The Mormons' War on Poverty: A History of LDS Welfare, 1830-1990.

• Author: Hammond, Claire Holton

An important tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is a call to work towards the building of an ideal society, one in which there will be no poor. From their earliest beginnings in the 1830s Mormons have taken this call seriously and have worked to alleviate the plight of poor Mormons. The Mormons' War on Poverty is the history of this continuing straggle.

Garth Mangum, of the University of Utah, is an economist with considerable experience with federal antipoverty programs. Bruce Blumell was Senior Historical Associate for the LDS Church from 1973-1979, and this book draws on some of his research during that period. Both are committed Mormons who regret their church's decision to restrict their (and other researchers') access to church archives and their ability to cite their previous research performed for the Church Historical Department and the Church Welfare Services Department. What data they have is mostly pre-1980s when the LDS Church stopped publishing statistics on their welfare services.

Despite these impediments, Mangum and Blumell have written a history with an impressive, almost daunting, array of chronological institutional detail. Chapters 1 through 4 cover the 19th century Mormon antipoverty efforts as Mormons searched for a permanent home where members from throughout the U.S. and Europe would settle. Their journey took them deep into the frontier as they moved from New York, to Ohio and Missouri, on to Illinois and Iowa, ending in the isolated territory of Utah. Mangum and Blumell argue that the exigencies of such a harsh migration combined with the theological injunction to create a society without poverty led Mormons to develop strong principles of aiding the needy combined with emphasis on self-reliance. No family was to be left behind because they lacked the wherewithal to follow the Mormon gathering. Every family that arrived was to be supported until they could become independent. Mangum and Blumell describe Mormon experiments with church ownership of members' assets. The church asked each family to transfer ownership of all that they had, each receiving stewardship over resources needed to sustain themselves. With these resources, hard-working families were to generate surpluses to support the incoming settlers and to build up the church and community infrastructure. Every able-bodied person was to work and it was the bishops' responsibility to provide building and farming jobs for those in...