Item Detail
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11912
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3
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0
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English
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Social Stratification and the Dissolution of the City of Zion in Salt Lake City, 1847-1880
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University of Utah
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Ph.D. diss.
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"This study analyzes the conditions and processes involved in the evolution of Salt Lake City from a small utopian community into a diversified commercial service and religious center characterized by inequality and modern social stratification. In spite of the usual encampments of sojourners, the city was, in 1850, a homogeneous community dedicated to commonly held values and the pursuit of economic equality. By 1880 this community was gone, transformed by the powerful economic and political forces of American nationalism then unifying the west. The incursion of market capitalism and centralized government precipitated confrontation between later arriving non-Mormon government officials and free-market businessmen and the more numerous homogeneous, economically egalitarian Mormons. This study emphasizes important elements of that conflict by focusing on the decline and subsequent end of economic equality or classlessness, the central principal of Mormon communitarianism. The framework is, therefore, comparative statistically analyzing the measurable differences between the city's social groups using such criteria as wealth, demographics, social status, economic opportunity, and geographic mobility. With the analytical framework so designed, the following questions concerning the failure of the City of Zion are easily answered. What went wrong? Could the city have been saved? Who were the major recipients of the new and higher class positions? Who succeeded and who did not in the new economic structure? To what degree and why? The evidence clearly shows that Salt Lake City was a relatively closed economic and social system in 1850, providing opportunity for establishment of citywide equality in economic affairs. Outside influences that gained more control over political and economic developments weakened equality and the Mormon theocracy during the next twenty years. During the 1870s because of the arrival of the transcontinental railroad, the city was grafted into the national urban hierarchy that unleashed forces strong enough to dismantle the Mormon communitarian system, remove the church's power elite from control over city processes, and interrupt the preoccupation with the building of the City of Zion. The result was rapid population and economic growth accompanied by high levels of inequality and stratification." [Author's abstract]