Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918 (review)

Nichols has written a fascinating, well-researched case study of cultural conflict as seen through opposing definitions of marriage and prostitution, centering on Mormonism. When the Latter-day Saints arrived in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1847, they regarded sexual purity as one of the cornerstones of their kingdom of God and promoted proper conduct through moral legislation that blurred the distinction between sin and crime. If prostitution was practiced at all, it was practiced in secret. Mormons chose to believe that the "oldest profession" was an import by outsiders—fortyniners on their way to the California gold fields, the camp followers of an invading Federal army in 1857/58, and travelers appearing in growing numbers after completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. By the early 1870s, Mormons complained of a flourishing sex trade in Salt Lake City and resorted to vigorous measures to stamp it out.

The "Gentiles," however, regarded the Mormon attitude as hypocritical, charging that Utah (which had become a territory under the Compromise of 1850) was nothing less than a gigantic brothel—pointing the finger at the Mormon principle and practice of plural marriage or polygamy, as it was commonly called. Claiming biblical precedent and revelation as authority, Mormon founder Joseph Smith had secretly inaugurated the unorthodox marriage practice shortly before his murder in Nauvoo, Illinois. In Utah, Brigham Young, Smith's successor, publicly announced plural marriage as a divine principle, and it was not long before outraged Gentiles launched a crusade for its abolition (analogous to slavery), that gained momentum after the Civil War. Anti-polygamy crusaders regarded plural marriage as a particularly heinous form of prostitution because it was thought to strike at the very heart of the monogamous American family. Some called it the "Islam of America" and un-American. Sensationalism to the contrary, however, Mormons strongly discouraged licentiousness, regarding procreation as the primary purpose for sexual relations. Some commentators have called it "Puritan Polygamy."

Nichols has done an impressive amount of research in uncovering the political social, economic, psychological, and criminological dimensions of a trade, a business, and a culture flourishing in the shadow of respectable society. However, more interesting and more important is his fascinating discussion of how the warring parties used polygamy and prostitution in a crusade against each other that was both substantive and symbolic. Because Mormons were forced to abolish polygamy between 1890 and 1910, partly as a result of the crusade, a logical conclusion might be that the forces seen as willing to accommodate prostitution had triumphed. However, this was not the case. After their victory against polygamy, purity crusaders dropped the rhetorical link between Mormonism and prostitution, and trained their sights instead on those who favored regulation. In a process of accommodation, both Mormon and Gentile reformers came to agree on a single standard of morality and began to push for abolition of prostitution, part of a process of Americanization that began to bond Mormons to the larger culture.

Although Nichols might have made better use of B. Carmon Hardy, "Blessings of the Abrahamic Household," in Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Chicago, 1992), 84-126, on the whole he tells this story deftly and with methodological sophistication.