by Ted Koppel
Jeff used to be a big-game hunter and he’s pretty sure he could bring in some meat if needed. “And then we’ve got those two nags out there,” Pat says, though she may be joking. “You know, if they can’t provide transportation anymore…” The horses under discussion are grazing contentedly in a field outside the house.
Jeff and Pat are not counting on any government assistance in time of need. “And it isn’t because I hate the federal government,” Jeff assured me. “I think it’s grown too large. But if you had a crisis like that, a grid down, that would probably be pretty immediate and pretty catastrophic. You know, they’ve got millions of people to take care of and major population centers that will break down a lot more quickly than rural areas like this. So I would be surprised if we ever saw FEMA in Cody, Wyoming.”
Jeff is clearly proud of his connection to Cody’s frontier history. In trying to explain why Cody still works as a community, he noted that Cody is 96.9 percent white and 75 percent registered Republican. He was quick to reassure me that he is not a racist. “It’s just when you get that kind of…,” Jeff began, then paused, searching for the right word.
“Non-diversity?” Pat offered.
“Non-diversity,” Jeff continued, “makes for, you know, very little stress.”
If you’re looking for a way to sum up Cody’s demographics, non-diversity is almost perfect. There are Shoshone and Arapaho reservations about 150 miles south. There’s a Crow reservation, but that’s across the border in Montana. There are some Mexican Americans in Cody, but the total Hispanic population is 2.22 percent. I looked up the numbers after talking to Jeff, but he was pretty much on the money. African Americans, he conceded, are essentially missing from the mix. “I think like 0.78 percent. And the ones who come here, from my observation, are welcome. It’s just hard to be a black in a 96 percent white community. I knew Black Jerry, [who] was a black cowboy that came out here and cowboyed for my cousin Lee Dan, who’s an outfitter out here. He’s great. Got along fine. It’s just culturally it’s so different.” Jeff had, in fact, inadvertently exaggerated the number of African Americans in Cody. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the percentage at an even more modest 0.2 percent. If it has occurred to Jeff that Cody’s “non-diversity” may be the natural outcome of a social environment that does not welcome African Americans (Black Jerry notwithstanding), he does not mention it.
This is how Model’s claims of “western hospitality” and Knapp’s boast that “people are so good about working together here” can coexist with Wolz’s prediction of anarchy within six months.
The disconnect between New York and Cody, or Cody and Los Angeles, is even greater than it may seem. Underlying all expectations of survivability in a major city like New York is the assumption that underpopulated places such as West Virginia or Wyoming could, in extreme circumstances, absorb a couple of hundred thousand urban refugees. And perhaps they would, because the residents of those areas really do take notions of neighborliness and community values seriously. But when Joe Nimmich of FEMA and former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff speak blithely of evacuating several million people from a city like New York, there is really no concept of where they might resettle all these refugees. Insofar as the residents of a town such as Cody, Wyoming, have maintained their traditional values, they have done so in an environment of what Jeff Livingstone described with searing if unintentional candor as “non-diversity.” Perhaps if an urban exodus was part of a carefully imagined and well-thought-out plan, it might have a chance of success. If such a plan even exists, it might serve the greater good to let it be seen before it is needed. To just assume, however, that the underpopulated rural regions of the United States are inclined or even able to absorb tens or hundreds of thousands of urban refugees—white, black, brown, many of them poor—is to place too much reliance on the notion of neighborliness.
Which brings us to the Mormons. While conceding all glory to the Almighty, they are firm believers in the precept that God helps those who help themselves, and no group in the country approaches anything like the extraordinary scale and geographic scope of their efforts. Next we’ll explore the singular degree to which they have prepared for disaster—and its relevance for the rest of us.
16
The Mormons
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.
— GENESIS 3:19
What intrigued me about the Mormons was that their plan engages an entire community. When I first heard about it, it didn’t go much beyond the notion that Mormon families were encouraged to keep a three-month supply of food and water on hand. There were also faintly ominous suggestions that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had gigantic, strategically located storehouses filled with supplies. I envisioned armed guards, electrified fences, and barbed-wire enclosures.
I contacted the church’s public relations department in Salt Lake City and asked for the appropriate contact information. A little church history, I thought, and then a quick visit to a local warehouse. There is, after all, an enormous and imposing Mormon Temple less than half an hour from my home in Maryland. The message came back: the church would be happy to help, but I would have to fly out to Utah. I phoned Senator Orrin Hatch and explained the problem. I thought the senator, a prominent Mormon and someone I’ve known for many years, might be able to put in a good word and save me the trip to Salt Lake City. Hatch called me back a couple of days later to let me know that I would be receiving a call from Henry Eyring, a church leader in line for the presidency of the LDS church. Senator Hatch himself seemed slightly awed. “This is one of the most important men in the world,” he told me. Hatch himself is president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, a title bestowed on the longest-serving senator of the majority party—not someone I would have thought was easily impressed.
Henry Eyring, when he called, couldn’t have been more gracious or reassuring about the cooperation I would receive in researching this book. I would have to fly out to Salt Lake City, though, and I should probably allow two or three days for the visit. If I was going to investigate the Mormon approach to disaster preparation, it appeared that it would take more than a quick drive around the Washington Beltway and an afternoon’s worth of research.
The LDS church is not a casual operation. The office headquarters in Salt Lake City are linear and somewhat stark, like something out of an Ayn Rand novel. The interior space, where the offices of the church leadership are located, bears more than a passing similarity to the antechambers guarding the offices of the secretary of defense or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Nor is that the only echo of military structure. The church is a highly disciplined, hierarchical organization. There’s no uniform, but, as a matter of courtesy and mutual respect, the men customarily come to work dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and ties. And it is, if anything, even more tradition-bound; unlike the military, which has elevated at least some women into its highest ranks, those who govern the LDS church—the members of the First Presidency, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Presidency of the Seventy, the First Quorum of the Seventy, the Second Quorum of the Seventy, the Presiding Bishopric, slightly more than a hundred in total—are all men.
If all of this appears incidental, it is not. Like many devout believers of other faiths who have learned over generations not to take tolerance for granted, Mormons have been conditioned by prejudice. They are encouraged to prepare for the days of tribulation as a matter of religious doctrine, but also as a direct consequence of historical experience.
Though the LDS church is still the object of a certain degree of bigotry, these days bemused curiosity has largely replaced outright hostility. Where most of our mainstream religions can now cushion the supernatural aspects of the miracles and mysteries of their faiths behind an accumulation of millennia, the Mormon belief system is not yet two hundred years old. Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, written on plates of gold and revealed to him by the an
gel Moroni in upstate New York during the early 1820s, served almost simultaneously as the foundation of a struggling new religion and the object of ridicule, prejudice, and brutal persecution. When, during many of the religion’s early years, that hostility manifested itself in the form of physical violence against church members, preparing for disaster became an essential element of survival; this ultimately matured into a matter of doctrine itself. To gain a clearer understanding of how those early experiences shaped the modern church’s approach to disaster preparation, I met with Richard E. Turley Jr., one of the official historians of the LDS church.
After the church’s legal establishment in 1830, Turley explained, the small body of two or three hundred believers resettled twice in short order. Responding to a divine revelation, Joseph Smith first moved his followers from upstate New York to Ohio, where the Mormon community barely began to flourish before Smith announced the establishment of a parallel headquarters for the church in Missouri, in a new city to be called Zion. There was almost immediate friction in Missouri. The Latter-day Saints claimed to talk with God, which didn’t go over well with local Protestants in the 1830s. In addition, Missouri was a slaveholding state. Most Latter-day Saints, coming from the Northeast, opposed slavery, welcomed blacks into the church, and during those early years even ordained black men to their priesthood. In 1833, vigilantes drove the Latter-day Saints out of Jackson County, Missouri, across the Missouri River into Clay County. There followed a few relatively peaceful years, and then the Missouri legislature moved to isolate the Mormons by creating a separate county for them. The intent was that this new county would serve as a ghetto, the equivalent of an Indian reservation. When Mormons began to stray from the reservation, vigilante attacks resumed. These escalated, explained Turley, until “there was a civil war, what’s called the Mormon-Missouri War of 1838, with Latter-day Saints saying, ‘You know, we’ve been pushed and pushed and pushed. We’re Americans. We have rights, and if we don’t put our foot down, this is just going to keep going on.’ So they decided to fight back, and it resulted in a massacre of a Mormon village.”
This is history through the church’s prism, but that’s exactly what I was looking for. From Joseph Smith’s point of view, what he and his followers were facing was another existential threat to the Mormon community. Following another skirmish between the Mormons and a state militia group, the governor of Missouri ordered the “extermination” of Latter-day Saints from Missouri. In the winter of 1838–39 the Mormons crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois.
There the church flourished—briefly. With the establishment of the city of Nauvoo, Joseph Smith created a formidable power base both for the church and for himself. Smith continued as leader of the LDS church but also became the mayor of Nauvoo, the head of its municipal court, and, perhaps most significant, lieutenant general of the five-thousand-man Nauvoo Legion of the Illinois state militia. His city was, at the time, the size of Chicago, each with a population of about fifteen thousand. Joseph Smith had accumulated real power—and powerful enemies outside the church who feared his growing influence in Illinois. There were even published reports, one of them in the newspaper of a dissident Mormon group, that Smith had reestablished plural marriage, a practice among certain Old Testament kings and prophets. Smith loyalists destroyed the dissident newspaper’s press. But for Smith’s enemies outside the church, it had all come together: the rumors of polygamy, the “assault on a free press,” and most of all, concern over Smith’s growing power. It resulted in his arrest in 1844 on a charge of treason and conspiracy. Joseph Smith and his brother and designated successor, Hyrum, were brought to Carthage, Illinois, where a lynch mob stormed the jail and fatally shot both men.
Leadership of the LDS church then passed into the hands of Brigham Young, and it is here that the history and culture of the church were set on a different course. When attacks against Mormons of Nauvoo resumed, Young adopted a pacifist policy. He declared, as the historian Richard Turley paraphrased, “Let them pull the trigger, not us. We’re just going to keep retreating.” Young led the Mormons across the Mississippi River and headed west. Images of Mormon families pulling handcarts loaded with all their belongings are iconic in church history. It was 1847 when Brigham Young finally settled his followers in the Salt Lake Valley. “He wanted someplace where they wouldn’t be persecuted,” explained Turley. “A place that no other Europeans wanted.” It is where the heart of the Mormon Church beats to this day.
Most western towns spread out in random fashion. Salt Lake City was laid out in carefully planned ten-acre blocks, divided into one-and-a-quarter-acre lots to which settlers were assigned. Streams were diverted from the surrounding mountains so that each street had a supply of fresh water. There wasn’t any hardwood, so people built with adobe. By the late 1850s travelers describe coming out of the canyons and seeing beautiful homes, neatly arranged with gardens and trees. That physical orderliness would be an early indicator of the church’s own structure.
It may seem curious that in gathering information about the impact of a cyberattack on one of the United States’ electric power grids, I have spent the better part of a chapter sketching out the cross-country journey of the earliest Mormons. But it is a necessary prerequisite for understanding why the church is so focused on preparing for the unexpected. What Brigham Young told his followers in Salt Lake City created a mindset that informs Mormon behavior to this day: “If you are without bread, how much wisdom can you boast, and of what real utility are your talents, if you cannot procure for yourselves and save against a day of scarcity those substances designed to sustain your natural lives?”
One can easily become entangled in a theological discussion of the Latter-day Saints and their approach to the “end of days.” That may or may not be a motivation for the church’s ongoing emphasis on preparation. In any case, what they have achieved is extraordinary. No group of comparable size comes close to matching the scale and organizational discipline of the Mormons’ efforts to prepare for whatever catastrophe may come. Their example is hardly an easy one to follow, but it serves as a model of what can be done.
17
State of Deseret
If you are prepared you shall not fear.
— BISHOP GÉRALD CAUSSÉ
Even the most elaborate framework requires a solid foundation. For the Mormons, this means starting with families, who are encouraged to prepare, over time, for unspecified emergencies. They are urged to gradually set aside enough food, water, clothing, and money to sustain themselves for three to twelve months. Ezra Taft Benson, who served the Eisenhower administration as secretary of agriculture before becoming the church’s thirteenth president, framed the issue in thoroughly pragmatic terms. “Have you ever paused to realize what would happen to your community or nation,” he asked in 1980, “if transportation were paralyzed or if we had a war or depression? How would you and your neighbors obtain food? How long would the corner grocery store—or supermarket—sustain the needs of the community?” He recommended storing at least a year’s worth of supplies.
My visit to Salt Lake City was meticulously choreographed, and it was suggested that I share a home-cooked meal with a local family. If Norman Rockwell had chosen to paint the all-American Mormon family, he could very easily have ended up with the Turleys. Kate and Trey Turley are wholesomely good-looking, and there is an impish quality about their three boys. Their pantry, which Kate estimated contains enough stored food to feed the family for about six months, looks well organized but less overwhelming than I had imagined a six-month supply would be. (Big water containers!) That’s where Kate picked out the ingredients for our dinner that evening: chicken with pasta, frozen bread crisped in the oven, salad, and nonalcoholic apple cider. (The Turleys are, after all, a Mormon family, so there was no alcohol, tea, coffee, or caffeinated soft drinks.)
We sat down after dinner to talk about a few of the aspects of their lives that identify them as Mormons. Most of what they described would not
seem unfamiliar in a conservative Christian, Jewish, or Muslim home. Self-discipline and charity are high on the agenda. In their case, that entails giving 10 percent of their income to the church. (Tithing is mandatory for church members in good standing, but whether the 10 percent applies to gross or net income is left up to the individual. The Turleys opt for the more generous option of tithing from their gross income.) Kate explained that the boys are expected to tithe from whatever they earn: “So if they mow the lawn, they get $20 for the lawn, they pay $2 to their tithing.” On the first Sunday of each month, there is an additional fast offering. “Depending on where you sit financially,” said Trey, “the idea is to try to provide the funds that you would have spent on those meals that you fasted. But as you do better, there’s certainly nothing against adding funds to that.”
“We try to give as much as we can on that day,” added Kate. “So we go to bed Saturday night, we start our fast after dinner with a prayer, and then we skip breakfast and lunch and then we eat dinner Sunday night.” Since each of the boys is now over the age of eight, they all fast.
On Monday evenings they meet as a family to discuss important issues. It’s not a mandatory church practice, but it’s strongly recommended. These conversations can focus on a fire drill, charity, injunctions against smoking and drinking, or disaster preparation. Again, elements of this might be familiar to devout members of other faiths. Like many observant religious groups, practicing Mormons follow top-down instruction to maintain a set social structure, and almost all religions stress charitable giving. What distinguishes the Mormons is their extraordinary focus on the integration of self-sufficiency and charity. That carefully layered structure is what gives the LDS church its impact and efficiency.