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Zion's
Rowdies
By Davis Bitton
Attending high school graduations,
I see exuberant young people, with their different personalities.
A few feel the need to assert their individuality through dress,
hair style, jewelry, and the like, externals which tell us more
than nothing but hardly everything about a person. Most present
themselves in the best way they can and, I gather, are just glad
to have high school behind them. Above all, I see boundless energy
and expectation.
Like everyone else, I also see young
people at their jobs, in the malls, and on the streets. There
are great differences between them. All this provokes some historical
reflection and comparison.
I’m afraid it is not true that all
Latter-day Saints of the pioneer era were models of piety and
proper deportment. Indeed, from the beginning of the restoration,
some children and youth went their own way, rejecting the counsel
of their elders. Not long after the pioneers reached the Salt
Lake Valley
and throughout the remainder of the century, youthful rebels against
the norms of church and society were often called "rowdies."
Concerned about "the low state
of moral and religious [standards] existing
among the youths of the church," Bishop Edward Hunter urged
ward teachers to "make special enquiry of parents in regard
to the conduct of their children." Too many of them, he said,
were "unruly youngsters." The year was 1851.
In 1861, Brigham Young spoke to a
group of bishops in favor of the construction of recreation halls.
Without them, he said, many youths "would otherwise meet
in small groups and indulge in low, groveling rowdyism."
Just a few years later, the custodian of the Tabernacle complained
of "indecent words being written on the wall and the backs
of the seats being very much cut up."
In 1870, Martin Lenzi saw some teenagers
tearing up footbridges and ripping mailboxes from the fronts of
houses. Three years later, the newspaper deplored "the writings
of the most disgusting and obscene words and sentences on the
walls of public buildings and other places."
In 1880, a cluster of boys would
hang around many corners of the city, scuffling, shouting obscenities,
intimidating peaceful citizens. Often they carried firearms.
Even outside Temple
Square they would gather at the gate at the end of meetings and
"ogle, chew, smoke, spit tobacco juice, swear, and make vulgar
remarks about ladies as they pass." I am not aware that anyone
at the time defended this boorishness under the noble banner "freedom
of speech."
Examples could be multiplied. No
year passed without incidents. Disrespect and lack of consideration
were bad enough. Disturbing the peace, defacing public property,
and willful destruction were against the law. I do not know how
the experience among the Mormons differed, if at all, from other
places in America and Europe, but such
behavior was clearly a disappointment to those who expected a
community of Saints to approximate the scriptural standards.
Of what value is this kind of information,
which is seldom included in published histories and is understandably
not standard fare in seminary or Sunday School
classes? The following ideas are worth pondering:
1. All young people were never accurately
portrayed as rowdies. Just as it is wrong to assume that everyone
was without spot or blemish, so it is unfair to defame any large
group because of the misbehavior of a few. President Gordon B.
Hinckley, who is certainly aware of the relentless temptations
that beset people of all ages, repeatedly praises the youth of
today as the finest ever. This refreshing glass-half-full-rather-than-half-empty
evaluation could also have been made about the teenagers of the
1860s or the 1880s.
2. Some of the rowdies, continuing
on their path of flouting community standards, stand as object
lessons of the price paid for selfish indulgence, poorly chosen
friends, and habits that enslave. It is not only good examples
that we learn from.
3. Some rowdies turned their lives
around to become successful, contributing members of society.
Influenced by different friends, an employer, another caring adult,
a sweetheart or spouse, they managed to change their attitude
and their behavior. They remind us that labels, however necessary
to our thinking, should be used sparingly, cautiously, and, most
importantly, tentatively. Some who were once rowdies allow all
of us who err to rejoice in the conclusion, "I think there
may be hope for me."
4. Important institutional developments
of the late nineteenth century are best understood against the
backdrop of youthful idleness and criminality. An organization
for children, the Primary, formed in 1878 in Farmington
quickly multiplied until meetings were held across the territory
for the instruction of children. A retrenchment organization started
among the daughters of Brigham Young in 1869 was soon extended
to wards throughout the Church.
In 1875, the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement
Association was organized, bringing under a single umbrella the
scattered groups already in existence. As the two associations
developed along parallel lines and held conjoint meetings, courses
of study were organized, talents fostered, and themes expressing
commitment to the gospel were repeated by thousands of young people
each week.
These auxiliary organizations, along
with Relief Society for adult women, accomplished several purposes.
But looming behind the creative, inspired organizational response
was the perceived problem of wayward youth without goals and without
direction.
In the early 1870s, a teenage lad
on a mining crew followed the lead of the other men in smoking,
drinking, swearing, and gambling. Then he became apprentice to
a blacksmith in Centerville but continued to get in trouble of
different kinds. Eventually he turned his life around, thanks
in large measure to participation in a young men’s club that later
became the local Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association. The
young man was Brigham Henry Roberts
We are not surprised that the vigorous
organized effort to combat rowdyism failed to achieve one hundred
percent success. In 1898, apostle Brigham
Young, Jr., attending a meeting, noticed a group of boys on the
benches in the back of the hall and asked the presiding officer
who they were. "Why, those are our hoodlums. We work with
them the best we can." The officer went on to explain that
the parents seemed indifferent and did not discipline their children.
Needless to say, such disorderly
youth continued throughout the hundred years of the twentieth
century and now into the twenty-first. What city, state, or country
has been immune from their disruptive activities? Their percentages
may have gone up and down, they may have been called by different
names, such as juvenile delinquents, their modes of self-destruction
may have multiplied. In any case, they seem to be a permanent
feature of our modern society.
How are values instilled and perpetuated?
What is the learning or acculturation curve that is deemed acceptable?
Where does one person’s right end and another’s begin? Every human
society has faced such questions.
We do not praise antisocial behavior
or, like the popular news media, focus on it to the exclusion
of all those people who work hard and follow the rules. But if
we hope to expand our human self-knowledge through the study of
history, we must not bleep out the rowdies.
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