The Local Politics of Vice and Virtue | Jeffrey Nichols, Prostitution, Polygamy and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918

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One of the most intriguing ironies of life in Salt Lake City during the nineteenth century was the clash of the Mormons who were morally outraged to see the advent of prostitution in their valley and the gentile residents who considered the practice of polygamy equally reprehensible. The struggle between these two groups to smooth out their different ideologies and eventually to band together around the turn of the century to try to rid Salt Lake City of one of its most egregious and lucrative vices is the crux of Jeffery Nichols’s intricately re searched and meticulously documented historical study. 

Prostitution, Polygamy and Power delves thoroughly and unapologetically into the seamier areas of Salt Lake history during the decades when conservative Mormon dominance gave way to the bawdier, earthier lifestyles of the gentile merchants, railroad workers, and miners who settled in the valley in the late 1860s and 1870s and the women who followed and pandered to their baser needs. 

Nichols, an assistant professor of history at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, shows a competent acquaintance with Latter-day Saint history and values going back to the Nauvoo period, as well as an intimate knowledge of the characters and events of the first 70 years of the Utah experience for Mormons and non-Mormons alike. His narrative is rich with anecdotes about the most infamous prostitutes in Salt Lake City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes with genuine regret the lack of journals and other personal documents to provide more details about the daily lives and emotions of the women who for one reason or another were driven to sell sex in the bastion of Mormonism. 

Nichols discusses the harsh realities of women’s situation in Salt Lake City. Those who were not safely ensconced in either a monogamous or polygamous marriage had frighteningly few options for earning their own living. “The evidence from Salt Lake City supports financial necessity, sometimes to the point of crisis, as the leading reason some women resorted to selling sex,” the author states. “Women’s stories depict their desperate circumstances as they struggled to keep themselves or their families afloat” (p. 50). 

The Mormons’ condemnation of prostitution had originated with Joseph Smith, who denounced and suppressed brothels in Nauvoo. LDS members maintained that such phenomena were among the “corruptions of Babylon that the Saints sought to es cape by moving to the Salt Lake Val ley” (p. 25). As gentiles settled in the valley and faced protest and condemnation from Mormons over the rise of prostitution, they countered by calling Mormon males with plural wives “lustful Turks” with harems (p. 24) and labeling polygamy as an un-American and un-Christian practice that merely “gratified male lust—the same deadly sin that fueled prostitution” (p. 14). 

Mormons, who saw the anti-polygamy crusade as a continuation of persecution that the church had suffered for decades, shot back that polygamy was divinely sanctioned by God, and several prominent women who were involved in polygamous marriages—including Eliza R. Snow, Emmeline B. Wells, and Sarah Kim ball—vehemently defended their situation. The gentile-owned Salt Lake Tribune persisted in citing the similarities between the two practices. And so it went for decades, from the 1860s through the end of the century. 

Amid the controversy, Mormons turned their heads from the unspeakable fact that some of their own men were using the services of prostitutes. Nichols’s narrative turns gossipy as he reveals how the monogamously married Frank J. Cannon, half-brother of LDS Apostle Abraham H. Cannon, frequented the brothel of well-known madam Kate Flint in the 1880s. Embarrassed church leaders protected him from scandal and even paid off his debt to the house of ill fame (p. 65). 

The polygamy-prostitution tension began to fade into the background after the U.S. Congress passed the Edmunds Act, which dealt a blow to plural marriage, forcing male polygamists (including LDS president John Taylor) underground. Federal pressure eventually spurred President Wilford Woodruff to issue the Manifesto in 1890 and President Joseph R Smith to reinforce the end to polygamy with the Second Manifesto of 1904. 

Meanwhile, prostitution had gained such a toehold in Salt Lake City that numerous elegant brothels had sprung up in the downtown area, particularly Block 57 (running east-west from State Street to Main between 200 and 300 South [map, p. 53]). Their opulence testified to the lucrative profits they generated (p. 67). Nichols notes, however, that many of Salt Lake City’s prostitutes were black or Asian, and most were poor. The savvy madams pocketed the bulk of the income. 

The last third of the book de scribes the early twentieth-century cooperative efforts by Salt Lakers to eradicate prostitution from the city. Nichols calls the Manifesto the starting point of the “Americanization of Salt Lake City” (p. 214). With the polygamy issue quickly fading into the background, Mormons and gentiles at last felt a spirit of cooperation and united in this common cause. By this time, prostitution had been regulated and all but made legal by containment in Block 64, a large central district between 100 and 200 South and 400 and 500 West that had come to be known as the Stockade. 

Nichols’s text includes several pages of black and white photos of various madams in the city as well as the journalists, policemen, and politicians who were their protectors or nemeses. There are also photos and maps showing the locations of the most infamous houses of ill repute. The narrative is generously laced with vignettes about the lives of the madams and the largely unsuccessful efforts to prosecute and jail them for any length of time. One of the most intriguing characters was Dora Topham, who was sentenced to 18 years of hard labor when the notorious Stockade was finally shut down in 1909. Topham won her appeal in 1912 and left Salt Lake, only to reopen her business in Ogden, and later in San Francisco. 

Protestant women in such organizations as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the YWCA, who earlier had established “rescue homes” for polygamous wives, now banded with Mormon women (with the approval of President Joseph F. Smith) to create the Women’s Home Association of Salt Lake City. Their goal was to reform prostitutes by attempting to instill domestic values in them, so they might yet marry respectable men. These homes had limited success, but the anti-prostitution alliance generated by the women’s efforts did drive prostitution in Salt Lake City into a more illegal underground than it ever had existed in before. Unfortunately, improvements in genuine economic opportunities for women were very slow in coming, thus “guaranteeing that there would always be women desperate enough to sell sex” (p. 216). 

Nichols concludes with the observation that although the rhetorical link between prostitution and polygamy eventually withered in Utah, neither practice has completely disappeared from the state. His epilogue chapter provides updates on more recent cases of Utah polygamy (such as the 2002 jailing of Tom Green, husband of five wives) and facts about the ongoing prostitution problem in contemporary Salt Lake City. 

In conclusion, Nichols has provided a fresh, revealing overview of two topics in Salt Lake City’s history that often have been considered, if not taboo, then generally too delicate for close, honest inspection. His study treats polygamy and prostitution issues with honesty, sensitivity, and a professional historian’s eye for detail and documentation. For anyone interested in either women’s issues or the lesser-known realities of Salt Lake City’s early growing pains, this book is a fascinating read. 

Prostitution, Polygamy and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918, by Jeffrey Nichols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 247 pp.