I. Introduction: One “Problem” People Meets Another

In late March 1913, Booker T. Washington made his long-awaited visit to Salt Lake City, Utah. Before five separate audiences—comprised of high school and university students and educators, officials from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and white and black Protestant congregations—Washington spoke about the progress that African Americans had achieved in the fifty years since emancipation. Washington declared that in 1863:

The Salt Lake City audiences credited Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, which he co-founded in 1881, for much of this progress.Footnote ² For years, leading Mormons joined white Protestant elites in praise of Washington, in whom white America vested their hopes of solving the post-emancipation “Negro Problem.” Andrew Carnegie championed Washington as the “modern Moses” who would deliver African Americans out of the wilderness of post-slavery ignorance and immorality and to the promised land of black respectability.Footnote ³ Likewise, Mormon newspapers printed glowing reports from Tuskegee and penned editorials celebrating Washington's leadership. Following Washington's visit to Utah, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican described how Washington, who was born into slavery, had earned a place of “public respect and esteem held by no other African since Ham walked the earth.” “The president of Tuskegee institute owes his success to the discriminating methods he employs,” explained the Herald-Republican, then jointly owned by the LDS Church and U.S. Senator and church apostle Reed Smoot. “[Washington] owns no burning desire to make his race prominent or powerful; his wish is that its members shall be useful and self-supporting.”Footnote ⁴

Since at least 1903, Mormon educational, ecclesiastical, political, and media leaders like Smoot had hoped Washington would visit Utah in person.Footnote ⁵ After all, in many ways Washington's efforts to solve the “Negro problem” paralleled the Mormons’ own efforts to solve the “Mormon problem.”Footnote ⁶ Washington's “up from slavery” story—guided by an embrace of industrial education, personal discipline, and the pursuit of middle class propriety—matched the trek that the Mormons had made from their status as a despised, pariah people into the economic and political folds of the American republic. The major event in this process was the LDS Church's official abandonment of polygamy in 1890, which led to statehood for Utah in 1896. These similarities meant that Washington visited Salt Lake City not only to be toasted for his own personal achievements. In his first dispatch from Utah, published in the prominent African American newspaper the New York Age, Washington explained that for a long time he had wanted to study the Mormons “to see what kind of people they are . . . and in what respect they are succeeding.” He did so in order to take lessons home to Tuskegee as well as to share his findings about the Mormons with the rest of the nation. During his 1913 visit, Washington examined the Mormons’ educational and industrial endeavors. He inspected the minds and bodies of Mormon children, including those born and raised in polygamous families. Based on this evidence, Washington rendered this verdict: “I have never been among a more intelligent, healthy, clean, progressive, moral set of people,” he wrote in the New York Age. “Wherever one finds a Mormon colony there he finds evidence of hard work and wealth.”Footnote ⁷

That the Mormons (whose church long promoted anti-black theologies and policies of race-based exclusion) and Washington (the most famous black man of the early twentieth century) had a relationship at all may be a surprise.Footnote ⁸ Only in 1978 did the LDS Church lift its priesthood and temple restrictions against people of African descent which had been in place since at least the early 1850s. However, the Mormons and African Americans did share a history of violent persecution at the hands of the American people and the American government—though, to be sure, the religious persecution that the Mormons experienced was not the same as the slavery, segregation, and race-based terrorism that people of African descent have endured for centuries in America.Footnote ⁹

What is more, as I argue in this article, Washington and the Mormons shared a belief that the most efficacious way to gain membership in America's political and economic cultures was to demonstrate their “usefulness”—a category of “respectability politics” that I introduce here—manifested in the cultivation of their communities’ educational institutions, industrial resources, and middle-class (and monogamous) domesticity.Footnote ¹⁰ As a former slave and as former religious exiles respectively, neither Booker T. Washington nor the Mormons were native-born citizens to the “white American republic.” This was figuratively true; neither Washington nor the Mormons fit turn-of-the-century conceptions of white Americanness.Footnote ¹¹ It was also literally true: Washington was born into slavery in 1856, and the Mormon elites with whom he engaged were reared in pre-statehood Utah whose residents were seen as either wards of the state or enemies of the federal government. In other words, before these two “problem” peoples could become naturalized citizens in the white American republic, the Mormons and the Washington-led African Americans understood that they had to demonstrate their “usefulness” to the American republic's white Protestant elites.

This examination of Booker T. Washington and the Mormons differs from other recent studies of the so-called “Mormon” and “Negro” problems which have largely focused on why and how white Protestant elites continued to marginalize Latter-day Saints and African Americans in American political and cultural life. For example, scholars of Mormonism have tracked the evolution of the Mormons from a despised religious people in the nineteenth century to exemplary (white, conservative) Americans by the mid-twentieth century. But, as J. B. Haws and others have noted, white Protestants in particular still view the LDS Church as a suspect religion and place distinct limits on Mormons’ full acceptance in the American body politic. In a similar vein, scholars of twentieth-century black religion have disrupted the often-celebratory understanding of the southern “black church” as the headquarters of black political advancement, while also disrupting the image of white liberal Protestants as the black church's ally in the fight for civil rights. Instead, as Curtis J. Evans and Barbara Savage have demonstrated, much of the white American Protestant mainstream, as well as leading secular blacks (including Washington), viewed southern “black religion” as an impediment to black political integration and racial uplift.Footnote ¹²

Unlike these studies, by exploring the relationship between Booker T. Washington and the leading Mormons who publicly championed him, this article moves between two points (one black, the other Mormon) on the American margin, while always triangulating with the (white Protestant) center.Footnote ¹³ Doing so allows us to ask a more complex set of questions: In the early twentieth century, when “white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon” still served as the synecdoche for “American,” how did one “problem” people encounter another “problem” people? And in doing so, how did these marginalized Americans frame these encounters of one another to challenge their own marginalization?

Here, I argue that, to shed their “problem” people status, certain Mormons and African American elites attempted to demonstrate that they could be “useful” to themselves and to the “white American republic” writ large.Footnote ¹⁴ Unlike other forms of respectability politics, proof of usefulness not only required that the Mormons and Washington demonstrate their successful cultivation of (religious and educational) institutions that reaffirmed the supremacy of white middle-class Protestant mores.Footnote ¹⁵ Proof of usefulness also required that they demonstrate their successful cultivation of economic productivity which made their own communities self-sufficient and provided surpluses of labor and of agricultural and industrial products from which white Protestant Americans could benefit.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, proof of usefulness required—or at least was enhanced by—the ability to recognize usefulness in one another publicly so that the white Protestant gatekeepers to American respectability would notice.

The fact that a key component of this politics of respectability was for the Mormons and Washington to publicly recognize one another's usefulness opens up new research avenues for scholars who study marginalized Americans’ pursuit of acceptance in the turn-of-the-century United States. Respectability-seeking communities did not always assert their own “Americanness” by setting it against a racial or religious “other.” To put it differently, the Mormons’ and Washington's public displays of admiration suggest marginalized Americans did not always view the achievement of respectability as a zero-sum game.Footnote ¹⁷ To be sure, like other not-quite-white Americans, including the Irish, Jews, and Italians, the Mormons demonstrated their relative whiteness by asserting that they were not black; they denigrated African Americans as unfit to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship and unfit to enjoy the full blessings of the Mormon Gospel. Yet Mormon political, media, and ecclesiastical leaders also asserted their own whiteness by joining their onetime Protestant foes in support of Washington, the “colored brother,” as they called him, whom the Mormons believed was best positioned to solve the republic's most intractable problem, the “Negro Problem.”Footnote ¹⁸

In turn, Washington leveraged his popularity among leading white Protestants to challenge the common perception of the Mormons as a “problem” people. Instead, Washington portrayed the Mormons as a “progressive people,” exemplary members of the white American republic. Washington even suggested that “progressive” Mormonism might provide a better religious model to reform the post-slavery “Negro” character than the “Negro Church,” which he described as “too emotional” and too “apocalyptic” to support black uplift.Footnote ¹⁹ In his critique of the “black church,” Washington joined many of his white backers in undermining the only truly independent black institution in American history, which was thus also the black institution that white America most poorly understood and most feared.Footnote ²⁰ While Mormons argued that their (post-polygamous) faith produced “useful” (and “white”) American citizens—sentiments that Washington also echoed—Washington and many of his allies, including the Mormons, championed educational institutions like Tuskegee because the “usefulness” they instilled in their pupils reinforced the structures of white supremacy. And unlike the black church, white America could control Tuskegee and its pupils by giving or taking away their status as “respectable” Negros, as well as by loosening and tightening purse strings.

Yet, as I also argue here, there were distinct limitations to how much Washington and his Mormon backers saw themselves in the mirror that their encounter provided. And these limitations came into starkest relief, fittingly enough, during Washington's 1913 visit to Utah. As (aspiring) members of the white American republic, through their support of Washington, the Mormons participated in the national project of carving out a space for black Americans in which they could be “useful and self-supporting” while shunning even the appearance of challenging the economic and political structures of the post-Reconstruction white American republic.Footnote ²¹ Washington agreed with the Mormons that the Negro problem could be best solved by teaching blacks to be “useful” citizens. But Washington refused to limit his understanding of usefulness to economic productivity. Instead, Washington promoted what he called the “the fullest growth of the Negro,” which included (eventual) rights of full political citizenship.Footnote ²²

II. Booker T. Washington on “The Negro Problem”

Before detailing the relationship between Booker T. Washington and the Mormons, a bit of stage setting is needed to understand Washington's and the Mormons’ efforts to confront the “Negro” and “Mormon” problems. In short, in response to white Protestant American perceptions that they practiced the wrong kind of religion (and the wrong kind of sex) and occupied the wrong kind of non-white bodies, both Washington and the Mormons worked to resolve their respective “problem” statuses by pursuing a politics of usefulness.

Following his visit to Salt Lake City in 1913, Washington described the Mormons as model Americans—with homes full of healthy children, with fields and factories generating diverse and robust agriculture and products, and with picturesque and crime-free communities. According to Washington, Mormon productivity and respectability resulted from a religious culture in which a modern (and moral) capitalistic work ethic thrived. Among his own people, Washington found the opposite was true. Washington articulated a view long held by Southern segregationists, and increasingly Washington's own white and black Protestant backers in the North, that the root cause of the Negro problem was found in the “Negro Church.”

Two interrelated changes—one within white Protestant churches and their seminaries, the other in the (secularizing) universities—affected how American culture viewed religion in general and black religion in particular. First, white Protestant institutions increasingly adopted the fruits of higher criticism, which de-emphasized God's radical transcendence and instead emphasized Jesus's radical immanence in human experience. For many social-gospel-oriented Protestants, as well as for many evangelicals like Dwight Moody, Jesus became a figure to whom middle-class white Protestants turned to inspire economic productivity, thrift, and paternalistic care for the poor, especially city-dwelling immigrants and African Americans.Footnote ²³ Second, as Curtis J. Evans has argued, in American universities, the development of “the social sciences, and the psychology of religion . . . were the key cultural authorities in pathologizing the religious experiences of blacks in the South.” What during slavery was considered “the Negro's genius for religion”—Uncle Tom-like piety that had proven useful in the face of the Job-like suffering of the slave—signified the innate irrationality of the “African” mind by end of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁴

To be sure, in the eyes of white and black Progressive Era America, not all black religion was bad. One of Washington's greatest backers, Andrew Carnegie explained to the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh in 1907 that the positive and “commanding influence” the black Baptists and Methodists exerted over the black American population in the American South was expanding rapidly. “Let all doubters of the future of the negro race remember,” Carnegie exclaimed, that after emancipation, self-funded and self-governing black religious organizations had built tens of thousands of churches to house “communicants” numbering in the millions. Perhaps most importantly, the monies raised in these houses of worship also “supplemented deficiencies of the State systems” which regularly underfunded “negro education.” According to Carnegie, when paired with education, the black church became an engine for black progress and an exercise in black democracy: “Many of the foremost leaders of the negro people are to be found among their church men. They have been especially fortunate in their Bishops who are elected, not appointed, and are active, progressive men.”Footnote ²⁵

Yet few Progressive Era leaders were as optimistic as Carnegie that the black church would play a useful role in solving the “Negro Problem” in the South. To the contrary, as Barbara Savage has noted, more than optimism, “public discussions about black religion were marked by a profound unease” that the spiritual practices of formerly enslaved people failed to prepare them to properly exercise the rights and responsibilities of full American citizenship.Footnote ²⁶ Booker T. Washington joined a chorus of white and black Protestant leaders and activists, including the Social Gospeler Washington Gladden, the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Daniel Payne, and the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, in viewing Southern black religious culture as impeding black uplift.Footnote ²⁷ Washington and his eventual challenger to the mantle of leader of black America, W. E. B. Du Bois, criticized the overly emotive worship style of what Du Bois famously called “the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.” The rivals agreed that the “religion of the slave” had not sufficiently evolved post-emancipation.Footnote ²⁸ In his 1890 article “The Colored Ministry: Its Defects and Needs,” published in Congregational minister Lyman Abbott's magazine the Christian Union—the flagship publication of Progressive Era white Protestants—Washington wrote that most black Baptist and Methodist Southern clergy were “unfit, either mentally or morally, or both, to preach the Gospel to any one.” He argued that “the minister considers himself successful in proportion as he is able to set the people in all parts of the congregation to groaning, uttering wild screams, and jumping, finally going into a trance.” According to Washington, in such a state, the preacher finds his congregation more enthusiastic to fill Sunday's collection plate, with which he lines his own pockets instead of working the rest of the week to fill theirs.Footnote ²⁹

In contrast to the growing body of social science research on black spiritual life, which concluded that the “African race” was too innately “emotional” to ever become useful participants in a capitalistic American economy and a representative democracy, Washington understood the Negro church's problem as one of nurture rather than nature.Footnote ³⁰ As Washington explained in a 1905 article in the North American Review, during slavery, by accepting Christianity, “the Negro” proved himself capable of progressing beyond the “fetishism” of his African ancestors. Christianity allowed him “to lift his face from earth to heaven, and that made his burden lighter.” However, now that “the Negro” was free, his “Church must be recalled from its apocalyptic vision” so that it can support black economic and moral progress in this lifetime. Such a change in orientation started with creating biblically literate blacks. At Tuskegee, Washington instituted Bible training courses that placed emphasis on Jesus as a moral leader and industrious worker. According to Washington, biblical training and industrial education's usefulness were mutually reinforcing. At Tuskegee, future preachers developed an understanding of “the importance of learning a trade, [and] something of agriculture so that they can give the members of their congregations an example of industrial thrift.”Footnote ³¹ Likewise, for future captains of industry and agriculture, the school taught “that the way to have the most of Jesus . . . is to mix in some land, cotton, and corn and a good bank account.”Footnote ³²

Unlike the moral and hard-working men and women of Tuskegee, in an 1890 speech at the Women's New England Club, Washington suggested that most black “professors of religion” went into the ministry to avoid hard work: “The character of many of them is represented by one of whom it is said that while he was at work in the Cotton field in the middle of July, he suddenly stopped, looked up to Heaven and said, ‘Lord, de work is so hard, de cotton is so grassy, and de Sun am so hot, dat I believe dis darky am called to preach.’”Footnote ³³ Such minstrel-like rhetorical performances, juxtaposed with his own unaffected speech, highlighted Washington's belief that the path toward racial uplift ran through secular institutions like Tuskegee and not through the Negro church. However, for upwardly mobile black Americans, Washington sought to sacralize, not secularize, black life between Sundays. He wanted to instill in his charges a Weberian Protestant worth ethic and a social-gospel spirit of service to others. As Washington explained to the Alabama State Teachers’ Association in 1892, at Tuskegee the goal was “the formation of a Christ-like character” in which seeking “to give practical knowledge of agriculture, to give a technical and scientific knowledge,” as well as to give knowledge of the Bible, were means toward the end of teaching black students how to be useful: “To lose themselves in service for others and [so] it can be said of them as of the great Teacher [Christ]: ‘They went about doing good.’”Footnote ³⁴

Washington's public calls to reform Southern black religion were themselves performances. From the white Protestant readership of the Christian Union and the North American Review to speaking engagements before white Alabama teachers, the audiences of such performances were not “black people themselves,” as David Sehat has written. Instead, they were “the wealthy white benefactors before whom he spent so much time asking for money.”Footnote ³⁵ As such, perhaps it is fair to describe Washington's critique of the Southern black ministerial class as both strategic and sincere. It was strategic in that Washington hoped to curry favor with leading white Protestants who had long been wary of an unreformed “slave religion” which they believed stifled the development of middle-class mores that served as a bulwark against black criminality and racial antagonism. To his white audiences, Washington presented his Tuskegee Institute as an alternative to the “black church”—the institution white America most feared because it existed largely independent of white control and patronage. Washington explained to his white Protestant benefactors that at Tuskegee their money went to teaching freed slaves and their offspring not only to participate in the free labor system but to practice a useful religion that, as Curtis J. Evans has written, promoted “moral fitness and bourgeois behavior.”Footnote ³⁶ Washington's critique of black preachers was also sincere in that Washington believed that the unreformed black church promoted a misuse of the most useful capital to which black Southerners had access: their own labor. As such, Washington sought to redefine black Southern Protestant piety, the outward expression of which would no longer be useless emotional and escapist worship. Instead, blacks’ hard work would be the test of moral and spiritual fitness. And to both white and black audiences alike, Washington presented the fruits of his pupils’ labor for examination of such fitness tests.

III. The Mormons on the “Mormon Problem”

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Washington billed Tuskegee as an alternative to the “Negro church.” In this, Washington followed the era's middle-class, Social Gospel, and gospels of wealth models of white Protestantism. Washington sought to change the image and the substance of black religion, its forms of worship, and the fruits that the worship produced so that a reformed black church could prepare its congregants to be useful citizens. During the very same decades, the Mormons were engaged in reforming post-polygamy Mormonism with the goal of connecting the long-isolated Mormon people to the rest of the United States. These reforms were also intended to remake the image of the Mormons so that they could be seen as useful Americans—patriotic, capitalistic, and socially conservative members of the white American republic. A year after announcing the official end of polygamy, in December 1891, the LDS Church petitioned President Benjamin Harrison to grant amnesty to Mormon men imprisoned or charged under the anti-bigamy Edmunds-Tucker Act. Promising that the Mormons would be the most “loyal people” in the union, the church asked Harrison to grant its request with the same “clemency” that the federal government provided “men of the South” who, following the end of the Civil War, “threw down their arms and asked for recognition along the old lines of citizenship.”Footnote ³⁷ That same year, the church-run “People's Party,” which had dominated Utah's territorial politics, was disbanded. Church officials urged their members to divide themselves between the two national parties. In 1903, the U.S. Senate refused to seat the first Mormon elected to their body, Reed Smoot. Three years of hearings ensued. During one moment of the hearings, to buttress the claim that the Mormon faith was patriotic by its very nature, Smoot's lawyer cited a recent Deseret News editorial. The Mormons’ newspaper of record proclaimed that, like American Protestant denominations, the LDS Church also made “its adherents better citizens and more useful to the state” because the church taught its members to “‘render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's’ while they ‘rendered unto God the things that were God's.’”Footnote ³⁸ In 1907, a majority of Senators voted to exclude Smoot. Yet, with the backing of President Theodore Roosevelt, the vote fell short of a two-thirds majority needed to block the seating. Smoot subsequently served five terms in the Senate where he earned the reputation as a Republican Party standard bearer and an effective legislator.Footnote ³⁹

Perhaps even more than through their contributions to American politics, in the early twentieth century, the Mormons sought to demonstrate their usefulness by becoming celebrated American capitalists and patriots. Once prohibited from doing business with “Gentiles,” church members and the LDS Church itself established business partnerships with non-Mormons in Utah and throughout the rest of America. The church also opened up Temple Square to non-Mormon visitors. Next to the square, the church built the grand, ten-story Hotel Utah to provide lodging befitting the national and international dignitaries and wealthy vacationers who the Mormons hoped would soon flock to their capital. In 1911, the Mormon Tabernacle completed a 6,000-mile tour, including performances at Madison Square Garden and the White House.Footnote ⁴⁰ During World War I, two generations after they had been poised to go to war with the U.S., thousands of Mormon men joined the various military branches. Mormon women produced foodstuffs, sold liberty bonds, and served in the Red Cross.Footnote ⁴¹

As Matthew Bowman has argued, in all of these efforts, the Mormons sought “common ground with Progressive America. . . . [They] drained from their faith the apocalyptic utopianism of the dusty Great Basin frontier and made of it a church more American, but also no less Mormon.”Footnote ⁴² To do so, members of the Mormon hierarchy invested great resources into the development of church-based educational organizations, including Sunday schools and scouting programs, which drew from the same social-science-based theories of education and culture that pathologized “black religion” as antithetical to cultural progress. The Mormons shared the same goal as Progressive Era Protestant denominations that were also implementing sociology and social psychology in their educational curriculums: to mold young Mormon men and women into moral, capitalistic, law-abiding, useful American citizens.Footnote ⁴³ As such, the Mormon leadership certainly appreciated Washington's word choice when he described them as a “progressive people” in his first dispatch from Salt Lake City. In fact, later that same year, the church's official magazine, Improvement Era, and its newspaper of record, Deseret News, published lengthy excerpts of Washington's reports. In a preface, the publications declared that Washington's observations should serve as a rebuttal to the misrepresentations of “Mormon life” which were “generally advertised” in the American media.Footnote ⁴⁴

However, during the same period that they championed Washington as the answer to the nation's Negro problem, Mormon leaders also advanced race-based theologies and policies that placed distinct limits of participation in the Mormon Gospel on people of African descent. They did so, in part, to challenge their own “Mormon problem.” The Mormons’ white Protestant detractors had long advanced the idea that Mormon polygamy was so immoral and unnatural that the offspring produced from such unions were racially degraded—intellectually and physically less than white—and should not be allowed to participate in the civic and cultural life of the American republic.Footnote ⁴⁵

The LDS Church had not always been so anti-black. The founder of Mormonism Joseph Smith Jr.’s vision for his church was (relatively) racially inclusive. In the 1830s and early 1840s, a few black men were ordained to the Mormon priesthood, a position understood as a prerequisite for achieving both leadership status within the Mormon community and for reaching the highest levels of heaven. And Smith briefly housed a family of black Mormon converts in his home when the church was headquartered in Nauvoo, Illinois.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, within a few years of Smith's assassination in 1844, the church began excluding black men from the priesthood and black women and men from the Mormon temple, where the most sacred rituals of Mormonism are performed. And the church did so based on the same racial theologies that many antebellum Protestants asserted to support African chattel slavery: that black people's dark skin signified that they permanently suffered under a set of divine curses which they inherited from their ancient biblical forefathers, Cain and Ham.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the first decade of the twentieth century, then church president Joseph F. Smith, whom Washington would praise in his first New York Age report for showing him “kindness” and making his trip “successful,” formalized the position on black membership that would stand until 1978. “Descendants of Ham may receive baptism and confirmation,” Smith and the Quorum of Twelve Apostles declared in a meeting in 1907, “but no one known to have in his veins negro blood, (it matters not how remote a degree) can either have the priesthood in any degree or the blessings of the temple of God.”Footnote ⁴⁸

IV. Booker T. Washington Meets the Mormons

Booker T. Washington likely watched how the Mormons accommodated themselves to the requirements of acceptability in white Protestant Progressive Era America with more than casual interest. (It is unclear, however, how much Washington knew that this accommodation involved, in part, articulations of white supremacy and anti-black practices of exclusion.)Footnote ⁴⁹ During the decades before Washington's 1913 visit, Washington sent reports to Utah newspapers on the Tuskegee Institute's own pursuit of political and cultural acceptance through industrial education and economic development. The Mormons saw a lot of themselves in Washington's efforts. In 1890, the Deseret News described one report from Tuskegee as evidence that Washington had proven “conclusively that for blacks, if not for whites, the education most needed is the preaching and teaching of the new gospel of manual training.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In January of 1906, during a tour of the American West, Washington's wife, Margaret Murray Washington, delivered a lecture at Salt Lake City's YMCA on the advancements that “colored women” had made by adopting this new gospel.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1911, Mormon leader and Salt Lake City School Superintendent David H. Christensen visited Tuskegee. There Christensen and his wife toured the institute's farms, textile shops, and classrooms. Two years later, Christensen introduced Washington when he spoke at the Salt Lake City high school.Footnote ⁵²

In accounts of his visit published in the New York Age, Washington explained that his interest in the Mormons was not theological. Instead, it was historical, sociological, and anthropological. “I am not going to discuss the Mormon religion as I am not a theologian,” Washington wrote.Footnote ⁵³ This rhetorical move to set aside “the Mormon religion” was deliberate. Washington wanted to distinguish his dispatches from the well-established genre of “among the Mormons” travelogues in which the supposed immorality and abuses of polygamy were the central fascination.Footnote ⁵⁴ The year before his own visit to Utah, one of Washington's associates, Bruce Kinney, the former Superintendent of the Baptist Mission in Utah, published Mormonism: The Islam of America (1912). Though the Mormons had officially abandoned polygamy in 1890, Kinney insisted that church members still practiced the “moral perversity” which made “dupes and slaves” of the women forced into these unholy unions.Footnote ⁵⁵

In his own report, by bracketing the question of “the Mormon religion,” Washington guided his readers to his central objective: to detail the “interesting information [about the Mormons] that ought to prove of value to our race.” Washington believed that the Mormons’ experience was worthy of study because significant parts of Mormon history paralleled the history of “the Negro.” Like African Americans, the Mormons “were most inhumanly persecuted” as targets of extralegal violence against which the American “courts gave them little protection.” And like African Americans, Mormons “have been misrepresented before the world . . . because people from the outside have advertised the worst in connection with Mormon life.”Footnote ⁵⁶ According to Washington, such misrepresentations resulted not only from anti-Mormon bias but also from bad social science. What he called the “proper way to study groups” was not simply to reduce a people to a caricature based on an unorthodox cultural practice (for example, the Mormons as oversexed polygamists; the Southern Negroes as overly emotional preachers and worshippers).Footnote ⁵⁷ To correct such misrepresentations, Washington proposed what might be called a (proto)ethnographic methodology—“to get into the real life” of a people before “pass[ing] final judgment.” “No person outside a race or outside a group of people can ever really know that race or that group of people,” Washington wrote in his first dispatch from Utah, “until he gets into their homes.” During his visit, Washington's self-appointed task was to study this “inner life” of the Mormons in order to make this much-maligned people comprehensible to outsiders.Footnote ⁵⁸

What Washington found in the Mormons’ inner life was far from the image of sexually deviant heretics threatening white Protestant America. In fact, Washington implicitly challenged the long-held belief that Mormon polygamy produced a “new race,” one distinguished by “a certain feebleness and emaciation,” as Dr. Charles Furley, a surgeon in the Second California Calvary, had remarked following his own visit to Utah in 1863.Footnote ⁵⁹ Instead, Washington reported that he was impressed by the quality of Mormon families, especially the Mormon youth. Washington interviewed one of the daughters of church president Joseph F. Smith, the nephew of the founder of Mormonism. Washington wrote that though this child was one of forty-nine children, “she was an intelligent, modest, fine young woman with a strong body and an alert mind. I was told that the other forty-eight children were just as healthy and strong and alert as she.” Washington acknowledged that he did not know how many wives President Smith “has or had.” Nevertheless, Washington wrote, “I am convinced that the Mormons are not an immoral people. No immoral people could have such strong, fine bodies as these people, nor such vigorous and alert minds as they.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Washington observed that the Mormons had made good use of their strong minds and bodies by transforming Utah's once-barren landscape into a fecund metropolis. Starting from a small wagon train of ox carts and “150 people, hardy pioneers who entered Utah” a little more than fifty years before, by 1913, Washington found that “there are now over three hundred thousand Mormons, and they have certainly made the desert blossom as a rose.”Footnote ⁶¹ Washington asserted that the rapid increase in population, as well as the high levels of wealth and health among the Mormons, testified to the quality of the educational systems in place in Utah: “These Mormons have first class schools of every character, and they are pushing the matter of technical and industrial education to a stronger degree than we are in the South among the colored people.”Footnote ⁶²

Here, just as he drew parallels between Mormons’ and African Americans’ shared history of persecution and misrepresentation, Washington drew parallels between his vision for African American uplift through agricultural and industrial training, as well as through Bible-based moral education, and the educational systems that Mormons had instituted in their own schools. He communicated as much, not only in his dispatches published in the eastern U.S. but also during the five speeches he delivered in Salt Lake City, which were versions of the lecture he gave on March 27 at the University of Utah entitled “The Industrial Development of the Negro Race.” In the university's auditorium, Washington spoke to an overflow crowd of college students, educators, and leading church officials. As John M. Whitaker, a Mormon bishop, missionary, and chief architect of the LDS seminary system, wrote in his journal: “Practically every one of the [church] General Authorities and state officials and professors from [all] over the state were present.”Footnote ⁶³ Following the speech, a chorus of students serenaded Washington with “old plantation songs” and Washington was shown a class project in which pictures of Tuskegee were displayed in places of honor in one of the university's classrooms.Footnote ⁶⁴

Washington's first report from Utah succeeded in garnering a lot of interest from the New York Age readership. Washington received several letters, most from white Northern Protestants. But instead of thanking him for his open-minded appraisal of the Mormons, the letter writers warned him not to be taken in. A letter from Mabel Delano Clapp Lord, a Unitarian and wife of Boston physician Frederick Taylor Lord, was typical. She wrote that the Mormon faith was not “based on the spirit but on the body.” And she equated Mormon missionary work with spreading “white slavery,” a longstanding epithet for polygamy. Washington responded to Lord by insisting again that his interest was not in Mormons’ religious ideology. Instead, Washington understood the Mormon religion as a spiritual technology akin to the Protestant work ethic by which industrial output signified moral aptitude. He believed that “colored people” could adopt such a useful technology to hasten their economic and moral advancement, which would help them attain greater respectability.Footnote ⁶⁵

But Washington's professed lack of interest in Mormon theology contradicts the main message of the second report of his visit with the Mormons: how adopting the Mormon faith itself might make black Americans more useful. In this report, again published in the New York Age, Washington included all thirteen of the LDS Church's Articles of Faith, a copy of which he received from Bishop John Whitaker following one of Washington's speaking engagements in Utah. Washington wrote: “To what extent this creed will appeal to our [black] Methodist or Baptist brethren in the South I am not sure,” but “there is a good deal in this creed that appeals to me.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Washington's insistence that “I am not as of yet converted to the Mormon religion” and the praise he expressed for the Articles of Faith could have only added to the speculation among people like Mabel Lord that Washington's interest in Mormonism was becoming dangerously personal.Footnote ⁶⁷ Lamenting the failure of black “Methodist or Baptist brethren” to share his vision of black advancement through industry, in this second report, Washington also praised the LDS Church for its ability to connect faith with commerce: “The church believes in religion. It also believes in business, and the leaders of the Mormon church have the control of land, mines, banking concerns and factories. They say and I think wisely, that economic progress must go hand in hand with religious progress.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Washington urged his readers to do what he had done: to bracket animus for polygamy and to study the Mormons’ industry as signifying their ability to be useful to themselves and to the rest of America. What Washington understood as the Mormons’ practical and progressive theology was not unlike the Protestant work ethic preached by the Hampton Institute's founder, and Washington's mentor, Samuel C. Armstrong, who taught: “If a man is to work out his own salvation, he must learn how to work.”Footnote ⁶⁹

V. The Mormons Meet Booker T. Washington

The LDS Church leadership's policy to exclude Mormons known to have any African ancestry from the priesthood and the temple correlated with the church's views on full African American political membership. They believed that Americans with even “one drop” of African blood were unfit to participate in American civic life, a position that, during the rise of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became the law of the land over much of the South and parts of the North.Footnote ⁷⁰ And yet, like many of their Southern and Northern countrymen, the Mormon backing of Washington's efforts to make “Negroes” “useful” demonstrated that the Mormons too recognized that segregation and disenfranchisement alone would not resolve the nation's racial strife. A Deseret News editorial from January 5, 1889 articulated a fear common at the end of the nineteenth century: Because the “negro problem” had not been “solved by abolition of slavery, not by reconstruction of the South, not by enfranchisement and not by segregation of the races,” the editorial worried that “the increased fecundity of the black race” would soon “place the whites in the minority” in the South. “The proud-spirited Southron” would not abide “being ruled by their former slaves.”Footnote ⁷¹ On June 9, 1903, the Deseret News printed a speech by Thomas Dixon in which the author of the Clansman (1905) declared that whites should not be faulted for their racial animus. “The prejudice against the negro,” he explained, “is the instinct of self preservation.” Dixon saw three possible solutions to “the Negro problem”: “to raise the negro to our level; to sink to him, or to remove him.”Footnote ⁷² But, in their public support of Washington, the Mormons and other leading Utahns demonstrated that there was a fourth solution: to support the institutions that raise the Negro to his own racially specific potential so that he becomes useful to his own community and useful to the rest of the country. An October 31, 1903 editorial from the Salt Lake Herald declared: “If there were only a few more negroes in the United States of the caliber and influence of Booker T. Washington we would mighty soon be able to stop talking about the race problem.”Footnote ⁷³

Unlike most of Washington's other white boosters, the Mormons could empathize with some of the plight of African Americans. As Washington did in his dispatches from Utah, the Mormon newspapers drew parallels between Mormons’ and African Americans’ shared history of persecution. Victims of vigilante justice themselves, the Mormons were particularly vocal in their opposition to lynching. On August 28, 1900, the Deseret News published an editorial praising the state of Texas for convicting members of a lynch mob to life in prison. Yet the editorial suggested that the verdict was due to the fact that the victims were white: “Had they been colored, perhaps the outcome would have been different. This should not be.” The editorialists invoked Washington's perspective on the solution to such violence, but they also offered their own take on his position: “Booker Washington is undoubtedly correct in his assumption that the race problem will be solved by means of education. Only the white people need some education too. They need to learn that American law protects life, and that all citizens have certain rights which should be respected.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Yet these Mormon editorialists also understood that African Americans had to take responsibility for securing their own position of respect in the country. White America would not simply hand over to “the colored citizens . . . the rights that are his, to life, and to pursuit of happiness under the laws.”Footnote ⁷⁵ As the Mormons had done for themselves in Utah, African Americans had to secure those rights by demonstrating that they were capable of learning how to be useful to themselves and to the nation. As such, the abundant productivity described in the November 7, 1905 Deseret News article on the progress at Tuskegee—6,000 bushels of sweet potatoes harvested, 250 suits tailored, twenty-five full harnesses constructed—would have been happily familiar to the industrious Mormons of Utah. The article also pointed out that Tuskegee was not simply a farm, factory, and school: “It is a negro village of about 2,100 inhabitants, counting students, instructors, and various employees. And this community of colored people, [Washington] says, compares favorably in moral and spiritual tone with other communities, and a high standard of living is constantly sought and attained.”Footnote ⁷⁶ For Mormon readers in Utah, this assertion that Tuskegee would compare favorably with other towns—perhaps even white ones—matched the Mormons’ own self-perception as a people who had created communities in Utah that surpassed those of their non-Mormon Protestant persecutors in both moral rectitude and economic output.Footnote ⁷⁷

And yet, for some Mormon elites, Washington's story of upward mobility was understood not only to be inspirational for black Americans but for all Americans. During the first decade of the 1900s, Utah newspapers announced the release of Up from Slavery. And Utah libraries published notices that they had added the book to their collections. Women's book clubs read and debated Washington's memoir for its merits as a model for black uplift as well as for economic advancement for poor peoples across the world.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even before it was published as a book, well-educated Mormons read Up From Slavery in serial form when it was printed in the Protestant-establishment magazine The Outlook. Along with political musings and notes about his courtship with his eventual wife Rose Jenkins, Carlos A. Badger copied dozens of passages of Up from Slavery in his personal journal from 1900. Badger, who would become Senator Reed Smoot's personal secretary during the Senator's trials, focused on those passages in which Washington promoted the value of manual labor, moral education, and overcoming hardship to refine one's character.Footnote ⁷⁹

Even the LDS Church endorsed Washington as a model American whom young children of all races and religions should admire. For its 1915–1916 teaching manual for high-school-aged boys, the church-based Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association (YMMIA), which Carlos Badger's father Rodney cofounded, solicited essays on the definition of “success” from leading Americans. In the manual, Washington's response—the only one included by a black author—was published alongside essays written by Senator Reed Smoot, LDS Church president Joseph F. Smith, and non-Mormons—including labor leader Samuel Gompers, evangelist Billy Sunday, and the North Pole explorer Admiral Robert E. Peary.Footnote ⁸⁰ To be sure, the editors of the YMMIA (and other Mormon readers of Up from Slavery) recognized that Washington's experiences were rooted in the unique struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery. Yet, despite its specific and racialized history, the editors of the YMMIA took from Washington's story lessons that were distinctly not black. That is, packaged alongside the triumphs of great white missionaries and revivalists, labor leaders, explorers, church fathers, and politicians, Washington's lessons of success were blanched. They were stripped of any valence of the historic black struggle against white oppression. In doing so, Washington's history became universally useful, when “universal” ironically meant conforming to the standards of turn-of-the-century white supremacy and respectability.Footnote ⁸¹

VI. The Limits of African American and Mormon “Usefulness”

Leading Mormons’ interest in Booker T. Washington during the first decade of the twentieth century had national implications. In their support for Washington, Mormon political, media, and religious leaders hoped to demonstrate that they could be useful members of the white American republic by participating in debates about how to solve the nation's Negro problem. Yet leading Utahns' support for Washington had local implications as well. A November 19, 1902 Salt Lake Herald editorial entitled “Bad Negro Ministers” referred to a speech Washington gave in New Orleans in which Washington criticized a “class of ignorant, immoral and shiftless [Negro] ministers” for ruining black families: “Mr. Washington might have added that the shiftless, demoralizing negro minister is not confined to the plantations of the south. . . . Here in Salt Lake we have had negro ministers of the gospel who prostituted their holy calling and made their race a laughing stock. Negro churches have been turned into meeting places for political organizations.”Footnote ⁸²

An April 1906 Herald editorial pointed to what the paper understood as Washington's model of economic uplift first and political rights later. The paper did so not only to criticize the “shiftless” black clergymen but also to attack “the sweaty black politician” who passes his day “eternally bellowing about the rights of the negro.” “With some members of his race Booker Washington is unpopular,” continued the editorial, in likely reference to the Niagara Movement founded the year before to oppose Washington's conciliatory racial politics. According to the Herald, Washington's unpopularity was due to the fact that he “always preached the doctrine of self-help for the negro,” arguing that, to be useful to themselves and to their community, “negroes” should become “artisans, tradesmen, farmers, [and] stockraisers,” occupations taught at industrial schools like Tuskegee. “The fruits of [Washington's] labors,” the editorial continued, “are seen throughout the south.” There the “sober, industrious, trustworthy and efficient” Tuskegee graduates worked to better the economic vitality of the whole region. Yet the Southern Negro became less useful, even dangerous, the editorial suggested, when he did not leave politics to the white man.Footnote ⁸³

This categorization of black usefulness as limited to black economic contributions in the form of manual or semi-skilled labor echoed turn-of-the-century race science and slavery apologetics. According to political scientist Joseph Alexander Tillinghast, the “useful” educational precursor to the “Negro” industrial academies like Tuskegee was the institution of slavery itself. “In effect, American slavery was a vast school, in which a superior race drilled an inferior one into useful civilized life,” argued Tillinghast in The Negro in Africa and America (1902). In exchange for being civilized, the enslaved Negro turned over to his white “American civilizer . . . all surplus material product above net cost.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Likewise, the Utahn supporters of Washington championed his brand of post-slavery industrial school because, as a 1903 Salt Lake Herald editorial put it, such institutions taught African Americans “that thrift, industry and moral energy alone could establish their social and civil standing.” Too bad there were not more Tuskegees. If there were, the Herald editorial suggested, then the July 1903 race riots in Evansville, Indiana might have been avoided. Unlike the Tuskegee student who was “industrious [and] law-abiding,” the Herald proclaimed, “it was the shiftless, criminal negro, one whose life was useless to the state and should have been forfeited long ago, who precipitated a riot, infuriated a whole community and brought upon his people a loss from which they cannot recover in years.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Washington's critics on the black political left had good reason to find his condemnations of black ministers and black politicians troubling. His words were deployed to reinforce the idea that, a generation removed from slavery, black American usefulness could still be reduced to what labor they could produce with their bodies.Footnote ⁸⁶ Even more pernicious, by namechecking Washington, white Americans who opposed integration stamped the imprimatur of America's favorite Negro onto the stereotype of the Negro male as too emotional and lazy to be trusted with the reins of government and too licentious to be trusted with the right to sit next to white girls in schools, restaurants, and on trolleys.

Ironically, in the decade-long history of public pronouncements of mutual admiration between Booker T. Washington and the Mormons, it was during Washington's 1913 visit to Salt Lake when the Mormons’ views on the limitations of African Americans as useful citizens of the republic came into starkest relief. For example, the impression that Mormon Bishop John M. Whitaker took away from his meeting with Washington, which occurred following the Tuskegee principal's lecture at the University of Utah, was drastically different from that of Washington. Washington recalled that Whitaker, whom he had met earlier in the decade at a gathering of the World Methodist Conference in Boston, gave him a copy of the LDS Church's Articles of Faith during his visit to Utah. Washington included the articles in the second of his New York Age reports from Utah. And he proclaimed that the creed, which he (selectively) read as a proclamation of faith in the Protestant work ethic, contained wisdoms useful for all of humanity.Footnote ⁸⁷ In his personal journal entry dated March 27, 1913, Whitaker wrote that after the lecture at the University, he and Washington exchanged praise for the rapid economic and cultural advancements their respective communities had made. Yet Whitaker also left his encounter with Washington with his suspicions confirmed about the havoc that would come from allowing men with “negro blood” to exercise political rights. In the journal entry, Whitaker recorded this exchange between himself and Washington:

Historians should be skeptical about whether Washington actually made such a statement, which sounds more like the views of a defender of segregation and black disenfranchisement than those of a champion of black racial uplift.Footnote ⁸⁹ But there is also something particularly Mormon in Whitaker's fears of “negro blood.” Perhaps more than any other sizable American Christian community, by the early twentieth century, Mormons defined themselves as a racially pure people. They believed their superior whiteness was the result of their literal descent from the most ancient of biblical covenants, which even one drop of “negro blood” could undermine.Footnote ⁹⁰ Perhaps more importantly for the Mormons’ efforts to gain full membership in the (white) American political covenant, Whitaker's recollection reflected the consensus view among segregationists about why allowing blacks access to the polling booth represented an existential threat to the white republic. In doing so, ironically, Whitaker only added to the parallel history of Mormons and African Americans. Whitaker's fears about blacks always “voting with the Negro” echoed anti-Mormon fears of the monolithic Mormon voting bloc—fears that, from Missouri to Utah, white Protestants in particular sounded wherever the early Mormon community settled.Footnote ⁹¹

Whitaker's journal entry also helps to contextualize the more public analyses of Washington's visit that appeared in Mormon newspapers in the days following his departure from Utah. In an editorial from March 29, 1913, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican singled out Washington as the cosmic exception of his race: “Born a slave in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor, even the date of his birth given less record than that of his master's pedigreed bloodhounds, the desire to be of service to his race has brought him at last to a position in public respect and esteem held by no other African since Ham walked the earth.” By referencing Ham, the Herald-Republican asserted that, despite Washington's boundless abilities, he still remained bound by the curse of his forefathers. As such, the only avenue to greatness open to him was to teach his people how “to be useful and self-supporting.”Footnote ⁹²

Certainly Washington would have recognized much of his own vision for black advancement in the Herald-Republican’s characterization of his life story and career. In Up from Slavery, Washington cites “usefulness” as both a trait that he developed in himself and one he sought to develop in his pupils.Footnote ⁹³ Yet Washington would have rebuffed claims that he advocated that African American usefulness should be limited to economic contributions and not include political ones. In his 1895 “Atlanta Exposition Address,” which many of Washington's contemporaries derided as accepting segregation in exchange for racial peace, Washington made clear that “there is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Two decades later, Washington's message about African American usefulness had not changed. In the series of speeches he delivered in Louisiana in April 1915, Washington argued that the fact that the black labor force was not fully exploited led to black lasciviousness, vice, and violence. However, Washington argued, Louisiana's “Negro problem” could be solved by “mak[ing] the Negro more useful to himself, more useful to the State, and to the Nation.” The key way to cultivate “Negro” usefulness was to cultivate not only the “Negro's” economic ambition but his political one, too: To “increase his [material] wants”—for “better homes, better furniture, better churches, better schools”—and increase his desire and his ability to make a positive political impact in the life of his community. In the short term, African American usefulness would not manifest in the pursuit of political equality with white Americans. But it would mean that African Americans would petition their communities—including the white political class—to provide quality schools where a black pupil would be trained to be “useful as a laborer” and as a citizen.Footnote ⁹⁵ As such, for Washington, the development of African American usefulness necessarily included the development of African Americans as well-informed political actors and well-trained economic producers and consumers.

Even in his criticism of the “Bad Negro Ministers,” which the Salt Lake Herald cited to support their objection to the politicization of Utah's black churches, Washington's qualm with the “class of ignorant, immoral and shiftless ministers,” as he called them, was not that they were stirring up political ferment among their parishioners. Instead, it was that they were unemployed and unrooted. Their poor work ethic—they owned not “a foot of land” nor a “bank account” but instead spent their time “prowling from one plantation to another preaching here a little and there a little”—meant that they failed to set the example of respectability politics that Washington and other critics of black religious life were working to cultivate.Footnote ⁹⁶ And in his speeches in Salt Lake City, Washington made it clear that, unlike the Mormon bishop John M. Whitaker, who espoused a politic and theology that set limits on African American development, he recognized no such limits. He understood that African Americans had the potential to become, with time and proper training, as useful members of the American republic as their white neighbors. “The American white measures the negro with too big a yardstick,” Washington declared in Utah. “He forgets that the negro race is in fact only 50 years old. He measures the negro by himself without remembering that when the negro catches up to the standard of the American white, no other races in the world will be ahead of him.”Footnote ⁹⁷

It is important to note, though, that Booker T. Washington came to Salt Lake City not to “measure the negro” against the yardstick of the American (Protestant) white. Instead, he came to measure the Mormon against the American (Protestant) white. Washington studied the Mormons’ farms and cities. He examined the minds and bodies of their children. Explicitly, he did so to find lessons that he could take back to Tuskegee in order to refine and expand his own usefulness respectability politics. Yet, implicitly, he did so to determine whether the Mormons themselves were proving useful enough to be accepted as full citizens of the white American republic.

Washington proclaimed that Mormons passed the test. In fact, he suggested that they should perhaps be the new standard bearers for American whiteness, an unrivaled “intelligent, healthy, clean, progressive, [and] moral set of people.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet, through the act of making such grandiose pronouncements about the Mormon people's singular progress, Washington turned the gaze of Protestant and post-Protestant white social scientists—who in turn-of-the-century America, as Curtis J. Evans has observed, were creating a “professional discipline” out of the study of Southern black religion—onto the Mormons.Footnote ⁹⁹ Washington demonstrated that he had the authority to do so because he was a Protestant American whose usefulness to white Protestant America was more recognized than that of the Mormons.