Even the notion of tax-supported public schools was opposed by Mormons, who saw it as a potential threat to church dominance. Until the 1920s, because few Mormons qualified to teach in public schools, disputes over the likes of small pox vaccinations took on conspiratorial overtones. Of the first four district superintendants, three were non-Mormon. They were followed by such prominent representatives of the LDS church as L. John Nuttal, Jr., grandson and namesake of an influential LDS First Presidency secretary; Howard S. McDonald, future BYU president; and M. Lynn Bennion, former LDS supervisor of seminaries, albeit a particularly progressive one.

David O. McKay and others once strategized to infiltrate and take over the schools. But once they succeeded, they were unable--or perhaps unwilling--to make them into a theocratic "bulwark against the world" as originally conceived. The temptation to control the classroom remains, and it is occasionally sought not only by Mormons but by others as well.

Frederick S. Buchanan, author of Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890-1994, is a professor emeritus of educational studies at the University of Utah. His book, A Good Time Coming: Mormon Letters to Scotland, won Best Documentary Book Award from the Mormon History Association. He is a contributing author to Religion, Feminism, and Freedom of Conscience: A Mormon/Humanist Dialogue and has also been published in Brigham Young University Studies, the History of Education Quarterly, and elsewhere.