In his history of early Latter-day Saint journalism and the Deseret News, Monte Burr McLaws wrote the following about the Deseret News advertising tea, coffee, alcohol, and liquor (this, of course, being some time before the introduction of the modern, strict observation of the “Word of Wisdom” [D&C 89]):
Other examples of incompatibility between advertising and editorial policies concerned such items as liquor, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Although nineteenth-century Mormon policy did not completely prohibit the use of these items as it does now, the Deseret News frequently editorialized on their bad effects and warned against their use.
In an 1869 editorial headed “The Evils of Intoxication,” [George Q.] Cannon stressed the social and economic rather than physical harm of alcohol and declared that immoderate use of intoxicating drinks constituted one of the greatest evils in the civilized world. While the editor admitted that the older generation in the Church at times still imbibed, he urged people to adopt complete abstinence. The best rule was “touch not, taste not, handle not” (News, 27 April 1869). In a later article on the same topic, Cannon observed that the ability to control one’s appetites made a person a much more substantial human being in all his activities and warned that the habitual use of intoxicants was one of the worst habits one could adopt and that too often it grew until it completely enslaved its victim (Ibid., 23 April 1873).
Apparently advocating mandatory prohibition, the News in 1871 printed the text of a discourse by Apostle Joseph F. Smith on the subject of alcohol. Smith expressed the hope that he could soon see the day when no one in Utah, Mormon or Gentile, would be permitted to touch intoxicating drink:
It would not be oppression to me, for the proper authorities to say—“you shall not take intoxicating liquors; you shall neither manufacture nor drink them, for they are injurious to your body and mind,” nor would it be to any Saint—(Ibid., 16 September 1871)
As with patent medicine advertisements, those for liquor and tobacco were accepted simply for commercial reasons, with no implied Church endorsement. Unfortunately, some modern writers have tended to perpetuate a misinterpretation of early Utah history by leaving the impression that such material was never accepted. Treatment of tobacco and liquor advertisements in the official centennial biography of the Deseret News, for example, is conspicuously absent (Wendell J. Ashton, Voice in the West: Biography of a Pioneer Newspaper [New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1950]). A Newsweek article stated that because of Mormon principles tobacco and liquor advertisements have never appeared in the Deseret News (“Daily Crusader of Mormonism: The Deseret News of Salt Lake,” Newsweek 17 [31 March 1941]:65). Contrary to such assertions, and unlike such papers as the Kansas City Star and the Christian Science Monitor, the News in its early years regularly admitted to its columns advertisements for all kinds of liquors from local as well as outside merchants, despite its frequent and uniform attacks on drinking (For some further editorials on this subject, see News, 23 and 24 November 1895, 8 January 1874, and 2 April 1887).
Such advertisements found their way into the earliest issues of the Church paper. On 31 August 1850, a notice by News employee Thomas Bullock offered a good price for hops delivered at his house. It was not long before News advertisements included the Queen City Hotel’s notice of “all kinds of choice Liquors” (News, 18 September 1852). The initial issue of the daily had two such advertisements, one announcing that W. Howard had opened a “Liquor Store” opposite the Salt Lake Hotel, while the other claimed that Sewell and Company’s Oasis Saloon had the finest and best wines, liquors, and beer in Salt Lake City.
Representative of this kind of local advertisement, which regularly appeared in the columns of the News throughout the nineteenth-century is the following notice from William Godbe, an ex-Mormon merchant.
Pure Wines & Liquors, Fine old Whiskies, Pure Imported Brandies, The Celebrated Red Jacket Bitters, Old Tom Gin, etc. Also Alcohol and Coloque Spirits, to be had at Godbe’s Exchange Building (Ibid., 12 December 1868).
Even ZCMI, owned and operated by the Church, advertised “Liquors, Draught and Case,” “Twelve-year-old French Brandy, Lafayette Whiskey and Genuine Imported Old French Port,” as well as the Southern-Utah brewed “Pure Dixie Port Wine” (Ibid., 1 December 1869, 1 September 1870, and 10 July 1875).
Liquor advertising came from local liquor stores, from Omaha’s Brewer and Bemis Brewing Company, and from Adams McNeill and Company, wholesale grocers of Sacraments (Ibid., 1 September 1870 and 26 August 1869. It is interesting to note that in 1880malt liquors constituted the second largest capitalization in Salt Lake City; William Mulder “Salt Lake City in 1880: A Census Profile,” Utah Historical Quarterly 24 [July 1956]:236).
As with alcohol, the News very early began editorial attacks on the use of tobacco. They were aimed directly at the young people and, unlike Church admonitions today, appealed more to the pride of superior man than to the question of health:
Some people are slaves to tobacco. Only think of it—slaves to that stinking weed! What noble creatures to submit to such vile degradation! . . . They are perfectly helpless in its presence. They almost go crazy in its absence . . . They are happy only with a pipe or cigar in their mouths, or a loathsome cud of tobacco between their teeth. What a thing to contemplate—a man, with his vast and exalted powers and capabilities, voluntarily submitting himself to be the slave of a half inch cube of filthy, nauseous, molassesized tobacco! (News, 8 June 1876; see also 16 March 1853 and 26 December 1874)
Tobacco advertisements appeared simultaneously with such editorials.
It was easy to detect the coming of the semi-annual Churchwide conferences. Advertisements in most newspapers increase in number around Christmas, but those of the Deseret News increased in October and April. Such front-page advertisements as “Special Announcement!” “To Continue During Conference,” and “Grand Spring Opening” greeted visiting Church members. In many cases these special notices featured various brands of teas, coffees, and tobacco (Ibid., 10 April 1871). A full month before and April Conference, ZCMI began running a long advertisement which included among a long list of items: “Fine cuts, smoking and chewing Tobaccos, Natural leaf, Black and Bright Navy Plugs, in all sizes, including our own and other Brands which we control” (Ibid., 2 March 1874).
National tobacco companies also advertised in the News. Among others were Liggett and Dausman, manufacturers and dealers and Loker Tobacco Company, both of St. Louis and the J.B. Pace Tobacco Company of Richmond, Virginia (Ibid., 1 September 1870, 14 April 1873, and 1 June 1892). (Monte Burr McLaws, Spokesman for the Kingdom: Early Mormon Journalism and the Deseret News, 1830-1896 [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1977], 113-16, comments in square brackets added for clarification)
Elsewhere, McLaws noted that:
It was years after the surge in advertising of the late 1860s before the Deseret News brought its tobacco and alcohol advertisement policy into closer harmony with its editorials. The last tobacco advertisement appeared on 5 April 1898 and the last liquor advertisement on October 26 of the same year. Later, the News even went so far as to retouch comic strips to take cigarette and pipe smoking out of the pictures. (Ibid., 116)
In a footnote for this, we read:
Exactly when this policy started is not yet determined, but it gradually faded out of the existence during the mid-1950s. William B. Smart, executive editor, Deseret News, Salt Lake City, 23 September 1972, letter to the author. The Christian Science Monitor has had a similar policy of editing whiskey drinking and tobacco smoking out of pictures: Erwin D. Canham, Commitment to Freedom: The Story of the Christian Science Monitor (Boston: Houghton Miffin Company, 1958), p. 122. (Ibid., 121 n. 116)
Of course, as mentioned earlier, this was all before 1921, when Heber J. Grant made strict observance of the WOW a pre-requisite for a Temple Recommend. Commenting on WOW observance during the time of Brigham Young, we read that:
[S]cholarship on early practices indicates that Mormons’ observance of the Word of Wisdom in the nineteenth century was far less of a focal point than it later became, despite the Word of Wisdom later being declared a firm commandment by President Lorenzo Snow on May 5, 1898, following the precedent set by “a statement from Brigham Young that the Word of Wisdom was a commandment of God.” Early Mormons eschewed drunkenness, for example, but did not entirely abstain from alcohol. Wine was served at Mormon weddings in the 1830s, at religious gatherings in which the Saints practiced speaking in tongues, and as part of the sacrament in church meetings. Historian Lauren Thatcher Ulrich has chronicled the fact that “a jug seems to have been essential equipment” at Winter Quarters in the 1840s. When he was president of the Church, Brigham Young himself did not always adhere to the Word of Wisdom’s counsel. He maintained his habit of chewing tobacco until 1848, when he decided to quit the habit, and abstained successfully until 1857, when a painful toothache drove him to seek pain relief in chewing once again. He finally kicked the habit for good in 1860. In a sermon in March of that year, though, Young did not demand total abstinence from other brethren: he advised any men with a tobacco habit merely to “be modest about it,” not spitting in public or taking out “a whole plug of tobacco in meeting before the eyes of the congregation.” Rather, they were to go outside and avoid sullying the parlors of Zion. “If you must use tobacco, put a small portion in your mouth when no person sees you,” he advised. (John E. Ferguson III, Benjamin R. Knoll, and Jana Riess, “The Word of Wisdom in Contemporary American Mormonism: Perceptions and Practice” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 51/1 [Spring 2018]: 39-77, here, pp. 41-42)
Further Reading
Steven C. Harper, The Word of Wisdom (Setting the Record Straight)
