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Show life (the Mormons called their communal living "the United Order") with workers living a prescribed life of labor and with as few drones as possible. Brigham Young, as the king bee and the "all-seeing eye" of God, was the benevolent beekeeper. As a political kingdom, the beehive was self-contained and was thus representative of the Mormon settlement. The beehive had definite boundaries and was completely protected. There were no windows looking out to the world and none looking into the Mormon kingdom. Mormons worried that the rest of the nation looked on them as attempting to replace the great tradition of American democracy with a perverted theocracy. And everything about the new land and its natives seemed hostile. The Mormons, suffering from what amounted to paranoia, treasured the idea that they were safe from both the outside world and their own new environment, and the beehive was a metaphor for this self-sufficiency. The Council of Fifty, the earliest governmental body of Utah, unsuccessfully applied for statehood six times from 1849 to 1895. Each time Salt Lake City sent a constitution to Washington for the proposed State of Deseret, it gave up a little more autonomy, Mormon exclusiveness, and territory. Three years after the Mormons had entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake, the American eagle had swooped down and lighted protectively upon the beehive. In fact, the earliest material examples of the hive show it in conjunction with that other powerful political symbol, the eagle, common to both American and Masonic imagery. The Utah, not Deseret, Territory7 was created by the United States Congress, and Brigham Young was named governor. There continued to be a dual government for eighteen years: the legislature acted both as elected representatives of the Territory of Utah and as church-appointed workers for the religious State of Deseret. The use of the beehive and the word "Deseret" persisted during these years of conciliation and compromise. Most Mormon businesses of the early years employed the emblems of the beehive or the all-seeing eye, the words "Deseret" or "Zion," or the phrase "Holiness to the Lord" upon all signs, letterheads, and advertisements. As Johnston's Army entered Salt Lake Valley in 1858 and the dream of an isolated kingdom ended forever, the symbols and rituals of the church began to take on new meaning. Secrecy shrouded the temple ceremony. Benevolent symbols such as the all-seeing eye looked too exclusive to outsiders and were resented by7 them. Such emblems ran against the grain of the American self-image: independent and free, the Americans wanted no eye, not even the eye of God, watching them. As statehood came closer, that foreign-sounding word, "Deseret," was dropped from all governmental use. The beehive also seemed too exclusive a symbol, but unlike the more formal and holy Mormon icons, the beehive was a fairly7 common figure throughout European and American tradition. Like most folk symbols, the beehive, and with it the word Deseret, was adaptable to new times and circumstances. The politicians of the |
