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Plowshares & Perfume. As commander of temporal as well as spiritual affairs, kindly old President George Smith presides over an enormous going concern. The church, as owner of the big and prosperous Z.C.M.I. (Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution), Salt Lake City's first department store, deals in everything from plowshares to perfume. It owns Salt Lake City's top-rung Hotel Utah and its next-best Temple Square Hotel. It owns one of the city's daily newspapers, the Deseret News, and its biggest transmitter, radio station KSL. The church's Utah Idaho-Sugar Co. operates eight refineries; it owns 14,000 acres of land, buys the sugar-beet crops of private farmers in Utah, Idaho, Washington, Montana and
South Dakota. The church is the possessor of great parcels of urban real estate and, as one of the West's prime financial institutions, owns the Utah State National Bank, Zion's Savings Bank & Trust Co. and the Beneficial Life Insurance Co.
Green Valleys. In 100 years the Mormons have won their war with wastes of sagebrush, sun-parched alkali flats and barren mountains. Their desert has indeed blossomed like the rose. Orchards, dairies and sugar-beet fields in green Utah valleys are a tribute to their skill at irrigation, and great stands of wheat prove the worth of their dry farming. Utah's 555,000 cattle and 1,646,000 sheep stem mostly from Mormon herds. Mormons built roads, farms, towns and temples across the West.
In 100 years they increased from 20,000 to a million people. The million composes one of the most tightly organized and smoothly functioning organizations on earth. The church has no clergy in the usual sense, but a vast pyramid of lay orders to which every male is expected to belong and to which a full 250,000 do. Boys become deacons and begin taking part in religious services when they are twelve. As they grow older they may become, successively, teachers, priests, elders, members of a Council of Seventy, and high priests. Women only "share in their husbands' priesthood," although they are duty-bound to take a vigorous part in subsidiary church work.
There are four Mormon temples in Utah, others in Hawaii, in Alberta (Canada), Arizona and Idaho; there are Mormon congregations in every state in the Union. There are Mormons overseas.
This tremendously active and democratic religious cooperative is ruled by an autocratic hierarchy: a Council of Twelve Apostles, two counselors in presidency and, at its apex, the president, George Albert Smith.
Triumph. To the Latter-day Saints, who once expected the nations of the earth to rally unto them, and who are still fond of calling themselves "a peculiar people," these tangible triumphs constitute only a partial fulfillment of destiny. But, considered coldly, they seem almost incredible.
Mormonism sprang from the mind of Joseph Smith, who was born in Vermont in 1805, grew up on a Manchester, N.Y. farm, and hated to plow. He was handsome, tall, wavy-haired, had long eyelashes and a faint but unmistakable resemblance to Comic Danny Kaye. He had a fecund imagination and an instinctive sense of drama and command. At 18 he professed to be able to look into a "peep stone" and find hidden gold. He found none.