Growing up in the years after Watergate, I became a true believer in the power of the press to make society better by reporting on government’s corruption, lies, ineptitudes, and inefficiencies—as well as genuine public service, improvements, and accomplishments. In … Continued
Despite the gradual erosion of the Bible’s significance in American consciousness after the Civil War, the Bible remained “the most imported, most printed, most distributed, and most read written text in North America up through the nineteenth century.”1 The Bible’s … Continued
Emmeline B. Wells was one of the best-known and most influential women members of the Church in her time. She worked tirelessly within the Relief Society, various suffrage organizations, and her community, and she left a voluminous record of the events surrounding her many achievements. Silver and Bench provide a collection of excerpts from Emmeline’s diaries and editorial descriptions of suffrage events that she wrote for the Woman’s Exponent. Alongside Emmeline’s personal life, described are the 1879 meeting in Washington, D.C., when National Woman Suffrage Association petitioned U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes for woman suffrage, and the 1895 drafting of the Utah state constitution, when women under Emmeline’s direction successfully petitioned to include universal suffrage in the new state’s legal framework.
Throughout the 1800s, the territory of Utah was at odds—ideologically and at times legally—with the rest of the expanding United States. Carol Madsen illustrates the importance of the Woman’s Exponent to the women of Utah in the end of the century, the publication allowing them a voice to defend polygamy and promote woman suffrage. The Woman’s Exponent, under editors Louisa Green and Emmeline Wells, also documented and perpetuated emerging ideas of the “New Woman.” The pioneering traditions of the women in the Church conflicted with traditional nineteenth-century concepts of a “woman on a pedestal” kept away from the spheres of politics and public life; and the ideals of the New Woman, including independence, found a strong advocate in the publication’s pages. In addition to these social and political campaigns, the Woman’s Exponent has preserved much of the history of Utah during this period in biographies, obituaries, poetry, commentary on and minutes of Church and local conferences, letters, and more.
Utah pioneers have not been known for their humor, but Keep-A-Pitchinin, one of the West’s first illustrated journals and humor periodicals, testified to a warmer, more human side than had been seen of the Mormons in Utah. Led by publisher and editor George J. Taylor, eldest son of John Taylor, Keep-A-Pitchinin, was written by distinguished men of talent, usually under pseudonyms. The journal’s consistent victim was the Godbeite “New Movement” that had begun to divide members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah. In addition to working against the Godbeite movement, it also served as a humorous relief when emotions ran high about immediate and local concerns, such as polygamy, the U.S. Census, the Danites, and even a Relief Society work project. The Keep-A-Pitchinin was characterized by satire, sarcasm, puns, and “spelling and grammatical gaucherie,” as were popular in nineteenth-century humor. The periodical gleefully satirized the ultimate downfall of the Godbeites, but declined after the demise of the “New Movement” because the journal no longer had a sustaining purpose.
The story of the Salt Lake Tribune is a paradoxical one. The author expressed this idea when he wrote: “That their newspaper survived in the face of obstacles confronting it was a kind of miracle. Even now it is difficult to sort … Continued
Although opponents in the antipolygamy controversy, Mormon and non-Mormon female journalists nevertheless shared basic beliefs about a woman’s role in family and society.
A window through which one can gain a fascinating glimpse of the LDS church in the South in the late nineteenth century is Southern Star, the weekly tabloid published at the headquarters of the Southern States Mission in Chattanooga, Tennessee, from 8 December 1898 until 1 December 1900. An examination of its contents provides significant insight into the status of the Church in the southern states near the turn of the century. This glimpse reveals that as the nineteenth century drew to a close Mormonism in the southern part of the United States was a faith still struggling to define, defend, and sustain itself in a largely hostile environment.
The Exponent published for forty-two years, from 1872 until 1914 when it was replaced by the Relief Society Magazine, official publication of the women’s organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Amidst a variety of feature and news articles—some local, some lifted, some polemic, and many feminist—there was from the outset poetry. In the tradition of the newspaper in the eastern United States—from which area most of the leading lights among Mormon women came—it contained always a poetry corner, not labeled such, but invariably positioned in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. Why was there always such a prominent place for verse?
In speaking poetically of the ideal, the higher good, the heavenly vision, the women were reminding themselves of the better life they were promised as children of the covenant. Let prose speak the sordid truths; poetry would sing, albeit by the waters of Babylon, the songs of Zion.
The Wasp, an early Mormon periodical, was one of many small newspapers striving to make a place and a name in an era called by many the “golden age” of American journalism. Newspapers were the popular of American reading materials in the 1840s; almost all growing frontier communities sought to establish a small press, and more populous areas often had a dozen or more. The boom of newspaper publishing throughout the country caused a jump from 800 such papers in 1830 to 1,400 in 1840.
The motives behind the eager interest shown by the common man for newspapers in the 1840s were social, political, religious, and literary. One author has suggested that 89 percent of the white population of the country was literate in 1840. While this estimate seems high, it does indicate that a large percentage of U. S. citizens created a market for cheap newspapers.
The average newspaper in the less populous regions was not only edited but written almost entirely by the editor, who was often poorly educated. This was an era of democratic agitation in which the primacy of the newspaper was virtually unchallenged. Frequently the editor or his financial backer established a newspaper with the specific purpose of expressing or suppressing a definite political, religious, or social view. Vicious libel was common.
Financial problems also occurred frequently, and many of the small town newspapers went under in their enthusiasm to corner unique events and extend their circulation.
