The first impression I had of the Mormon Church was of what the Mormons called Mutual, which you know about. Every Tuesday night, down in the ward amusement hall, youth activities go on, classes of one kind or another, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all those other organizations that Mormons are very good at. I fell into that with great eagerness. . . . I’ve forgotten what ward, but . . . I liked it. That gave me a kind of hole to crawl in, and I liked it very much.
—Wallace Stegner1
The end of the great depression did not mean the end of LDS recreational programs. Throughout the war years and continuing to the end of the twentieth century, Mormon recreational programs taught young church members what it meant to be “Mormon.” Wholesome entertainments and rigorous athletic events socialized generations of Mormons long after the progressive era faded into the distant past. Although the programs continued, the emphasis on nurturing wholesome forms of recreation diminished in importance. Church leaders warned against particularly illicit activities—like pornography and gambling—but the coherent approach that applied early in the twentieth century had all but disappeared. Leaders at the close of the century returned to the ad hoc method that had characterized Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The progressive era witnessed the apex of LDS-sponsored recreation. As the religious organization expanded throughout the world, church officials focused less on [320] the games that integrated Mormons into the American mainstream and more on maintaining cohesion within a growing, worldwide church.
The new circumstances of global growth forced church leaders to amend the recreation programs. Beginning in September 1971, the popular all-church athletic tournaments and music and dance festivals were replaced with regional tournaments and festivals staged in local areas. No explanation was given for the change in athletic programs; however, the Ensign magazine reported that dance and music festivals were modified “to permit increased participation at the local level.”2 Recreational activities are carried out on a similar local basis in the church today.
Though globalization concerns within the church played some part in the decline of church-sponsored recreation, the social concerns that had given rise to the recreation program—namely, the unacceptable activities in American cities—had also largely fallen by the wayside after the 1940s. As Mormons joined other Americans by moving into suburban settings where middle-class values reigned supreme, the city’s siren songs sounded less ominous. In the 1940s, the population of Salt Lake County outside of the city boundaries grew from 62,000 to 92,000. The next decade saw the population of the county (exclusive of the city) double to 194,000. More importantly, as one demographic study of the suburban migration shows, it was “largely parents with [321] young children who [were] leaving the city.”3 Although Boy Scout programs and annual girls’ camps continued to keep youngsters busy, they were couched in terms less antagonistic to urban life. Rather, the lure of outdoor activities became the adventure that could be added to a lackluster suburban adolescence. Urban problems were far from solved but the Mormon migration to suburbia made the inner cities seems less a serious threat to the rising generation than it had been in the early part of the century.
Like the Boy Scouts and girls’ camps, many of the programs begun in the progressive era linger in the church as the twentieth century wanes. Athletic programs (primarily basketball) continue to interest church members worldwide and obedience to the Word of Wisdom remains linked with athletic excellence. Although not generally in well-organized programs, American missionaries persist in spreading the Gospel by participating in sports with potential contacts. The Boy Scout program of the LDS church provides the foundation for the Scout movement worldwide and continues to offer adolescent Mormon males an opportunity to learn the skills of outdoor survival and personal leadership.
Not all programs enacted in the progressive era have endured, however. The Deseret Gymnasium—long an athletic pillar in central Salt Lake City—was torn down in 1997 to make way for a new tabernacle that will host semi-annual conferences and [322] other church events. No plans have been made for the construction of another church-sponsored gymnasium. Perhaps the most important departure from the foundation of progressive-era recreation has been a steady movement away from the overarching recreation ideology of the progressive era. Though based on the “scientific” principles of the seven urges of humankind, the comprehensive approach to religious recreation failed to persist much beyond the depression. Whether due to a decreasing faith in the social sciences or an orthodox theological turn in the 1930s, the ideological backbone of the recreation programs disintegrated imperceptibly over the years and was never replaced. Rather, following a pattern familiar to early church members, LDS officials considered recreational issues on a case-by-case basis, issuing ad hoc pronouncements as circumstances warranted.
Additionally, the church recreation program was caught up in the massive commercialization and privatization of recreation, sports, and leisure in the decades after World War II. As professional sports franchises came to dominate popular spectator sports and television became ubiquitous, interest in church-sponsored recreational activities waned. Although church sports continue, they no longer have the power to define the community. In Salt Lake City, church league champions can hardly compete with the popularity of the NBA’s Utah Jazz.
Despite the eventual diminution of the church program, it is apparent that leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints turned with an unmatched intensity to recreation programs in the early years of the twentieth century. By [323] developing a comprehensive ideology and creating space and programs for adolescents, Mormon leaders hoped to combat the deleterious effects of urban life and inculcate values and morals into the rising generation. Surely that was their aim, but how successful were they? Did athletics and social activities reach their target audiences and teach adolescents how to “be Mormon?” Answers to such questions remain elusive.
If you listen to quiet conversations in the corners of LDS meetinghouses, older members of the church remember the important role that Mormon recreation activities played in the church communities of their youth. Tales of Gold and Green Balls, music competitions, and basketball often bring a fond smile to their creased faces. Like stories of lost love, these senior citizens recall the past and the world they once inhabited. Such anecdotal evidence of the impact of LDS-sponsored recreation abounds within the church today. Other, more traditional evidence regarding the success of Mormon recreation programs is difficult to locate. No contemporary sociological studies charted the reasons for church attendance among the young nor did any intensive studies reported the relative importance of recreation as compared to theology, family influence, or spiritual persuasion. If such studies exist, they remain locked tightly away in the LDS archives—hidden from the prying eyes of historians.
However, one short evaluation of the YMMIA’s recreation program appeared in sociologist Arthur L. Beeley’s Boys and Girls in Salt Lake City, a survey of the recreational and leisure-time pursuits of boys and girls in the Mormon capital. After reviewing the efforts of YMMIAs throughout the Salt Lake valley, Beeley and his staff concluded that [324] the program’s success was ambiguous. They wrote, “In spite of the remarkable work done by this organization, there are several things which stand in the way of its even greater usefulness.” Regarding particular goals, Beeley’s group did not evaluate Mormon recreation on its own terms, but seemed to compare it to the sociological ideal of a program that would meet the most needs of the most members. Nevertheless, the study’s conclusions offer meaningful insight into the shortcomings of the program. First, the group located several problems in the area of leisure-time leadership including a “need for more, well-trained recreation workers on part and full-time bases to augment the non-paid services of the present, exclusively volunteer personnel.” Further, the sociological team called for an end to the “socially obsolete ward and stake boundaries which still obtain, and to organize the work and supervise it on a city-wide basis.” Finally, another “handicap” of the YMMIA program lay in the fact that each ward and stake furnished their own leaders. The report concluded that “since some wards have an abundance and others a paucity of leaders, there should be free importation and exportation of leadership potential.”4 Though Mormon leaders had labored to create a recreation ideology and to transmit it to local leaders through recreation institutes, they often fell short of the mark, at least to this group of contemporary sociologists. [325]
The group’s most meaningful critique of YMMIA recreation stressed the “need to extend the self-governing opportunities in all departments of the work.” It appears that church officers often took a heavy-handed approach and did not countenance local translation of recreation programs. As the survey concluded, “The program of activities while rich in quality is nevertheless too rigid to be easily adapted to special circumstances. There is an unnecessary uniformity in such matters as (a) the order of the program, (b) the time of closing, (c) the subjects to be taken up.”5 Though uniformity and regularity were two of the values at the heart of the recreation program, perhaps church administrators had learned the lessons too well. If local needs had been given wider berth, perhaps a more responsive recreation program would have emerged.
Even Beeley’s contemporaneous study, however, yields little useful analysis. Because Boys and Girls in Salt Lake City was concerned primarily with the social impact of Mormon recreation, it came to no conclusion about the religious and social impact that recreation made within the church. For the most part, the leisure-time programs were designed to influence Mormons within the fold while accruing the secondary benefit of propelling Mormons toward the cultural mainstream of Protestant America. In the end, the impact of the programs remains nestled in the lives of individuals who learned the rules of various games in addition to learning morals, values, and proper social roles. [326] The purpose of LDS play was to make Mormons—a process which takes place in internal realms where measurements are meaningless.
By studying Mormons at play, however, we learn more than just how “Mormons” were “made.” Though the LDS community might not represent Americans in every particular, their experience is instructive regarding the moral vision of progressive recreation reformers. The era’s play “experts” had largely come out of the Protestant social gospel tradition and continued to be influenced by Christian morals. Despite the fact that some historians of the progressive period—most notably, Roy Lubove and Robert H. Wiebe—have argued that reformers abandoned their moral visions when they dove headlong into bureaucratic methods, the Mormon experience discounts this notion severely. Though smitten with sociological expertise and “scientific” play philosophies, Mormon recreation leaders maintained their moral foundation. The reform represented just one means to accomplish a more morally upright society. In the details, perhaps bureaucracy prevailed. But when the big picture comes into view, the purpose behind Mormon play was not professionalization or bureaucratization, but moral regeneration.6
The field of Mormon recreation—and religious recreation in general—remains largely untapped. Many meaningful components of LDS recreation deserve further [327] exploration. To test Beeley’s conclusions, it would be useful to examine how local leaders tailored the churchwide programs to fit local conditions. Furthermore, little has been done to analyze recreation in nineteenth-century Mormon communities. How did Mormons play in Orderville or Fillmore? From an international perspective, how did LDS members outside of the United States accept games that missionaries imported from America? Did the stories linking abstinence and athletic excellence possess meaning to converts from the Pacific rim or in Eastern Europe? Additionally, much biographical work could be done to ascertain the contributions of little known recreation leaders like Charlotte Stewart, Claude Cornwall, and Eugene L. Roberts. As Mormon studies branches out to include social and cultural history, future inquiries might analyze how recreation programs acted as “sites” of negotiation between general leaders and local leaders and between local leaders and church and community members. [328]
1. Wallace Stegner and Richard W. Etulain, Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature, rev. ed. (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1996), 101.
2. “Programs and Policies Newsletter,” Ensign 1 (Sept. 1971): 76.
3. Paul A. Wright, “The Growth and Distribution of the Mormon and non-Mormon Populations in Salt Lake City” (Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1970), 96.
4. Arthur L. Beeley, Boys and Girls in Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Publications in the Department of Sociology and Social Technology, University of Utah, 1929), 90.
5. Ibid.
6. See Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Robert Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). For a further treatment of the “morality” of progressive play reform, see Don S. Kirschner, “The Perils of Pleasure: Commercial Recreation, Social Disorder and Moral Reform in the Progressive Era,” American Studies 22 (fall 1980): 27–42.
