Word: mormons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Since Mormon history is a book in itself, Stegner has concentrated mainly on the civilization and the society that was built up on the banks of the Great Salt Lake. Polygamy played an unimportant part, contrary to popular opinion. The great ideal was a brotherhood and a sharing of worldly goods, built into a simple, ascetically Christian, agricultural life. This was the greatest strength of the Mormon colony. This is what attracted people from Europe and even Hawaii to walk in groups of hundreds and thousands across the country, pushing their few worldly possessions ahead of them in wheelbarrows...
Stegner's first non-fiction work, part of the American Folkway series, takes Mormonism from all ican Folkway series, takes Mormonism from all points of view and up to the present day. The scholarship is amazingly thorough and the intimate details such as interviews with now-senile bandits and orators that colored the old West are nothing short of sensational. Wallace Stegner has spent most of his life in Mormon country so he can write their story in their language without any trace of a strained, scholastic note. The story is only vaguely organized; what it loses in form...
...Utah this week political dopesters figured the chains had a better than even chance to win. For one thing the all-powerful Mormon Church has been pleasantly silent during the whole hubbub (perhaps because it controls a wholesale house which sells to chain stores). If the chains win, it will be their biggest victory since California voters tossed out chain-store taxes in 1936, will probably mean an all-out drive against the chain-store tax laws of 19 other States...
...Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) takes itself very seriously as an international organization-though all but 70,000 of its 892,000 members live in the U.S. And to Mormons the utterances of their First Presidency (President Heber Jedediah Grant and his two counselors) are a divinely inspired part of the continuous revelations of God. These two facts last week produced a First Presidency message to the semiannual Mormon conference at Salt Lake City whose impartial stand on the war closely resembled the attitude of the Pope...
Meanwhile the average Mormon, who is fighting as hard for his country as anybody else, might draw what comfort he could from the fact that his church once more (after a ten-year lapse) has a Presiding Patriarch. For this sole Mormon hereditary position the conference last week chose Joseph F. Smith, great-grandson of Founder Joseph Smith's brother Hyrum, who was killed by the same Illinois mob that lynched Joseph in 1844.* The new patriarch is 43, father of five, heads the University of Utah's phonetic department and is one of the best amateur actors...