15.

9. Richard Bushman pioneered the study of Mormon wards in the outmigration and set in motion the study of a ward in Delaware of which he was bishop. See Susan Buhler Taber, Mormon Lives: A Year in the Elkton Ward (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

10. Armand Mauss, email to the authors, December 19, 2006.

11. While the majority of study of the twentieth century has focused on the early decades, scholars are starting to focus on the rest of the period. Some of the notable studies include, but are not limited to, the following: Alexander, Mormonism in Transition; Noel B. Reynolds, “The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon in the Twentieth Century,” BYU Studies 38, no. 2 (1999): 6–47; Jan Shipps, “In the Presence of the Past: Continuity and Change in Twentieth-Century Mormonism,” in After 150 Years: The Latter-day Saints in Sesquicentennial Perspective, ed. Thomas G. Alexander and Jessie L. Embry (Provo, Utah: Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 1983), 3–35; Shipps, “Beyond the Stereotypes,” 342–60; Mauss, Angel and the Beehive; Richard H. Jackson and Mark W. Jackson, eds., Geography, Culture, and Change in the Mormon West: 1847–2003 (Jacksonville, Ala.: National Council for Geographic Education, 2003); Alexander, Times of Transition; Gregory A. Prince and William Robert Wright, David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 2005); Carol Cornwall Madsen and Cherry B. Silver, eds., New Scholarship on Latter-day Saint Women in the Twentieth Century (Provo, Utah: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, 2005); and Rodney Stark, The Rise of Mormonism, ed. Reid L. Neilson (New York: Columbia University, 2005).

12. See E. G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 48, no. 2 (1885): 167–227.

13. See Martin Cadwallader, Migration and Residential Mobility: Macro and Micro Approaches (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 39, and 8 for following quote.

14. Paul White and Robert Woods, eds., The Geographical Impact of Migration (New York: Longman Group, 1980), 7.

15. White and Woods, Geographical Impact of Migration, 12.

16. Paul Boyle, Keith Halfacree, and Vaughan Robinson, Exploring Contemporary Migration (Longman: New York, 1998), 72. Emphasis in original.

17. For example, on the Jews, see the excellent studies on early migrations by Jack Glazier, Dispersing the Ghetto: The Relocation of Jewish Immigrants across America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); for later migrations see Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: The Free Press, 1994); and on the Irish, see Timothy Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and J. J. Lee and Marion R. Casey, eds., Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and on African-American migrations, see excellent study by James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migration of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and E. Marvin Goodwin, Black Migration in America, from 1915 to 1960: An Uneasy Exodus (Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen Press, 1990).

18. How Mormons fit into a rapidly urbanizing American society cannot be explored in detail in this article. Because of its importance, this subject will be covered in a forthcoming article we are preparing based on the project’s archives.

19. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 423.

20. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).

21. This is not to say, though, that the Church itself became less centralized over the twentieth century. In many ways, the Church became much more centralized and uniform. As Armand Mauss has written, “The system of governance evolving in the church began to be based far less upon the individual prophetic initiative of a Joseph Smith or a Brigham Young and far more upon the collective, collegial, and bureaucratic model usually associated with large corporations.” Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 23.

22. Joseph Smith Jr., History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. B. H. Roberts, 2d ed., rev., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1971), 4:541. Philippians 4:8 is the text Joseph Smith was paraphrasing.

23. Brigham Young, in Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool: F. D. Richards, 1855–86), 13:335 (April 24, 1870).

24. The artists were John Hafen (1856–1910), Lorus Pratt (1855–1923), John B. Fairbanks (1855–1940), Edwin Evans (1860–1946), and Herman H. Haag (1871–95). Richard G. Oman, “Arts, Visual,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1:70–73.

25. For more on the relationship of Mormons in the Intermountain West to the broader American culture, see Mauss, Angel and the Beehive; Alexander, Mormonism in Transition; and Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2004).

26. Ned Hill, interview with the authors, March 8, 2007.

27. The authors have studied a similar phenomenon during several major field trips to West Africa among the Senegalese, the first people in Africa to be colonized by the French in 1659. It was remarkable after three hundred years, in the face of having the French language and law imposed upon them, that these resilient people kept alive in their homes traditional language, dress, and customs, and for many, their Islamic beliefs. Yet at the same time, they had become productive members of a society and economy that was making a transition from colonial rule to independence. Publicly, they had become assimilated; privately, they had clung to their uniqueness for over three centuries. G. Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971); G. Wesley Johnson Jr., “The Senegalese Ubran Elite, 1900–1945,” in Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 139–87; Marian A. Johnson, “An American in Africa: Interviewing the Elusive Goldsmith,” International Journal of Oral History 1 (June 1989): 110–30.

28. Claudia L. Bushman, Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 146.

29. Alexander George, “The Operational Code: A Neglected Approach to the Study of Political Leadership,” International Studies Quarterly 13 (June 1969): 190–222.

30. Stark, “Rise of Mormonism,” 64–65.

31. Chantal Bordes-Benayoun and Dominique Schnapper, Diasporas et nations (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 69.

32. Jean-Pierre Hassouan, Hmong du Laos en France (Paris: PUF, 1997).

33. Martine Hovanessian, Les liens communautaire: Trois generations d’Armeniens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992).

34. Alain Taurrius, Les Nouveaux cosmopolitismes: mobilites, identites, territoires (La Tour d’Aigues: Editions de l’Aube, 2000).

35. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2001). Cohen and some of the other authors cited recognize the pioneering work of James Clifford, “Diaporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–38.

36. See an early discussion of this problem in Mauss, Angel and the Beehive, 62–66.

37. Frederick C. Luebke, Immigrants and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969); Frederick C. Luebke, ed., Ethnicity on the Great Plains (Lincoln: Center for Great Plains Studies, 1980).

38. Phylis Cancilla Martinelli, “The Transformation of an Ethnic Community: Phoenix’s Italians, 1880 to 1980,” in Phoenix in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Community History, ed. G. Wesley Johnson Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 69–74.

39. In the 1960s, David B. Haight and later Jack Wheatley each served as mayor of Palo Alto, California, and in 1970 John Driggs was elected mayor of Phoenix.

40. Compare Jeff Benedict, The Mormon Way of Doing Business: Leadership and Success through Faith and Family (New York: Warner Business Books, 2007).

41. See also Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 264–65.

42. Henry B. Eyring, interview with the authors, March 2002.

Marian Ashby Johnson

BYU Studies Publications