After the exodus to the Great Basin and the establishment of the briefly independent state of Deseret, Young tirelessly preached the impossibility of coexistence between the communitarian values of Zion and the greed-driven capitalism of Babylon (the United States). Indeed, even before the Saints’ wagons had reached Salt Lake City he had repulsed mutineers who wanted to keep going to the fat valleys and gold fields of California, straight into the open maw of Mammon.
The driving of the Golden Spike in 1869, however, flooded Utah with cheap Eastern goods as well as outlaws, mineral prospectors and Gentile immigrants. A few years later the Crash of 1873 demonstrated that Utah was no longer insulated from what Young denounced as “the oppression of monied monopolies.”
“The sooty misery of working-class England,” Turner explains, “had left Young with a lingering belief that capitalism could produce an existence worse than chattel slavery.” Convinced that the Kingdom of Saints was now threatened with moral and economic absorption into a society run by robber barons and stock jobbers, Young launched a Mormon Cultural Revolution: the United Order of Enoch.
Under the Order, “the Latter-Day Saints would consecrate their property and resources to common management, divide labor according to specialized ability, and eliminate disparities of wealth.” Young, although old, fat and in declining health, spent most of 1874 and 1875 passionately — and sometimes threateningly — shepherding his people into lives of deeper generosity and unity. The original template was Brigham City, but some of the poorer frontier Mormons “attempted to fully live out Young’s communitarian vision.”
The most complete embodiment was Orderville, east of Zion National Park, where private property had been abolished, members ate in a common hall, and there was no trade with the Gentile world. Turner quotes Wallace Stegner’s estimation of Orderville as a “communism of goods, labor, religion, and recreation such as the world has seen only in a few places and for very short times.”
Although Orderville, Brigham City and a handful of other Mormon kibbutzim survived through the 1880s, the United Order encountered intractable resistance from an emerging upper class of Saints, some of them in lucrative business partnerships with Gentiles. A mining boom, meanwhile, diverted the loyalties of many working-class Mormons. Despite Young’s ceaseless campaigning, public enthusiasm for the United Order died within a few years.
This was the major political and spiritual defeat of Young’s reign. At the dedication of a new temple in St. George, the same southern Utah town where he had launched the United Order only three years earlier, the LDS president gave a fierce speech against the corruption of the Mormon soul by capitalism, railroads, and mines. He warned his people that they would “go to Hell” unless they repented materialism and greed. For emphasis, he pounded the pulpit with his gnarled hickory cane. Six months later, in August 1877, he died.