Mormon History Association conference notes Mormon relations with tourists

ST. GEORGE — Tourism in Utah has had a complicated and ambiguous relationship to Mormonism from the time the state was settled, said Susan Sessions Rugh, the Friday luncheon speaker at the annual conference of the Mormon History Association.

She addressed more than 700 professional and amateur historians who have convened in St. George for the three-day event that ended Saturday.

"Visitors to Brigham Young's Salt Lake City satirized Utah's 'peculiar people' as frontier blackguards and homely polygamous wives," observed Rugh, a professor of history at BYU.

In 1947, Utah observed its centennial by emphasizing pioneer history, Rugh said. But with the advent of "industrial tourism" in the post-World War II period, "Utah officials attempted to brand the state like any product," she noted.

"They tried various slogans that skirted the subject of religion," she said, such as "Utah, the friendly state," "Utah, land of color" and "Utah, the unique."

"Finally," Rugh said, "with 'Ski Utah' in 1960, Jim Cannon (Utah Publicity Council director) created a successful brand that carefully concealed religion under a cosmopolitan wrapper of skiing and apres-ski nightlife."

In the 1980s, Moab emerged as a mountain-biking capital, and St. George became a retirement community, she said, noting that Delicate Arch from Utah's red-rock country was designated the symbol of the state centennial in 1996.

Thus, Mormon culture and history were deliberately ignored in post-war state branding.

Rugh cited historian Hal Rothman's phrase "the devil's bargain," which refers to the effort by corporate interests in the West — assisted by locals — to promote economic growth in a way that unwittingly destroys local culture.

"I'm arguing that states were also part of this, not just corporations, but the idea of 'the devil's bargain' is a powerful interpretive trope," Rugh said.

She applied it to Utah in analyzing "this messy mix of church and state, religion and business, God and mammon."

Rugh compared the views of three tourists to Utah: Frenchman Albert Tissandier, who came in 1885; Vermont novelist Zephine Humphrey in 1934; and photographers Dorothea Lang and Ansel Adams in the early 1950s.

How does the traveler observe the landscape, and how does the traveler see the Mormons were two questions Rugh posed.