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Tag Archives: W. Paul Reeve

We recommend – Black, White and Mormon

10 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by rarebooks in Recommended Exhibition

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Tags

J. Willard Marriott Library, Mormon, Oxford University Press, political cartoons, polygamy, rare books, slavery, The University of Utah, W. Paul Reeve

Black, White and Mormon
Tuesday, September 8 – Thursday, October 29
J. Willard Marriott Library, Level 1, The University of Utah

From W. Paul Reeve’s Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (Oxford University Press, 2015), illustrations from political cartoons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries highlighting two themes: polygamy as the racial corruption of the white family and polygamy as slavery.

Dr. Reeve’s thesis is that outsiders projected their own fears of race mixing onto the Mormons. In their minds, polygamy was not merely destroying the traditional family, it was destroying the white race.

Several illustrations used by Dr. Reeve come from the Rare Books holdings.


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We recommend – Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by rarebooks in Recommended Reading

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citizenship, history, Mitt Romney, Mormon, Mormonism, Mormons, New York, Oxford University Press, polygamy, Protestant, race, racial, religion, The University of Utah, United States, W. Paul Reeve


Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness
W. Paul Reeve
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015

The Protestant white majority in nineteenth-century United States was convinced that Mormonism represented a racial – not merely religious – departure from the mainstream and they spent considerable effort attempting to deny Mormon whiteness. Being white equaled access to political, social, and economic power, all aspects of citizenship in which outsiders sought to limit or prevent Mormon participation. At least a part of those efforts came through persistent attacks on the collective Mormon body, ways in which outsiders suggested that Mormons were physically different, racially more similar to marginalized groups than they were white. Medical doctors went so far as to suggest that Mormon polygamy was spawning a new race. Mormons responded with aspirations toward whiteness. It was a back and forth struggle between what outsiders imagined and what Mormons believed. Mormons ultimately emerged triumphant, but not unscathed. A portion of the cost of their struggle came at the expense of their own black converts. Mormon leaders moved away from universalistic ideals toward segregated priesthood and temples, policies held firmly in place by the early twentieth century. So successful were they at claiming whiteness for themselves, that by the time Mormon Mitt Romney sought the Presidency in 2012, he was labelled “The whitest white man to run for office in recent memory.” Mormons once again found themselves on the wrong side of white.

W. Paul Reeve is Associate Professor, History, The University of Utah.

BX8611-R44-2015-cover

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