In many ways the history of Salt Lake is the story of that effort: its initial success; its movement away from the original ideas in the face of intense political, economic, and social pressure from the outside; and its increasing, but never complete, assimilation into the mainstream of American life. Its history has been the story of many peoples and of unsteady progress, and it was formed from a process of conflict--a conflict of ideas and values, of economic and political systems, of peoples with different cultural backgrounds, needs, and ambitions.

For about a generation after its founding, Salt Lake City was very much the kind of society its founders intended. A grand experiment in centralized planning and cooperative imagination, it was a relatively self-sufficient, egalitarian, and homogeneous society based mainly on irrigation agriculture and village industry. Religion infused almost every impulse, making it difficult to draw a line between religious and secular activities. A counterculture that differed in fundamental ways from its contemporary American society, it was close-knit, cohesive, and unified, a closely-woven fabric with only a few broken threads. The hand of the Mormon Church was ever present and ever active.

The extent of early Mormon pioneer unity can be, and often is, overstated. Even so, for the first few years of settlement, it was Salt Lake's most striking feature. Gradually at first, however, and then more rapidly, the city began to change. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the subsequent spread of a network of rails throughout the territory ended the area's geographic isolation. Its economy became more diversified and integrated into the national picture. Mining and smelting became leading industries. A business district, for which there was no provision in the original city plan, began to emerge in Salt Lake City. A working-class ghetto took shape in the area near and west of the railroad tracks. Urban services developed in much the same time and manner as in other cities in the United States, and by the beginning of the twentieth century Salt Lake was for its time a modern city. Main Street was a maze of wires and poles; an electric streetcar system served 10,000 people a day. There were full-time police and fire departments, four daily newspapers, ten cigar factories, and a well-established red-light district in the central business district. The population became increasingly diverse. In 1870 more than 90 percent of Salt Lake's 12,000 residents were Mormons. In the next twenty years the non-Mormon population grew two to three times as rapidly as did the Mormon population. By 1890 half of the city's 45,000 residents were non-Mormons; and there was also increasing variety among them, as a portion of the flood of twenty million immigrants who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found its way to Utah.

Conflict began to moderate after 1890 when, as a result of intense pressure from the federal government, particularly in the form of the Edmunds Act of 1882 and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, Mormon leaders decided to begin a process of accommodation to the larger society and endeavor to conform to national economic, political, and social norms. In 1890 Mormon Church President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto, which proclaimed an end to the further performance of plural marriages. A year later, the church dissolved its People's party and divided the Mormon people between the Democratic and Republican parties. Following that, non-Mormons disbanded their Liberal party. During the next several years, the church abandoned its efforts to establish a self-sufficient, communitarian economy. It sold most church-owned businesses to private individuals and operated those it kept as income-producing ventures rather than as shared community enterprises.

These actions simply accelerated developments of the previous twenty years, and the next two or three decades were a watershed in Salt Lake's history. The balance shifted during those years. By the 1920s, as Dale Morgan says, the city no longer offered the alternative to Babylon it once had, and the modern city had essentially emerged. The process has continued to the present, with Salt Lake City increasingly reflecting national patterns.

Since Utah became urbanized at about the same rate as the United States as a whole, Salt Lake faced the problems of urbanization and industrialization at the same time they were surfacing elsewhere, and it responded in similar ways. During the Progressive Era, for example, it established a regulated vice district on the west side, undertook a city beautification program, adopted the commission form of government in 1911, and that same year elected a socialist, Henry Lawrence, as city commissioner. The city languished through the 1920s, as the depressed conditions of mining and agriculture affected its prosperity. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit harder in Utah than it did in the nation as a whole. Salt Lake correspondingly suffered, making clear its close relationship with the world around it and its vulnerability to the fluctuations of the national economy; and New Deal programs were correspondingly important in both city and state.

World War II brought local prosperity as war industries proliferated along the Wasatch Front. In the post-war period defense industries remained important, and by the early 1960s Utah had the most defense-oriented economy in the nation. It has remained in the top ten ever since. During the 1950s a number of important capital improvement projects were undertaken, including a new airport terminal, improved parks and recreational facilities, upgraded storm sewers, and construction of the city's first water-treatment plants. As a move to the suburbs began, the city's population grew slowly, increasing by only 4 percent through the 1950s. Racial discrimination was still one of Salt Lake's most serious problems. The real power in the city lay with a group of three men (though it is difficult to get specific information detailing their activities): David O. McKay, president of the Mormon church; Gus Backman, executive secretary of the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce; and John Fitzpatrick (and after his death in 1960, his successor, John H. Gallivan), publisher of the Salt Lake Tribune--representing, respectively, the city's Mormon, inactive Mormon, and non-Mormon communities. The triumvirate continued to function through the 1960s.

See: Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons and Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (1984); Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West (1982); John S. McCormick, The Historic Buildings of Downtown Salt Lake City (1982); John S. McCormick, Salt Lake City, The Gathering Place: An Illustrated History (1980); and Dale L. Morgan, "Salt Lake City, City of the Saints," in Ray B. West, ed., Rocky Mountain Cities (1949).