The Mormons' War on Poverty: A History of LDS Welfare, 1830-1990.

An important tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is a call to work towards the building of an ideal society, one in which there will be no poor. From their earliest beginnings in the 1830s Mormons have taken this call seriously and have worked to alleviate the plight of poor Mormons. The Mormons' War on Poverty is the history of this continuing straggle.

Garth Mangum, of the University of Utah, is an economist with considerable experience with federal antipoverty programs. Bruce Blumell was Senior Historical Associate for the LDS Church from 1973-1979, and this book draws on some of his research during that period. Both are committed Mormons who regret their church's decision to restrict their (and other researchers') access to church archives and their ability to cite their previous research performed for the Church Historical Department and the Church Welfare Services Department. What data they have is mostly pre-1980s when the LDS Church stopped publishing statistics on their welfare services.

Despite these impediments, Mangum and Blumell have written a history with an impressive, almost daunting, array of chronological institutional detail. Chapters 1 through 4 cover the 19th century Mormon antipoverty efforts as Mormons searched for a permanent home where members from throughout the U.S. and Europe would settle. Their journey took them deep into the frontier as they moved from New York, to Ohio and Missouri, on to Illinois and Iowa, ending in the isolated territory of Utah. Mangum and Blumell argue that the exigencies of such a harsh migration combined with the theological injunction to create a society without poverty led Mormons to develop strong principles of aiding the needy combined with emphasis on self-reliance. No family was to be left behind because they lacked the wherewithal to follow the Mormon gathering. Every family that arrived was to be supported until they could become independent. Mangum and Blumell describe Mormon experiments with church ownership of members' assets. The church asked each family to transfer ownership of all that they had, each receiving stewardship over resources needed to sustain themselves. With these resources, hard-working families were to generate surpluses to support the incoming settlers and to build up the church and community infrastructure. Every able-bodied person was to work and it was the bishops' responsibility to provide building and farming jobs for those in their wards. With the help of the LDS Relief Society, the bishops were to provide basic aid to those unable to work.

Mangum and Blumell document that most members failed to relinquish their assets so that by the time they arrived in Utah, Mormons had returned to a policy of private ownership. They retained, however, a strong commitment to church planning. For example, land in Utah was divided into city and farm plots and allocated among the settlers by church leaders. No one was to subdivide or sell their assigned plots. Each settler was assigned particular jobs to assist in community development. At one point the church established a Central Board of Trade to plan economic development and regulate prices and output throughout the territory.

Chapters 5 through 7 cover the Mormon welfare experience during the first half of the 20th century. The authors argue that external pressures, beginning with the opening of the railroad and culminating with the use of federal force to end church-sanctioned polygamy, led to the end of Mormon isolation from the rest of the U.S. economy and to the end of church economic planning. But efforts by local bishops and the Relief Society to aid their needy continued, supported by tithing and fast contributions and by newly-formed local government agencies. By the beginning of the 1930s Mormon welfare policy was that immediate families had the primary obligation to help their needy, followed by the county government, and then the church. Nevertheless, during this time church aid to Mormons dwarfed other sources, leading Mangum and Blumell to conclude that the argument of some historians that Mormon antipoverty programs were in hiatus during the first quarter of this century is wrong.

The response of the Mormon church to the Great Depression forms the central part of the book. The Depression hit Utah particularly hard. Church responses were many and varied but ultimately not adequate to care for the burgeoning needs. When federal funds became available in the early 1930s the church welcomed the help and encouraged its needy members to apply for federal aid.

As federal aid turned increasingly from work relief projects to direct cash assistance, the church rethought its welfare policy. Its leaders worried that historically self-reliant Mormons were becoming dependent on government aid and adopting a "something for nothing" attitude. In 1936, they issued the Church Welfare Plan which reclaimed for the church primary responsibility for caring for Mormon needy. Mangum and Blumell contend that there was nothing radical in this plan, that it was essentially a return to the survival values of Mormon frontier days. The Plan enjoined members not to accept government cash assistance. To make up the shortfall the church decided to provide work on its own properties for its unemployed members and to more strongly encourage thrift and sharing. Mormon attempts to end their reliance on government aid in the 1930s were never completely successful but their efforts to tie relief to work were widely discussed throughout the country, and according to the authors have formed a strong foundation for contemporary Mormon welfare efforts.

Chapters 8 and 9 recount the modifications to the Church Welfare Plan through the last half of the twentieth century as Mormonism has spread across the world and as Mormons have come to see disaster relief to non-Mormons as one of their missions. Chapter 10 discusses the future of Mormon welfare services.

For historians this book recounts a wealth of historical detail. For economists the book is less satisfying. Mangum and Blumell concentrate on what happened more than on why it happened. They emphasize description of institutions, instead of analysis of incentive structures. Their lack of reportable data and comparison statistics makes this reader uncomfortable accepting some of their conclusions (for example, that Mormon welfare efforts have been larger than those of many other churches).

Claire Holton Hammond Wake Forest University