In the days when amusements were held in the old Social Hall there arose an aggregation known as the Negro Minstrelsy. Its leader was Joe Russell, a painter. The end men were Scipio Africanus Kenner as Sambo and Jos. W. McAllister, now of Kanab, as Bones. Among others of its members were Clem Horsley and brother, and Joseph Judd. They burlesqued everything and everybody. Their jokes and witty sallies are still remembered and it is said that their concerts were attended by the Church Authorities who used to winter here, and more than one of whom were wont to roll back in their seats and roar with laughter at the doings and sayings of the Negro Minstrels.

I’ve said from the top of the post on through the comments that this was cultural, not doctrinal. As long as you’ve dropped your odd assertion of a pecuniary motive and are no longer denying ties between our people of the past and our people of the present, then we don’t appear to differ.

In any case, ji, you’ve had your say now. Move along.

There’s were we differ — you might be embarrassed by the last generation, for “something [you] aren’t so pleased to own.” I’m not embarrassed by them. I won’t repeat what they did in this regard, but I’m not embarrassed to be associated with them. Anyway, I see their actions as cultural, not as Mormonism. I’m entirely satisfied to call them good Latter-day Saints. Even so, I’m glad the culture has changed.

Of course the attitude represented by this post is not doctrinal. It *is* culture, though, American culture (not merely Rocky Mountain culture) embraced by our people so completely that they didn’t see anything negative in it.

And if your idea were true that the magazines only published this stuff to sell subscriptions — how cynical of you! — that would be absolute proof that our people DID find this poisonous stuff amusing, enough to pay money to have access to it, and not to subscribe if the magazines didn’t publish it! Ouch! I refuse to go there, and don’t think you’ve really thought the matter through.

While I point out this unkind, unfortunate aspect of our — yes, *OUR* — cultural past, nobody should mistake that I’m condemning our grandparents for sinning in this regard. Right at the top of my post I note that I do not “unduly condemn” our ancestors; I don’t believe they were consciously sinning, but following along with the unenlightened wider culture of which they were a part. You’re right, though, that if you — or any of us — were to duplicate these things today, we would be sinning against the greater light that we have.

Acknowledging that these things were a part of our past does not require us to pretend that they didn’t matter — to excuse them because they weren’t doctrinal, or to pretend that they weren’t pervasive throughout the church, or to imagine that we were forced to do it by financial concerns. We used to do this because we shared a culture with the rest of the nation. *We* did. And we don’t anymore.

Ardis, no. 50 — You’re right about the power of history with regard to us today — I much prefer to use history to help guide my own actions and thoughts (repeating the good and avoiding the bad) than to judge those who lived in the past. As far as I know, our God might not have counted the actions of those persons as sin, but I tend to think they would be sin for me today.

I tend to see what was reflected in those Church-related magazines as Rocky Mountain culture rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Those magazines had to take advertising and sell subscriptions to stay in business, unlike the Church magazines of today. Today, a better parallel to the old Church-related magazines is the Church-owned TV station — is it KSL? I hope no one fifty years form now will look at KSL broadcasting content and interpret what they see as Mormon doctrine.

I would change one word in one sentence in the original posting. I would change “we” to “they” in the second paragraph, so that it reads, “[they] imbibed some of the social attitudes and indulged in the cultural atmosphere of America in ways that had nothing to do with doctrine or theology.”

In another direction, virtually everything I post on Keepa is here because history is reflected in — is very much relevant to — the present. Some articles contrast our present with our past. Some articles perpetuate the memory of a Saint from the past. Some articles explain how our present church practices grew out of an event in the past. None of those articles would be of any interest if they didn’t have relevance to the present. That’s true of negative matters, like these blackface shows: knowing the history lets us evaluate how far we have come, whether that’s far enough, and how we got into such habits in the first place to guard against falling into related traps again (how we looked at blacks in the past isn’t all that different from how too many church members look at Hispanics today).

Again, I’m very happy to know that some people are free of these attitudes and their consequences. Such people are in the minority.

Hate to beak it to you, JI. Much of what you accepted was just that…the values of a Rocky Mountain culture.