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Show 78 Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters had yoked up theirs so that he could take the two remaining. Yet he could sing in the choir, play the flute in the band. act the comedian in the theater, and give the lecture on English gram mar. In the same way, people from many backgrounds and trades made their contributions to the new commonwealth. With the first one, hundred years behind us, we see more clearly than ever that not in the past lies our destiny, except as it may help us to understand our present and to look ahead more clearly. The Mormon Church today is a force in the lives of al most a million, not the whole encircling element in their lives as it was with the first pioneers, but still a powerful force. Many members, knowing that it may not be perfect nor its leaders in fallible, still are loyal to it and proud of it. True, there are some who, privately, will gripe at the fact that officials are retained in office after senility has set in, and who insist that there is more of relation than of revelation in the selection of new officers, sug gestingfhat any man not fortunate enough to belong to one of the right families by birth should be shrewd enough to marry an apostle's daughter if he aspires to a high office in the church. Yet it is these same people who resent most vigorously a Centennial celebration divorced from the history and culture of the state. We want something more than a cheap western as our official centennial movie, they say with great emphasis; we want, not glorified strawberry days or onion days or peach days, but some thing special that has its roots in our past, something inspira tional that will help us look with faith to the future. A State program that is only another lyceum course, that could be pre sented as appropriately in any state and at any time just as well as in Utah in 1947, is a good lyceum course, but what is its con nection with the centennial? "The good old days! They are gone forever. Thank God they are gone!" a young Mormon said in offering a toast to the first one hundred years. He was right. Thank God they are gone. But we third and fourth generation Mormons must learn to look at them objectively from this point, to see that for per secutions of our people there were some provocations, that some of our troubles were 'Of our own making. During the early years in Utah, Gentiles were perhaps too quick to believe every tale of our barbarity and cruelty and to fasten onto us many crimes for which we were not responsible. On the other hand, Mormons were perhaps quick to count every Gentile an "enemy" and to use questionable means of getting him to leave the Territory, stronger measures than just the threat of the Whittier's Club. One governor was waylaid by a groun of Mormon ruffians as he was leaving the state and beaten soundl y; an outsider squatting on a land claim was invited to leave and ducked in the Jordan a few times to season the invitation; a doctor not of the faith was called out in |
