In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.
Title: What is a Salt Laker?
Author: Ben Fulton
Date: July 6, 2000
America loves fame. We dote on celebrities' every word and action, even minor ones. So perhaps it's with the famous, or at least famous artists and intellects, that the proper definition of a Salt Laker should begin.
So cozy up with one or two of the city's most renowned culinary delicacies: ketchup and mayonnaise ("fry sauce"), a deep-fried scone or Jell-O. And please refrain from pulling out your lawfully held concealed weapon. The personal will and testimony of Salt Lake City's most famous visitors isn't always kind. Still, if the past informs our present, as historians insist, there's a lot we can learn. And learn we will—as U.S. Census Bureau figures tell us time and time again, Salt Lakers, or at least Utahns, value high school diplomas and university degrees at a higher rate than the national norm.
The first, most famous witty mind to wile time in Zion was Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens. But as anyone who's read Roughing It cover to cover knows, there's more to his Salt Lake City visit than that famous dictum on homely Mormon women: "The man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity. ... And the man that marries 60 of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity." Clemens' report was peppered with even better knee-slappers. More importantly, it gave our city its first real assessment as a nascent hub of the American West. And more than 135 years after its writing, it's yet to be topped.
"There was fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon. This was fairyland to us, to all intents and purposes—a land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery," Clemens wrote.
Mystery, because he didn't spend most of his time among the city's brothers and sisters. Brigham Young—"the king"—ignored Clemens during their one meeting. Then it was off to the "Gentile" dens for pipe-smoking. Clemens complained about the high prices. He read the Book of Mormon, then declared it "a pretentious affair ... chloroform in print." When Young commanded a stubborn group of Mormon men to fulfill their business contract with a "Gentile" for the hoisting of telegraphic line, Clemens was duly impressed. All in all, Salt Lakers were "reticent" and "extremely healthy."
"Intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked," Clemens wrote halfway through his account. But at the end of his visit, already on his way to Nevada, the same man who nailed the emerging American psyche in Huckleberry Finn couldn't put a firm finger on what Salt Lake City was all about.
Pithy Brit and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, had no problem cutting to the chase upon his 1953 visit to Salt Lake City. His interests were strictly limited to architecture and religion. He marveled at the local religion, "A church once condemned by the Supreme Court as an organized rebellion, but now a monolith of respectability"; and found himself vexed at the sight of the LDS Temple—so much so that it inspired his short essay, "Faith, Taste, and History."
"To what extent are the arts conditioned by, or indebted to, religion?" Huxley asked. His answer wasn't long in coming: "Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable."
The downtown LDS Temple was "this vast essay in eccentric dreariness." Still, one of the most famous men in modern British letters couldn't resist transforming into prose this put-down, which was really a backhanded compliment: "Long after the rest of Victorian and 20th-century architecture shall have crumbled back to dust, this thing will be standing in the Western desert, an object, to the neo-Neolithic savages of post-atomic times, of uncompromising reverence and superstitious alarm."
Visiting Salt Lake City that same year, architect Frank Lloyd Wright couldn't be bothered with so many words about the temple. He was much more taken by the adjoining tabernacle. Rarely one to flatter, this time he gushed, praising it as "one of the architectural masterpieces of the country and perhaps the world."
Before you dismiss the LDS Temple as nothing of significance upon the local mindset, think again. The Eiffel Tower? Paris. The Coliseum? Rome. Remnants of the Wall? Berlin. The Space Needle? The Golden Gate Bridge? The Strip? Architecture plays big everywhere. It evokes a powerful, yet subconscious effect on everyday life. It sets a tone—even more so here, where every city block is measured by its distance from Moroni's perch. In this city, your address is your proximity to "The House of the Lord."
But what about us, the people? Let's just say that, by modern standards and all available evidence, Salt Lakers aren't the sort of people who inspire the rest of the world to stand in line. Then again, the same could be said about lots of cities west (and yes, even east) of the Mississippi. As denizens of this biggest of backwoods burgs, we're woefully unexamined. The local dialect of swallowed vowels, "Flippin'," and "Oh my heck" could have been the cute little crown on someone's nationwide hit film. Instead, its rightful place was usurped by the lax, Scandinavian inflections of the Coen brothers' Fargo.
Don't let anyone tell you it's religion that keeps Salt Lake City out of the ranks of America's most culturally vibrant cities. With its glut of churches and doughnut houses, Memphis still managed to give birth to rock & roll. Even Mississippi, forever cited as America's most backward child, had the honor of inspiring William Faulkner, arguably the greatest American novelist of the 20th century. Instead, we get writers who waste no time heading to the southern part of the state, where they rhapsodize about wilderness, wilderness, wilderness.
When Swiss photographer Robert Frank compiled his trailblazing collection The Americans, nearly every state and city in the union was represented by images that were haunting, poetic and cynically true. The most famous of the lot was captured in New Orleans, with the desperate face of a black man peering from the back of a trolley car. What did Salt Lake City net when Frank drove through? A staid shot of the McCune-McCarthey Mansion on 200 North and Main Street with not a person in sight, that's what. Thanks, man.
On the road, terminally hip Beat Jack Kerouac dismissed us as "a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean [Neal Cassady] to have been born." Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov took an invitation to speak at the University of Utah, then spent the rest of his time hunting butterflies around the Alta Lodge and Little Cottonwood Canyon. Not too many years later in the '60s, Joan Didion was doing her "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" gig with the California counterculture across our way. Writers, after all, go where the elements are in flux. All too often, Salt Lake City's pace of change has the velocity of molasses dripping down an iceberg.
Don't look toward film to define us, either. Years before Touched By an Angel shot its first episode, Salt Lake City hosted the setting for Carnival of Souls. This 1962 film was the story of a young woman who survived a car wreck to wander Salt Lake City aimlessly and score a job as a church organist. After prodding by a horde of ghosts, she's forced into remembering that—oops—she should have been dead all along. Life in Salt Lake City was some chilling, ineffable illusion. Now a black-and-white cult favorite, Carnival of Souls is lethargically grim.
SLC Punk! gave us angst, angst and more teenage angst as a young punk beats up cowboys with his buddies and rails against his parents, until facing the very rare dilemma of whether or not to attend Harvard Law School. What could have been a razor-sharp film statement about life in a frustratingly unique city, instead turns into an old story about outgrowing rebellion: adolescence is a phase, Salt Lake City merely a stage.
All this recounting, mulling and harping serves one point: The number of people willing, able and ready to cross the divide from Salt Laker hypothesized to Salt Laker defined is few indeed. Once potential candidates stop their snickering, they realize it requires a sharp mind. That brings us back to Clemens. After all his jokes and tourist's asides, not even he was up to it.
"I left Salt Lake City a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there—and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not," he wrote.
Of course, that's a coward's exit. Great writers, like Clemens, are always good at making a cop-out sound artful and somehow inevitable. Look the question straight in the eye and we find that Salt Lakers can be defined. The trick is finding several artful cop-outs, and lots of experts who will hazard the guess with a sporting attitude and a large portion of manners.
But first, we must understand where not to look for definitions. Do not, even as a last resort, consult travel guides. The Insider's Guide to Salt Lake City plays a good game, but resorts to appalling propaganda in places. Travel guides exist solely to make vacationers all warm and fuzzy about spending tourist dollars. Why else would the Insider's Guide give us this: "Several traits characterize the people who live in the Salt Lake Valley. Visitors are often struck by the warmth of the locals, and it doesn't take long to realize that we are an industrious, hard-working lot with a strong spirit of volunteerism. A gracious gesture or a helping hand is the way of life everywhere in the Salt Lake Valley."
Zzzzzzz. Someone should have also mentioned that we have a weakness for shameless backslapping. Even worse, those accounts of volunteerism may not be true. In 1993 research conducted by the Cal State-Fresno psychology department involving 36 metropolitan areas, Salt Lake City ranked 24th for its helpful hands—several notches below Houston, St. Louis and Detroit. When researchers feigned injuries, or posed as blind people needing help across the street, Salt Lakers were evidently too busy to help.
There's a message in such bald-faced pabulum, though. Listen carefully: It's the sound of an inferiority complex, or at least the desperate desire to be adored—the yearning to be understood for what we truly are as a city. Is it any wonder that cavernous hotels are being erected at this very minute, waiting for the media hordes to descend on Salt Lake City a mere 20 months from now? The Winter Olympics is one hell of a clever ruse. What we really ache for are glowing media profiles in magazines and on television, those giant advertorials that will finally tell the world what Salt Lake City truly is.
To a certain extent, marketers, who follow money's path at every turn, already have. To them, we, and all of Utah, are "The Mother Market," a state bursting at the seams with infants. Salt Lake City also tops the list of "Security Blanket Cities," places where 15 measures of financial security—income, cost of living, employment rate and other factors—ensure that most of us won't be thrown out on the street. Minneapolis-St. Paul placed second.
In terms of business, we tend to avoid risk. While listing Salt Lake City as a "Hot New Tech City," Newsweek magazine also characterized the city's financial elite as a group that would rather invest in more traditional institutions, such as mining, real estate and oil. Even the city's unique base of genetics and biotechnology firms grew in part out of a naturally occurring circumstance: The LDS church's genealogical records make it the ideal place for research.
And let's be honest where ethnicity is concerned. Despite a rapidly growing Latino population, despite a healthy Polynesian population, despite an Asian population that gave us our first Buddhist temple, and despite one of the largest Greek communities between Chicago and the West Coast, Salt Lake City remains honkytown with a capital "H." At just over 90 percent European-American, we're drowning in white.
From one historian's perspective, however, one of the great wonders of this strange species called Salt Laker is the fact that, despite our perceived quirks, we're remarkably like the rest of the nation: diverse yet appallingly homogenous, eccentric yet remarkably predictable. Salt Lake City is a place of its own, sure; but no more so than any other American city. That's largely because, like any other American city, Salt Lake City is both the victim and benefactor of history—a mistress that never plays favorites.
"What is a Salt Laker? That's a crucial question you're asking," says John S. McCormick, a Salt Lake Community College professor who can count himself among the handful of experts on the city's history. "You're kind of having fun with it, but what emerges again and again from the historical question is whose city is it, to whom does it belong, and who has a right to assign their place to the city."
Surely American Indians have the right. So too do the Mormon pioneers, who eked out life in a subsistence economy more than 100 years before Salt Lake City was blessed with one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates. But is the question of "whom it belongs to" really that interesting? A lengthy conversation with McCormick, who recently penned The Gathering Place: An Illustrated History of Salt Lake City, reveals that the most interesting queries deal in events which have shaped the city.
McCormick proudly states that he hails from the school of history that sees progress in conflict. History is a question of who has power, and who's about to crash the gates. To his way of thinking, past definitions of the Salt Laker have been woefully narrow.
"In Salt Lake there's a lot of denial of history, or what I call 'hard-to-hear' stories. It's easy to engage in what Noam Chomsky calls 'necessary illusions,' or 'necessary lies,'" McCormick says.
Salt Lake City's accepted history is well-known and, for the most part, inevitably woven into the history of the LDS church. Tenacious pioneers escape religious persecution to arrive at "the place." Seagulls save a vital harvest from crickets. A contentious relationship with the federal government ends with the church's abandonment of polygamy, and a beacon shines into the future, etc.
What's so often overlooked is that large gap of time between 1900 and 2000, the events, in short, that make Salt Lakers so much like the rest of the nation. "There's the surface, and what's below," McCormick says. "Much of what's below the surface threatens to disturb the placidity. There are a lot of cracks, and a lot of people laying dynamite in the hidden cracks."
Salt Lake City, and Utah for that matter, had a much more radical past than many of us have been led to believe. Most of us know the oft-recited story of labor organizer and martyr Joe Hill, who was hanged here. What's not so well-known is that he was one man among many with a reputation for standing up to The Man. Utah boasted a large Socialist element from 1900 to about 1920.
"By our count there were 107 Socialists elected to office in 14 Utah communities," McCormick says. "It turns out that about 40 percent of the Socialists were Mormon."
Salt Lake City had a Socialist on the City Council. That was nothing compared to Murray, which from 1911 to 1915 housed an all-Socialist City Council and Socialist mayor to match. J. Alex Bevan of Tooele may be the state's first, and last, Socialist to ever sit in the state Legislature.
These weren't just armchair Socialists, either. Many took a stand. Near the beginning of the Great Depression, Utah was in the throes of the fourth highest rate of unemployment in the nation. Households and whole farms were sold off at auction to pay taxes and bank loans. During a state auction at the City & County Building on 400 South, several hundred protesters attempted to shut down the proceedings. The presiding sheriff called in extra police. When that failed to disperse the crowd, the fire department shooed them off with a high-powered water hose. Instead, the crowd wrestled the hose from the firemen and doused the City & County Building. Several canisters of tear gas and 15 arrests later, the melee ended.
"That shows how hard times were, which can surprise a lot of people today," McCormick says. "People like to think that because we're so virtuous we escape the worst."
Much like the Old South of Jim Crow laws, Salt Lake City did its share discriminating. The City & County Building coffee shop and Lagoon amusement park remained segregated through much of the '50s. During that same time, 60 out of the city's 100 restaurants remained segregated. The Hotel Utah, now the church's Joseph Smith Memorial Building, was the most salient example of this shameful policy. After a 1960 performance, black contralto singer Marian Anderson was allowed to stay at the Hotel Utah only if she entered through the rear of the building. Harry Belafonte was denied a room outright. For McCormick, the most striking story of Salt Lake City segregation is that of a black, decorated WWII veteran with a missing arm who could not get a room, but he could sleep in the hotel lobby.
But in Salt Lake City, just like in the rest of the nation, people picketed and protested for equal rights. The Civil Rights movement, needless to say, didn't change things overnight. Rev. France A. Davis, who founded Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City after a move from Georgia 27 years ago, encountered a city of frosty glares, restrictive covenants in real estate and racist landlords.
"That's less common today," Davis says. "And a lot of that has to do with changes in the law, the LDS revelation [giving black males the priesthood in 1978], and now just the new mix of people who live here.
It was closed when I moved here. It was exclusive in terms of a particular religious group and racial group. But I found, on the other hand, that a Salt Laker is someone who's willing to put aside more traditional expectations to be more accepting of a wide diversity."
But, Davis notes, that diversity isn't found in neighborhood communities as it is in, say, the East Coast, where traditional ethnic lines are drawn in districts predominantly Irish, Polish, black or Italian. Salt Lake City's minorities may still tend toward the West Side, but there are no hard, fast rules anymore. "People don't live in specific neighborhoods. So instead of communities, we have meeting places," Davis says. For many African-Americans, that meeting place remains the church.
For Latinos, life in Salt Lake City embraces an increasing sense of ethnic pride. Because of their large numbers and a closer border with Mexico, Latinos in Texas and California rarely wanted for a sense of identity. Not so with Utah Latinos.
"The whole pride thing really didn't hit me until I graduated from high school," says John Renteria, chief executive officer of the Utah Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, who's lived his entire life in Salt Lake City. "We were always here, we just weren't so visible. Now we're an up-and-coming people, and we don't fit a mold in any particular way."
Remember, too, that Utah was once part of Mexico. On another level, however, the Latino connection to this state digs much deeper. While Anglos think "Beehive State," Latinos think "Aztlan," a word that hearkens to the time of the Aztecs, who claimed all of southwest America, Utah included.
"We can relate to our pre-Columbian roots in that way," Renteria says. "But we're also a product of our own in terms of being part of the baby-boom generation and the '60s, which impacted everyone."
Indeed, Latino life in Salt Lake City holds several events unique to its own community—events few outside the Latino community remember. Few recall labor organizer Cawsar Chavez's visit to Salt Lake City. In the middle of the '70s, Chavez led a march down 900 West to Utah's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (DABC) to protest the E&J Gallo Winery's use of non-union labor for picking grapes. Among Salt Lake City Latinos who remember that day, there are whispers of a push to rename 900 West in honor of Chavez's human-rights legacy.
And it should come as no surprise that, even as other cities managed tense relations between minorities and law enforcement, Salt Lake City did the same. "The last straw was that incident at the Terrace," Renteria recalls.
A concert hall between 400 South and 500 South along Main Street, the Terrace Ballroom hosted some of the city's best-loved concerts during the '60s and '70s. A 1974 party celebration attended by city Latinos was not one of them. After police checked in on a reported altercation, they let loose a pack of German shepherds. "A very large number of complaints about police brutality went unanswered, but that event was a precursor to the Blue Ribbon Committee [a panel later set up to look into police abuses]," Renteria remembers.
And today? Well, today Salt Lake City is a microcosm of the world at large. So much so that just by virtue of its changing numbers, Renteria no longer sees his hometown as the "city of Mormons." Nor do most who live here. That stereotypical image does, however, exist in the minds of most people outside the state. Chances are good that once those people visit, the stereotype leaves with them.
Andy Markowitz, editor of Baltimore's City Paper, paid Salt Lake City a visit in 1996 when City Weekly hosted the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies annual convention. His first impression was befuddlement, followed by surprise.
"I found it a sort of strange and fascinating place, what with the liquor laws and the downtown that really doesn't exist," he remembers. "We went out to dinner at 7 pm, and the streets were practically deserted. But our art director, who was gay, had a blast. He found the gay clubs and boogied down."
Then again, certain film stars may come away with a completely different impression. Civic boosters are still reeling from Ewan McGregor's scathing pronouncements on our fair burg when he shot a film here four years ago. The Scottish star of Phantom Menace and Trainspotting minced no words: "I hated it. Working there was bad enough because you are so high up and all that running around is so hard to do in the very thin air. But the people ... the Mormons ... I'd walk to the supermarket with my wife and baby and be stared at because we weren't dressed like them. They looked at me as if I was Satan himself," he told Film Review magazine.
Ted Wilson, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, served as the city's mayor from 1976 to 1985. He loves the shock on people's faces when he tells them Salt Lake City is less than 50 percent Mormon.
"They think everyone walked to the beat of the Mormon church," Wilson says. "I was always proud to tell them we were probably about as diverse as any place else. Yet, at the same time we're broad enough to house the dominant religion and culture. That's all a credit to our city. A city ought to be a place where all people can come together."
Politically, our city has its own flavor. Decisions are made more on the basis of consensus, and sometimes even out of the public eye. "Here we say. 'Let us all come together and reason.' It's a softer town. In a place like Denver, there's more contention, maybe a little more of the dueling press conferences going on," Wilson says. "Here, issues are not fought out in public. They're oftentimes discussed quietly in back rooms, then announced. We tend to have more of an elite political leadership that tends to do more work behind the scenes. Interestingly, though, our new mayor is not in that mold. He says, 'This is what I believe, I'm going to throw the gauntlet down.'"
Mayor Rocky Anderson breaks another mold as well, Wilson believes. He's one of the few liberal Democrats to back up words with action. After all, he made it all the way to public office. Not so in the case of other liberal Salt Lakers, who tend to complain more than organize. "I do think liberals tend to be less energized these days," Wilson says. "Gayle Ruzicka spoke up here a while ago about her work with the Eagle Forum. Whatever you think about her politics, she's connected and passionate about her causes. I don't know many liberals who do all that she does."
Conservative tendencies, then, bring us full circle to Salt Lake City's mainstream, a class routinely grouped as white, middle-class, and Mormon. In the wake of the city's increasingly eclectic mix, conservatives still strike more of the predominant notes. And they have a solidarity that provides the entire city with a foundation of stability that, at the end of the day, gets the job done. East Coast cities are often famous for bickering and backbiting—not Salt Lake City.
"You don't have those 'let's just talk for talking's sake' conversations that you can in New York," says a professional woman who moved to Salt Lake City from New York state 18 years ago. "Plus, there's no such thing as arguing for arguing's sake. You can't argue about anything without wondering if someone will talk to you again. It's hard to explore the issues and then walk away. People here don't like to have their beliefs challenged, that's part of it."
So it's telling, then, that this same woman didn't want to be identified for fear that her comments might be viewed as anti-Mormon. Salt Lake City is a softer town? No kidding. Along religious lines, our egos bruise easily, too.
McCormick approaches the topic with due care. "Some would argue that the religious culture of the city makes no difference. I think you cannot overlook it. There's a tendency to do that, which is a mistake," he says. "You also can't overestimate it, so it's a tricky tightrope. But the Mormon influence is more complex than most people think."
Once again, the issue of religion is inextricably linked with the city's history. Mormon and non-Mormon tensions were at their height from 1870 to 1890. Protestant denominations tried, often in vain, to wrest Mormon women from polygamous marriages. Not only were politics split along religious lines with parties for Mormons and non-Mormons, but so was the city. Mormons kept to the north and east sections and shopped at ZCMI. Assorted "Gentiles" kept to the south end and shopped at Auerbachs. Protestants and Jews formed a fraternal organization at Oddfellow Hall, which still stands in the middle of Market Street.
All distant memories, to be sure. But anyone who discounts the city's religious climate need only scan The Salt Lake Tribune's Public Forum for a reminder that "Mormon" is a loaded word. Be careful where and how you aim it.
"When some people are other than what you are, it makes itself felt," McCormick points out. "In general, the Mormon community tends to be more unified. Gov. Cal Rampton used to say that Mormons who ran for office had an advantage because they had a large base to start with in the ward. Other people may be non-Mormon, but they might not have much in common beyond that."
But can some mythic "Mormon temperament" define the still amorphous question of "What is a Salt Laker?" Not in a million years, especially when Mormons themselves often draw distinctions. "For all those who have been told to shut up or leave, I apologize for my misguided brothers and sisters. Remember the well-known fact that there are wonderful Mormons around the world, and then there are 'Utah Mormons,'" wrote David Graves in a recent Tribune Public Forum letter. "The two are as different as night and day."
In attempts to define the character of the city's mainstream inhabitants, perhaps it's useful to remember that the European ancestry of Salt Lake City stems largely from England and Scandinavia. Baedeker's guidebook to Norway, Denmark and Sweden commits many of the same sins as Salt Lake City guidebooks. But who could deny that its description of the Scandinavian character could easily apply for scores of Salt Lakers? "Scandinavians tend to be quiet and unassuming, patient themselves and offended by impatience in others. Spontaneity and improvising are not high priorities in life, and they maintain respect for the quiet life."
Cross that with the mellowing influences of the California psyche, and we may not be too far off.
"Salt Lakers are interesting people," says Larry Mankin, president and CEO of the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, who describes himself as a "mid-Westerner and mid-Easterner." He's lived in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. "A lot of the people I meet here are as much California as Utah. I've found Salt Lakers to be more deliberate in the way they make decisions, whereas people in Michigan, for example, will be much quicker in making decisions."
Mankin noted two key phrases that keep popping up in conversation. One is, "Let's study this to make sure we do the right thing." Another is, "It's a good thing."
Apart from that, we're spoiled with a good climate. "Here the weather's always wonderful," Mankin says. "In Michigan people complain about 364 days of winter. Salt Lakers clearly don't understand what bad weather is."
But who wants to complain about the weather when we can complain about roads, stereotypes aimed at us or the stereotypes we aim at each other like heat-seeking missiles? Defining Salt Lakers is all about balancing competing perspectives, and keeping a keen eye on the shifting social strata that will change that definition. "The trick is not underestimating Salt Lake City's uniqueness, while still realizing it's much the same as any place," McCormick says. "Salt Lake City is a place of people in the presence of others, which seems obvious of course. But in order to understand Salt Lake City, you have to take the notion of difference seriously, and you have to focus on power relations."
One day, after a little training in the city's real history, we just might get the hang of it. And so what if Clemens was left scratching his head at "whether a state of things existed there at all or not"? In the end, Salt Lakers are over everyone's heads—including our own."
