Chapter 1, Introduction: Religion, Reform, and Recreation

Recreation of whatever nature or form, under the direction of the Church, should make true Latter-day Saints. It should increase the spirit of brotherly love and sympathy, break down undesirable class distinction, develop leadership, promote health, direct and develop the power of self expression, direct the emotional expression and develop culture and refinement.

—John T. Wahlquist (1923)¹

The growth of the city, throughout the nineteenth century but more particularly as “new” immigrants migrated to American urban areas after 1880, provoked “an authentic, intense, and growing fear of the threat urbanization posed to society itself.”² Efforts to reform city dwellers (particularly immigrants living cheek by jowl in slum-ridden inner cities) reached a crescendo as the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth. Referred to by historians and others as the “progressive era,” reform activists from approximately 1890 to 1920 transplanted the moral concerns of antebellum reformers in the bustling cities of industrial America. Whether organizing settlement houses where middle-class professionals worked to “Americanize” immigrants newly arrived from eastern and southern Europe or creating action groups to democratize state and federal politics, progressive reformers sought to bring order to the complex and often confusing city. Armed with sociological statistics, progressives ^[1] tried to transform the physical landscape of the city in the belief that physical modifications would naturally lead to social and moral changes.³

Although the concept (or even the existence) of a “progressive movement” remains hotly contested, most historians agree that the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century saw myriad important changes that transformed American life as it encountered modernity. In the words of historian David M. Kennedy,

The progressive era, in sum, was an era of transition, and that transitional character is one of its most significant aspects. We cannot look to it for the source of all aspects of our modern life, nor can we make the progressives the heroes or the scapegoats for the triumphs or failings, as the case may be, of the rest of the century. Progressivism, after all, is past, and must be so treated. But past does not mean irrelevant, and certainly does not mean nonexistent.”⁴

If the progressive era was a time of transition for Americans at large, the decades after 1890 marked a momentous transformation for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter Mormon or LDS), both within the church and between the ^[2] religious organization and the world outside of LDS-dominated Utah. As the last decade of the nineteenth century began, Mormons had been in the throes of federal persecution for more than thirty years. Attempting to force the LDS faithful to fall in line with the standards of Victorian America, the federal government outlawed polygamy (a deeply held though controversial LDS doctrine)⁵ in 1862 and thereafter passed increasingly punitive measures. Captured in antipolygamy raids, hundreds of Mormon men and women received jail terms in state and federal prisons. Other church members including church president John Taylor and various apostles avoided the long arm of the federal law by hiding in “underground” safe homes throughout the Mormon region. Eventually, with that passage of the Edmunds (1882) and Edmunds-Tucker (1887) acts—which dissolved the church as a legal corporation, forced the forfeiture of all church property over $50,000, disenfranchised all polygamists and ended female suffrage in Utah, and allowed the federal government to assume control over the territory’s schools—the church faced its breaking point. Rather than continue to antagonize the federal government, church president Wilford Woodruff announced in 1890 the official end of LDS-sanctioned polygamy. That profound change in Mormon ^[3] practice (the theological doctrine has never been officially disavowed) began the church’s first major accommodation to the main currents of American behavior. The next several decades witnessed the general, though not absolute, acceptance of Mormons into conventional American Protestantism.⁶

The Mormon movement into the mainstream was neither quick nor painless. According to historian Thomas G. Alexander:

Conditions during the period of the 1890s constituted for the Latter-day Saints a challenge to the paradigm under which they had operated at least since 1847. The previous paradigm necessitated the integration of religion, politics, society, and the economy into a single non-pluralistic community and adopted polygamy as a means of solving the traditional problem of the marriage relationship. This was simply unacceptable to Victorian America, so in the 1890s the Mormons began groping for a new paradigm that would save essential characteristics of their religious tradition, provide sufficient political stability to preserve the interests of the church, and allow them to live in peace with other Americans.⁷

Seeking the temporal salvation of the religious body, church leaders began to emphasize nuances of LDS doctrine that had previously been overshadowed by polygamy. The dietary code (known as the Word of Wisdom), tithing (pegged at 10% of a member’s ^[4] income), and the construction of sacred temples helped fill the void created by President Woodruff’s prohibition of polygamy.

During this period of transition—when Mormons were seeking for methods to maintain their unique way of life while accommodating to the American mainstream—the LDS church first utilized organized recreation as a means of teaching morals and Mormon values to adolescents. As part of the effort to maintain the cultural distinctiveness of Mormons, church leaders organized a massive recreation program designed not only to keep young men and women interested in church attendance but to inculcate a sense of “Mormon-ness” in the rising generation. The creation of intra-church athletic meets and leagues as well as the addition of gymnasiums to local meetinghouses and the construction of a state-of-the-art athletic training facility in downtown Salt Lake City furthered the work of the church by teaching lessons of cooperation and teamwork through sporting events. A close alliance with the Boy Scout organization and the construction of elaborate girls’ camps also helped church leaders promote frontier values to a generation raised in the city. Undergirding the creation of the wide-ranging recreation program was the development of an LDS recreation ideology based on Mormon theology and the writings of twentieth-century play theorists. Recreation offered a plastic social device which could teach religious values to adolescents and prove to outsiders that Mormons fit in with other religious denominations. ^[5]

The Mormon use of recreational programs to right the wrongs of urban life places the religious group firmly in the broad category of progressive reformers that Paul Boyer identified as “positive environmentalists.” This brand of reformers, in Boyer’s formulation, “took their cue from the more hopeful and visionary side of late nineteenth-century urban reformism. Their goal was to create in the city the kind of physical environment that would gently but irresistibly mold a population of cultivated, moral, and socially responsible city dwellers.”⁸ Although Mormon leaders also participated in some efforts typical of “negative environmentalists”—most notably the eradication of saloons—generally the church sought to raise downtrodden urban dwellers by adding uplifting activities to the variety of urban offerings. Like settlement house workers, playground advocates, and park planners, Mormon recreation leaders worked to provide replacement activities to lure boys away from street corners. Mormons may not have exemplified the “typical” progressive reformers but their concerns about the social dislocation caused by urbanization and their reliance on sociological expertise mark them as much more similar than different to their progressive counterparts in American cities.

Mormon leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century faced a double dilemma. Not only did they have to construct new distinctions between their religious group and the outside world, they also had to deal with the problems confronting other ^[6] progressive Americans—namely urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. In organizing their recreation program, LDS officials built on the foundation constructed by a variety of both secular and religious recreation reforms enacted in nineteenth century American cities.

Religion, Recreation, and Reform in the Nineteenth Century

Perhaps the most famous religious recreational effort in the nineteenth century city involved the importation of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) from England. Founded in London in 1841 by a young dry goods clerk, the original YMCA reading room offered urban young men an opportunity to socialize in an uplifting atmosphere far removed from the immoral streets of England’s capital city. Brought to the United States in 1851 by George M. Van Derlip and George H. Petrie, who had visited the London reading room during a trip to the Crystal Palace Exposition, the idea quickly caught on in American cities. Boston, Montreal, and New York City soon housed YMCAs and a national confederation of organizations was formed in 1855. Phenomenal growth followed as the YMCA movement paralleled the growth of the city. More than 1500 local organizations had been established by 1900 in cities throughout the country.^9 [7]

The YMCA’s approach differed somewhat from the Jacksonian moral reclamation projects like Sunday schools and Biblical tract societies. Rather than concentrate on slum dwellers and the unchurched, YMCA activists worked primarily with middle-class, native-born Protestant men employed in the city. Few day laborers or factory workers sought relief in the organization’s reading rooms which were populated by office workers, students, and skilled craftsmen. Though each local organization created a unique program, initially most YMCAs centered on providing intellectual and religious guidance to free-floating young men of the city. Reading rooms, Bible studies, lecture programs, evangelical proselyting, and charity work provided the typical fare.

Building on the strategy of promoting spiritual redemption through religious activities, YMCA organizations soon tapped the power of social redemption through recreational activities. Exercise rooms, gymnastic drills, swimming pools, and gymnasiums quickly came to dominate the organization’s offerings. According to one estimate, by the turn of the century, 77 percent of urban YMCAs contained gymnastic facilities. Large associations often augmented their gymnasiums with meeting halls, libraries, and areas for games and classes.¹⁰ Many of the early play leaders in the United States—including Luther H. Gulick, Jr., the “preeminent individual in the adult-managed boys’ sports movement”—began their careers as physical educators in the ^[8] YMCA.¹¹ Other YMCA innovations include the development of the games of basketball and volleyball as non-violent alternatives to football and other rough athletic activities. By 1892, nearly a quarter of a million YMCA members enjoyed 348 gymnasiums staffed by 144 trained exercise professionals. Though a wide range of athletic and religious opportunities attracted young men to the Christian organization, the associations were unified around a core “determination to draw the city’s anonymous young men out of their isolation and into a sheltering institutional fold.”¹²

German Jews in American cities followed the lead of the American YMCA and created their own organization for urban adolescent males. In 1854, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association was established in the express form of the YMCA including the construction of gymnasiums and swimming pools. In the tradition of “muscular Christianity,” the YMHA institutionalized “muscular Judaism” to improve body, mind, spirit, and society. YMHA facilities became landmark social centers in many middle-class German-American communities, the most well-known location being the 92nd Street Y on New York’s Upper East Side. The complementary programs at the YMCA ^[9] and YMHA may have stemmed from divergent religious traditions but both were undergirded by similar recreation ideologies.¹³

Other religious institutions in nineteenth-century American cities developed programs to reclaim immigrant slum dwellers from the social and spiritual dislocation attendant to urban life. In the 1880s, Congregationalists organized the American Home Missionary Society to build city missions and churches and to begin work among urban immigrants. By going to the source—actually living and working in the city’s poorest districts—Protestant missionaries to the slums approached urban dwellers with a zeal typically reserved for proselytizing in non-Christian foreign lands like China and Africa. By the 1920s, approximately 3000 missions operated in American cities proclaiming spiritual salvation and social redemption to the urban masses.¹⁴ Out of this desire to deliver city residents from city evils grew the “institutional church movement.” Seeking to increase their influence among immigrant Catholics, many liberal Protestants turned away from doctrinal differences and instead offered an array of “secular activities and programs geared to the interests and needs of the surrounding immigrants.”¹⁵ An 1867 article on “Amusements” published in the New Englander described that it was a “Christian duty to bring recreation within the pale of Christian ^[10] thought, and to make such provision for innocent enjoyments as to protect our youth from sinful indulgences and perilous amusements.”¹⁶

On New York City’s Lower East Side, a polyglot area teeming with immigrants, St. George’s Episcopal Church employed the secular activities of the institutional church movement to tremendous advantage in the 1880s. Under the direction of rector William S. Rainsford, at times the church resembled a settlement house more than a house of worship. Complete with boys’ club, recreational facilities, and industrial training programs, the church widened its appeal well beyond the faithful. Even religious services, energized by congregational singing, marked St. George as an atypical urban church. Such unorthodox activities, however, rewarded the Episcopal church with unique respect and popularity among its neighbors. In 1890, it was reported that more than 7000 persons had participated in some program offered by St. George.

Following the road map of urban rectitude drawn by St. George and the Salvation Army, other churches expressed admiration for the programs but often came up short in the administration of their own “institutional” programs. A survey in 1900 revealed that only 15 percent of New York City churches had sponsored any community programs. In Chicago, less that 10 percent of the urban churches sustained literary societies and even fewer utilized sports programs and gymnasiums. The ^[11] combination of religious revival aided by recreational programs attracted a multitude of emulators but very few imitators.¹⁷

Churches were not the only organizations turning to gymnasiums and athletic activities to address problems in the city. The plastic nature of recreation was used by immigrant and ethnic groups to accommodate to the main currents of American life (a process often referred to as “Americanization”) and to maintain a distinct ethnic heritage and lifestyle. Recreation became an instrument to insulate ethnic groups while simultaneously providing an opportunity to make inroads into the dominant culture. For example, when ethnic athletes participated in a citywide athletic tournament, both resistance and accommodation occurred. Athletic excellence not only fostered group pride, it gave the participants admittance into a wider world.^18 [12]

According to sports historian Steven A. Reiss, ethnic athletic associations in urban areas after the Civil War “fostered athletic participation by the second generation in American sports, under the supervision and direction of ethnic recreation leaders, in hopes of maintaining an ethnic identity for the American-born and reared.” Ethnic sports, then, “facilitated the adjustment of old immigrants in their urban villages” and allowed immigrants to maintain ties with the old country. For example, though American sports like baseball, boxing, and basketball became a “major focal point around which Irishmen living in the slums or the zones of emergence organized their social life and secured self-esteem,” traditional Irish games persisted among Irish immigrants as well. In Boston, the formation of the Irish Athletic Club kept alive Hibernian sporting traditions including goaling, trapball, and stone throwing. Reiss records, “Beside promoting manliness and solidarity, as in the past, sport also provided both a means to encourage and express Irish nationalism and a vehicle for social mobility.”¹⁹

For many German-Americans, community life centered on the turnverein, a social center that often combined gymnasium facilities with game rooms, library, club room, dining room, and dance hall. Though turners were renowned for their gymnastic feats of skill, “the goals of the turners were to maintain the German character of their communities, encourage physical fitness, and improve conditions of working-class folk.” ^[13] Exercise, public debate, political and trade union activities each played a major part in German turnhalles across the country.²⁰ By 1890, membership in turnvereines reached more than 35,000. Bohemian immigrants followed the German tradition and created their own ethnic social centers known as sokols. Much like the turnverein, sokols promoted physical exercise and encouraged “newcomers to identify with their fellow Bohemians and their language and culture.” When second generation Bohemian-Americans lost interest in the calisthenics and drill exercises that formed the core of the sokol exercise plan, sokol leaders in Chicago’s southwestern suburbs organized a Sunday baseball league which “got the youth involved in the sokol and encouraged them to sustain their ethnic identity.” After learning to play on the diamonds of Pilsen, several Bohemian-American baseball players graduated to the major leagues, where they became a source of great pride for the community.²¹ Pilsen’s sokol provides a preeminent example of ethnic sports fostering community pride and awareness while furthering ties with the outside social groups.

At the end of the twentieth century in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, French-Canadian mill workers fell in love with the great American pastime but managed to ^[14] preserve their ethnic identity as well. Reiss describes the complex cultural interaction when the immigrants “read box scores in a French-language newspaper and followed the exploits of local hero Napoleon Lajoie, the premier second baseman of his day. French-Canadians playing Anglo teams often gave signals in French, which was still their primary language. Playing baseball under these circumstances promoted ethnic pride and cultural pluralism as much as Americanization.”²² Likewise, in St. Louis, the accomplishments of Italian sports and athletic heroes often united the ethnic community together. Historian Gary Ross Mormino concludes that “sport channeled forces that had historically divided Italian immigrants in St. Louis and harnessed these divisive energies into creative participation” and “encouraged not only the preservation of an ethnic subculture, but the preservation of the community itself.”²³ In ethnic enclaves across the United States, sports acted as a malleable social device which simultaneously cemented ethnic allegiances while accelerating the “Americanization” process.

Civic officials and other groups with a vested interest in urban reform likewise turned to supervised recreation as a particularly effective way to promote social order. Not only did organized games give children a reason to stay away from the street ^[15] corner, athletics and recreational activities could inculcate self-discipline and cooperation—values considered most important for the urban proletariat in the industrial age. Reiss writes that “social reformers believed they could protect city youth from the pathological defects of their neighborhoods by building parks, playgrounds, and public baths that would provide an uplifting and healthy environment and as an alternative to gambling halls, poolrooms, saloons, and brothels.”²⁴ For example, Boston mayor Josiah Quincy raved about the effects that city-sponsored playgrounds, bath houses, swimming pools, gymnasiums, and free concerts had on “the social and moral development of the masses of the people.” Moreover, according to Quincy, adolescents who frequented the gyms and swimming pools were “less likely to fall into vicious ways.” Not only had rates of juvenile delinquency fallen, the city was becoming a beacon of social order. Quincy reported that at one large outdoor concert, over 10,000 spectators had behaved themselves under the watchful eye of only a “very few policemen.”²⁵ As University of Chicago Settlement House worker Mary McDowell described, “Muscle exercised on a punching bag, or a swinging club, or a turning pole or in a swimming pool, is not apt to be used to bully fellow workers and lead to struggles against law and order.”^26 [16]

According to historian Stephen Hardy, who has expertly described the central role played by recreation in the urbanization of Boston, scholastic sports teams acted as a community “epoxy” which bound social fragments into wholes. Cheering for the local squad not only brought citizens together, it provided potent examples of physical fitness and endurance. The highest hopes for a sports program, as one progressive educator recorded, were not the coaching of physical skills but the inculcation of social values. Speaking of the lessons of sport, P. D. Boynton instructed the National Education Association in 1904: “The spirit of working together earnestly, enthusiastically, and intelligently for a given end, which is the spirit of our democracy” came from playing organized games as did “the desire of working for one’s institution with one’s whole mind and heart and strength, which in the world outside we call Patriotism.”²⁷ Cooperation, interpersonal connection, and a desire to belong to something that was larger than yourself—these were the lessons taught by playing and watching sports.

School-sponsored sports—a means of raising school spirit, teaching cooperation, and ensuring that excess energy was spent in uplifting activities—prospered during the progressive era. Though the rise of intercollegiate sports is widely known, a much more striking development occurred in the organization ^[17] of leagues directing athletic meets for secondary school students. The largest city association, New York City’s Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) organized by Luther Gulick in 1903, developed a wide-ranging athletics program which “channeled bad gang conduct into constructive behavior, encouraged the development of primary relationships, provided opportunities for altruistic experiences (putting the team above the individual), and promoted school spirit.”²⁸ Mass participation evidenced the demand for organized play opportunities. One year, over 60,000 boys competed for the PSAL broad jump title. Participants in the organization’s field days (held at individual schools) annually numbered over 100,000 boys. A girls’ branch of the PSAL was created in 1905. Following in the PSAL’s pioneering footsteps, programs in Baltimore and Chicago took shape and by 1910, seventeen cities had their own local versions of the scholastic athletic league.²⁹

Across the country, municipal officials and concerned citizens worked to provide recreational space, organization, and supervision. New York City, Boston, and Chicago, and other metropolises created large park systems to promote outdoor exercise and socializing. Parks introduced fresh air into the fetid urban atmosphere and gave many city dwellers a legitimate place to gather far away from their tenement stoops. In New York, Lillian Wald and other reformers created the Outdoor Recreation League in 1898 ^[18] which organized the Hudsonbank, a public gymnasium on the Lower East Side. Later the league expanded its program to include a playground, athletic field, and grandstand in what eventually became Seward Park. Boston’s Park Department built gymnasiums in the middle-class neighborhood of Franklin Park and near the slums of the West End.³⁰

Progressive era social reformers were interested in much more than merely protecting their urban clients. In many cases, the recreational elements of reform activities were thinly veiled mechanisms of “Americanization”—the quest to transform immigrants from southern and eastern Europe into red-blooded, true-blue Americans. Reformers believed that games and other playground activities would instill democratic values, patriotic feelings, and industrial discipline in the teeming masses of immigrants. Steven Reiss argues that “the ‘best people’ hoped to use parks to raise the moral level of urban folk, improve their character, and Americanize them, or, if that did not work, to use playgrounds as a source of social control.”³¹ The concept of progressive reformers as social control specialists—like so many puppeteers forcing their subjects to salute the American flag—no longer seems appropriate to describe the give and take of urban reform efforts in the early twentieth century. Rather, as Paul Boyer has written, any effort to shape social behavior “involves considerable mutuality, with a nexus of shared social assumptions and aspirations linking the ‘controllers’ and the ‘controlled.’” The ^[19] shared social assumptions and aspirations in the progressive era are evident in many of the recreation programs. Reformers used them as an instrument to teach social values; participants, on the other hand, were eager to join the games not to learn proper behavior but because the games provided diversion, competition, and fun. Programs proved popular to both reformer and reformee, albeit for different reasons.³²

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a variety of social forces combined to create a unique opportunity for the rise of recreational reform efforts. Concern over the plight of urban children, a desire to reform or “Americanize” immigrants, and the formation of a guiding play ideology turned parks and playgrounds into centers of socialization for progressive-era children. Preceded by a long history of urban reform efforts, progressive reformers often turned to play programs as the antidote to urban disorder. Similarly, in the Mormon community, the problems caused by urbanization led directly to the creation of church-sponsored recreation programs.

“Progressive” Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City was not only the home of the LDS temple and Mormon church headquarters, it was a thriving city, the economic and social hub of the intermountain West. Though located in the far-off Great Basin and populated primarily by a unique religious subgroup, Salt Lake in the twentieth century greatly resembled other American ^[20] cities scattered from coast to coast. By 1911, as one history of the city records, Salt Lake had assumed the appearance of a “generally typical American city.” Long considered abnormal among American urban areas because of distinctive Mormon-Gentile antagonisms, historians now regard cultural and religious conflict as commonplace in many American cities. The presence of such conflict (though not necessarily the terms) might qualify Salt Lake City as typical rather than aberrant. Furthermore, the city of the Saints had been integrated into the national economy at least since the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. In no sense an “island” community of the type described by Robert H. Wiebe, the Mormon capital city had taken on the characteristics of most cities of the industrial era: department stores, dance halls, newspapers, theaters, sports, and other urban amenities flourished by the end of the nineteenth century.³³ Urbanization, immigration, and industrialization affected the Mormon capital in the decades after 1890 as much as they did other “progressive” cities. ^[21]

Like other urban areas during the progressive era, Salt Lake City experienced massive growth between 1890 and 1930. Six years before Utah gained statehood, the 1890 census enumerated 44,843 persons living in Salt Lake City. By the turn of the century, the city boasted 53,531 residents (an increase of 19.4 percent). From 1900 to 1910, the city’s population expanded to 92,777, an increase of over 70 percent. Salt Lake’s 1910 population placed it in the same rank as cities like Reading, PA (96,071), Dallas, TX (92,104), and Lynn, MA (89,336). Augmented by immigration and in-migration from rural areas, the population continued to grow, reaching 118,110 in 1920 and 140,267 in 1930.³⁴ In the forty years after polygamy was renounced, the population of the city of the Saints more than tripled (312 percent increase). For the same period, the state’s population expanded from 210,779 in 1890 to 507,847 in 1930, an increase of 240 percent. [See Table 1.] ^[22] Not only did the city’s growth rates typically outpace the population growth rate of the state as a whole, urban areas gradually siphoned a majority of the population away from rural locations. Although the majority of Utah’s population resided in rural areas until 1930, the percentage of the population in the cities increased significantly after 1880, as Table 2 indicates. ^[23] By 1930, Salt Lake City had not entered the first rank of American urban places (or perhaps even the second rank) but urbanization had transformed Utah’s capital from a Mormon outpost to a regionally important social and economic center.

Table 1. Population of Selected Cities and Decade Growth³⁵

Table 2. Rural and Urban Population in Utah³⁶

Long before the “new” immigration of the 1890s brought millions of southern and eastern European immigrants to American cities, European immigration had played a major role in the peopling of Utah. As a component of the Mormon vision of Zion, convert immigrants from abroad had flowed into LDS communities since the church’s founding in 1830. Just months after the church incorporated in April of that year, church members began teaching the gospel to friends and relatives in eastern Canada. Within fifteen years, more than 2500 Canadians had converted to the faith, and many of them had left their home country to join the Saints in Kirtland and Nauvoo. In 1837, Heber C. Kimball and Orson Hyde opened Great Britain to LDS proselytizing ^[24] where by 1841 over 5000 converts had been added to the faith. Almost immediately, new members from Britain, energized by calls to gather with the Saints in the United States issued in 1840s, left their homeland to join their fellow believers. In 1849, after the relocation to Utah, LDS leaders established the Perpetual Emigrating Fund which used church funds to assist poor European Mormons with the costs of emigration. From 1840 to 1910, more than 100,000 LDS converts emigrated to the United States, an average of more than 2000 per year. In 1855—the height of LDS European immigration—over 4000 Mormons emigrated, a figure which represents about 2.4 percent of all European immigration to the United States that year.³⁷

On the streets of nineteenth century Salt Lake City, then, one would have expected to meet European immigrants at nearly every turn. In fact, one report estimates that 69 percent of households in Salt Lake County were led by immigrants, the majority having come from English-­speaking countries. Salt Lake’s “average family” in the second half of the nineteenth century consisted of foreign-born parents and their ^[25] children. Anglo-Saxon and Celtic surnames dominated city directories though a smaller number of Scandinavian, central European, and Italian surnames are evident.³⁸ Most Mormon immigrants quickly assimilated to the dominant culture. Though church publications and activities were available in many languages, most immigrants also attended worship services in English. Nearly all second-generation residents of Salt Lake City became fluent in English and “relatively little sense of ethnic community survived beyond the generation of immigrants themselves.” In fact, when immigrant descendants served as missionaries to their ancestral homes, most had to learn the language in order to communicate.³⁹

Notwithstanding the long tradition of European immigration into LDS communities throughout Utah, the face of immigration modified slightly after 1890. Similar to immigration changes taking place nationwide, Utah received a larger number of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe. Immigration from Great Britain and Scandinavian countries continued to dominate (in terms of population and cultural impact), but an influx of “new” immigrants permanently altered the ethnic composition of Utah. As shown in Table 3, the total population of all immigrants in Utah remained largely static, except for a noticeable rise of more than 12,000 between 1900 and ^[26] 1910—an increase of 22.3 percent. The stability of the total immigrant population, however, obscures the unprecedented growth of several ethnic groups during the period. Though the population of the newer immigrant groups would never approach the size of the groups from northwestern Europe, it is instructive to note which ethnic groups grew the fastest in Utah during the progressive era.

Without question, the most remarkable expansion occurred within Utah’s Greek community. Virtually nonexistent until 1900, Greek immigrants flooded into Utah in astounding numbers between 1900 and 1910. The 1900 census enumerated but 3 Greeks in the state and just ten years later, the Greek population had reached 4039, a growth rate of 1346 percent for the decade. Though most did not settle in the urban areas along the Wasatch mountains—they were bound for the mines of central Utah or the railroads—the Greek culture made an impact on Salt Lake City. From the erection of the Holy Trinity Church in the city’s center to Greek coffee houses, the immigrants strove to transplant Peloponnesian culture in their new homeland.⁴⁰ Other ethnic groups experienced similar, if not quite as meteoric, increases in their numbers. The population of Italians in Utah nearly tripled from 1062 in 1900 to 3117 in 1910; the number of state residents born in Japan grew from 419 at the turn of the century to more than 2000 in 1910; Austrian immigrants likewise expanded their numbers from 272 to 1870 in the first decade of the twentieth century. Interestingly, owing to ^[27] natural causes and a decrease in immigration, the immigrant communities from Denmark and England decreased in size from 1900 to 1910, though they remained the largest immigrant groups in the state (see Tables 3 and 4).

Table 3. Country of Birth of Selected Immigrant Populations in Utah, 1890–1920⁴¹

Table 4. Country of Birth of Selected Immigrant Populations in Salt Lake City, 1910⁴²

As these immigrant communities became more sizable, they transformed Salt Lake City by introducing new languages, religions, fashions, and ways of life. Greek coffee houses, Asian restaurants, and ethnic business enterprises evidenced not only the reality of relocation but the immigrant’s desire to replicate their home cultures. In addition to changing the social landscape, the presence of immigrant communities also recast the physical environs of the city as ethnic groups congregated in particular corners of Salt Lake. The Chinese community, for example, concentrated in the heart of downtown in an area bordered by Main and State streets and First and Second South. To the south of the Chinese lay African-American neighborhoods between Main Street and Third East. Japanese-Americans lived just west of the Salt Lake Temple along First South. Syrians, Italians, and Greeks likewise lived in ethnic enclaves, often close to the railroads and typically in the poorer sections of the city.⁴³ Since the earliest days of settlement in the Salt Lake valley, immigration had been a constant factor; as the twentieth century unfolded, however, the nature of immigration shifted as an increasing number of Utahns hailed from southern and eastern Europe and Asia. ^[28] With ethnic neighborhoods and institutions adding new flavor to Salt Lake City, the wave of “new” immigrants propelled urban growth.

In addition to urbanization and immigration, Salt Lake underwent the process of industrialization as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. As the percentage of the population living in rural areas gradually declined, the number of Utahns working in manufacturing industries expanded quite rapidly. Statistics alone fail to convey the day-to-day realities that followed in the wake of industrialization in Utah and elsewhere. Ever elusive, perhaps the best method to apprehend the lives of industrial workers is found in social and labor histories of the period.⁴⁴ A statistical portrait, however, also clearly outlines the growing importance of industrial manufacturing to Utah’s economy.

As Table 5 indicates, growth in Utah’s manufacturing sector kept pace with the state’s expanding population. Already well established by the turn of the twentieth ^[30] century, industrial manufacturing became a staple of Utah’s economy during the progressive era. Concentrated in the emerging urban corridor from Ogden to Provo, the number of manufacturing firms—not including extractive industries like mining—grew from 619 in 1904 to 1089 fifteen years later, an increase of 76 percent. Moreover, the number of industrial workers expanded 139 percent during the decade and a half, with 9650 industrial employees in 1904 giving way to 23,107 workers by 1919. Wage-earning workers (those paid by the hour or by piece rate rather than salary) comprised the vast majority of Utah’s industrial workers in the century’s first decades. Figures for 1904 indicate 8052 wage-earners while fifteen years later the number had grown to 18,868—an increase of 134 percent. Eighty-six percent of wage-earning workers during the period were male, thirteen percent female, and approximately one percent were children under the age of sixteen. Seasonal employment, however, affected the number of employed Utahns. For example, in April 1919, only 16,196 wage earners found employment compared to 22,592 workers employed in October of the same year, a difference of thirty-nine percent. Many of the fluctuations in the availability of wage work can be attributed to the ebb and flow of seasonal demand and the agricultural cycle.

Table 5. Industrial Workers, Utah, 1904–1919⁴⁵

White collar employment reached significant levels by 1919, as well. Salaried officials of corporations numbered 266 across the state while superintendents and managers weighed in at 880. More than 2000 clerks worked in the offices of the state’s ^[31] industrial companies. Unlike the situation on the factory floor, however, women made up nearly thirty percent (572 of 2004) of Utah’s clerks.

At least in terms of the three major markers of the progressive era—urbanization, immigration, and industrialization—Utah and its major cities kept pace with the developments occurring in other regions of the country. Rural folk flocked to the cities, factories lured farmers from their fields, and the addition of “new” immigrants broadened the ethnic diversity in urban and rural areas.

Mormon Society at the Crossroads

Mormon cities were not alone in experiencing profound change in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. During this period, LDS society, still reeling from federal persecution and dealing with the end of polygamy, faced its most severe crisis since the martyrdom of founder Joseph Smith. In historian Jan Shipps’s estimation, Mormons after the Manifesto stood at a critical crossroads:

At stake was the sheer survival not of the LDS Church itself, but of a Mormonism that continued to preserve its exclusive claim to be the sole ^[32] corporate body in possession of the holy priesthood and invested with the status of God’s chosen people. Without boundaries to set them apart, without ‘gentiles’ to stand over and against, a chosen people cannot exist; their very identity depends on their perception of specialness; and that specialness, in turn, depends on their being separated in some way from that part of the population that is not special. The United States government had made it clear that institutionally established and maintained boundaries could not be tolerated in this nation, and this meant the Latter-day Saints were faced with a serious internal problem. Somehow the responsibility for boundary maintenance had to be shifted from the corporate body to the individuals within that body, and that shift had to be legitimated in such a way that it would gain general acceptance.⁴⁶

Mormons were caught between a past where plural marriage provided a strict border with the outside world and an uncertain future where boundaries would have to be carefully constructed and cultivated to keep the mainstream world happy while maintaining the unique aspects—the “specialness”—that the faithful had enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century. Boundaries had to be set that allowed the religious organization to maintain its integrity; however, those borders needed to be permeable enough to permit passage of ideas, trends, and eventually acceptance from the world outside of the church community. The scriptural injunction that directed Christians to be in the world but not of the world not only became a prescriptive catch phrase for Mormons, it described the church’s ambivalence on the eve of the twentieth century.^47 [33]

Despite the processual nature of “Mormonism in transition,” after 1890 the church experienced a mighty change, an unanticipated thrust into the modern world. Though no geographical relocation was required, the psychological, cultural, and spiritual transformation was every bit as wrenching as immigration had been for other progressive-era Americans. Both immigrant and Mormon faced a new world where new vocabularies had to be mastered, rules adjudicated, and identities forged. Just like many progressive reforms concentrated on “Americanizing” immigrants, LDS recreational efforts intended to “Mormonize” the rising generation of post-polygamy young men and women. The desire to inculcate values, teach morals, and model exemplary behavior energized the recreational reforms sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The LDS church’s accommodation to the outside world after 1890 has been well-chronicled by historians, both within and outside of the faith. Most have noted that outside forces—primarily political—impinged on the church, wore down its resistance, and eventually convinced and coerced Mormon officials to set aside their separateness, renounce polygamy, and enter the currents of mainstream American thought and behavior. According to this view, the church was changed enormously through contact with the outside world. In large measure, especially in the political realm, this interpretation provides insight and understanding into the “Americanization” of the Mormon church and people. Focusing only on the intrusion of unwanted power from the outside, however, fails to tell the whole story. As an ^[34] analysis of LDS recreation during the early twentieth century shows, the church’s contacts with the outside world were often complex and ambiguous. In designing and implementing recreation programs, church officials turned to outside “experts” to acquire ideas and techniques that would meet more adequately the recreational needs of church members.⁴⁸ In no way forced to seek or accept assistance from outside sources, Mormon leaders willingly cultivated contacts to help them solve their problems. Even though officials sought advice from non-LDS professionals and organizations, the church consistently used those borrowed techniques to strengthen church membership. Rather than wholesale “accommodation” to non-Mormon groups or value systems, Mormon recreation offers an example of “creative adjustment” that bolsters historians Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton in their contention that the church used worldly knowledge and contacts to insure the continuity of the group’s unique institutions. Not “selling out” to Gentile experts, LDS leaders were cautiously “buying into” ideas that they could manipulate to their own ends.⁴⁹

In many ways, the use of recreation to aid the “creative adjustment” of Mormons to the modern world closely resembles the role of sports in the “Americanization” of ^[35] many immigrant Jews in the early twentieth century. As detailed by Peter Levine, the children of Jewish immigrants “turned sportive experiences to their own ends in ways that paid attention both to traditional Jewish communal purpose and mainstream American values.” Levine describes that sports became a “middle ground” for the alteration and adaptation of a “significant American cultural institution to serve ethnic community ends while encouraging their own enthusiasm for full integration into American life.”⁵⁰ During the progressive era and beyond, sports and recreation programs allowed both Jews and Mormons to accommodate to American culture without completely surrendering their “ethnic” identity.

As just one part of a complex religious organization, the recreational programs of the LDS church ranged widely over the years and involved millions of Mormons at play. It would be foolhardy to suggest that any one treatment could cover the vast terrain of Mormon recreation in any period. Even in surveying such a small field as the decades between 1890 and 1940, volumes of material have been left out. Rather than create a catalog of activities, events, participants, and final scores, the following chapters represent an in-depth treatment of how particular programs in the church used recreation and sports to communicate Mormon morals, attitudes, and expectations. As an instrument of social persuasion—a method of teaching proper behavior—recreation programs instructed adolescents in what it meant to be Mormon. Though many other ^[36] lessons were learned along the way, LDS leaders hoped that morals learned from games, hikes, and social activities would instill the faith of nineteenth-century pioneers into the church’s first urban generation.

To ascertain both the depth and the breadth of Mormon recreation, we will first turn to an examination of the development of a rationalized recreational philosophy within the church. Borrowing from myriad outside sources, church leaders organized a system of thought to guide recreational leaders in devising worthwhile activities. Next follows an examination of the church’s changing articulation of sacred and secular space with the introduction of gymnasiums into LDS meetinghouses. As the demand for recreation increased in the early years of the century, Mormon leaders responded with a massive construction program that eventually incorporated gymnasiums as a major feature of LDS worship space. As part of chapter 2, the Deseret Gymnasium is analyzed as the Mormon “Temple of Health” where young Mormons learned the principles of physical salvation as well as the outlines of proper gender roles within the church. Chapter 3 explains what happened inside the newly constructed LDS gymnasiums and describes the important social role played by athletic programs on the local and general church level. Moreover, the connection between prominent Mormon athletes and the construction of the new interpretation of the Word of Wisdom is analyzed to explain the central role that athletics played in forging a new boundary between church members and the outside world. Moving beyond LDS gymnasiums, the Boy Scouts and girls camps receive treatment in Chapter 4. Hoping to link urban ^[37] adolescents with their pioneer forebears, LDS leaders sponsored programs that temporarily removed young men and women from the city for rest, recuperation, and a recapitulation of the frontier experience of early Mormonism. The final chapter considers LDS recreational programs during the great depression of the 1930s. Forsaking the thematic approach, this chapter offers an example of the church using all of its recreational weapons to fight a particular challenge—economic depression. This chapter provides a fitting conclusion by tying all of the various strands together and showing the instrumental nature of LDS recreation. A short conclusion summarizes the main arguments and sets forth areas of needed research.

Although this analysis of LDS recreation spans from the renunciation of polygamy in 1890 until the eve of the Second World War, the adjective “progressive” applies throughout. Scholars often end the “progressive era” with the century’s first World War; for our purposes, however, the term “progressive” should not be considered merely in chronological terms. Rather, built on “progressive” principles and philosophies, the recreational programs of the LDS church persisted well into the 1930s and beyond. This is not meant to argue for a new periodization of the “progressive” movement. It is meant to contend, nonetheless, that ideas and concepts expounded during the progressive era continued to influence Mormon recreation well beyond the traditional death of progressivism in approximately 1920. As shown by many of the programs of the New Deal, progressive philosophy was not a casualty of World War I, even though the progressive era might have been. ^[38]

An analysis of Mormon efforts to organize recreation in the early twentieth century yields a great deal about Mormon society and American recreation. Although federal persecution may have pushed Mormons into the modern world, most Mormons went willingly. They often looked to outside sources for ideology and direction, and then combined that knowledge with the inspiration they found within their church. By the Second World War, Mormons enjoyed social acceptance among mainstream Americans while maintaining an aura of slight separation from the larger society. No longer viewed as threatening polygamists or crackpot communitarians, Mormons joined the American middle class with its emphasis on private property, accumulation of wealth, and political conservatism. The church’s recreational ideologies and activities help us comprehend the “Americanization” of the Latter-day Saints. As recreation historian Bruce C. Daniels describes, play patterns often reveal details about a social group that otherwise remain hidden. “Everyone plays; the need to do something for relaxation is built into the biology and psychology of human beings. The forms of play, however, are not universal but are a social construction shaped by specific physical circumstances, values, and history,” writes Daniels. Most importantly, he continues, “A culture at play should tell much about itself. Patterns of leisure and recreation are manifestations of a society’s core identity.”⁵¹ Just as Daniels deciphered the core ^[39] elements of early New England religion by studying “Puritans at Play,” this examination of Mormon recreation reveals much about that religious group’s “core identity.”

Moreover, by analyzing a “progressive” recreation program far removed from the typical venues of progressive social histories like Chicago and New York City, we learn that progressive philosophy had an impact well beyond Hull House and the huge metropolises. Progressive ideas are shown to have been plastic enough to shape the programs of a unique religious subgroup in a mid-sized western city. Although they will never be considered alongside Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, LDS leaders like Lyman R. Martineau and Amy Brown Lyman were engaged in the same “progressive” conversation as their more renowned counterparts. By looking at LDS recreation schemes, we learn that Mormon leaders followed the progressive norm by applying the findings of social scientists to re-make their urban world. Mormon leaders hoped that by instructing play leaders and constructing play spaces, young Mormons could find a moral alternative to the typical urban offerings of corruption and wickedness. That such a wide-ranging program of recreational offerings was organized in Salt Lake City by a conservative religious organization reorients our historical fixation away from eastern urban areas. New York, Boston, and Chicago will certainly remain the historical settings of much progressive-era recreation scholarship. In the future, however, historians must widen their lens to include cities of lesser renown that were home to similar recreational reform efforts. ^[40]

Finally, a note on Mormon terminology. The church’s hierarchical organization is capped by the President of the church, a man revered as a modern-day prophet who leads the church through revelation from God. The president with two counselors forms the First Presidency, which, along with the Twelve Apostles, compose the ruling body of the organization. During the early twentieth century, the Apostles were assisted by the First Council of the Seventy, men responsible for missionary work who were often called upon to assist the Apostles in spiritual and administrative matters. A Presiding Bishop, assisted by two counselors, oversaw the church’s temporal affairs. Each of these men was considered a “general authority” in church matters, an ambiguous term that denotes official sanction. The church’s auxiliary organizations (women’s Relief Society, Young Women’s and Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations, Sunday School, and children’s Primary) were each run by a general board overseen by a president (or superintendent) and two counselors.

The church is organized into geographic domains known as stakes (like parishes) and wards (congregations). Several wards (the smallest denominational unit) comprise a stake. Local lay leaders, called and confirmed by general authorities, officiate in presidencies (president and two counselors) on the stake level and bishoprics (bishop and two counselors) in each ward. Local leaders continue to hold outside jobs and work in the church on a volunteer basis. The lay priesthoods typically include worthy male members older than twelve. The lesser or Aaronic priesthood contains three offices (deacon, teacher, priest in ascending order) as does the superior ^[41] Melchizedek priesthood (elder, seventy, high priest). Organizational and spiritual direction is given in general conferences held each April and October. During the progressive era, the auxiliaries for the young men and young women held an annual conference in Salt Lake City each June. ^[42]