| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907–1921. By Matthew C. Godfrey. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007. vi, 226 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-87421-658-5.)

In recent years, historians of Mormonism have devoted considerable energy to understanding the dramatic change in that peculiar faith and culture that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century as the church abandoned painfully its practice of polygamy, divided its membership into the two national parties, and began a determined attempt to enter the mainstream of American life with Utah statehood in 1896. Having paid much attention to the social and political revolutions that engulfed Mormondom during that period of rapid transition, they have given much less notice to the more invisible role that economic forces played in the whole process. For example, after a half century of sometimes quixotic efforts to build self-sufficiency in the Mormon Kingdom and to keep its denizens separate from their neighbors, church leaders aggressively began to involve themselves in the growing beet sugar industry of the West so that its agrarian faithful could thrive on a cash crop and thus help fill the once-empty coffers of the unpopular church. Such a move would certainly have furrowed the brow of the late Brigham Young, whose exclusionist view of the Great Basin seemed anathema to his successors' schemes to enrich not only Mormon farmers but the church itself by satisfying the sweet tooth of a burgeoning national market.

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