Rags, rags, rags, we need rags! the Deseret News pleaded to early Saints

Few accounts of the Mormon Church in 1850s Utah tell us about “rag missions” but they were an important calling, and no less than Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball took to the pulpit to exhort LDS households, the women especially, to save and donate their rags to the church printing mill. The reason was critical in those times: it was to gather enough newsprint to publish the new Deseret News, which often moved from weekly to bimonthly due to a serious lack of newsprint.

I read “Spokesman for the Kingdom: Early Mormon Journalism and the Deseret News, 1830-1898,” a 1970s era BYU Press book by Monte Burr McLaws. It’s a tad dry but filled with interesting nuggets of info. Here’s what the Deseret News editorialized on Oct. 19, 1850. “RAGS! RAGS!! RAGS!!! Save your rags, everyone in Deseret save your rags; old wagon covers, tents, quilts, shirts, etc. etc. etc., are wanted for paper …” Rag requests were made to ward congregations by bishops and early Mormon George Goddard was sent on a “rag mission” by President Young that stretched from Franklin, Idaho, to Sanpete, Utah. For more than three years, Goddard, a merchant, went from town to town and door to door soliciting rags from residents, whether they were subscribers to the Des News or not. (By the way, Utah was once described as a journalistic cemetery and 90 percent of 19th century newspapers in the state failed)

According to McLaws, the very first talk in the Salt Lake Tabernacle was a “rag” discourse by Goddard, urging donations, and that was followed by more rag exhortation from Young and Heber C. Kimball. Rags were extremely valuable in the isolated Great Basin where the early Saints lived. Communication was at least a month away in the early years, and mailed news to the valley was often poached by settlers east.

Young’s paper mill needed supplies that rags could only partially fill but the need was desperate. Many of the rags could not be properly bleached and produced, via handpress, a coarse, dark gray paper that was difficult to read outside of sunlight, but that type of newsprint was common in the West.

In fact, rags, the need for, and lack of newsprint provided for one of Young’s most angry yet least-reported denunciations of Latter-day Saint women in the 1860s, according to McLaws.  In an Oct.9, 1862 discourse, Young raged against Mormon women who wasted rags. He “questioned whether there was a mother in the community that thought she was so well off that she did not need the extra money from saving rags. Answering himself, he charged that many of them would rather steal beef and other things they need than stoop to pick up rags to make paper on which to print the Deseret News,” recalls McLaws.

The Standard, Trib, DesNews and other papers are frequently called rags as a derisive term. However, there was once a time when a newspaper gratefully and desperately associated itself with rags of all types.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published at StandardBlogs