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Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918

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The richness and diversity of Utah history tends to be obscured by Mormon history. So much energy is expended canonizing Utah's saints that few resources remain for celebrating and preserving the capricious, ironic, and improvisatory. ("[In Utah] people talk only of the Prophet, hogs, and Fords," cracked Bernard DeVoto in 1926.)

In New York City, for example, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell chronicled gorgeous demotic street scenes for the ages. But as far as I know, nothing comparable in Utah literature ever emerged. The stories a Liebling or Mitchell might have dug up had they toured Utah, however, are at least hinted at in Jeffrey Nichols's study of prostitution in Salt Lake City (and Ogden) during the years just before and after statehood (1896). (In fact, as Nichols tells us, a very young Harold Ross covered the red-light district for the Salt Lake Tribune two decades before founding The New Yorker.)

Despite the unique religious and moral strictures in Utah's criminal code, prostitution as an industry had no better or worse luck surviving in Salt Lake than elsewhere. If other cities experimented with regulation but then gravitated toward total suppression, Nichols shows that Utah moved in lockstep with the rest of the country. A few hilarious bits bubble up through the book's erudition. One sumptuous brothel flourished for a time inside the Brigham Young Trust Company building. Later, a high-profile madam included the governing councils of the Mormon Church among the Utah dignitaries to whom she sent engraved invitations to the opening of her Palace bordello.

For Utah history buffs, Nichols's bibliography and notes alone are worth the price of the book.