Religion, politics, and sugar : the Mormon Church, the federal government, and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1907-1921
Matthew C. Godfrey (Author)
"One famous target of Progressive Era attempts to rein in monopolistic big business was the eastern Sugar Trust. Less known is how federal regulators also tried to break monopoly control over beet sugar in the West by going after the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, a business supported and controlled by the Latter-day Saints church and run by Mormon authorities." "As sugar beet agriculture boomed, the Mormon church's involvement led directly to monopolistic practices by the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company and to federal investigations. Church leaders encouraged members, a majority population in much of the intermountain West, to patronize the company exclusively, as suppliers and consumers. As early as 1890, Mormon church president Wilford Woodruff had called missionaries to raise money for the fledgling company and asserted divine inspiration for church support." "Utah-Idaho bridged the cooperative, theocratic, self-sufficient economic model of nineteenth-century Mormonism and the integration of the Mormon West into the national market economy. Religion, Politics, and Sugar shows, through the example of an important western business, how national commercial, political, and legal forces in the early twentieth century came west and, more specifically, how they affected the important role the Mormon church played in economic affairs in the intermountain West."--BOOK JACKET
Print Book, English, c2007
Utah State University Press, Logan, Utah, c2007
History
226 pages : illustrations, map ; 23 cm
9780874216585, 0874216583
74988178
Introduction
The establishment of the sugar industry in Utah and Idaho, 1851-1907
Before the Hardwick Committee of the House of Representatives
National sugar policies and the First World War
Political and legal troubles in the aftermath of the First World War
Restraint of trade : Federal Trade Commission v. Utah-Idaho Sugar
Conclusion