Books, Bluster, and Bounty: Local Politics and Carnegie Library Building Grants in the Intermountain West, 1890-1920

5. Carnegie Libraries in Religiously Diverse Utah Communities

112 5 Carnegie Libraries in Religiously Diverse Utah Communities “An enlightened people” Though around the turn of the twentieth century, rural Latterday Saints perceived that their culturally hegemonic way of life was being challenged by a gentile invasion, outsiders had in fact lived in Utah for many years. Among the earliest gentiles to arrive were the military occupation forces of Johnston’s Army, soldiers assigned to surveillance in 1857–58 because the federal government feared Mormon sedition. During the Civil War, a military division under Colonel Patrick Connor camped above Salt Lake City, gaining notoriety for its harassment of residents. Utah’s territorial officials were not Mormon and their relationship with the people whom they were superintending was often contentious. After the Civil War gentiles came to Utah in increasing numbers. Missionaries settled in the territory to attempt to convert Mormons. Miners, freighters, and railroaders emigrated to take advantage of new economic opportunities. Utah’s largest cities—Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Provo—held substantial non-Mormon populations by the turn of the twentieth century; so did some smaller places like Eureka, Price, and Springville. Utah’s non-Mormon minority found itself uneasily integrated into the state’s predominant culture. Gentiles protested discrimination in hiring and blue laws and they complained that Mormon religion was being taught in community schools. They found themselves excluded from the social life of their towns and they protested that their children were shunned by Mormon children. They claimed that community officials were more interested in collecting church tithing and building church structures than Carnegie Libraries in Religiously Diverse Utah Communities 113 initiating civic improvements. They argued that the cooperative stores Brigham Young promoted were designed to discourage gentile entrepreneurship . Mormons, in their turn, accused these outsiders of challenging their freedom of religion, inciting violence, and corrupting their young people.1 Given this history of suspicion and discontent, it is absurd to imagine that identifying Carnegie public libraries with the LDS church would have fostered universal support for grant applications in Utah’s mixed-religion communities. No gentile uneasy about the separation of church and state would ever have pledged tax support to an institution promoted, as Howard Driggs once suggested in a Latter-day Saint periodical, as “a help to . . . the Church.”2 No non-Mormon would have stood by gratefully while a stake president decided which were the “best books” and prohibited literature he considered inappropriate. No non-Mormon would have imagined a Mormon Sunday school committee as the appropriate governing body for a free public library. When citizens of Utah’s religiously diverse communities sought to interest others in Carnegie libraries, they were thus obligated to devise other arguments in favor of the institutions and to constitute their governing boards in different ways. This chapter explores the various shapes Carnegie library applications assumed in several clusters of such Utah communities, arguing that, once again, reading the local mindset was crucial to pitching a library successfully. No matter how religiously and ethnically varied a town’s population was, if library proponents could find a way to symbolically connect their Carnegie library with some common community agreement about “who we are” or “who we want to be” that resonated with a significant proportion of the population, their applications stood a good chance of succeeding. Small Mixed-Religion Towns Local history would have made citizens of one cluster of four small Utah towns especially sensitive to the dangers of sectarian divisiveness. As geographically isolated towns, Springville, Mt. Pleasant, Price, and Eureka City 1 For the history of early Mormon-gentile relations in Utah see Dwyer, The Gentile Comes to Utah and Alexander and Allen, Mormons and Gentiles. 2 This quotation comes from Driggs, “The Utah Library-Gymnasium Movement,” 514. Books, Bluster, and Bounty 114 understood the necessity of community self-reliance, yet obvious fault lines in all four offered the threat of paralyzing civic disagreement and stalemate. Like the communities described in the previous chapter, Springville and Mt. Pleasant had been established as Mormon agricultural settlements and still made their livings primarily from agriculture at the turn of the twentieth century. Their insular culture changed, however, when they were selected as mission sites by protestant denominations engaged in a coordinated effort to proselytize in Mormon Utah.3 Presbyterians established a church and academy in Springville, both of which quickly gained a foothold . Baptist and Episcopal churches joined them. Mt. Pleasant...