Adult Westerns

...they wanted to establish a theocracy, and they succeeded—better than any comparable sect—for as long as they could maintain their isolation...

...the systems of popular culture production and distribution have followed the tendency of industries toward gigantism, corporate rationalization, conglomeration, and oligopoly...

...Young came from the "Burned Over District" of upstate New York, an area saturated with revival meetings and Bible thumpers...

...The question of democracy was, in any event, as irrelevant to them as to the Catholic Church...

...Slotkin scants people's lived experience, expending the major part of his energy on the mythologizers' writings and thereby leading us on a tedious tour of second-rate novels, self-serving memoirs and pugnacious editorials...

...Undaunted, Slotkin at this late date resurrects the old arguments: "The artist in an industrial society, whether 'serious' or 'popular,' stands at a remove from his final audience...

...Here was a product undeniably "of the people," blacks, poor whites, the young...

...A revelation in 1833 forbade the use of tobacco, liquor, coffee, and tea...

...government, and ruling, as did his predecessor, by "revelation...

...and although they could hardly have been more hostile, it prevailed and they capitulated...

...The entertainment merchants were caught completely off-guard...

...Until his death in 1877, he remained president of the Church, beating back occasional dissidents, battling with the U.S...

...Following an excellent opening chapter that convincingly details the rigors of frontier life in upstate New York, Arrington is forced to treat the "miracles" and "revelations" surrounding the development there of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...

...A teetotaler and a vegetarian, he possessed a religious intensity no denomination could satisfy until he discovered Mormonism...

...When the Holy Spirit spoke to him, Young said, he could "write revelations as fast as [a] dog trots...

...These movies were more "serious" than De Mille's campy spectaculars yet, being neither fish nor fowl, also more boring...

...Brigham Young gains solidity once the Saints arrive in Utah and get down to the palpable business of constructing a civilization in the wilderness...

...The considerable achievements of that theocracy are recounted in voluminous detail in Arrington's study...

...Those observations are not new...

...In 1844, after Smith was murdered in an Illinois jail, Young became the Mormons' leader—by virtue, adherents said, of a "miracle...

...Such studied neutrality simply flattens out what true believ ers accept as supernatural interventions and most others will take for frontier enthusiasm...

...He prefers to let Young speak for himself: "Were you to ask me how it was that I embraced 'Mormonism,' I should answer, for the simple reason that it embraces all truth in heaven and on earth, in the earth, under the earth, and in hell, if there be any truth there...

...The thesis of his book is that the Frontier Myth provided the ideological justification for capitalist development in America...

...Perhaps, but somehow it seems more to the point to say they were trying to get elected...

...Slotkin's problem emerges at the very start of the book, where he does some fancy footwork to absolve himself from the necessity of examining wie es eigentlich gewesen, how it actually was...

...The money that was made on it went at first to small, maverick record companies, Chess and Atlantic, not to the corporate giants like RCA, Decca and Columbia...

...Some of these writers were given pause by the Edsel debacle, when Ford spent millions of dollars in an unsuccessful attempt to promote a product the public simply did not want...

...We have only that golden glow...

...To this day, the breakdown of the desert Zion is an ongoing story...

...An altogether different aspect of the West is presented in Richard Slotkin's massive The Fatal Environment: TheMyth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890(Atheneum, 636 pp., $37.50...

...But the belief in a parasitical popular culture was finally burst by the Rock-'n-Roll explosion...

...The concrete is precisely the missing element in Slotkin...

...Arringtondoes best dealing with the brute, concrete facts of pioneer existence...

...Four years later he was guiding over a thousand Saints across 1,500 miles of wilderness to Utah's Salt Lake Valley, markingoneofthegreatadventuresof American history...

...Arrington does no better with Smith's "revelations...

...He has been influenced by numerous high-powered thinkers, including Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, E.P Thompson, and Northrop Frye...

...Writers &Writing ADULT WESTERNS BY BARRY GEWEN There is a certain resemblance between the early sections of Leonard J. Arlington's Brigham Young: American Mcwes(Knopf, 522 pp., $24.95) and some of the old Hollywood Bible epics...

...Later, the Word came down that polygamy was a Biblical principle and therefore required of (male) Mormons...

...When some Mormons claimed to seethe murdered Smith standing in Young'-, spot, thereby putting God's seal of approval on the succession, Arrington's comment begins: "W hatever took place, miraculous or not...

...They produced it and they reveled in it...

...Slotkin has done a vast amount of reading, as his 31-page bibliography attests...

...Nonetheless, I suspect many readers will wonder, Where's the beef...

...His conversion cries out for sociological and psychological interpretation...

...In discussing, for example, William Henry Harrison and other Presidential candidates who created log-cabin origins for themselves, he observes: "These attempts to clothe military aristocrats in Frontier buckskin are motivated by a wish to reconcile the competing ideologies of entrepreneurial democracy, egalitarianism and paternalism...

...Eyewitness accounts of faith healing are repeated without amplification...

...Even in Young's lifetime, however, the railroad and the telegraph were signaling the elimination of the frontier and thus the eventual dissolution of their Utopia...

...A similar notion informs George Orwell's 1984...

...Young, a struggling, uneducated farmer and craftsman, was converted to Mormonism in 1831, at the age of 30, and was soon named one of 12 Apostles of the Church by its founder and prophet, Joseph Smith Jr...

...Lurking somewhere in the background as well is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his theories about the cultural hegemony of the ruling class...

...In the 1940s and '50s it was a common view of American intellectuals, often though not always residual Marxists, that the public was a passive mob, almost infinitely manipulable by the mass media and Madison Avenue...

...The issue is the same: how to present allegedly miraculous happenings to modern, literal-minded audiences without losing credibility...

...It linked national prosperity to agrarian expansion, translated social and economic conflicts into racial issues— with the Indian wars serving as a paradigm—and muted or sublimated urban divisions through concepts like the safety valve...

...Until it is completed, until Utah loses its distinct Mormon flavor and becomes just another state, America will continue to live with the ambiguous legacy of Brigham Young...

...None of these incidents is analyzed...

...In either case, the vividness of the experience is lost...

...They performed Shakespeare in the Salt Lake Theater and sang hymns in the Tabernacle choir, all under their president's watchful and domineering eye...

...While a commercial vulgarian like Cecil B. De Mille enjoyed parting the Red Sea for the paying customers, less crass filmmakers have generally tried to compromise, placing the Main Events offscreen or showing figures like Jesus bathed in a warm glow and letting audiences reach their own conclusions about whether the glow came from God or the lighting man...

...For the frontier was not merely a myth, it was also a reality, and Americans' ideas were surely shaped as much by what they encountered as by what they believed or wanted to believe...

...It has come to represent the mythology and ideology of those groups or classes whose political and economic concerns and cultural predilections have by and large dominated and directed the course of American social, economic and political development—entrepreneurs and corporate directors, salesmen and promoters, entertainers and purveyors of grand ideas...

...Arrington falls into a similar trap...

...although Arrington provides the basic facts, he refrains from explaining what it was in the new creed that met Young's spiritual needs and that of his entire family, all of whom became life-long Mormons...

...The Saints had their Truth...

...Having failed to establish any ground for his analyses, he floats away in abstraction...

...Maybe someone should take him to a Bruce Springsteen concert...

...In modern, fragmented societies, he argues, myths do not arise out of the group or its experience, as they do in traditional tribal cultures...

...public choice is really exercised within limits that are set by the imperatives of particular kinds of media-business...

...Arrington, a respected historianof the American West and himself a Mormon, proceeds cautiously with all this, trying to steer a middle course between piety and rationalism...

...Self-sufficiency was the goal, and to avoid contact with the gentiles the Mormons built their temple, started a university, printed their own money, even imported mulberry trees and silk worms so that they could spin their own silk...

...Young's authoritarianism was no less distasteful to his gentile contemporaries than to modern readers, yet the Mormons could scarcely have accomplished what they did in so short a time had they not created a highly centralized community for themselves...

...In Ohio, the Prophet and Oliver Cowdery, his assistant President, reported meeting with Moses and Elijah...

...Instead, they are fabricated by particular interests seeking to foster or impose their ideology: "If we choose to study national popular culture, we should see it not as a national folklore but as the myth medium of the victorious party in an extended historical struggle...