Modernity afoot

In 1840, Apostle Brigham Young landed in Liverpool to begin a spectacularly successful Mormon mission. The years following would witness tens of thousands flock to the Church from the British Isles and then travel on to join their fellow Latter-Day Saints in the new Zion – God’s place for his people in North America.

Brigham preached, baptized, and oversaw church publications; drank tea and the occasional glass of wine; visited the Tower of London; and strolled through cathedrals, palaces, and galleries. He did so among a people undergoing dramatic socioeconomic changes.

The Industrial Revolution was afoot in Brigham’s England, uprooting the landscape like a cyclone from which one never recovers, throwing those in its path out of their place. It would mark the beginning of a fresh chapter in world history. Old ways would be left behind as new modes of production touched every aspect of British life, from social classes and the political system to fashion, leisure, and the arts. The Revolution would then sail out from the island to remake communities on distant shores as the mighty British navy shrank the globe and its superior goods flooded foreign markets, leaving a radically new world in its wake.

The consequences were nothing short of astonishing.

Through the mechanization of work, humanity would witness a dramatic rise in productivity, and thus of living standards, like never in history.

And it all coincided with the birth and burgeoning of the Mormon Church; the very public innovations in material life occurring simultaneously with the stirrings of the Holy Spirit in the hidden consciousness of a people waking up to who they might become and gathering together as a community.

While Joseph Smith was undergoing the private trial of a painful childhood surgery, the British were producing the first tractor (the “barn engine”) and canned foods - the heroic and the practical; the mythic and mundane, juxtaposed in the stream of events that we call history.

The year Joseph received his first vision and began quietly pondering what it all meant, the Scottish engineer John McAdams was revolutionizing road construction, which would greatly facilitate the future spread of the restored gospel in what would become a very missionary church.

As Joseph received further divine visitations and the golden plates, Michael Faraday was converting electrical energy into mechanical energy.

The decade which saw the publication of the Book of Mormon; the establishment of the Church; the baptisms of Brigham and Heber C. Kimball; the trials of the Saints in Ohio and Missouri; the creation of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; and the building of the first temple in Kirtland, was also one in which the first electric generators and the Hussey and McCormick reapers were invented, along with the telegraph and photograph, which would help preserve our past, including the only known daguerreotype of Joseph.

This first wave of the Industrial Revolution led to subsequent waves, all of which were put on display in various world fairs.

The 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, for example, boasted the typical sights of ages past – paintings and sculptures by European artists as well as diamonds from India and other world treasures. It was designed, however, to show the superiority of British manufacturing in a decisively new age. As a contemporary pamphlet put it:

The next [section]...will be that of machinery of all kinds, illustrative of the agents brought to bear upon the products of nature, in order to bring them in to a manufactured state…[E]very one may be able to see how cloth is made for his clothes, leather for boots, linen for shirts, silk for gowns, ribbons, and handkerchiefs; how lace is made; how a pin and needle, a button, a knife, a sheet of paper, a ball of thread, a nail, a screw, a pair of stockings are made, how a carpet is woven... In addition to this, the machinery will be exhibited in motion…

From the building that housed the exhibitions to the structures and processes within, the fair was a scientific and technological wonder. The Crystal Palace represented a spectacular architectural and engineering feat - an enormous, cathedral-like edifice transparent to the heavens, in which glass walls, ceilings, galleries, and archways rose and joined the limitless sky, all fused with light. As advertised, spectators who entered could watch the entire process of spinning raw cotton into finished cloth and marvel at the many other magically moving machines that made a seemingly endless supply of goods at a speed never imagined by an artisan of a previous age.

And as the world gazed on these new architectural and mechanical wonders, Brigham, now a prophet and leader of his persecuted people, was also busy building.

He planned cities for the Saints, who had been forced to flee west, and founded far-flung yet interconnected communities across a wide swath of rugged America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. By the time New York created its own version of a crystal palace for the 1853 fair, which introduced the elevator, Brigham was governing the Utah Territory – his new Zion – also to be on display as a beacon to a spiritually backward humanity in need of another type of revolution; another type of elevation. The Bessemer process, which lowered the cost of making steel, coincided with the Mormon Reformation (a time of internal spiritual renewal), which Brigham initiated to steel the Saints.

Other world fairs similarly astounded the continuous stream of visitors that flocked to them before the century’s end; onlookers who stood awestruck, delighted, and sometimes terrified at what the human mind had accomplished – not just harnessing nature, but transforming and animating it; giving it a seeming intelligence to create while simultaneously directing it to lift, haul, cut, and bind as a beast of burden, relieving human labor from much of the muscle and sweat.

Likewise, the novelties of Mormon life both captivated converts while they alarmed much of the public. This was thus the beginning of a whole new era in both material production and American religious life.

The two would not long remain within their original geographical boundaries nor as separate and isolated phenomenon.

On the one hand, it was an amazing time to be alive. Whereas some have speculated as to whether Europe was more technologically advanced in the year 1200 CE than it had been in the year 200 BCE,[1] the same could not be said of the nineteenth century compared with any previous. Economic growth went from 0.12 percent per year – century after century (between the years 1000 and 1500) – to rates that would begin climbing fast in the nineteenth century (around 1 percent per year) and then even faster (3-4 percent in the post-WWII West and as high as 8-9 percent in some East Asian economies).[2]

It would mean the difference between communities devoted to subsistence farming, sprinkled with enough surplus to fight a war or build a cathedral, to average families living in ranch-style homes, watching the latest space probe or playing computer games before jumping in the car to pick someone up from the airport.

While previously the European peasant’s life had remained basically the same, and trade had represented but a trickle of luxury goods for the wealthy, now huge shipments of cotton traveled the globe, sailing from India in the East and the great American slave plantations in the West to Britain, which stood at the center of a world-wide system of production. And textiles for average folks would travel back in return ships that reached the colonies and beyond.

As the revolution continued, the worker would eventually live at a level that the royalty of days’ past could not have imagined, while everything from ties and toys to today’s semiconductors, financial statements, and X-rays crisscrossed the ocean and flew up and down continents.

And so, these were astonishing times – novel, and highly significant in both their own day as well as ours. They not only transformed the world, but did so for the better, at least when viewed from the vantage point of technological development, production levels, and general standards of material life in the aggregate.

They were not without a dark side, however, one that touched the Saints deeply. We’ll pick up this historical thread down the line as the story of the House of Israel continues to intertwine with both the grandeur and grotesque of modern material life. Stay tuned.

“Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.”

-Sinclair Lewis

Did you know?

Before he became an apostle, N. Eldon Tanner had a political career in Canada. He belonged to the Social Credit Party, which was founded on Christian social conservatism and a radical monetary policy that would place banking under government control and make credit more widely available. Like Andrew Yang today (and other proponents of a universal basic income), Tanner’s party understood the threat to families as technology replaced labor. It argued that citizens should receive a dividend from machine production, just as do shareholders.

What’s next?

Before we pick up the story of the House of Israel again, we’ll consider two strange aspects of our world. They explain many of the economic pathologies that we suffer today, and they were uniquely corrected by the Mormon Restoration (which this website seeks to bring to the fore). We’ll address the first in post #8.

But first

Check out the follow up post to this one on our rapidly changing world. It may surprise you. The transformations taking place all around us are happening so fast, and with such dramatic consequences, that they have been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. If we don’t understand what’s going on, we can’t respond appropriately (and there’s a lot on the line). Post #7a helps get us up to speed with these new developments. As always, it comes accompanied by questions for individual reflection, journaling, and/or group study.

[1] Robert L. Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Making of Economic Society, 12th ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008) 61.

[2] Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: A User’s Guide (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014) 40, 43, 182.

- M. B., January 2021

7. Intertwining Threads: The Industrial Revolution and the Mormon Restoration (The story of the House of Israel - 2)