[This paper had originally been solicited for inclusion a book length essay collection on the works of Godfather-of-LDS-Literature Nephi Anderson, which was initially intended to come out on or near the centennial of Nephi Anderson’s death, 2023. It is has since been trapped in–what the movie industry would call–developmental hell. If and/or when this collection finally comes out, I will replace this text with the book announcement itself and link for where it can be purchased. But in the meantime, just to ensure that this paper doesn’t go to waste, I will post it here.]
The popular quotation “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, has been variously attributed to Mark Fisher, Frederick Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. As Fisher explains in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, there persists in our post-Cold War world this “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher). Likewise Žižek, in a 2005 documentary on the eponymous philosopher, contrasts the popularity of world-destroying Hollywood disaster films (e.g. Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddon, Deep Impact,etc.) against the curious dearth of films that destroy our current economic systems; hence his own recitation of “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Žižek). Margaret Thatcher had famously said “There is no alternative” to a free-market economy clear back in 1980; yet even as countless critics have disagreed with her specific policy initiatives, few have disagreed with the statement’s underlying sentiment. Even fewer have tried to imagine something different.
We can also observe these limits on our imaginations when we catalogue the absolutely massive roster of futuristic dystopias in our popular fiction and cinema over the past century—We (1924),Brave New World (1932), Anthem (1938), 1984 (1949), I Am Legend (1954), Planet of the Apes (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Silent Runnings (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Logan’s Run (1976), Judge Dredd (1977), The Stand (1978),Mad Max (1979), Escape From New York (1981),Blade Runner (1982), Snowpiercer (1982),The Terminator (1984), Brazil (1985), Robocop (1987), Akira (1988), Tank Girl (1988),Battle Angel Alita (1990), The Giver (1993), Demolition Man (1993), The Matrix (1999), A.I. (2001), Equilibrium (2002), The Road (2006), The Hunger Games (2008), The Maze Runner (2009), Divergent (2011), Ready Player One (2011), Elysium (2013), The Purge (2013), The 100 (2014), I Am Mother (2019), The Last of Us (2023), and innumerable more—and contrast it with the utter poverty of genuine utopias. Ursula K. LeGuin attempted to describe an idealized society in her award-winning 1973 short-story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” though she spends the majority of it just describing her own difficulties with imagining a genuine utopia: “I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you” (LeGuin). Yet ultimately she fails to pull the trigger on an unqualifiedly utopic society as well, instead electing to describe a dark, awful secret of child-abuse as the rotten foundation to all of Omelas’s joys. There is also, notably, the Star Trek universe, which presents the United Federation of Planets as a sincerely idealized society, though that franchise has been notoriously hazy on the details of how their moneyless economy actually functions; it is also a canonically post-apocalyptic universe, since the utopic Federation only emerges after a thermonuclear World War III. Such has been typical of almost all our futuristic fiction, which tends to either: a) present a despairing vision of an oppressed world wherein the worst excesses of capitalism have run unchecked (e.g. Blade Runner, Robocop, Soylent Green, The Hunger Games); b) present a communist-style dictatorship as the only other—and far worse—alternative to our current system (e.g. 1984, Anthem, THX 1138); c) simply present human civilization in irrecuperable collapse (e.g. Mad Max, The Road, Planet of the Apes, A.I.); or d) present a seemingly perfect utopia as inevitably tainted by a dark and vicious underbelly (e.g. The Giver, Logan’s Run, Brave New World, and of course “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”). What they all share in common is a pessimistic sense of inevitability and hopelessness; as LeGuin herself scathingly writes, “This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain” (LeGuin). Even those popular narratives that focus upon successful resistance and overthrow of oppressive regimes (as in so much 21st century YA dystopic fiction) spend precious little time imagining what the new system replacing them might look like, because again, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” For the post-World War II generations especially, the idea that there might be genuinely better worlds possible rarely seems to occur to even our most visionary authors and film-makers.
But not for the pre-war generations. Mormonism’s own Nephi Anderson, for example, in his widely-circulated 1897 novel Added Upon, envisioned not only what an actual utopia might look like, but should, and will. In particular, Anderson in Part Fourth of Added Upon takes a detour from his main narrative (wherein he follows a cadre of spirit children as they journey from the pre-mortal existence through their various mortal probations), to describe the City of Zion during the Millennium of Christ’s rule upon the Earth. This shift in focus alone is notable, because although there have been numerous more recent examples in Christian evangelical media that have imagined what the lead up to the Second Coming might look like (the Left Behind series of 1995-2007 being the most famous example of the same), there are, again, precious few that imagine what the world might look like after the Second Coming. Yet that is not to say Anderson created his Millennial vision ex nihilo. As Scott Hales notes, “it is telling that a portion of his first novel, Added Upon, responds to the dystopian tenor of anti-Mormon fiction with a description of a decidedly Mormon utopia, itself a repetition of tropes gleaned from the utopian novels then in vogue” (96). Indeed, late-19th century America produced a plethora of utopian novels for Anderson to draw from, including: Edward Bellamy’s 1888 best-seller Looking Backward (which inspired hundreds of Bellamy societies to form nation-wide, to try and make his vision a reality), as well as William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1892), William Dean Howell’s A Traveler from Altruria (1894), Walter Browne’s 2894, or The Fossil Man (1894) and many more. These texts emerged against a global backdrop of Labor agitation: Anderson himself was born in Norway, only 10 years after the 1855 collapse of a large-scale Norwegian Labor movement organized by Marcus Thrane, a journalist and theologian whose writings still helped lay the groundwork for the socialist democracies that eventually came to power across Scandinavia in the 1930s, and still persist with astonishing success into our present day. Thrane, like Anderson’s family, also emigrated to the United States, which at the time was also a hotbed for large-scale Labor organizing (indeed, internationally-observed May Day has its roots in the 1881 Hay Market Affair in Chicago—where, incidentally, Marcus Thrane also later settled). Much of the rhetoric of the U.S. Labor movement of this time-period finds its way into Added Upon, as we shall be also reviewing shortly. For that matter, the century preceding Added Upon’s publication was positively saturated with both utopian experiments across America itself: e.g. the Shakers in New England, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s proposed Pantisocracy in Pennsylvania, the Brook Farm transcendentalist utopias, the Fruitlands commune at Harvard, the Oneida Community in upstate New York, the Bishop Hill Commune in Illinois, the New Harmony settlement in Indiana, the Amana Colonies in Iowa, the Bethel Colony in Missouri, the Aurora Colony in Oregon, the Puget Sound Cooperative in Port Angeles, WA, and the French-based Icarians who replaced the Mormons in post-exodus Nauvoo (not to mention the Mormons themselves, as we shall also be reviewing shortly), the overwhelming number of which were religious in origin. It was an era when it was apparently still possible to imagine the end of capitalism.
Of course, part of the reason the aforementioned Icarians chose Nauvoo is because the city was already the locus for another attempted utopian experiment: The United Order. The Order was Joseph Smith, Jr.’s attempt to reproduce the class-less Christian societies described in Acts 2:44 (“And all that believed were together, and had all things common”), and endorsed by both 4 Nephi 1:3 of The Book of Mormon (“they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift”) and Doctrine and Covenants 49:20 (“it is not meet that one man should possess that which is above another; wherefore the world lieth in sin”—which had been first read to the local utopic Shaker colony, incidentally). Per an 1831 revelation now found in Doctrine and Covenants section 42:30-39, the United Order functioned by equitably diving up properties between families, and placing all excess property into the Bishop’s storehouse for the maintenance of the poor. Furthermore, often overlooked is the fact that in the initial Law of Tithing outlined in Doctrine and Covenants 119:1-3 in 1838, one was not only asked to pay a tenth of all one’s “increase” (the only part of the Law that Church members are still required to keep today), but also that all “surplus property be put into the hands of the bishop of my church in Zion”, so as to further ensure that there are no rich nor poor among us. This, of course, was already a downgrade from the more strictly egalitarian order Joseph Smith had first proposed in section 42; he had apparently become pessimistic about fully implementing the United Order by the time the Saints settled Nauvoo,[1] after his earlier attempts to establish it in Missouri and Ohio had been frustrated. Although the salaciousness of polygamy understandably gets the lion’s share of attention in 19th century Mormon studies, it is important to emphasize that for Joseph Smith and his successor Brigham Young, the United Order was as essential for the Biblical “Restoration of all things” as prophets, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the gifts of the Spirit, the Priesthood, Temples, and personal revelation. There is an inescapable irony to the fact that Utah and Idaho, which today are the deepest of red states, Republican hotbeds of Reagonomic conservatism, libertarianism, Ensign Peak portfolios, pyramid schemes, MLMs, and the progenitor of such unapologetic conservatives as Ezra Taft Benson, Mike Lee, and the Romneys, were settled by a faith whose first two presidents openly advocated for a class-less economic order that was openly hostile to laissez-faire capitalism. Such, indeed, is how Nephi Anderson also understood the United Order, which he preaches with orthodox zeal to his fellow Latter-day Saints in the closing chapters of his most popular novel.
Brigham Young likewise attempted to re-create this United Order in the Rocky Mountains after their forced exodus to the Salt Lake basin. Young notably established a pair of model show-piece communities to prove the viability of the United Order within Utah territory—Ordersville in the south and Brigham City in the north—which is here especially relevant because Anderson lived and worked in Brigham City as an educator from 1886 till 1906 (interspersed with two foreign missions to Great Britain). However, Brigham City by the end of the 19th century was largely a holdout; the rest of the Church membership was already rapidly embracing capitalist practices and institutions, quietly abandoning the United Order that they had only ever embraced haltingly and sporadically. Sarah Dant for example has documented how:
As the LDS faithful shifted their production efforts to supply growing demand from extra-local consumers, they became inextricably entwined in the larger emerging market economy. It was ultimately unsustainable. This change in focus—from local ecclesiastically governed subsistence to national and even global secularly motivated commerce—fundamentally transformed Mormon lifeways and gradually drew Utahns away from Young’s communal land ethic. […] By the 1890s, the degradation that accompanied what historian Frederick Jackson Turner celebrated as the triumph of ‘civilization’ over savagery’ was sobering: numerous species in peril, overgrazing and land erosion, and obvious limits to once abundant resources. (Dant 39)
It was during his time in Brigham City, when the Latter-day Saints were already shifting inexorably from “Young’s communal land ethic” and towards an already-unsustainable “larger emerging market economy,” that Anderson wrote Added Upon. Indeed, when Anderson drew upon the rhetoric and imagery of the United Order for Part Fourth, it was perhaps as much to try and turn the Church membership back towards Young’s communal land ethic, as it was to describe the actual nuts-and-bolts inner-functioning of the City of Zion. As Dant also records, “Young was keenly aware that the lures of secular commerce were steadily eroding the Edenic mission of the Mormons. As he lectured in March of 1858, ‘we cannot avoid knowing that much of the conduct of this people has been directly in opposition to our becoming the kingdom of God in its purity on the earth’” (Dant 41), and Anderson was apparently just as concerned with pushing back against these self-same “lures of secular commerce”. The value of this section of the novel, however, comes not only from how it provides an ethnographic snapshot of local Brigham City attitudes towards capitalism and socialism in the late-19th century, or in how it documents Anderson’s reactions against Utah’s inexorable embrace of capitalist systems, but in how his vision of a United Order Zion is now more relevant than ever to our 21st century anxieties, especially in drought-stricken Utah.
Part Fourth opens with the King of Poland and his counselor Remand arriving at the City of Zion early during the Millennium after Christ’s Second Coming. Anderson quickly establishes that although Christ rules the Earth absolutely, free agency is not infringed: national borders still exist, and none are compelled to convert or switch religions. As Paulus, their tour-guide around the city of Zion, carefully explains,
It is well that you have disbanded your armies, and that your instruments of war have been made into plows and pruning hooks. Remember the law that the nation and kingdom that will not serve the Lord shall perish. The King grants to all His subjects their free agency in the matter of religion, forcing no one to obey the gospel law; still He is the King of the earth; it is His, and He made it, and has redeemed it. (181)
Although the Polish King and Remand have traveled In Cognito, they are informed by Paulus that the city officials were already made aware of their identities by the Spirit of the Lord, that in fact this same Spirit of the Lord is what moved upon the Polish King to visit the city in the first place, so that he might return to Poland and rule with greater righteousness. Paulus also assures them that although they have been treated grandly as guests of state, they have nevertheless been treated no better than any other pilgrims who have arrived to the holy city—since, again, radical equality is the premier priority of the United Order, which Anderson takes every opportunity to stress.
As Paulus shows his guests around City of Zion, they behold lions literally lying down with lambs, bears playing gently with children, and resurrected beings interacting with regular mortals. Some of these beings, like George Washington, Martin Luther, and Socrates, are even seen teaching history classes to the children. It is important to emphasize here that Anderson does not present these resurrected personages as ethereal or ghostly images, but as concretely physical, flesh and bone, like every other living being. Indeed, the Polish King and Remand “could see no marked different between them and the rest of mankind” (179), recognizing that “They certainly were not unreal, shadowy beings” (180). Anderson does not read the resurrection of the dead as allegoric or symbolic, but quite literal. Likewise, the whole Isaiahic “lion shall lie down with the lamb” is not a mere metaphor for Anderson, but also a literal, concrete reality that shall physically come to pass. He refuses to allegorize his faith. As such, one must understand that Anderson also intends the United Order to be read and understood just as literally; however much of an outlier he may have already been in Utah by the end of the 19th century, the Law of Consecration for Anderson was not a mere symbol, nor a simple reminder to serve in Church callings and pay tithing without complaint (though Anderson assuredly believed that too), but the foundation for the only just, equitable, and fair economic system that will ever meet with the approbation of the Almighty.
As they continue on their tour, Paulus shows his guests the contents of a recently unearthed time capsule from the late-19th century, which includes a number of newspapers with such agonizing headlines as: “Yesterday this city was visited by a most destructive fire”; “The great strike. Thousands of workmen out of employment. Children crying for bread. Mobs march through the city, defying the police, and demolishing property. The governor calls out the state militia”; “War! War! England, Germany, France, Russia and the United States are preparing!”; and “Millions of the people’s money have been expended by those in office to purchase votes. A set of corrupt political bosses rule the nation” (187). These headlines were directly inspired by the leading news-items of Anderson’s own day: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had occurred within living memory of Anderson’s book; likewise, state and federal governments did indeed regularly resort to violent military oppression to break strikes, as documented during the Pittsburgh Homestead Strike of 1892, the 1886 Haymarket Affair, and the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago (and as would shortly occur again during the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903); similarly, the corruption of large scale political machines, as exemplified by Tammany Hall and William “Boss” Tweed in New York (arrested for corruption in 1877), were still widely notorious; and it is perhaps sobering to note that the looming specter of the Great World War was so obvious that even a provincial author in isolated rural Utah saw it coming.
Yet even more interesting is how much of the anxieties of our present historical moment are anticipated by Part Fourth; specifically, our angst about environmental destruction and our poor stewardship of the earth (which is also a recurring theme throughout Anderson’s oeuvre). For as they continue their tour of Zion, the Polish King and Remand admire the cleanliness of Zion’s factories: “The buildings were not great, black-looking structures with rows of small windows in the walls; but they were handsome, spacious buildings, resembling somewhat the finest of the public buildings with which the visitors were acquainted in their own country. Remand noted the absence of smoking chimneys” (189). As Paulus explains this lack of smoke-stacks: “We have done away with all that…Pure air is one of the essentials of life” (189), going on to boast that, “As you have noticed, our city is clean, and the air above us is as clear as that above forests or fields” (190). In this description, Anderson was again being completely orthodox and loyal to Brigham Young’s prophetic pronouncements. Indeed, no less than Hugh Nibley has hammered on how a constant theme of Brigham Young was the importance of maintaining the purity of the streams and air in Utah territory:
At a time when ‘free as air’ signified that a thing was of negligible worth, Brigham Young was insisting that the greatest physical asset the Saints possessed and one they should treasure most highly was pure air: ‘What constitutes health, wealth, joy, and peace? In the first place, good pure air is the greatest sustainer of animal life.’ ‘The Lord blesses the land, the air and the water where the Saints are permitted to live.’ ‘We have the sweet mountain air, and a healthy country…What kind of air did you breathe, who lived in eleven, twelve, and fourteen story houses in your native country?’ (24-25).
That last quoted line from Brigham Young also indicates just why he valued fresh air so highly: as a former missionary to Industrial-Revolution-era Great Britain, Young understood exactly what it was like to live in cramped, squalid quarters with filthy-polluted air. He knew to never take that air for granted, and so Anderson is careful to prize and preserve clean air as well; in his environmental-mindedness, Anderson was in all things following the prophet. (As Nibley also cannot help but sardonically note, when Young was giving his admonitions to protect the natural environment, Mark Twain was still writing giddily about the time he started an entire forest fire near Lake Tahoe in The Innocents Abroad—an act that in our current era of endless record-breaking California wildfires, cannot help but strike us now as monstrously irresponsible and short-sighted.)
Yet Anderson here not only echoes the rhetoric of a then-recent Church president, but also, incredibly, anticipates the immense need for renewable green energies in our own day: “We use electricity for heat also…We get it direct from the earth, also have it generated by water power, both from falls and the waves of the sea,” Paulus explains to his guests, “We have also learned to collect and conserve heat from the sun” (190). Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and even the geothermal energy first proposed by his contemporary Nikolai Tesla, are all matter-of-factly highlighted by Anderson as the only sustainable manners by which to build up Zion and preserve the Earth long-term throughout the Millennium. Just as Anderson accurately anticipated the Great War, so too does he accurately anticipate the calamitous need for our own hard-pivot to green energies. Especially in our present moment, when Utah is now regularly afflicted with severe drought, choked with some of the worst smog in the world, and the Great Salt Lake is at imminent risk of drying up for good and unleashing toxic dust-clouds of arsenic and mercury upon millions, the necessity for Zion to become a model for green energy is now more dire than ever. (We might even say, “there is no alternative.”)
What is also fascinating to note in the preceding passage, is how much the architectural design of this Zion factory—those “handsome, spacious buildings, resembling somewhat the finest of the public buildings with which the visitors were acquainted in their own country”—pushes back against our larger economic tendency to streamline efficiencies and privilege production above all other considerations. Indeed, even towards the end of the 19th century, the ornateness that was privileged in new construction less than a century earlier was already starting to be treated as a liability, not an investment—a frivolous extra to be excised, not indulged in—in the ever-increasing need to maximize productivity by any means necessary. If it was a choice between beauty and efficiency, beauty was now becoming sacrificed. Architecture inevitably betrays where a society’s priorities actually lie; and Brigham Young had forcefully lambasted those cramped, squalid buildings of “eleven, twelve, and fourteen story houses” back in Great Britain, because he could foresee the same occurring state-side—as well they did. Those same tendencies carried over into the Brutalist architecture of mid-20th century America University campuses, and still informs the cookie-cutter housing developments, industrial parks, suburban developments, and boxed-in corporate campuses of the 21st century. (In practice, the dull cinder-block apartments of communist Moscow vary little from those of capitalist Manhattan.) For that matter, those same obsessions with efficiency above all other concerns also drive the regular lay-offs, third-world sweat-shops, gig-economies, adjuncts, “contract” employees, 1099s, Amazon warehouse horror-stories, inhuman algorithms, and all other forms of “minimizing” labor costs of our present historical moment. By contrast, the factories specifically imagined here by Anderson are specifically designed with the worker in mind, not the bottom line; they were built to delight the eye and serve the worker, not to be served by the worker. Moreover, as Paulus also explains, “The hours vary according to the arduousness of the work, though it is much more easy and pleasant, owing to our labor saving machinery. From three to four hours usually constitute a day’s work” (198); as with the architecture, the machinery in Zion is intended to benefit the lives of the workers, not the workers the machines.
Paulus’s statement about “three to four hour” workdays is especially fascinating for two reasons: 1) Brigham Young openly proposed the same, arguing that in his ideal world, “If we all labor a few hours a day, we could then spend the remainder of our time in rest and the improvement of our minds” (302); he also provocatively argued, “Work less, wear less, eat less, and we shall be a much wiser, wealthier, and healthier people” (187). Work for Brigham Young was not an end, but a means, and the less we could get away with, the better. “And what is done with this leisure?” (198) asks the Polish king; “Most of it is devoted to working in the temples of the Lord,” replies Paulus, which reflects an admonition towards Temple service that is still indeed emphasized within the Church today. However, Paulus also emphasizes: “but many other things are done. For instance, he who thinks he is an inventor, devotes his time to perfecting his invention; those who wish to pursue a certain line of study, now have time to do so; some spend time in traveling” (199). Such, as we have just cited, was also Brigham Young’s hope and desire. And 2) this promise of a shortened work week directly mirrored of the U.S. Labor movement of the time. “8 hours to work, 8 hours to sleep, and 8 hours to do as we please” was the slogan oft-recited by Labor activists in the push for a 40-hour work week, many of whom anticipated that the rise of automation would continue to make the work-week even shorter. Of course, the opposite happened; in our era of high-automation, Americans are somehow still expected to work even longer hours than ever. But then, yet again, that is because our current system very openly expects us to live to work, not work to live; to serve the machine, not be served by machines. Such is not the ethos of Anderson’s Zion, however, wherein the design of the factory very explicitly serves the needs of the workers and larger community, not the other way around.
As does the design of the actual corporate structure itself. “Whose factory is this?” (190) asks Remand at one point during their tour. “You mean who has charge—who is the steward?” (190) responds Paulus confusedly, whose use of “steward”—a key word in LDS theology—already indicates the alternative model of ownership the novel is about to espouse. “No; not exactly that,” says Remand, “This magnificent plant must have an owner, either an individual or a corporation. I asked for the ownership of the property” (190). It is here that Paulus “realized that these men had come from the parts of the earth where the celestial order had not yet been established. The old ideas of private property rights were still with them” (191). No matter how alien it may seem to the libertarian conservatism of contemporary Utah, in the late-19th century, the collectivization of private property under the United Order had been considered within living memory an essential and core part of LDS theology, a fact that Anderson appears intent on reminding his fellow Church members as bluntly as possible. As Paulus patiently explains, “My friends, the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof. He is the only proprietor. How can weak, mortal man own any part of this earth! No, ownership is for a future time, a future state. Now we are only stewards over the Lord’s possession” (191). Here, Anderson defers private ownership to a much more distant future, when (per Joseph Smith’s King Follet discourse) perfected humanity will have achieved godhood themselves, and therefore be worthy to create and possess worlds of their own; such is a unique LDS doctrine, and is part of what distinguishes Anderson from the pack of other socialist-utopic writers of his era. Private property for Anderson is not an inherent evil, but nevertheless remains unwise while humanity remains un-perfected. Nevertheless, the distant eternities are largely beyond the purview of his novel, so Anderson leaves this tantalizing topic undeveloped, contenting himself to explain why private factory ownership is at present unnecessary in Zion. “But surely someone must have charge here,” the Polish King insists, to which Paulus responds, “Certainly. A master mechanic is steward over this factory, and he renders an account of all its doings to the Bishop, who is the Lord’s representative” (191). The factory, in other words, is run more like a Church, with stewardships rather than stock-holders. Now, one could here protest that most churches (including ours) are run more like businesses anyways, as money-maximizing enterprises, save for this key difference: in Anderson’s United Order model, the function of the Church is, again, to serve the needs of the worker, not the other way around. Wages, for example, are distributed based upon need, not seniority or executive title: “The wood-carver whom we spoke of has a large family of children. His needs are greater than the superintendent’s, therefore he receives more of his portion. That is just, is it not?” (196). Karl Marx is who coined the slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” but here in Anderson’s City of Zion, it has actually been put into effectual practice. As Paulus further explains to his guests, “my dear friend, we have no common workmen…No man in our industrial system can say to another, ‘I have no need of thee’” (195). 1 Corinthians 12:21 for Anderson is not only good counsel for organizing a church, but also an economy, which for Anderson are one and the same. In Anderson’s economic model, all peoples are necessary and none are disposable (which, needless to say, is the polar opposite of our present economic order).
Such also means that each worker’s talents are uniquely valued in this factory: “Each man, as far as possible, does the kind of work best suited to his tastes and abilities,” explains Paulus, “Of course, we have machines that stamp and carve wood; but the pleasure derived from the use of the skilled hand is not to be denied the well-trained mechanic and artist” (191); for again, the pleasure of the worker, not the maximization of production and efficiency, is the chief priority of this factory. For Anderson, we can have our cake and eat it too; machine reproduction and artisan craftsmanship are not opponents, but partners. As such, the workers in this United Order factory no longer feels alienated from their labor. This is an especially important point to emphasize as well, because a core anxiety of what would come to be known as the Modernist period in early-20th century art is the automation and mechanization of the human subject. David Ayers, for example, reads the constant grapple with humanity’s mechanization as the defining attribute of the era, as emblematized in the works of Anderson’s contemporary D.H. Lawrence:
[Lawrence’s] guiding notion is that civilization has tended to force apart mind and body, with the effect of turning sexual relationships into verbal meetings accompanied by mechanical sex, focused on the instrumental pleasure of two separate beings…he examines the ways in which an imagined unity of mind and body has become lost, and the ways in which it can be glimpsed or rediscovered in industrial modernity. (Ayers 88)
For Lawrence (according to Ayers), the reason the worker becomes alienated from their work is because machines have made the mind alien from the body. Indeed, so much of Modernism generally can be read as competing strategies for grappling with this mechanization and alienation. Some authors of this period turned towards fascism (e.g. Ezra Pound, Filipo Martinelli) as a strategy to re-unite the body and the soul; others turned towards nostalgia for some mythological pre-modern, pre-industrial milieu (e.g. T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats) to reconstitute societal unity; while still others embraced fragmentation itself (e.g. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf) as a new sort of unity. What is interesting is how Nephi Anderson referees these tensions: he determines we need not sacrifice the benefits of industrialism or our own humanity, because the United Order can reconcile both together—largely because it reconciles all of humanity together generally, as the Atonement itself does.
The centrality of the Atonement of Christ to the United Order is why, for Anderson, it is the only economic order that meets with the unqualified approbation of the Almighty, and therefore is the only economic system worth investing in. As his mouthpiece Paulus explains it:
In olden times, this law was called the order of Enoch, because we are informed that Enoch and his city attained to a high degree of righteousness through its observance. Later it was called the United Order. It has been revealed to and tried by men in various periods of the earth’s history, but never has it had such a chance to redeem the world as it is having now. According to this law, no man can accumulate unto himself the wealth created by the work of others, as was the case in former times with us, and still prevails to some extent among other nations. All surplus which a worker accumulates beyond his needs is turned into the general storehouse of the Lord. (192)
Again, in this mini-sermon, Anderson is speaking dependably orthodox. His explanation of how all surplus goes into the “general storehouse” for the benefit of all is entirely consistent with the original Law of Tithing as outlined earlier in Doctrine and Covenants 119:1-3. His follow-up statement that “…the celestial law as pertaining to temporal things is that no man shall have more than is required for his and his family’s support” (192) is likewise entirely consistent with D&C sections 42:30-39 and 49:20, which we have also already cited. His boast that “There is no rich or poor” is, again, but the literal fulfillment of Acts 2:44, 4 Nephi 1:3, and 3 Nephi 26:19. These were the Sunday School answers of his era—or at least, he hoped to preserve them as such.
Moreover for Anderson, the United Order is not just the only system that God approves of, but the only that can work in the first place: there really is no alternative. For Anderson’s is no naïve economics; as Remand notes, “but in our country and time, as indeed, it has been in the past, many have tried plans of equality, but they have been more or less failures. Why have you succeeded so well?” (193). In a way, Remand is inadvertently anticipating the failures of communism 20 years before the Bolshevik Revolution (and given what would happen to Poland itself under the Soviet Union, surprisingly prescient; but then, Anderson would have already been aware of how the Icarian commune had already collapsed back in old Nauvoo—not to mention how the Saints had repeatedly failed to live the United Order across the Midwest, and was now being actively abandoned throughout Utah). He explains:
The chief cause for the past failures of the world in this industrial order lies in the supposition that unregenerated men, who have not obeyed the gospel of Jesus Christ, and who are, therefore, full of weaknesses and sins incident to human nature without the power to overcome them—I say the mistake lies in the supposition that such men can come together and establish a celestial order of things, an order wherein the heart must be purged from every selfish thought and desire. No wonder that a building erected on such a poor foundation could not stand. We have succeeded because we have begun right. […] People who do things that you observe around you must have the Spirit of God in their hearts. This celestial order is God’s order, and those who partake of its blessings must be in harmony with God’s mind and will. (193-194)
Anderson here is threading an interesting needle; this passage at first appears to anticipate Ezra Taft Benson’s oft-quoted parallelism, that “the world would take the man out of the ghetto; Christ takes the ghetto out of the man,” insisting that it is only the inward-person who must change, not their outward circumstances, to achieve lasting social change. Such was an implicit rejection of the economic superstructure prioritized by Marx, who believed it was the structure of society alone that must be radically reorganized in order to improve men. Anderson however emphasizes how much both the inner-man and the outer-society must be reformed concurrently, when Paulus declares on the same page, “Yes, in the days when every man had to look out for himself and had no thought for his neighbor, it was a continual struggle to get as much as possible for one’s work and to give as little as possible for the work of another” (194). For Anderson, there is a simultaneous two-fold reform that must occur to achieve Zion: the inward person must be renewed, to become more generous, selfless, and charitable, and the outward circumstances must be reformed to allow these more Christ-like impulses to fully manifest. It is not either/or, but both/and, for Anderson, since both must occur at the same time. Indeed, it requires Christ Himself to accomplish this miracle; as Paulus himself acknowledges,
We are not perfect, even here…but you must remember that we look on every man as a brother and a friend, and as I have stated, we have the spirit of the Master to help us. When this proves insufficient by reason of our own failure to do the right, and in our weakness we are unjust or over-bearing, or oppressive, then there is the Lord Himself whose throne is with us. He balances again the scales of justice, and metes out to every man his just deserts” (196).
Christ for Anderson is the check and the balance that allows the whole United Order to operate successfully; for this reason, every system of social equality, no matter how well-intentioned, is doomed to failure, according to him. Like the rest of Added Upon, Part Fourth is a proselyting sermon in novel form.
The irony, then, is that the majority of the objections raised by the Polish King and Remand against this class-less system are ones that are still echoed by so many contemporary Utah/Idaho politicians and voters. For example, Remand argues that economic competition is the engine that drives investment and wealth-accumulation, to which Paulus smiles and responds, “What good would hoarded wealth be to a man whose needs are all provided for as long as he lives, as also his children after him. We have but one bank here—the Lord’s storehouse” (195). Both the necessity and desirability of wealth hoarding are rendered moot by the United Order, which ensures no one ever suffers scarcity. Remand then offers that “The argument usually urged against all orders of equality…is that it takes away man’s incentive to work,” to which Paulus fires back, “Have you seen any idle men in or about Zion?” When they acknowledge that they had not, Paulus explains, “The new order has not taken away incentives to work; it has simply changed the incentive from a low order to a higher. We can not afford to work for money as an end. Wealth, with us, is simply a means to an end…Wealth is not created to be used for personal aggrandizement; and, in fact, its power to work mischief is taken away when all men have what they need of it” (196-197). The incentives to work, according to Paulus, have merely been shifted, not eliminated. As have the incentives towards competition: when Remand then argues that a lack of capitalist competition “would bring stagnation” (199), Paulus responds with, “We have the keenest kind of competition…Each steward competes with every other steward to see who can improve his stewardship the most and bring the best results to the general storehouse” (199). Workers now compete to improve outcomes for everyone, not just themselves individually. It is this reorientation towards the common good, not just the individual, that marks the City of Zion as genuinely utopian for Paulus. He then finishes this section with a sort of praise psalm, wherein Paulus declares,
When I think of the times past—how so many of the human race had to struggle desperately merely to live; how men, women, and children often had to beg for work by which to obtain the means of existence; how sometimes everything that was good and pure and priceless was sold for bread; while on the other hand many others of the race lolled in ease and luxury, being surfeited with the good things of the world—I say, when I think of this, I cannot praise the Lord too much for what He has now given to us. (198)
This is the Millennial vision that Anderson believed he had inherited from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young—a global Christian community of neither rich nor poor, where all things are held common—and which Anderson sought to preserve for the Saints within his most popular novel. The irony, again, is that gross income equality has been sanctified by many contemporary Church members as natural, benign, even desirable. Before I returned to grad school, I worked as a writing instructor at what was then called LDS Business College, wherein I regularly received student essays opposing the capital gains tax, universal healthcare, “hand-outs” (despite many of these young students being reliant upon the Church welfare system) and defending the necessity of third-world sweatshops as preferable to starvation (that there might be a third option—paying garment workers living wages—rarely seemed to occur to them). Our collective imagination has been stunted to the point that even many of our youth can see no alternative; whereas for Anderson, there was clearly no alternative to the United Order.
Towards the end of their tour of Zion, the trio come upon a man leisurely feeding the geese at a park; “here, at last, they had discovered one of the idle rich” (200), think Remand and the Polish King. But Paulus immediately disabuses them of this assumption, declaring that this man—one of Zion’s most beloved authors—is actually the hardest working man there of all, since “Imaginative literature is one of the highest forms of art” (200). As a defense of Anderson’s vocation, it is perhaps (like so much of Added Upon) a bit on the nose; but then again, as I sought to belabor at the start of this paper, it remains a work of genuinely difficult labor to imagine not only a viable but inevitable alternative to our present economic system. We must appreciate the magnitude of Anderson’s achievement, because it is increasingly difficult for the Latter-day Saints to imagine a viable United Order even today. As repeatedly noted already, the Utah-Idaho corridor is nowadays a hotbed of Thatcherian/Reagonian supply-side economics, unabashed worship of the “Invisible Hand,” laissez-faire capitalism, de-regulation, pyramid and ponzi schemes, low minimum wages, worker exploitation, climate change denialism, and gross income inequality. Defenses of the Church’s multi-billion dollar hedge-fund often center on how this wealth will be necessary to fund church expenditures during the Millennium, as though the Savior of the World will need to cash out his portfolio before every knee will bow and every tongue confess. Like so many of my old LDSBC students, we are unable to imagine, let alone desire, an end to capitalism.
Yet there is also evidence that we will yet be forced to imagine it soon. The aforementioned drying of the Great Salt Lake make force our attention sooner than later, as the primacy of private property in water-rights may soon be forced to give way to collective action simply out of necessity. Truman G. Madsen once speculated of the 1838 Latter-day Saints that “because they would not keep the Law of Consecration voluntarily, the Lord forced them to do so” during the Missouri exodus to Illinois (Madsen), and we may soon find ourselves in a comparable position far sooner than we think. It may not even be a matter of force: Bernie Sanders won the 2020 primaries at BYU, of all places. For that matter, a more charitable reading of the Church’s massive investment portfolio is that it also funds the Church’s extensive welfare programs, charities, humanitarian aid projects, the Perpetual Education Fund, its large-scale building construction programs (removing the burden from local membership), its heavily-subsidized education and missionary efforts, and so forth. Arguably, the basic infrastructure remains in place for the United Order (perhaps even more so now than in the turbulent 19th century), even if there is not yet the political will at either the leadership or lay level to implement it. For that matter, the covenant to keep the Law of Consecration remains ritualized as the final and highest covenant of the Temple Endowment ceremony; and despite all the numerous changes, tweaks, and adjustments that have been made to the Endowment in recent years, it is worth noting that the Law of Consecration has remained untouched. It remains our culminating end goal; the United Order still awaits resurrection. If, as Dieter F. Uchtdorf once said, the Restoration is still ongoing—and if, as the Book of Mormon repeatedly affirms, the course of the Lord really is one eternal round—then the United Order may yet return around again, and Part Fourth of Added Upon may still yet be fulfilled. To paraphrase Mark Fisher, Added Upon imagines both the end of capitalism and the end of world, as well as the beginning of the next one.
Works Cited
Anderson, Nephi. Added Upon. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft. 37th Printing, 1974. 1898.
Ayers, David. Modernism: A Short Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
Holy Bible, King James Version. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1978.
The Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1978.
Dant, Sara. “The ‘Lion of the Lord’ and the Land.” And The Earth Shall Appear As the Garden of Eden: Essays on Environmental Mormon History. Edited by Jedediah S. Rogers, Matthew C. Godfrey. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2019.
The Doctrine and Covenants. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1978.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Great Britain:Zer0 Books, 2009.
Hales, Scott. Of Many Hearts and Many Minds: The Mormon Novel and the Post-Utopian Challenge of Assimilation. Dissertation for the University of Cincinnati, 2014.
LeGuin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975.
Madsen, Truman G. “Brigham Young.” The Presidents of the Church: Insights Into Their Lives and Teaching. Audio CD. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2004.
Nibley, Hugh. Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints. Collected Works Volume 11. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1994.
Widstoe, John A. Discourses of Brigham Young. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1954.
Žižek, Slavoj. Žižek! Dir. Astra Taylor. Zeitgeist Films, 2005.
[1] “And again we further suggest for the concideration of the counsel that there be no organizations of large bodies upon common stock principals in property or of large companies of firms untill the Lord shall signify it in a proper manner as it opens such a dreafull [dreadful] field for the averishous and the indolent and corrupt hearted to pray upon the inocent and virtious and honist We have reason to believe that many things were introduced among the saints before God had signified the times and not withstanding the principles and plans may have <been> good yet aspiring men or in other word men <who> had not the substance of Godliness about them perhaps undertook to handle edg tools children you know are fond of tools while they are not yet able to use them”. (Letter to Edward Partridge and the Church, circa 22 March 1839) https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-edward-partridge-and-the-church-circa-22-march-1839/1#full-transcript